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

The news today, about this proposed grant attack, it’s like someone wants to take the gears out of a perfectly good clock and replace them with… well, with nothing, or worse, with sand. A trillion dollars in grants, shifted to political appointees. That’s the mechanism they’re proposing.

Here’s the thing you have to understand. Science, real science, isn’t about who you know, or who you voted for. It’s about ideas. It’s about testing those ideas. It’s about whether the experiment works, whether the data holds up. When you fund research, you’re not just handing out money; you’re betting on an idea, on a question, on the possibility of discovery.

If you put that power in the hands of political appointees, what do they optimize for? Not for the best science, I’ll tell you that much. They optimize for what looks good, what sounds good, what gets them re-elected, or what aligns with some pre-conceived notion. It’s like trying to build a bridge by committee, where the committee members are chosen for their speaking ability, not their engineering knowledge. The bridge falls down.

The current system, with all its flaws, tries to find the best ideas. Peer review, for all its squabbles and biases, is a filter. It’s a messy, human filter, but it’s trying to find the signal in the noise. This new proposal? It’s not a filter. It’s a megaphone for whatever noise is loudest at the moment. It’s a broken circuit, designed to short-circuit discovery. It doesn’t make sense. It can’t work.