And the non-cancellable nature of grants is not just a nice-to-have, it's absolutely critical for research with upfront capital costs (buying equipment, building labs, etc.)

The very _fact_ that this is a policy is disrupting research, even if specific grants haven't been cancelled. Some universities are stepping in to backstop, but it's a powerful chilling effect.

A professor I worked for in college was a big fan of how the US funding was fragmented, with some coming from the NSF, some from NIH, Energy Ag, each branch of the military... if one department had a loon in charge, the others would keep things running smoothly.

>Science has flourished in the US precisely because it could proceed without whimsical political picking and choosing

Please don't take this as a defense of the Trump administration pulling these ocean sensors, but the previous administration also had political demands on grants. One of the better articles about this I've found is "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge" - https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-an...

This ended up getting grants cancelled because they'd throw in a line so the DEI checkbox would get checked, and then Cruz went through with a hacksaw and cancelled the grant for it, as Scott Alexander found - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/only-about-40-of-the-cruz-w...

https://www.project2025.observer/

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I thought it might be Orange Man Baby.

Sadly, he will not be jailed for all the destruction he has caused. Can we send him the repair bill after he's out of office?

Also famous for being a principal architect and author of Project 2025, which explicitly calls for impoundment as a mechanism for expanding presidential authority to control the Federal budget for political purposes.

(and one of the authors of Project 2025)

He’s a self described Christian nationalist. He literally believes the laws should reflect Christian morals and views. Like a right wing sharia. And that’s what Project 2025 includes. Things like age verification for porn are meant to be backdoor porn bans, and also meant to hurt gay and lesbian culture. But it’s based on a puritanical Christian theocratic sort of view.

We haven't started the Democracy phase yet in the US. It's a constitutional republic and its working exactly as designed by the founding fathers. The wealthy elite stay in control of the Senate (equivalent to the House of Lords) and the citizens get to have their say in the House (equivalent to the House of Commons). In this system nothing becomes law unless approved by the Lords of the Senate.

This started as an Aristocracy with well meaning participants but its evolved into an Oligarchy just as anacyclosis[1] predicts. The next stage is Democracy and then that, eventually, crumbles into mob rule (Ochlocracy).

[1] https://anacyclosis.org/portfolio/what-is-anacyclosis/

Blame 'The Reapportionment Act of 1929', the representatives capped their number and denied you adequate representation.

If you did call you may get a response from one of your representative's staff, the number which are granted is based on the population of your state.

Do it anyway!

That's what they want you to think.

They're ideological goals, not technical ones. If they don't make sense to you it's because you're not viewing it through their ideological lens.

They're isolationists. They do not care about America's standing in the world.

> reduce America's standing in the world.

That is the goal.

If you want to be an authoritarian ruler, truth is the first thing you have to eliminate! If noone knows what is true, a leader can tell you what to believe! Science is our method to determine truth! A führer cannot have that!

The primary goal of authoritarianism is consolidation of power among a small number of elites. Anything that can reduce that power is an enemy.

The essential weakness that the powerful elites have is that they are, by definition, outnumbered. So in order to consolidate and maintain power, they need to disturb any system that the masses can use to coordinate and form collective action.

(It's a kid's movie, but Hopper's speech in "A Bug's Life" captures this very well: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1hfo90u/hoppers_jus...)

Reality has a strong consensus-creating effect. We all live in the same material world, so simply by understanding it better and sharing that understanding, we will automatically trend towards having more common ground and more agreement.

That's a threat to elite power, so authoritarian governments have always been anti-science. They may pay it lip service, or attempt to harness it to their own ends, but they never want an entire populace that it well-educated and grounded in reality, because well-informed masses are harder to divide and conquer.

It's all outlined in Gulliver's Travels.

Pretty much every single part of Project 2025 is designed to reduce America's standing in the world, not just the anti-science parts of it.

It's a general trend across all authoritarian regimes; it's harder to be authoritarian with lots of international connections, with lots of strength and partnerships.

Autarky, authoritarianism, isolation, all go together (along with weak economies, etc., but the goal isn't to have the biggest amount of pie, the goal is to be able to control all the pie slices and take the biggest portion, even if the pie is far smaller.)

The steel man is that you can’t peer review your way to breakthroughs that change consensus, because peer review relies on consensus, so peer review has to be made subordinate to accountable decision makers.

If we do not have objective facts and data, the truth is whatever the loudest person says it is.

Studying the ocean temperatures verifies that climate change is not a hoax. "He" is making money off fossil fuels. That is enough of a reason for being anti-science. This is the same guy that decided that the COVID numbers would go down if we just stopped measuring them. Burying his head in the sand is his go-to solution for all problems.

I think this is part of an anti-climate change agenda, which is about protecting fossil fuel investments. Not sure that it is broadly anti-science, except maybe in the sense of being against public funding broadly.

If you believe that our leadership is being influenced by actors such as Vladimir Putin, then you see that this is intended.

Once you start asking what Trump would do differently if he actually were an agent or captive of hostile foreign interests, the rest will begin to make more sense.

There's a lot of collateral damage that could have been avoided if millions weren't being squandered on dubious "science" like studying grooming habits of trans aboriginals in the Central African Republic (a made-up scenario, but there are many like it).

At some point the baby's going to be thrown out with the bath water until the course is corrected.

What COVID research shutdowns are you talking about? That's too vague to understand, it could mean anything of any sort of political motivation! But with COVID specifically, there's an entire industry devoted to feeding fake conspiracies, so you'll have to be very specific in order for anybody to agree with you.