Two of the most powerful journals in the world used America’s 250th birthday to warn that the country’s research institutions are under attack, and The Lancet reached for a specific phrase to do it: a “new gilded age.” Mark Twain coined that one in 1873, for a country whose surface glittered while the machinery underneath ran on graft and self-dealing. What made the age gilded rather than golden was the gap between the shine and the rot. When a journal that helped smother the biggest science-integrity story of the pandemic borrows Twain’s word to describe someone else, it is worth asking who is doing the gilding, and who is looking underneath.
The occasion was the anniversary. As the United States prepared to mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the Lancet published an editorial titled “The USA at 250: science in the new gilded age.” It opens on Benjamin Franklin’s line, “A republic, if you can keep it,” and warns that “the present US administration’s injuries and usurpations to the nation’s scientific institutions continue to escalate.” Another flagship journal, Science, published by the AAAS, ran its own anniversary editorial, “American science at 250,” the same week. Two of the loudest voices in global research, timing their alarm to the fireworks.
Notice the borrowed language. “Injuries and usurpations” is not a phrase the Lancet’s editors coined. It comes straight from the Declaration itself, the bill of particulars the colonists drew against King George. A British medical weekly is casting the elected American government as the tyrant and itself as the aggrieved patriot. That tells you the register these institutions have chosen, and it is not argument. It is grievance, and grievance works best when nobody checks the ledger.
So check it. The administration’s fiscal 2026 request did seek to cut the National Institutes of Health by roughly 40 percent and the National Science Foundation by more than half, with comparable reductions floated at the CDC and NASA’s science directorate. Early in 2025 the NIH moved to cap reimbursement of institutional “indirect costs” at 15 percent, well below the 30-to-70 percent universities had come to rely on. An analysis of agency records counted close to 1,400 terminated NIH grants. If you run a university lab, none of this is abstract.
But the editorials underplay one thing, because it complicates the tragedy: most of it did not happen. Congress, which controls appropriations, largely refused to ratify the proposed cuts and restored much of what the White House tried to zero out. Federal courts halted the indirect-cost cap and ordered frozen funds released; the appeals bench upheld the block, and the administration eventually stopped fighting for it. What the “extinction-level event” rhetoric describes is a budget request that the constitutional system then absorbed and blunted. The apparatus is bruised, not dead. When the volume of the warning outruns what actually occurred, that gap says something about the warner.
It also raises the question the editorials will not go near: why is the public’s trust in these institutions there to be spent in the first place, and who spent it? Because it was spent, and the Lancet helped spend it.
We have seen this before, and recently. In June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, the Lancet retracted one of the most consequential COVID papers it ever ran, an analysis claiming hydroxychloroquine raised the risk of death. The data came from a company called Surgisphere that could not, or would not, produce the underlying records for audit. Retraction Watch documented the collapse as it happened: a paper that had already prompted the World Health Organization to pause the hydroxychloroquine arm of its global trial, built on numbers no one could verify. The New England Journal of Medicine pulled a companion study the same day.
Four months earlier, in February 2020, the Lancet had published the letter that did more than any single document to freeze the debate over where the virus came from. It condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” It was organized by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, the group that had routed U.S. NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study bat coronaviruses. That institutional conflict of interest went undisclosed, and the journal later admitted it had known about the problem for a year. The lab-leak hypothesis the letter smothered is now treated as likely by U.S. agencies including the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Energy.
Public trust in science is not a budget line you defend with a press release. It is earned or forfeited by conduct, one retraction and one buried conflict at a time. The people who stopped believing the flagship journals did not do so because Congress debated the NIH’s indirect-cost rate. They did so because they watched a paper strong enough to pause a global drug trial turn out to rest on numbers that did not exist, and because they watched the origin question get labeled a conspiracy by a scientist whose organization had funneled U.S. taxpayer money into the very lab under suspicion.
None of this makes every cut wise, and some are not. The administration’s own request would have shuttered the NIH center that studies complementary and integrative medicine, folding it into a consolidation that cut the agency’s institutes from 27 to 8, exactly the kind of non-pharmaceutical research a health-reform movement should be defending. That is a fight worth having on the merits. The standard is not hard to state: defend useful public science, expose the parts that have been captured, and stop asking disgraced institutions to be believed on credit. America First means guarding public science from capture, not treating every line item as expendable. But that argument has to be made honestly, and honesty starts with the institutions naming their own role in the collapse they are now mourning.
The original Gilded Age did not end because its beneficiaries wrote essays about how noble they had always been. It ended because reformers pried the machinery open and showed the public the rot. If the Lancet and Science want the authority of that anniversary, the next move is theirs, and it is not a fireworks-week op-ed. Watch the fiscal 2027 appropriations fight this fall, and watch whether these journals spend it defending their COVID-era record or finally reckoning with it. A republic, if you can keep it. Trust in science works the same way.
Sources
- The Lancet – Editorial, “The USA at 250: science in the new gilded age” (2026)
- Science – Editorial, “American science at 250” (2026)
- Scientific American – Trump administration proposes massive budget cuts to science
- Chemistry World – Congress blocks proposed cuts to US science agencies
- STAT – Appeals court upholds ruling blocking NIH indirect-cost cap
- NBC News – Trump tried to gut science research funding. Courts and Congress have rebuffed him.
- Nature – US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains
- The Lancet – Retraction of the Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine analysis (2020)
- Retraction Watch – Lancet retracts controversial hydroxychloroquine study (2020)
- Times Higher Education – Under-fire Lancet admits conflict of interest on lab-leak letter
- CBS News – CIA now says COVID most likely originated from a lab leak
- Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute – Overview of proposed changes to the NIH