The political system, representing the taxpayer (primarily via Congress), has always dictated scientific strategy--do we build the Superconducting Supercollider or cancel it; do we return a sample from Mars or not; do we sequence the human genome. How big a budget do we devote to medical research compared to physics, etc. Scientists advocate, but politicians decide.

However, the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day tactical decisions have before been made through expert peer review, by scientists. Given a fixed and finite budget set by Congress, what is the best way to make discoveries?

Having been on grant review panels, it's brutal--at 5 or 10:1 oversubscription rates, your peers will find any flaw in your proposal.

Political appointees are deeply unqualified to make these judgments. To take a very specific example: the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is headed by Michael Kratsios. He has a BA in politics and has never written a scientific publication. (Every prior OSTP head was a PhD scientist.) The OMB memo says he and those like him should decide what to fund without deferring to scientists. How is he going to assess which of 50 proposals on (say) "hypothalamic SH2B1 neurocircuits and SH2B1 signal transduction pathways" is the good one?

He can't, so he'll either choose AI or graft. Both are destructive to our once world-leading scientific enterprise.