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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. We usually start off the week with a news roundup, but today we’re doing something a little different. On Friday we talked to a few Scientific American editors about how the upcoming election could impact issues of science and health policy. Today we’re back to hear from a few more SciAm staffers before we run out of time to hit the polls.
First up we’ll see where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris stand on climate change and energy policy.
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Andrea Thompson: I’m Andrea Thompson. I’m associate editor for Earth and environment.
So we’re in a little bit of a mixed bag on climate and energy. You know, we’re not where we need to be in terms of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, but President [Joe] Biden’s efforts have been by far the most any presidential administration has taken to try and tackle that problem. A lot of that comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has put a lot of funding towards renewable energy and electric vehicles, but there are also efforts at the [Environmental Protection Agency] to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And all of those collectively will make, hopefully, the biggest dent that we can. But a lot of that depends on, you know, what happens in this election.
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Vice President Harris hasn’t talked a lot about climate change on its face in her public appearances or in debates, but it is widely expected that she would continue and likely build on what President Biden has done. Her record as a senator and before that as attorney general in California was very favorable towards environmental justice, towards climate change issues. Of the experts I talked to, a lot of them were really excited, particularly about her housing policy because where people live has a big influence on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their lifestyles.
So one of the biggest things I think we would expect a Harris administration to do is continue to implement the Inflation Reduction Act and all the funding that it makes available. I think the Harris administration would also be expected to try to continue to strengthen EPA regulations to rein in emissions, although that is somewhat potentially hamstrung by what happens in the court system. But, you know, everyone I talk to expects a Harris administration to try to keep building on the Biden-Harris administration legacy.
The one sort of caveat there is that Vice President Harris has signaled that she has been open to continuing oil and gas leasing and drilling in this country, which is something that has also happened in the Biden administration. Some of that is just, you know, legally, they have to allow certain leases; there’s not a lot they can do about that. But it is, I know, a little bit of a concern among environmental advocates.
So Trump is about as polar opposite as you can get. A few people I spoke to said, like, you know, there could not be a starker difference between the two candidates on a, on a policy.
So Trump has widely signaled, and really straight-out said, that he wants to increase oil and gas extraction.
[CLIP: Donald Trump speaks in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in October: “And we will frack, frack, frack and drill, baby, drill [laughs].”]
Thompson: Nominally, that is to, I think his words are, to make America “energy-dominant.” And there has long been this sort of idea of energy independence, although that’s a little bit of a misnomer because oil and gas are globally traded commodities, so they are always going to be subject to a global market.
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Just judging by his statements, by the Project 2025 blueprint and looking at what happened during his first administration, I think a Trump administration would be very antagonistic to the bedrock environmental and public health laws in our country, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. They rolled back something like more than 200 environmental regulations during their first administration. They definitely tried to reduce the amount that the EPA could actually regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
There’s been some modeling of, you know, what would happen to greenhouse gas emissions if you had a continuation of the current policies versus what is laid out in Project 2025. Project 2025 would basically erase all of the gains made under the Inflation Reduction Act and some of the other policies that the Biden administration has put in place. And the thing with climate change is we have to act very rapidly, and if you lose four years, you cannot get them back.
If Trump won, one of the things that would be really obvious in people’s lives, although it’s hard to say whether it would happen or not, would be disaster response. We just had two very major hurricanes hit in North Carolina and Florida that caused devastation, and the federal government is a huge part of those responses. [The Federal Emergency Management Agency] has funding to help people recover after a disaster, as [does] the Small Business Administration. And the Project 2025 plan basically guts that funding, so it would make it considerably harder for communities to bounce back after a hurricane or a wildfire or any other disaster. And it’s already, even with that funding, very hard to do.
Whereas we would expect a Harris administration to continue in the vein of the Biden administration, which has very much put a push towards preparation—so not just disaster response but getting ahead of the disaster to prepare communities so that they are less impacted when those flooding or wildfire events happen.
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I would say the bottom line is that a Trump administration would be pretty disastrous for trying to continue any progress, even as limited as it is, on climate change. It would be a significant setback at the very least, and it could put achieving the Paris climate agreement goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] completely out of reach. We don’t get there without the U.S. participating.
The Harris administration, it’s harder to say exactly how that would go, but it would at least continue us on the path that the Biden administration has set. It could even put us ahead of where we are on that current trajectory.
Feltman: This is Rachel again. There are few health policy issues more contentious than gun control. Earlier this year Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared firearm violence a public health crisis in the U.S. It’s now the nation’s leading cause of death for children and adolescents. Firearms aren’t even in the top four causes of death for children in other countries that are comparable in terms of size and wealth, according to health policy nonprofit KFF. Here’s where the two candidates stand on this devastating crisis.
Meghan Bartels: My name is Meghan Bartels, and I’m a senior news reporter at Scientific American.
The first thing people should know about gun violence in the U.S. is that the country is actually home to more guns than people. That ends up meaning that guns killed nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. in 2022. More than half of those deaths were suicides. And guns are the leading cause of death for children between the ages of one and 17.
The U.S. still doesn’t have as much data as scientists really need to come up with clear and strong scientific conclusions about what policies do and don’t reduce gun violence. Researchers are trying the best they can with the data that they have, but it’s really difficult to study.
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The vice president’s track record on gun policy begins during the 1990s and 2000s, when she held a string of district attorney offices in California.
As vice president she has headed up the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which President Joe Biden founded. In 2022 Congress passed the first sweeping gun legislation in nearly three decades. It was primarily sort of funding mechanisms, but there were some really important policy changes in there as well. One is requiring stronger background checks on gun buyers who are under 21 years old, one is requiring more types of gun sellers to conduct background checks, and one is broadening a measure that keeps guns away from domestic violence offenders to also now include people who have abused dating partners.
Vice President Harris has discussed the damage done by school shootings.
[CLIP: Kamala Harris speaks in North Hampton, New Hampshire, in September: “And it’s just outrageous that every day in our country, in the United States of America, that parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive. It’s senseless. It, it is—we’ve gotta stop it.”]
Bartels: She’s met with survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, who are actually old enough to vote in a presidential election for the first time this year.
Harris has also talked about the fact that both she and her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, are gun owners, and she talks about how neither of them want to take away people’s guns.
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When Trump was president he primarily loosened restrictions on gun ownership. That said, his really big action on this front was that he appointed about 200 federal judges with gun-friendly records.
The one key action that President Trump took in office that could have reduced gun violence was banning bump stocks, which are attachments that allow semiautomatic guns to shoot faster. However, the Supreme Court has since overturned that, including the three justices that Trump appointed.
The Supreme Court has also overturned a New York state provision that limited concealed carry of weapons. Concealed carry provisions that allow people to have guns in more places do increase gun violence. And sort of the repercussions of the Supreme Court decision are still being understood, but experts are worried because most gun regulation happens at the state level, and rulings like this one can sort of eat away at states’ ability to regulate gun violence in this way.
Trump also openly talks about being a defender of the Second Amendment. His campaign website has a “Gun Owners for Trump” web page.
Trump hasn’t shown any signs of changing his course of action on guns. That said, he hasn’t necessarily given a whole lot of clear details. One idea that has come up from the Trump campaign via his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, is this idea of “hardening” schools. Vance talked during the vice presidential debate about making doors lock better and making them stronger and making windows stronger.
One other piece that has come up is Trump has expressed interest in the idea of concealed carry reciprocity, which is something that would basically eat away at concealed carry weapons bans where they do exist.
There are a lot of policies that don’t directly relate to guns but that do affect how gun violence plays out in the nation. One of the researchers that I spoke with talked about how gun violence is about desperate conditions. It’s particularly prevalent in neighborhoods that are very poor and very disadvantaged. And so there are a host of socioeconomic proposals that don’t include the word “gun” in them anywhere but could reduce gun violence nonetheless. And so it’s also important to look at the broader swath of socioeconomic policies that each candidate presents if you’re interested in looking at the rate of gun violence.
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If Harris wins the election, I think we are looking at a president who genuinely wants to reduce gun violence and is willing to try a range of policies that could help make that a reality. If Trump wins a second term, I think we’re facing another presidential term of weakening gun policies and also continuing this focus on putting in place conservative judiciary members who will see to it that these sorts of policies last long beyond his presidency.
Feltman: Now let’s talk about another contentious issue: immigration. Debates and dog whistles about immigration certainly make the news on a regular basis, but you might not realize the impact related policies have on science and technology in the U.S.
Gary Stix: I’m Gary Stix. I’m a senior editor at Scientific American, and I’ve been writing about immigration policy related to the 2024 election.
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The country has a significant need for filling jobs for STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the country will require one million more STEM workers in 2030 than were needed a decade earlier. The CHIPS and Science Act is an attempt to revitalize the semiconductor industry. It was passed with bipartisan support in 2022. However, some prognostications have been that without more immigration, this plan is either gonna be hindered or it could even fail if there are not more computer scientists, engineers and technicians to staff chip factories.
The Trump plan and his overall policy would make it unlikely and perhaps virtually impossible to meet the needs for skilled workers. The plans that he has for undocumented immigrants will resonate throughout his policy for legal immigration as well. He has one of the most, if not the most, extreme anti-immigration policies that has ever been conceived of, which is witnessed in his plans to expel millions of undocumented immigrants, and perhaps other noncitizens as well, that he baselessly claims are committing crimes, planning to vote illegally and stealing jobs from U.S. citizens. It might even entail building detention camps for those waiting to be expelled.
[CLIP: Donald Trump speaks at July’s Republican National Convention: “The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country—even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.”]
Stix: Trump also [had policies] during his first administration of making it more difficult for legal immigrants to come to this country as well.
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Kamala Harris presents a fairly divergent perspective. The entire political system has grown more conservative as far as immigration policy. Harris has endorsed the bipartisan immigration bill that never went through because Trump did not want to give the Democrats a win on this issue. The bill would have enabled the administration to restrict asylum seekers at the border.
At the same time, though, Harris has also endorsed a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. She has acknowledged that the current immigration system is “broken” and that there needs to be measures to address that.
So the Trump and Harris positions on immigration provide voters with a highly divergent choice when they go to the polls very soon. If Harris wins, it’s quite likely that the bipartisan immigration bill that Trump opposed would pass, and it probably would be a good solution to the overwhelming numbers of asylum seekers encountered at the southern border.
If Trump is elected, his plans to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants—and perhaps even more, because there are legal immigrants that he also wants to deport: the well-known case of Springfield, Ohio, where he baselessly said that migrants were eating pets. It’s quite possible that the plans to deport anywhere from 11 to 20 million people will prove to be impossible.
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Immigration to the world’s best-performing economy is going to continue to be a major issue. There is a dire need for comprehensive immigration reform that would take the form of congressional legislation that regulates the number of people crossing the border and provide pathways to legalization for undocumented workers and allow for more immigration to meet employer needs. That probably would not happen—even in a Harris administration. If Trump continues with his deportation policy, it could completely upset the American economy. There would not be enough workers at every skill level, and it would undermine the basic functioning of the American political system.
Feltman: Our last topic for today is education: How are Trump and Harris planning on changing American schools?
Allison Parshall: My name is Allison Parshall, and I am an associate news editor here at Scientific American.
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So education has been the subject of some of the candidates’ most ambitious promises on the campaign trail. For Harris, that’s her promise to relieve student debt and work towards universal preschool education. For Trump, that’s his promise to eliminate the federal Department of Education and install what he calls, quote, “universal school choice” around the country.
Trump’s promise to eliminate the Department of Education is part of a broader plan to just cut down on what he sees as government overreach in general, but here specifically, he’s talking about what he sees as the department having undue influence over what students across the country learn. The education policy researchers I spoke with stressed that the Department of Education actually has very little say in setting curricula across the country, and they also pointed out that eliminating the department would require an act of Congress.
But even if that happened, Trump hasn’t said what he would propose to do with the department’s many programs that fund education across the country. Most importantly, that’s Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA. So these two programs support the education of low-income students and those with disabilities, respectively, and provide about $34 billion in funding to schools and students across the country.
Trump has been vague in his promises, but Project 2025 was more specific. It promises sending Title I funding and IDEA funding, which are normally earmarked for educating, as I said, low-income and disabled students, to states as no-strings-attached block grants, which they could effectively do with as they pleased. And Project 2025 also calls for phasing out federal Title I funding after 10 years. The policy experts I spoke with found this very concerning, as schools across the country, public and private, rely on this funding to educate their disadvantaged or disabled students.
Harris, in contrast, has spoken out against Trump’s plan to shutter the Department of Education, and her platform calls for fully funding IDEA. Also on the topic of federal spending, Harris has promised to build on the Biden-Harris administration’s programs to forgive student debt. So you may recall the Biden administration’s plan to forgive $10,000 of student loans across the board; that was axed by the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority that had been installed by Trump.
Despite this, though, Harris has cited the administration’s successes so far in saying that they’ve approved [nearly] $170 billion in student loan forgiveness through different programs, but she has not made any specific promises about what future debt relief would look like if she’s elected.
Harris has also voiced her support for universal pre-K, which the Biden-Harris administration has repeatedly pushed for but which has stalled repeatedly in Congress. And she’s also put forward economic proposals like the expanded child tax credit and an income cap on child care costs that would all support parents of young children.
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And then there’s another big area of difference between Harris and Trump, and that’s public K–12 education. Since the pandemic, movements to privatize public education have really gained steam. State and local governments across the country are enacting voucher programs and other types of school choice programs, which give public funds directly to parents to fund private education.
This is something that Harris opposes because these programs decrease funding available for public schools, but these are also programs that Trump has long supported. In his first term he appointed school choice advocate Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, and his appointees to the Supreme Court have ruled on pivotal cases, which now require voucher programs to include religious schools.
So while these statewide voucher programs are increasingly popular, research has shown that they have a largely negative effect on student achievement; that’s been the case in Louisiana and Indiana. Often that’s because the choices that it opens up for families are more limited than you would expect, and private schools funded by vouchers are also allowed to turn away students who need additional accommodations, like those with disabilities and those who are learning English as a second language. And they can also discriminate against LGBTQ+ students on religious grounds, too.
Of course, that is all pretty in line with Trump’s stated goals for education in the country under what he calls, quote, his “Agenda47.” Roughly speaking, that’s to increase the presence of Christian religion in public schools and to censor teachers and student speech about important topics that he doesn’t like, such as LGBTQ+ issues and structural and historical racism.
His movement has led to increasing book bans, teacher “gag order” laws across the country, and despite being ostensibly against federal involvement in curricula, he’s repeatedly threatened to use federal powers like opening civil rights investigations or withholding federal funding to get states and schools and teachers to comply with his vision for curricula.
And this is something that Harris has called out on the campaign trail.
[CLIP: Kamala Harris speaks at July’s American Federation of Teachers Convention: “And while you teach students about our nation’s past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history.”]
Parshall: One of the experts I spoke with, I think, summed up the moment that we’re in pretty well. Her name is Elizabeth DeBray; she’s an education policy researcher at the University of Georgia. And she said that the pandemic has left many people unsatisfied with the education system in this country: a lot of learning gaps, especially in STEM; high teacher turnover; and just kind of a general dissatisfaction with the status quo.
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And so now, as we’re looking forward to the election, if Trump wins, you can probably expect to see the school choice movement gaining even more steam and seeing more support behind these efforts to move funding away from public education and to kind of say, you know, “The learning gaps are too great; we can’t overcome this. We’re gonna almost divest and move to a more private model for our education.”
And if Kamala Harris were to win, I think we would see something fairly similar to what we’ve seen with the Biden-Harris administration—not proposing too many upheavals but proposing a reinvestment in the systems that we have now that people are dissatisfied with and hoping to create something that works better.
Feltman: That’s all for our comprehensive election roundup. Now all that’s left to do is vote!
We’ll be back on Wednesday with something to take your mind off election news because, yeah, we're all gonna need it. We have an episode lined up all about a time when magic and science were one and the same.
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Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was reported and co-hosted by Andrea Thompson, Meghan Bartels, Gary Stix and Allison Parshall. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Don’t forget to vote!
