The government is and always has been the primary driver of science research funding. There simply isn't enough of a known payoff for private investors to bother and private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall. Or perhaps more accurately the government stepped in because private individuals would not and the risk was falling dramatically behind the world in research.
Now new administrations have always been able to influence grant awards. But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
People have always been driven by ideology but the current US admin is just so stupid. Shockingly incompetently stupid. Even if you agree with their ideology do you really want this clown show being the ones implementing it in such a ham-fisted idiotic way?
Depends what you (and they) think their job is.
RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".
Russel Vaught said:
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."
not true. in the us, the government funds only about half of all research and development expenditures.
> private philanthropists have never come close to making up the shortfall.
you are certainly not thinking about university endowments. Numerically most university professors are operaring from a startup budget given by the university, not a grant. even in an r1, most professors do not come in with external money.
> bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?
i mean. i dont know which is dumber. thinking a keyword list is a good idea for cancelling grants or thinking that a grant application is the right way to filter for good science in the first place?
Well, the alternative is to have a competent (debatable..) execution of a rotten ideology...
The idea of freedom of speech is to not limit expression of ideas counter to any one ideology.
Also, if corporations donating to political campaigns is speech, so should science funding be - which is now being restricted.
Their usual retort is: “we need more speech in the market place of ideas, not censorship”.
So why don’t they just fund right-wing-aligned projects instead?
Hypocrisy all around.
if you accept money from the government, you must also accept the fact that that money is political. complaining that losing a barely earned privilege is a loss of freedom of speech is a fucking slap in the face of people who have actually fought hard for freedom of speech.
It has been made political relatively recently. That’s one of my issues.
Please also read the first amendment.