Take inventory first, because the inventory is the argument. Since January 2025 the Trump administration has tried to cut the National Science Foundation by more than half, NASA by a quarter, and the NIH by forty percent. It purged thousands of workers from federal science agencies, froze grants to universities it designated as enemies, clawed back funding on anything it could smear as DEI, gutted the Department of Education, installed a vaccine conspiracist atop the public health apparatus, scrubbed climate and demographic data from government sites, and in April of this year removed the entire advisory board overseeing the NSF. Layered under the federal assault is the state-level project: book bans by the thousands, curriculum laws that criminalize accurate history, school boards captured by people who think a library is a threat vector.
None of this is incidental. Authoritarian movements always come for the knowledge infrastructure first, because the knowledge infrastructure is the immune system. A population that can evaluate evidence cannot be governed by grievance. So the universities become enemies, the librarians become groomers, the scientists become elitists, and the measurable world becomes optional. The cruelty toward expertise is not a side effect of the cult. It is the membership fee.
Now the part the doom cycle skips. The maximalist version lost. Congress, including Republicans, rejected the catastrophic 2026 cuts and kept core science budgets largely intact. Courts restored billions in terminated grants. The plan to collapse the NIH’s twenty-seven institutes was refused. The proposed cut would have dragged nondefense research spending to 1991 levels, unprecedented in half a century, and lawmakers in both chambers declined. The system’s antibodies are degraded, not dead.
So the administration changed tactics, and this is what vigilance now means. The budget looks fine on paper while the money is throttled in practice. NIH issued two-thirds fewer grant awards in early 2026 than the year before, by restructuring how grants are made so fewer scientists get funded. NSF grantmaking slowed to a crawl before the board purge cast its future into deeper doubt. Watchdogs call it withholding by other means, impoundment with extra steps. The frontal assault failed, so the siege began. Sieges are quieter. Sieges depend on you getting bored.
Which answers the question of how we stay engaged. Not with vibes. With the specific behaviors that the record shows actually work.
Fund the substrate directly. California is moving a twelve billion dollar state research bond to the November ballot precisely because federal money can no longer be trusted. Whatever state you live in, that model is replicable, and state legislators respond to startlingly few constituent contacts. Your public library, the most besieged civic institution in America, runs on local budgets you can influence in an evening.
Take the small elections seriously. Every banned book passed through a school board vote, and school board races are decided by hundreds of ballots. The cult understood this a decade before the rest of us. Showing up to the meeting is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism.
Support the litigation. The grant restorations did not happen because someone posted. They happened because universities, unions, and state attorneys general sued and won. The lawsuits that protected American science were funded by memberships and donations to exactly the unglamorous organizations everyone forgets between emergencies.
Protect the data and the record. Researchers have spent eighteen months mirroring federal datasets before they vanish, tracking every canceled grant, documenting the slow-walk in real numbers. The 66 percent figure exists because someone counted. Counting is resistance now. So is teaching a kid to ask how we know what we know, which no executive order can reach.
And refuse the framing. The movement wants science understood as a partisan faction, one tribe’s hobby, so that defending it reads as politics rather than self-preservation. Do not concede the premise. Chemotherapy is not woke. Weather satellites are not woke. The enemies of thinking want the fight described as left versus right because they lose the fight when it is described accurately: people who want to know things versus people who profit when you cannot.
The pursuit of science and thinking has survived inquisitions, lysenkoism, and worse cults than this one, and it survived them the same way every time. Not because truth defends itself. It does not. It survived because specific people kept the labs open, hid the books, taught the classes, and counted what the regime preferred uncounted. The infrastructure of knowing is not an inheritance. It is a relay, and the baton is currently in our leg of the race.
Project 2025 is often discussed as a political blueprint, but its significance lies less in any single proposal than in the cumulative direction of its recommendations. Many of the policies pursued since January 2025 closely mirror themes found throughout the document: reducing the size and influence of federal agencies, expanding executive control over government institutions, rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, restructuring the Department of Education, and challenging what its authors describe as ideological capture within universities, research bodies, and the federal bureaucracy. Supporters view these changes as necessary reforms designed to reduce government overreach and restore accountability. Critics, however, see something far more consequential - a systematic effort to reshape the institutions that produce knowledge, conduct scientific research, educate future generations, and provide independent expertise to the public.
The concern for many observers is not any individual budget cut, grant cancellation, or personnel decision, but the broader pattern that emerges when these actions are viewed together. Significant reductions proposed for scientific agencies, pressure placed on universities, the removal of advisory bodies, restrictions on educational content, attacks on diversity programs, and efforts to centralise political control over previously independent institutions all point in a similar direction. Whether one calls it Project 2025 in practice or simply a continuation of long standing conservative goals, the effect is perceived by critics as the same: a transformation of the relationship between government, education, science, and public knowledge. To those critics, the issue is not merely administrative reform but the possibility that institutions built over generations to inform, challenge, and educate society are being fundamentally reoriented around political priorities rather than independent inquiry.