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

The spectacle, of course, is not new. The Republic has always made a pet of its most cherished parasite: the vast, damp, and endlessly replicating administrative apparatus. Today’s dispatch announces only that the parasite is now to be fed by a different orifice.

The proposal, they say, is to place the distribution of a trillion dollars into the hands of political appointees, removing it from what they call the ‘grant-making system’ - a phrase which, in the argot of the governing class, signifies any process that involves the slightest consultation with people who know what they are talking about. The scientists, we are told, are in a state of ‘complete shock and dismay’. Their astonishment is the most damning evidence of their own naiveté. To be shocked that a politician, upon finding a lever marked ‘ONE TRILLION DOLLARS,’ would wish to pull it, is to have misunderstood the fundamental nature of politics. It is like being shocked that a wolf, upon finding a sheepfold, licks its chops.

The machinery of government exists for one primary purpose: to sustain itself and to reward its operators. The notion that it might function as a delicate instrument for the advancement of human knowledge is a charming fairy tale, suitable for the edification of graduate students and editorial writers. The current administration has merely dispensed with the fairy tale and embraced the machinery’s true purpose with a refreshing, if terrifying, candor. They propose to replace a slow, creaking, and occasionally competent bureaucracy with a fast, sleek, and gloriously partisan one. The product will be the same - a great deal of money will be spent - but the recipients will wear different lapel pins.

One can almost admire the brutal elegance of it. Why bother to influence science when you can simply purchase it, wholesale, and have the invoices sent directly to the Treasury? The ‘attack,’ as the headline wails, is not on grants, but on the pretense. And for that, I suppose, we must credit them with a kind of dreadful honesty.