Totally agreed, but I will just add, to your first point, it’s fine for priorities to change, but we do also have well-established statutes that define how changes in administrative rules are supposed to be implemented (eg the Administrative Procedures Act), and at least some of the lawsuits about grant termination have argued that those rules have been being ignored or outright turned inside-out. The district court judge’s written decision in the APHA v NIH case was quite detailed in his explanation of the many, many, many ways that the APA was grossly violated. So yes, priorities are allowed to change, but we have a system in place to manage that; otherwise we are, as Justice Jackson put it this week, playing Calvinball which IMHO is no way to run a country. At a micro level, it’s really painful to spend months writing a grant, more months waiting for it to come up for review, and then at the last second have it get administratively bounced because of new “rules” that didn’t exist when the grant was written or submitted (as happened to me earlier this year).

You are of course correct that it’s utterly bananas that in 225 we are wasting our time trying to guess which words shouldn’t be used in grant applications, and that our colleagues at the CDC and NIH are having to do the same for their papers.