alt Hacker NewsMore of the same at this point.
If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.
The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.
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Besides the brutal impact on those already invested in the American research community, this is one more nail in the coffin when it comes to competing for new talent. What researcher in their right mind would move their research and their future to the USA to join this clown rodeo?
It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.
My father was a Ph.D., a research scientist at a large state university. After understanding how political everything is under the surface, he cautioned me from ever working in a field that depended on government funding. "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.
Ah, yes, grants should definitely be tied to how much you want to brownnose for the current political team.
What could go wrong?
Definitely not more corruption.
Definitely not more uncertainty that kills gross fixed capital formation.
This cuts both ways: grants are more valuable as political favors when they are immune to cancellation, and grants with objectively-established value are harder to terminate without political blowback.
Put more simply, it all becomes a slush fund for the regime in power.
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> If you are politically connected, or stay in a narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path..
Exactly.
For example, if your research is about how to perform extreme body modifications on minors who think they are a gender that didn't exist 5 minutes ago, your funding is safe. But if you stray from the politically approved path, and discover something heretical like, "Actually, humans are sexually dimorphic" then you and your grant will be cancelled.