What did Donald Trump do today?

He opened the door to some funding for science, as long as his political minders approved of it.

Trump released an executive order today establishing litmus tests for politically acceptable scientific research, and empowering his appointees to overrule the expert panels that—until Trump's second term began—were in charge of making decisions about which studies to fund.

Trump appointees like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have already been open about substituting their judgment for scientifically literate experts where cutting-edge medical research is concerned. But Trump's order mandates that his appointees reject anything they consider politically unacceptable—or think he would—regardless of how strong the expert consensus is in favor of it. 

Trump's idea of installing political minders in research labs has been tried before: in fact, it is an inevitable aspect of scientific research in totalitarian regimes. One particularly close analogy is the Soviet Union under Stalin. Entire fields of research like cybernetics were deemed ideologically offensive by the state and banned. Others, like quantum mechanics or relativity in physics, or most of the social sciences, were permitted only after they had been "camouflaged" in ways that flattered the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was central to Soviet communism. (One thing Trump's order and Soviet commissars have in common is an obsession with seeing Marxism everywhere they look.)

Even then, Soviet scientists were at risk of being caught in political (and sometimes literal) crossfire. In one particularly notable example, Lysenkoism—a form of evolutionary theory that had already been discredited in the Soviet Union and abroad—was elevated to official state doctrine because of its originator's political connections to Stalin. Thousands of scientists who dissented from it lost their positions, and in some cases were jailed or executed as enemies of the state. Because the core idea behind Lysenkoism was incompatible with reality, its adoption effectively halted all progress in agricultural research in the famine-plagued Soviet Union for two decades.

Trofim Lysenko (left) addressing Soviet leaders including Stalin (right) at the Kremlin in 1935.

Lysenkoism had one other significant consequence: it provided the United States with a major victory in the Cold War, as dissident Soviet scientists defected. A similar "brain drain" is already beginning as American researchers accept offers to work in politically stable countries.

Why does this matter?

• Virtually every scientific and technological advance since the 1940s has roots in the American system of science funding built around never, ever doing exactly this. 

• Dictators never tolerate dissent, and they never make exceptions for science.