It is hard to know, these days, whether any particular move emanating destructively forth from the Trump administration can be blamed primarily on malevolence or incompetence. Surely, most have at least a dash of both, and some, like a questionnaire sent to some recipients of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants on Friday, seem to rest on equally massive Corinthian columns of the two.
“Can you confirm that your organization does not work with entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties, or any party that espouses anti-American beliefs?” reads one question. “What impact does this project have on protecting religious minorities, promoting religious freedom, and combatting Christian prosecution?” asks another.
It acts as a sort of catch-all for the various purge-like policing of government projects that have emerged since January 20 — “Can you confirm that this is no DEI project or DEI elements of the project?” “Can you confirm this is not a climate or ‘environmental justice’ project or include such elements?” “Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined in the below Executive Order?”
Several sources told Splinter they received this questionnaire, marked as “URGENT/DUE MARCH 8,” specifically due at 8 AM ET. It specifies that the questions must be completed for all projects, including even those that were terminated or closed (yes, according to at least one source it appears to have gone out to institutions with already-canceled government contracts or funding), and multiple sources pointed out the impracticality of actually completing such a task in that time frame. The OMB document says it has “estimated burden” of 30 minutes — for each project, sent the day before it was due.
And what’s more, many of them weren’t supposed to get the questionnaire in the first place: While the Reddit post was in r/InternationalDev and said international partners would be receiving it, multiple sources told Splinter that the survey had been sent to CDC grantees that had nothing to do with “Foreign Assistance” — which is, again, the target of the executive order on which it is based. It had recipients “aghast,” per one source, obviously with little idea of how or if to respond. The foreign or domestic institutions that received them will likely respond centrally from general counsel or similar offices, if they do indeed have projects involved with foreign aid, but it is once again throwing the world of federally funded science and other fields into utterly unnecessary chaos. “There’s still some confusion about it,” one source said, with a healthy degree of understatement.
The OMB guidance suggests that responses to the Purity Test will be scored using a specified system, with projects receiving a max of 180 points. Given the sheer number of projects — and that, in spite of the supposed foreign aid focus, this will almost certainly find its way to NIH, NSF, and other agency grantees as well, given its origination in a generalized executive order and at OMB — this once again seems like the kind of thing that will be fed through some broken, Klan-sympathizing AI system to weed out the undesirables.
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