What Caught My Eye forMay 7 - 13 (#15)
Some of the articles that caught my eye that I felt were worth sharing from May 7 to 13.
Voters say they want young candidates. In practice, they do not
One explanation is path-dependent: voters are often not offered the alternative they might have preferred.
My primary ballot this year doesn’t have a single challenger to the incumbents. None of them are octogenarians but without challengers, what option do we have? We need younger candidates to challenge the old guard to bring new faces and new life to our government.
We Need to Prepare for the Mammoth Task of De-Trumpification
You don’t just switch the lights back on for these things after Trump is gone and expect to find everything just as it was. From NIH, FDA, SAMHSA, CMS, and CDC, to NSF, NOAA, EPA, and NASA, the harm is so significant that massive amounts of resources will be needed just to bring us back to baseline, let alone prepare ourselves for the challenges of the 21st century and beyond.
This is why I know why it won’t happen in my lifetime. As much as I want to see the resources poured into improving our research and push to the future, helping everyone, you know the GOP is going to all of a sudden become fiscally “responsible” and claim we can’t spend money or raise taxes on the wealthy, or any number of things.
None of this is to say public health and scientific research in the US were perfect before Trump took power again. But that’s also the point: Recovering from the devastation gives us the chance to build the system we’ve needed for so long. Yet confronting the sheer scale of what needs to happen is the first step toward recovery.
Accountability is not our strong suit.
Trump has also not acted alone. The de-Trumpification of American public health and science will have to confront the legacy of his accomplices. From agency chiefs like Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya to higher-ups like RFK Jr. and Russell Vought, to the low-level insiders like Matthew Memoli and Jon Lorsch at NIH, whose familiarity with the workings of their agency helped to bring it down from within, all of these men need to be held accountable. Again, Democrats will have to show some spine should they ever be in leadership again and hold hearings at the very least. Better yet, they should impanel an independent commission to document the day-to-day work that was done by all the president’s men and women, agency by agency, to gut public health and science in America.
This isn’t about retribution; it’s about bearing witness, putting the facts in the open so everyone knows what these people did. Letting them slip back into private life, back to cushy university appointments and far-right think tanks, without an accounting of what has happened is an affront to decency, dishonors the dead from this administration’s policies, whitewashes history, and makes it all the easier to let it happen again. Truth? Yes. Reconciliation. Maybe.