Perspective
Amelia Acker /
Nov 11, 2025
This perspective is part of a series of provocations published on Tech Policy Press in advance of a symposium at the University of Pittsburgh's Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) on threats to knowledge and US democracy.
Acker is the author of Archiving Machines: From Punch Cards to Platforms, published today by MIT Press.
US President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the America Business Forum Miami at the Kaseya Center in Miami, Florida, Wednesday, November 5, 2025. (Official White House photo by Molly Riley)
There was a running joke in the first Trump term that every week was “infrastructure week.” At the close of the first year of Trump’s second term, that joke has been slowed down, flipped, and reversed. Now, every week seems to bring another assault on institutions, destroying another layer of the nation’s infrastructure.
It’s a pattern that follows the same playbook: fire career professionals who maintain the nation’s information institutions, replace them with loyalists, then defund ongoing data collection and management efforts that took decades to build. In the spring of 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner was fired hours after releasing disappointing jobs data. The first woman to serve as the Librarian of Congress was dismissed in a two-sentence email. The National Archivist was removed despite having previously blocked the Biden administration’s Equal Rights Amendment ratification. Each firing portends further erasure of critical knowledge production in the nation’s most robust institutions, by systematically weakening America’s ability to collect and preserve information that markets, policymakers, and citizens depend on.
The dismissals are part of a coordinated assault on America’s knowledge infrastructure. From statistical agencies to national scientific research, the massive defunding threatens profound risks to economic competitiveness that Wall Street has yet to fully price in. The systematic targeting spans the entire knowledge production chain, from soup to nuts. The National Science Foundation has already terminated hundreds of previously approved grants, stopped paying out those that remain, and is no longer awarding new ones. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget would slash NSF funding from $9 billion to $4 billion, a 55% reduction, the deepest cuts to American scientific research since the agency’s founding.
Americans have always been anxious about the nation’s history: writing it, rewriting it, tearing it down, and debating its meaning. But what happens when this anxiety becomes destructive action, when fear produces what sociologists call “agnotology,” or the deliberate production of ignorance? This is the paradox of the present moment and the current assault on knowledge infrastructure. Week after week, we are witnessing the systematic destruction of the very instruments designed to document reality.
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