Trump, Musk, and RFK jr are a horrific combo that has discovered how fragile the institution of science can be — all it takes is handing the keys to funding to a small number of incompetents and ideologs. It’s such a simple thing: decree that a few words are verboten and will get your grant application pulled. Take a look at the complete list of words that will flag a grant for being held. They include “gender,” “disability,” and “race”. They include “female” and “women,” but not “male” or “man”. They include “socioeconomic,” “socio economic,” and “sociocultural”…they really wanted to make sure that they got that one covered.
The NSF has sent out this ridiculous decision tree:
Seriously. You want to know how these bad decisions are sailing through? It’s because there is a petty bureaucracy running the NSF that designs redundant, pointless, stupid diagrams like that. It’s Kafkaesque.
The USC professor who is reporting this says:
These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you’re going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you’re going to control for socioeconomic status – totally standard practice – you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.
The word “systemic” is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran’s Administration, but we can’t study trauma now?
If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word “biased” gets me flagged. You can’t design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA
And then, all the Republicans in congress have predictably caved and are going to approve a manifest madman, “Bobby” as they call him, to control health and human services, while a narcissistic boob, Elon Musk, is running rampant through the country’s finances.
So what next? All political norms have been shredded. Democracy doesn’t matter. Anarchy reigns. The law is irrelevant — do you think the Supreme Court can bring reason back? We’re all helpless, and are reduced to spectators to our rapid, catastrophic destruction. It’s going to get much worse.
Is the only solution a violent overthrow of the Trump regime, a complete dissolution of all of the Trump precedents, and a rewriting of the US Constitution? We have to recognize that the US is broken.