Trump Administration proposes science commissars

The Office of Management and Budget is proposing a set of new rules that would put OMB officials in charge of all federal scientific grants, allowing them to overrule peer review panels. They can also cancel grants at any time for essentially any reason. This would end the current grant review mechanism and turn it into a kind of political patronage system. Any research or research institutions could immediately be cut off if they offend the Administration.

What’s being proposed here reminds me of political commissars of Stalin’s USSR. In science, it brought about the imprisonment or death of eminent geneticists and the rise of Lysenkoism, which set Soviet agriculture back decades. For someone who grew up during the Cold War, the idea a Republican administration would embrace the practices of communism is a breathtaking inversion.

Or consider what happened to German and Italian physics during fascism. Many of the world’s best fled to the West and served in the development of the atom bomb that helped drive Japanese capitulation.

There’s every reason for Republicans in Congress, who have historically stood up for science, to loudly oppose this poisoning of peer review. The American research enterprise will be diminished for decades if they don’t stand up.