When he has appointed people to key technical roles, Trump seems to have deliberately selected candidates with either no expertise or an aversion to the scientific mission of the agencies they've been selected to lead. While Obama nominated Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steve Chu to head the Department of Energy and named his top science adviser before even taking office, Trump appointed a former Dancing with the Stars contestant who got Cs and Ds in physics and chemistry to oversee the nation’s nuclear arsenal. “They are flying blind when it comes to science and tech issues,” Kumar Garg, a former senior adviser to Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told the Times.

But Trump’s war on science goes well beyond his apparent disinterest in hiring S.T.E.M. advisers. In his first two months in office, the president has proposed cutting $5.8 billion in funding from the National Institutes of Health, and $900 million from the Energy Department’s Office of Science. He wants to reduce funding for NASA, would reduce research funded by the National Science Foundation by $350 million, and slash the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy program by more than 50 percent. The White House budget plan calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to be cut by 31 percent, which one senior E.P.A. official warned could cause the department’s research office to “implode.”

Trump, who rarely uses a computer and has struggled to articulate his words when talking about cyber issues, often seems to revel in this atavistic worldview, promoting disappearing industries like steelmaking and coal mining and loosening regulations designed to encourage more advanced energy technologies. This week, Trump signed an executive order unraveling the Obama-era Climate Action Plan, which helped limit carbon emissions at coal-fired power plants. His orders also ease restrictions on hydraulic fracking and eliminate the National Environmental Policy Act. “My administration is putting an end to the war on coal—going to have clean coal, really clean coal,” he said. Even talk of climate change has been discouraged since Trump moved into the White House. Politico reports that the Department of Energy's Office of International Climate and Clean Energy has been told to avoid using any mention of “emissions reduction,” “climate change,” and “Paris Agreement” in written communications.

Other decisions put the president directly at odds with Silicon Valley leaders. Trump is expected to sign into law a bill that allows Internet service providers to sell customers’ browsing data without their permission, a strike against consumer privacy online. His administration has also dismissed the impact that automation and artificial intelligence have had on the work force, instead blaming manufacturing job losses on China and Mexico. Last week, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said that the threat of artificial intelligence and robots taking American jobs is “not even on our radar screen,” adding that it’s likely “50 to 100 more years” away. “I’m not worried at all,” he said. “In fact I’m optimistic.” The tech community slammed Mnuchin’s response. “Utterly shocking, just a willful disregard for the truth,” David Pakman, a partner with New York-based venture-capital firm Venrock, told the Hive. “It appears his understanding of A.I. is rooted in science fiction.”

Critics worry that Trump’s anti-intellectual approach to governance could have far-reaching consequences if and when his administration confronts a complex scientific and technical challenge like the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill—all crises, the Times notes, during which Obama turned to his science office for advice.

“We are all sitting on the edge of our seats hoping nothing catastrophic happens in the world,” Obama science and tech adviser Phil Larson told the Times. “But if it does, who is going to be advising him?”