The New York Times brings us a depressing story from inside government halls on just how bad things have gotten for science during this latest Republican administration. It goes through multiple instances of government-backed scientists being told to remove references to the human causes of climate change—or recognition of climate change at all—in their scientific works.
The catch is that the people requesting the changes weren't the hard-right Trump appointees you would normally associate with demands for watered-down science. They were requests from mid-tier department bureaucrats trying to toe their new bosses' lines before those bosses ever got wind of the problems. "Government experts," says the Times, "said they have been surprised at the speed with which federal workers have internalized President Trump’s antagonism for climate science."
Whether the speed with which the bureaucracy of the various government agencies and departments has adapted to new anti-science edicts is "surprising" likely depends on how cynical you are. Presumably, the people in the highest-ranking nonappointed agency positions got there either by being very good at their jobs or being very good at pleasing higher tiers of the bureaucracy; if you want to know which of those is the more important qualification for career advancement, feel free to ask those who report to them.
The Times quotes a former National Park Service specialist to explain it in uncynical terms: "They're doing it because they're scared."
This is the problem we have seen all over as conspiracy theorists froth about the Deep State and Trump's greatness being compromised by a gargantuan bureaucracy bent on running government from the shadows while making Trump's associates look bad by somehow spurring them into incompetence, crimes, or both. That sort of resistance is difficult. It takes work. It's extremely risky. As Trump's ongoing purge of inspectors general and other federal watchdogs demonstrates, supposed civil service protections mean little once you have arrived on a corrupt administration's radar: Even if your job is not threatened, your career advancement will certainly suffer.
Even after the current regime leaves, your superiors will remember who tried to push them into uncomfortable battles with their superiors, and there is no better way to find yourself in a career ditch in any company or field than making your boss' job slightly more annoying than it would otherwise have to be. In those lands, dragons wait.
The takeaways here are twofold, perhaps. One: We cannot count on our institutions to save us. Not from corruption, not from mismanagement, not from ideology-premised sabotage. Two: If government agencies can adapt within the span of a few years to extremist positions, it seems reasonable to expect the same agencies will adapt just as quickly when the wind blows from another direction.
That last bit doesn't negate the true damage being done here, of course. The problem with incompetent management is that it makes competent people want to leave even as the incompetent ones hang on for dear life. It is self-fulfilling. Those who are taking early retirement or drifting off into Literally Anything Else as their departments struggle with their new deadbeat between-lobbying-jobs overlords will probably not be eager to come back. The long-term effects of Trump's demands for incompetent government done boorishly will outlast him by two decades, at least.