By now it is clear that Trump and MAGA policy and tactics has targeted American science for corruption into a taxpayer-paid service center for special interests. Science reports that on April 24, Trump fired all 24 members of the US National Science Foundation’s governing body. That will get rid of its independence and focus on science in the public interest. The tax dollars the NSF controls will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration.
Trump's email from his personnel office insultingly dumped them like this: “On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service.”
Those firings removed the institutional safeguard designed to insulate taxpayer-funded scientific research decisions from political interference and special interest capture. Now, all any special interest has to do to get access to those tax dollars is pay Trump what he demands. Miraculously, taxpayer science will start working for special interests to solve special interest problems, not to solve public interest problems.
For context, the NSF funds ~25% of all federally supported basic research in the US. It has a nearly $9 billion annual budget.
NSF board members have been critical of Trump’s proposed massive NSF budget cuts, including a proposed 55% reduction. So, Trump got his revenge on both those feisty board members and taxpayer dollars spend in service to the public interest. The mass firings here follow a well-established pattern of executive orders that codify denying or terminating grants not aligned with what Trump and allied special interests want. What they want is to stop research on inconvenient (profit-impairing) things like climate change and mRNA vaccines.
The concern that tax dollars will be reoriented to serve special interests who pay in Trump's deeply corrupted pay-to-play administration reflects the fundamental incompatibility between merit-based peer review and corrupt, politically directed funding.
Once again, the taxpayer is screwed, while allied pay-to-play special interests can reap big rewards on the taxpayer dime, in return for their "free speech" in the form of bribery of Trump and his elite MAGA allies.
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