Flooding the Zone

President Musk's strategy is basically to commit so many outrages so quickly that nobody can focus on any one of them sufficiently to resist effectively. Meanwhile, the nominal president just spouts insanity and inanity, essentially as a distraction. The New York Times doesn't have to write a serious policy analysis explaining why the U.S. is not going to take over Greenland or the Gaza Strip, but they do it anyway, which both dignifies delusions and takes up space that otherwise might be put to meaningful use.

 

I'm going to focus, at least for now, on the question of whether president Musk really wants to destroy the scientific research enterprise in the U.S. and if so, why. First of all, that would be the effect of executive actions taken so far, and further proposed. They've put a raving lunatic in charge of HHS, which includes NIH, the CDC, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration*, and some smaller pockets of money for public health promotion and research. The abrupt, unilateral cap on indirect costs of 15% affects all of these agencies, and the National Science Foundation, NASA, Advanced Research Projects Agency, and others that fund scientific research. Musk has also suspended all review panel and national advisory committee meetings, which are the mechanism for actually awarding funds. We'll see where that goes.

 

I've explained the indirect costs issue before, and I won't repeat myself, but take my word for it, with a 15% cap it will be impossible to sustain more than a shadow of the current scientific enterprise in the U.S. And no, private corporations do little or no basic research. They only invest where they can see a likely financial payoff, and that means they'll do some applied research but with basic science a) there's not telling whether and how it might lead to profit and b) you can't patent scientific facts. The pharmaceutical industry turns discoveries made by NIH-funded investigators into billions in profits, but it doesn't invest in making the discoveries itself.

 

The basic problem for president Musk is that his rule depends on a vast edifice of lies. Truth is the enemy, and truth is part of the mission and the culture of the university. The first thing the Nazis did when they invaded Poland was not to hunt down the Jews, but rather to murder the so-called intelligentsia, "the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society;^[1] as such, the intelligentsia consists of scholars, academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers.^{[2][3] . . .} After the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the Nazis launched the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, by way of the military operations of the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, the German AB-Aktion in Poland, the Intelligenzaktion, and the Intelligenzaktion Pommern." Stalin did the same thing in the east.

 

I don't think Musk intends to murder us, but he does want to put us out of business. He's gotten a long way down that road.

*SAMHSA doesn't technically fund research, but they fund many demonstration and capacity building projects that typically included 15% for evaluation, which amounts to implementation research. If a university or other research institute has the subcontract for evaluation, they'll get their indirect costs as part of that 15% of the grant.