I don't think your argument is a genuine one in this case.

The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.

Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?

> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

Depends what you (and they) think their job is.

RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".

Russel Vaught said:

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."

> There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.

> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.

you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.

> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?

>Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?

Well, the alternative is to have a competent (debatable..) execution of a rotten ideology...