Watching knowledge disappear before our very eyes

President Donald J. Trump speaks with members of the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, April 16, 2026. (Official White House photo)

By Bruce Botelho

Ray Bradbury’s novel "Fahrenheit 451" is set in a near-future American city where mass entertainment, constant noise, and shallow media have replaced reading, reflection, and meaningful conversation, and where owning books is a serious crime. Rather than fighting fires, firefighters are charged with burning books and the places that house them. Written more than 75 years ago, "Fahrenheit 451’s" message that knowledge survives only if people actively value, remember and teach it seems more relevant today than ever.

The Trump administration has unleashed its arsonists in every corner of American society and is waging a war on knowledge itself. By starving science of funds, disappearing public data, and policing how history can be told, it is attempting to narrow what Americans are allowed to know, study, remember and imagine.

Trump’s latest budget efforts have been driving federal science spending to its lowest levels in decades, with deep cuts across the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and climate-related programs. Thousands of grants have been canceled, delayed or rescoped to fit ideological priorities, and entire divisions focused on topics like climate, public health and diversity have been targeted for elimination. One tangible result has been a forced exodus of researchers and forfeiture of the kinds of discoveries that have made our nation pre-eminent in science and technology.

Don’t be fooled that this is simply routine budget tightening. It is a programmatic effort to reduce the government’s capacity to ask questions that might produce uncomfortable answers — about warming oceans, toxic air, or racial disparities in health and wealth. If you don’t fund the research, you can later claim the problem does not exist.

This assault on knowledge does not stop at the lab door; it reaches into the very infrastructure of information. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the administration has dismantled or hidden federal datasets on everything from maternal mortality and substance use to infrastructure vulnerabilities and prison conditions. Thousands of federal datasets have been removed from public access and many others have quietly stopped being updated.

In Trump’s first term, one analysis found that more than 8,000 federal web pages disappeared within weeks, including thousands of pages of CDC health information and all state-level hate crime data from the Justice Department’s site. The new wave of data disruptions is broader and more sophisticated: agencies still collect some information but no longer release it in usable form, or they let systems lapse until they are technically “unmaintained.” The most recent example is this week’s confirmation by the Food and Drug Administration that it blocked publication of multiple studies supporting the safety of COVID-19 and shingles vaccines. What the public cannot see, it cannot be questioned and future policymakers cannot repair.

The battle extends from spreadsheets to storyboards. A leaked Interior Department database, reported by the Washington Post, catalogues plaques, exhibits and educational materials in national parks that officials fear might “disparage” America. The flagged items focus heavily on African American history, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and climate change, and they map out a potential campaign to dismantle or dilute exhibits that tell the country’s hardest truths. Alaska was not spared: Sitka’s Russian Bishop’s House signage was to be replaced because of its reference to missionaries who “worked to destroy indigenous cultures and languages across Alaska.”

History is being curated not for accuracy, but for emotional comfort and political utility.

Taken separately, a budget cut here, a shuttered database there, or a sanitized museum label might look like bureaucratic housekeeping or ideological overreach. Taken together, they form a coherent strategy: to shrink the universe of facts on which democratic deliberation depends, and to replace it with a state-approved story.

Democracy assumes that citizens can see the world as it is: that we have reliable data on public health and policing, that we can read honest accounts of slavery and segregation, that scientists can follow evidence even when it contradicts the slogans of the day. When a government chokes off research, hides statistics and punishes institutions that tell an unflattering history, it is not just editing footnotes; it is making ignorance a governing philosophy.

The alternative is harder but more faithful to the country we claim to be: fund the questions, protect the data, argue openly over the past, and trust the public with the full, often painful, record. The way we treat knowledge now will determine not just what future Americans know about us, but whether they have the tools to correct our mistakes.

• Bruce Botelho is a former Juneau mayor and Alaska attorney general.