On: ‘Complete shock and dismay’: scientists unite against Trump’s $1tn grant attack

The news arrives like a page torn from an unfinished manuscript - one that describes a library where the cataloguers have been replaced by men who do not believe in books. The proposal is a curious inversion: a system designed to dismantle the very mechanisms that sustain it. I think of the Codex Politicus, that apocryphal volume attributed to the 17th-century jurist Johannes Faber, which claimed that every bureaucracy contains within it the seeds of its own dissolution, planted by those who mistake the map for the territory.

What unsettles me is not the redistribution of funds - money has always flowed like sand through an hourglass, piling arbitrarily in one chamber before spilling into the next - but the architecture of the decision. A grant system, after all, is a labyrinth of criteria, peer reviews, and committees, each layer a mirror reflecting the one before it. To replace it with the judgments of appointees is to replace the mirror with a single, unblinking eye. The irony is that the new system, in its rejection of recursion, will inevitably reproduce it: the appointees will develop their own rituals, their own justifications, their own invisible hierarchies.

I recall a line from the Annals of Imperial Administration, a text I may or may not have read: “No system collapses into simplicity; it only collapses into a different kind of complexity, one less visible to its architects.” The scientists protest, but their dismay is already a footnote in a report they cannot see. The new labyrinth is being drawn even as they speak, and its center, as always, is a Minotaur of their own making.