Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would l…
> That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constituti…
It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.
There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.