Predictions for a second Trump Administration

Well, it's been (a fast) two months. I have delayed this post as long as possible, and here we are. Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president of the United States today. I have some thoughts, and maybe even some predictions for the second Trump Administration. 

In the last two months, I don't think we've gotten significant clarity on where the Trump Administration is leaning. We have seemingly learned who will be very influential (Elon Musk). It's pretty clear that immigration will probably be a very high profile issue. 

I proposed five areas that I wanted to think about - I'll put four of them below*: 

• Tariffs: How will Trump’s threatened tariffs impact American chemists? 
• Regulation: How will the EPA and the FDA be impacted under their new leadership? EPA/FDA
• Immigration: What will immigration policy be under the second Trump Administration? 
• Employment: How will this change the long-term trajectory of employment for American chemists? 

On the tariffs issue, I don't feel that we've heard sufficient specifics to know how this issue will impact chemists. The BIOSECURE Act did not pass, and I felt that was an issue that might have caused a tit-for-tat battle with China. Tariffs are an issue where a President Trump could have the most direct impact. At the moment, I can't think of a specific sector where chemists are employed in the US that would be impacted yet. I grade this as a place where tariffs will have a low direct impact to chemists. We should check in again in six months. 

Regulation: We now know that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the nominee for HHS, that former New York representative Lee Zeldin will be EPA Administrator and physician Marty Makary will be the head of FDA. Of these three men, it seems most clear to me that Zeldin will deregulate aggressively. I predict (with 60% certainty) that the dichloromethane rules that have been put into place by the Biden Administration will be reversed within 12 months of inauguration. I'm sure there are other rules that will be reversed, but this is the one that I am tracking and most interested in. 

I have no idea what Marty Makary will be like as FDA Commissioner, but he seems to be more focused on food than drugs. No predictions from me on the direction of FDA, although I do wonder with the advent of HHS Secretary Kennedy, if the forces of alternative medicine will be unleashed even further on America. (Why is Kennedy HHS Secretary - how exactly is he going to make America healthy/ier? What statutory authority does he have to bring to bear?) 

Immigration: In the interests of time and clarity, I am going to divide this subject between undocumented and documented immigration. Undocumented immigration is well outside the scope of this blog. It is difficult to fully understand what the Trump Administration plans to do regarding immigration that affects typical scientists because we have two different bits of evidence. The first is that Stephen Miller seems to be well-entrenched in the second Trump White House; I believe that his intentions are to decrease all immigration into the United States. The second signal is the prominence of Elon Musk in the second Trump Administration, and the weird contretemps on Twitter between Musk and Vivek Ramaswany and other activists about the H1b visa system, which resulted in Trump making a statement in favor of the visas. Will Stephen Miller attempt to crimp down on the H1b system? If he did, I could imagine this being part of a move against student visas. However, I think this is a relatively low priority for the second Trump Administration; I rate this (moves against H1b visas or student visas) as a 40% probability to happen in the first 12 months of the second Trump Administration. 

Employment: I really don't know for now, so I'm going to refrain from a prediction. However, I can't imagine that a second Trump Administration will do great things for what I feel is the one remaining strong industry for chemists, i.e. the pharmaceutical industry. The reason that the pharmaceutical industry is strong in the United States is that we have the best academic and industrial biomedical science complex in the world, aided by the in-migration of many of the brightest minds in the world. I feel much less confident that the United States is an attractive place to work for international scientists now, and this does not bode well for the long-term trajectory of our country. 

*I've decided to leave academic funding out of this set of predictions, because funding levels are set by Congress and not the president. This Republican congress does not love scientists, and does not love the NIH nor the NSF. That being said, I don't feel we will see full-scale gutting of the federal R&D complex, but I genuinely have no idea yet.