Every day seems to bring more bad news for science in the US. Websites vanish, funding is cancelled, and scientists are denied the ability to address the public. But each time something terrible happens, we only have to wait a few days before half of these ideas gets changed or completely rescinded. It can be hard to tell what’s going on and what that means for the future of science in the world’s leading producer of the stuff.

The fact is, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect some approaches to communicating with the public to change with a turnover in administration. It’s also not unreasonable to limit communications until the new people can set policies and determine how to communicate them.

At the same time, the Trump transition team seems to be unusually chaotic. Questionable policies have been disavowed in a surprising number of instances once senior officials were installed. And some of the things that have been left in place are clearly problematic.