What will the US presidency mean for science?
Kamala Harris, an independent scientist and environmental advocate during biden’s term as secretary of state for the US Senate, is running a progressive candidate for the presidency?
After US president Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign on Sunday, he and other senior Democratic politicians threw their support behind vice-president Kamala Harris. Although the situation could change between now and the official selection of the Democratic candidate for the presidency in August, she is widely expected to face off against former president Donald Trump this November.
Harris was influenced by her mother, a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of the disease, at an early age.
Harris has long promoted action on climate as well as environmental justice, says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general for the state of California, Harris became a champion for communities on the front lines of fossil fuel pollution, Stokes says. Harris followed a similar path with work on public health and the environment as a senator from 2017-2021.
As senator, Harris co-sponsored efforts to improve the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) workforce. Legislation was introduced to help students from underrepresented populations get jobs in the sciences, and work experience in the sciences. And as a candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she proposed a plan to invest $60 billion to fund historically Black universities and bolster Black-owned businesses.
As vice-president, Harris has overseen the National Space Council, which is charged with advising the president on US space policy and strategy. Under Harris’s leadership, the body has focused on international cooperation, for example on the Artemis mission, which aims to send astronauts to the Moon.
It is still unclear who Harris will choose to be her running mate if she receives the party nomination. Mark Kelly is a candidate who has decades of experience in science and engineering, if he is chosen.
Harris could be an even stronger proponent for reproductive health care than President Biden, who has been hesitant to speak directly about abortion during his presidency. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has said that he isn’t “big on abortion” and even opposed it in his early days as a senator, but his views have evolved over the years.
It is still unknown whether she will embrace these kinds of progressive health policies or choose a path that might be more appealing to independent and centrist voters, says Alina Salganicoff, director for women’s health policy at the health-policy research organization KFF, based in San Francisco, California. “I anticipate she’s going to be a staunch defender of maintaining and supporting the Affordable Care Act, which has also been a priority for the Biden campaign,” she says.
The Biden-Harris administration has made drug pricing one of the priorities as well as endorsing the use of march-in rights which would allow the government to intervene to set the price of innovations created with public funds. In 2019, Harris co-sponsored legislation that would have created an independent agency to determine appropriate drug prices.
Peter Maybarduk, director of the access to medicines programme at the advocacy organization Public Citizen, based in Washington DC, praised these actions, and said he hoped they would continue under a potential Harris administration, “The Biden-Harris administration has been by far the strongest yet in challenging outrageous drug prices and starting the country down a long road toward medicine affordability,” he says.
This has been a major issue for voters in the US, with 63% of the population saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to a poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC. The Democratic victories of the past year are thought to have been caused by increased support for abortion rights. That’s a winning issue for Democrats and the fact that she’s willing to talk about it is going to be huge. “It’s a major point of differentiation between the two parties and the person who can make that case most clearly to the American public, I think will be in a stronger position.”
At the event, Harris said the Biden administration was fighting to protect women’s access to reproductive care. “We trust women. Women have the power to make decisions about their bodies. We trust women to know what is in their own best interest,” she said.
“Harris and Biden are in lockstep on climate, and that’s exactly what we need,” says Stokes. We can’t afford to lose progress because our2030 goals are right around the corner.
“We’re incredibly excited that we have somebody who has a long track record in fighting for abortion access as potentially being the person who’s at the top of the presidential ticket for the Democratic Party,” said Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a group that supports public insurance coverage of abortion, in an interview with WIRED.
Elisa Wells, cofounder of the nonprofit Plan C, which provides information on self-managed, at-home abortion with pills, told WIRED that she expects Harris to bring “strong leadership” on reproductive rights and have a “bold agenda” to restore legal access to abortion.
A candidate who will forcefully campaigns for reproductive health access will be a huge boon to abortion rights groups, according to an email from an executive of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The right to have an abortion has been protected by the Supreme Court in a case that happened 50 years ago. Three justices appointed by former president Donald Trump—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were among the five who made up the majority opinion to repeal Roe. The decision opened the door for states to ban abortions, and there are more than a dozen of them.
In the speech, she talked about the case of Meaghan and Joe, a Wisconsin couple who discovered they were pregnant, and that the baby had a genetic disorder that put her at risk of death. Meaghan traveled to Minnesota to get an abortion because she could not get one in Wisconsin.