Science/AAAS - Muskism, Voughtism, Trumpism - Three Different Approaches To Destroying Science And Government
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To answer those questions, some policy specialists say it’s useful to group the administration’s actions into three categories. One observer has even named each category after its chief advocate within the White House. “There’s Muskism, there’s Voughtism, and there’s Trumpism,” says economist Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a centrist think tank.
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Atkinson thinks Muskism has already run its course. Although USAID is unlikely to be resurrected anytime soon, many of Musk’s professed goals are still unrealized. Musk relished issuing daily postings of how much “waste” DOGE had eliminated, for example, but it’s now believed that most of those numbers were exaggerated (and at times fictitious). And although DOGE staffers terminated or froze many grants and contracts and orchestrated a mass firing of newly hired or promoted federal employees at several research agencies, many of the most extreme moves were ultimately rescinded after federal judges ruled they were illegal. And some laid-off scientists were rehired.
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Voughtism has the potential to leave a more lasting mark on the U.S. research enterprise. It draws inspiration from Project 2025, a 900-page policy road map for Trump’s second term released in 2023 by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Vought contributed to the plan, which calls for a government that is as small as possible in scope, budgets, and staffing. “In Russ Vought’s world, spending money is the worst thing the government can do,” Atkinson says. That worldview envisions the president controlling all levers of government, including the legislative and judicial branches. “I think Vought and OMB are pushing the boundaries to see how far they can take that,” says Tony Mills, a science policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.
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The concept is called impoundment. In September 2025, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to impound $4 billion in foreign aid, and he’s promised to do it again, including perhaps at research agencies. If he does, the move will almost certainly trigger lawsuits that would give the Supreme Court another chance to weigh in. Zerhouni believes a second Trump win before the high court could be catastrophic. “When I was at NIH, it never occurred to me that I could say we’re not paying for something that Congress had appropriated money for because it was not in line with my policies,” he recalls. “But if that power is given to the executive branch to use whenever it wants, then all bets are off.”
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https://www.science.org/content/article/which-trump-s-upheavals-u-s-science-are-likely-stick