- How Trump has made the government smaller, but not more efficient or dependable;
- Example of shutting down NASA’s library;
- Example of cuts to science research;
- How Trump prefers “vibes” to data;
- New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser wonders how people let this happen;
- And a collage of lists about 2025.
NY Times, Eileen Sullivan, 30 Dec 2025: Trump Upended the Federal Government. The Full Scope of the Impact Is Still Unclear., subtitled “President Trump achieved his goal of shrinking the work force. But many current and former officials say the government is less dependable and efficient than it was a year ago.” [gift link]
In his first year back in office, President Trump has made unparalleled changes to the federal government, shrinking its footprint both in the services it provides and the size of its work force.
The extent of the effect on the public so far is unclear. Some of the White House’s moves are stalled by a mountain of litigation — more than 200 lawsuits have been filed challenging the firings of federal workers and the freezing of grants and elimination of programs, a vast majority of which are still pending. And agencies have not fully detailed the number of staff members and services that have been cut, making it difficult to discern the full scope of the difference between today’s federal government and the one from a year ago.
Mr. Trump pledged in February to make the government “smaller, more efficient, more effective and a lot less expensive.”
By one specific standard, Mr. Trump can claim a degree of success: The work force is definitely smaller.
But not more dependable or efficient. I suspect that small-government zealots are either simpletons, who don’t understand what the government actually does, and think that if they don’t understand it, it must be unimportant and can disappear, or idealogues who sincerely believe that the government has no business providing services to people they don’t like or in support of programs they think are useless. Either way, their slash-and-burn tactics destroy more than they improve.
Remember when Al Gore cut the government by some percent back in the ’90s, and did so very carefully, so that no one noticed? That’s why you don’t remember it.
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For example. Just the latest example.
NY Times, Eric Niiler, 31 Dec 2025: NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts, subtitled “Holdings from the library at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which includes unique documents from the early 20th century to the Soviet space race, will be warehoused or thrown out.”
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And.
The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu, 30 Dec 2025: The Trump Administration’s Most Paralyzing Blow to Science, subtitled “Cuts to research may have spoiled the country’s appetite for bold exploration.”
For all of the political chaos that American science endured in 2025, aspects of this country’s research enterprise made it through somewhat … okay. The Trump administration terminated billions of dollars in research grants; judges intervened to help reinstate thousands of those contracts. The administration threatened to cut funding to a number of universities; several have struck deals that preserved that money. After the White House proposed slashing the National Institutes of Health’s $48 billion budget, Congress pledged to maintain it. And although some researchers have left the country, far more have remained. Despite these disruptions, many researchers will also remember 2025 as the year when personalized gene therapy helped treat a six-month-old baby, or when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first glimpse of the star-studded night sky.
Links worth checking out. The first as an illustration of how science works, the second for the awe.
Science did lose out this year, though, in ways that researchers are still struggling to tabulate. Some of those losses are straightforward: Since the beginning of 2025, “all, or nearly all, federal agencies that supported research in some way have decreased the size of their research footprint,” Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist who has been tracking the federal funding cuts to science, told me. Less funding means less science can be done and fewer discoveries will be made. The deeper cut may be to the trust researchers had in the federal government as a stable partner in the pursuit of knowledge. This means the country’s appetite for bold exploration, which the compact between science and government supported for decades, may be gone, too—leaving in its place more timid, short-term thinking.
Once again, conservatives don’t do long-term thinking. Trump is gung-ho for AI, for example, because he thinks it will make his wealthy friends even wealthier. In the short term.
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And this.
Vox, 31 Dec 2025: Inside Trump’s “no data, just vibes” approach to science, subtitled “8 ways the administration has undermined data collection this year.”
I’ll quote the “Key takeaways.”
• The federal government is a key collector of vital data about the makeup of the country.
• President Donald Trump has long been hostile to data that contradicts his messaging and has presided over major rollbacks to data collection relating to the environment, public health, employment, demographics, and the weather.
• With less robust and accurate data, advances in science will slow down, Americans will have a murkier picture of the economy, and officials could miss important health trends. It will also further erode trust in public institutions.
The 8 ways: Scaling back vital health surveys; Clawing back research grants; Overhauling the childhood vaccination schedule; Deleting climate change references; Handcuffing the EPA; Assault on jobs data; Taking aim at quarterly earnings reports; Shaking up the census.
Concluding:
This, of course, isn’t Trump’s first time in office, nor is it his first attempt to manipulate, ignore, or erase the numbers. And researchers, nonprofits, and activists have raised the alarm before about losing access to quality government data.
There are now multiple groups working to rescue and archive federal statistics and websites, as well as guides for finding information that has gone missing.
But there’s only so much companies, universities, and NGOs can do to match the US government’s data-gathering scale and depth. A concerted effort from the White House to diminish or manipulate the numbers behind policies will be hard to counteract, and the effects will linger for years to come.
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More vibes:
JMG, 31 Dec 2025 (from Mediaite): Trump Claims Approval Rating Is Twice What Polls Say
Citing nothing but his own vibes, President Donald Trump claimed that his approval rating is a whopping 64%. On Tuesday night, Trump shared a graphic from Trafalgar, featuring an image of himself, along with text reading: “Over 50% of Voters Approve of President Trump.”
The president claimed that the polls are “rigged” against him and wildly insisted he has a 64% approval rating. Last week, Gallup released a poll showing Trump 23 points underwater.
He’s delusional.
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One more overview. Why have so many people let this happen?
The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser, 30 Dec 2025: Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful, subtitled “A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in the White House.”
No matter how low one’s expectations were for 2025, the most striking thing about the year when Donald Trump became President again is how much worse it turned out to be.
Did we anticipate that Trump would come back to office wanting to rule as a king, consumed by revenge and retribution, and encouraged by sycophants and yes-men who would insure that he faced few of the constraints that hampered him in his first term? Yes, but now we know that bracing for the worst did not make the inevitable any less painful. In the future, historians will struggle to describe that feeling, particular to this Trump era, of being prepared for the bad, crazy, and disruptive things that he would do, and yet also totally, utterly shocked by them.
A partial catalogue of the horrors of 2025 that not even the most prescient Trump-watcher could claim to have fully predicted: gutting cancer research in the name of expurgating diversity programs from the nation’s universities. Shutting the door to refugees—except for white Afrikaners, from South Africa. Empowering the world’s richest man to cut off funding for the world’s poorest children. Welcoming Vladimir Putin on a red carpet at an American Air Force base. Razing the East Wing of the White House, without warning, on an October morning. Alienating pretty much the entirety of Canada.
Your list might be different from mine. There is so much from which to choose. And that is the point.
And then:
Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen.
Much more.
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One more about 2025. Many perspectives.
NY Times, 27 Dec 2025: The Year in Lists, subtitled “How do we make sense of an overwhelming year? Writing a list is a great place to start.”
A collage piece by various NYT contributors. About fashion moments, words and phrases, retrograde moments for women, getting over the ’90s, how the ’90s comeback is here, absurd moments, and so on and so on. We do not all live in the same reality.
