When a Superpower Declares Science Illegal

Key Takeaways

• The Legal Foundation Is Gone: The EPA rescinded the 2009 endangerment finding on February 12, 2026, eliminating the legal basis for virtually all federal greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act (CAA).
• This Is Part of a Pattern: The endangerment rescission is not an isolated act. It is the capstone of a systematic campaign against empirical science spanning climate, vaccines, and federal research funding.
• The Competitive Cost Is Measurable: U.S. patent applications fell 9% in 2025. Chinese entities captured 26.9% of global electric propulsion patents by 2020, up from 2.4% in 2010, and now produce 65.4% of high-impact EV battery research. The innovation gap is widening.
• History Has a Name for This: The last time a major power subordinated established science to political ideology was the Soviet Union’s embrace of Lysenkoism. That experiment cost millions of lives and set Soviet science back 30 years.

The Erasure

On February 12, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the rescission of its 2009 “endangerment finding,” the scientific and legal determination that six greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide and methane, endanger public health and welfare. The EPA described it as “the single largest deregulatory action” in U.S. history.

That is a remarkable description for something that does not create a single new regulation. It only destroys one.

The 2009 finding was not a policy preference. It was a scientific conclusion, supported by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, upheld by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012, and declined for review by the Supreme Court in 2013. In September 2025, the National Academies published a fresh report affirming that the evidence supporting the original finding had only grown stronger.

The administration did not dispute that report. It declared it legally irrelevant. The distinction matters. The EPA did not produce new science showing greenhouse gases are safe. It produced a legal argument that the Clean Air Act never authorized the EPA to act on the science in the first place, citing the Supreme Court’s Loper Bright Enterprises and West Virginia v. EPA decisions to argue that Congress never explicitly granted the agency climate authority.

The science is still true. It is simply, by executive decree, no longer actionable.

The Domino Architecture

To understand why this single act matters more than any individual regulation it kills, consider what the endangerment finding actually supported. It was the legal root of a regulatory tree. Every branch grew from it:

• Vehicle emissions standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles (model years 2012-2027 and beyond)
• Power plant greenhouse gas limits under the Clean Power Plan and its successors
• Oil and gas methane rules governing wellhead and pipeline emissions
• Industrial source permitting requirements for new facilities
• Federal grant programs tied to climate mitigation

Killing the root kills every branch. The administration claimed this would save “over $1.3 trillion.” But Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the conservative think tank, noted a quiet contradiction: the finding has not itself led to profound changes in the U.S. economy or in how the country produces energy. If the finding had minimal practical impact, the savings cannot be both “trillionic” and negligible. The math exposes the motive: this act is not about economics. It is about erasing the legal capacity for a future administration to regulate carbon.

It is a ratchet. It only turns one way.

The Anti-Science Portfolio

The endangerment rescission would be alarming in isolation. But it does not exist in isolation. It is the capstone of a campaign against empirical science that spans multiple agencies, disciplines, and years.

The mRNA Purge

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directed the cancellation of $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine development. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) saw over 380 clinical trials interrupted, including more than 115 focused on cancer research. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has aligned the agency’s direction with MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), Kennedy’s populist health initiative. The proposed 2026 budget includes a 40% cut to NIH discretionary funding. The connection to mRNA is not incidental. This administration has treated mRNA technology not as a scientific tool but as a political enemy, with real consequences for the biotech sector and public health.

The Wind Energy Disinformation

“Windmills cause cancer.” This debunked claim, first made during the 2019 campaign. has been revived in 2025-2026 to justify blocking wind energy projects. The administration has also amplified concerns about bird deaths from wind turbines. While wind turbines do kill birds (Fish and Wildlife Service estimates average 234,000 per year in the U.S.), this is a fraction of the estimated 2.4 billion birds killed annually by cats, or the 599 million killed by building collisions. The selective outrage reveals the function: it is not environmental concern. It is a rhetorical weapon against a competing energy source. Meanwhile, the Department of Energy (DOE) has mandated that military bases purchase power from “beautiful clean coal” plants, and federal coal mandates continue to prop up economically unviable plants.

The Research Funding Collapse

Across the federal science apparatus, the damage is quantifiable:

Metric	Value	Source
Federal research grants disrupted (NIH, NSF, EPA combined)	$29.86 billion	NEA / Science.org
National Science Foundation (NSF) grants cancelled or suspended	Nearly 2,000	NEA
NIH clinical trials interrupted	380+ (115+ cancer-focused)	ACS Journals
Federal workforce reduction (through December 2025)	242,260 jobs	OPM Data
Proposed NIH budget cut (FY2026)	40%	Senate Commerce Committee

An August 2025 executive order expanded political appointee control over scientific grants, requiring ideological alignment with administration priorities. Climate research, diversity-related studies, and mRNA-adjacent work have been systematically deprioritized. This is not a budget dispute. It is an institutional purge.

The Lysenko Precedent

There is a name for what happens when a major power subordinates established science to political ideology. It is called Lysenkoism.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who, beginning in the 1930s, rejected Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution in favor of Lamarckian inheritance, the debunked theory that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetimes. He claimed crops could be “educated” through methods like freezing seeds to alter their germination patterns. The science was wrong. But it aligned with Communist ideology, which rejected Western “bourgeois” science.

Under Stalin’s patronage, Lysenko’s pseudoscience became state policy. The results:

• Thousands of geneticists and agronomists were fired, imprisoned, or executed
• Nikolai Vavilov, one of the world’s foremost geneticists, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison for opposing Lysenko
• Mendelian genetics was banned as “reactionary and capitalistic” after the 1948 Lenin Agricultural Academy meeting
• Soviet agriculture stagnated, contributing to chronic food shortages
• Soviet biology fell 30 years behind the West; the damage was not reversed until after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964

The parallel is not rhetorical. The Genetic Literacy Project explicitly drew the comparison in January 2026, arguing that Kennedy’s mRNA purge makes him “more dangerous than the 1930s Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko.” But the comparison extends beyond any single agency. The pattern is Lysenkoist:

1. Identify established science that conflicts with political ideology (climate science, mRNA technology, emissions data)
2. Replace expert judgment with political loyalty (grant oversight orders, RIF layoffs, advisory panel purges)
3. Delegitimize the scientific consensus (“the science was undecided,” “climate alarmists,” “windmills cause cancer”)
4. Erase the institutional capacity to produce inconvenient findings (data deletion, lab closures, budget cuts)

The crucial difference is scale. Lysenko controlled biology. The current campaign spans climate science, biomedical research, environmental monitoring, and energy policy simultaneously.

The Competitive Ratchet

Ideology has costs. Markets do not care about political loyalty. They care about physics, chemistry, and engineering. And the numbers tell a story the administration would prefer you not read.

The Patent Gap

According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and IFI Claims, the U.S. patent advantage is eroding rapidly:

Metric	U.S.	China
Total USPTO patent grants (2025)	323,272 (down 0.2% from 2024)	Leading growth
USPTO patent applications (2025)	393,344 (down 9% from 2024)	Rising
Global electric propulsion patents (2020)	Declining share	26.9% (up from 2.4% in 2010)
High-impact EV battery research publications	11.9%	65.4%

The U.S. still leads in aggregate R&D spending for alternative energy, but the innovation output gap is narrowing. U.S. patent applications fell 9% in a single year, the sharpest decline in recent history. Chinese entities captured 26.9% of global electric propulsion patents by 2020, up from 2.4% in 2010. That trajectory has only accelerated.

The Manufacturing Desert

China added record wind and solar capacity in 2024-2025, with over 100 GW of wind and 300 GW of solar installed in a single year. Its solar manufacturing capacity is projected to exceed the entire world’s deployment needs by 2030. The U.S. has no comparable manufacturing base. The subsidy cliff created by federal renewable cancellations has further destabilized domestic clean energy investment.

The global clean energy economy is projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2030. The question is not whether that economy will exist. It is whether the U.S. will participate in it, or cede it to competitors who did not declare the underlying science illegal.

The Brain Drain Multiplier

When tens of thousands of federal employees leave public service, they do not disappear. Some move to the private sector. Some leave the country. All of them take institutional knowledge with them. Universities are already making what the National Education Association (NEA) calls “impossible decisions” about which research programs to continue and which to abandon. Private funding is increasingly concentrated in Artificial Intelligence (AI), leaving fields like materials science, atmospheric research, and epidemiology starved of talent and capital.

The brain drain is a lagging indicator. The full cost will not become visible for five to ten years. By then, the laboratories will have closed, the grant pipelines will have dried up, and the next generation of researchers will have gone to Shanghai, Munich, or Singapore. This is how a competitive advantage dies: not in a single dramatic event, but in a decade of quiet attrition that no one notices until it is too late to reverse.

The Federalism Firewall

The picture is not entirely bleak. A counter-movement is emerging at the state level, and its resilience matters.

California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to the February 12 announcement by declaring the Republican Party “the pro-pollution party.” More substantively, California maintains its own vehicle emissions standards under a Clean Air Act waiver and continues to invest in clean energy infrastructure independent of federal grants. A January 2026 court ruling found that $7.6 billion in federal clean energy grants could not be legally cut by executive action.

Massachusetts enacted the 2024 Climate Act, mandating new streamlined permitting for clean energy infrastructure by March 2026. Its regulations, finalized in January 2026, include 12-month decision deadlines for solar and battery storage projects.

Washington passed 2026 legislation requiring data centers to fund grid upgrades, prioritize renewables, and curtail power during shortages before households or hospitals. State lawsuits blocked federal orders to keep the TransAlta coal plant operating and restored $12 million in Electric Vehicle (EV) charging funds.

New York, Oregon, Illinois, and 21 other states plus the District of Columbia maintain 100% clean electricity commitments. State attorneys general from California, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts have indicated they will challenge the endangerment rescission in court.

This is the federalism firewall. It is real. But it has limits.

A fractured regulatory landscape, where California requires one set of emissions standards and Texas requires none, creates exactly the kind of uncertainty that drives manufacturing capital overseas. China and the European Union (EU) offer unified regulatory frameworks. The U.S. now offers 50 different frameworks, plus a federal government actively hostile to the technology. For a manufacturer deciding where to build the next battery factory or wind turbine assembly plant, the calculus just got simpler. And it does not favor Ohio.

What Comes Next

The legal challenges will come fast. Environmental groups, state attorneys general, and scientific organizations have all signaled intent to sue. The D.C. Circuit Court, which upheld the original finding in 2012, is widely expected to look skeptically at the rescission. But the Supreme Court’s recent track record of limiting agency authority (West Virginia v. EPA, Loper Bright) creates genuine uncertainty about the final outcome.

Even if the courts restore the finding, the institutional damage may be irreversible. The researchers who left will not return. The grants that were cancelled will not be retroactively funded. The climate data that was deleted from federal servers will not reappear. The regulatory uncertainty will have already redirected investment to jurisdictions that did not spend two years fighting the basic premise that carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere.

The Soviet Union eventually abandoned Lysenkoism. It took 30 years and a change of leadership. Soviet biology recovered, eventually. But the Soviets never recovered the scientific leadership they had ceded. The geneticists they purged in the 1940s would have been the pioneers of the biotech revolution of the 1970s. Instead, that revolution happened in San Francisco and Cambridge.

The question for the United States is not whether the endangerment finding will eventually be restored. It probably will. The question is what gets lost in the interval, and whether the country that declared science illegal in 2026 can still lead the industries that science built.

The physics does not wait for the politics to catch up.