They are going after all of it. The entire US scientific enterprise, now in the crosshairs thanks to an unholy union of true believer ideologues and Pepe the Frog drawings come to life and installed at otherwise staid alphabet soup government agencies. It is hard, today, to imagine what comes next.
With a looming 5 pm deadline on Friday for government entities to scrub away the existence of DEI and “gender ideology” from literally anything they do or publish, the litany of horrors unleashed upon critical agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Science Foundation, and others is growing unwieldy.
At the CDC, chaos reigned on Friday, as critical databases such as the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System appeared to have been pulled entirely offline. Researchers across the country, as well as journalists, scrambled to try and download and save affected data. At NIH, sources told Splinter that leadership was in the process of singling out contracts that needed canceling, and the study groups that bestow billions in grant funding remain on hold, at least for now. The NSF appears to have frozen all payments to its grantees this week, even after the startling OMB spending directive was rescinded. There are rumors that entire agency websites may simply vanish by that 5 pm deadline, at least temporarily, given the impossibility of going through and eliminating any mention of “diversity” or the word “they.”
Maybe some of this gets undone. Maybe the NIH study groups restart, and the NSF payments start flowing to grantees, and maybe even some of the CDC data pops back up after someone awful goes through and deems them free of woke, or whatever. Maybe. But there is basically no chance that the overall scientific endeavor in this country will move forward into the meat of this second Trump term in anything resembling its usual form. There is not enough private money out there to fill the gaps that the administration is essentially threatening to claw out; scientists who can’t support their labs anymore will leave, ongoing studies and experiments will stop, drugs will go undiscovered or unapproved, and people will die who didn’t need to. The past 10 days have been the most anti-intellecutal, anti-knowledge, anti-science period in modern U.S. history; what comes next is anybody’s guess.
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The Truth Hurts
