Dutch scientists increasingly impacted by Trump's policy
Scientists and researchers in the Netherlands are increasingly noticing the consequences of American President Donald Trump’s policy, according to research by NU.nl, Investico, De Groene Amsterdammer, and Hoger Onderwijs Persbureau.
Trump has been sweeping through scientific organizations and universities, cutting budgets, scrapping studies, and halting collaborations. And this is having an international impact. In the Netherlands, Trump’s policy is affecting medical research, climate studies, astronomy, and communication sciences, the media found after surveying over 200 academics at almost every university in the Netherlands and various scientific institutions.
A third of the 210 scientists surveyed notice effects of the American policy in their daily work. 14 reported that collaboration with American colleagues has come to a standstill. 26 said that conferences and visits with Americans have been canceled or have had to happen in different ways. 20 said that funding for their research has disappeared or become uncertain.
Of the scientists who have noticed an impact, a fifth said that important data is disappearing. 17 said that the datasets or software they relied on are no longer available.
For example, the American program for demographic health research (DHS), which collects important medical data on a large scale, is “currently paused.” So, medical scientists researching infection control and HIV, among other things, no longer have access to valuable data. UMC Utrecht epidemiologist Sanne Peters noticed that data from a study on transgender people and a dataset on young people’s sexual orientation had disappeared from the DHS.
The same is happening in climate science. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is slowly removing or no longer updating datasets. The NOAA collects important climate data, including data from thousands of buoys in the oceans that measure temperature and currents. Without this data, weather forecasts will be less accurate, Sjoert Groeskamp of the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) said.
The investigative journalists also found that scientists often don’t know where to go with questions about missing data or disappearing funding, for example. Universities have taken few concrete measures so far. The survey showed that most educational institutions are concerned about the situation, but do not know how to act on it. Some individual universities are taking measures, but there is no national or structural approach.
