When an idiot is in charge of science’s purse strings…

Here’s a fantasy for you: a rich man uses his immense wealth to alleviate poverty, fund science that benefits all, or decides to distribute all of his money to worthy institutions. It never happens. Instead, we get the world’s richest man using his clout to get a job he isn’t qualified to do, who then uses his unwarranted power to do the opposite, and kill the research enterprise of the United States with one stupid stroke of his pen.

I’m not being dramatic. US research is the product of years of investment. There was a conscious decision to build up a more effective program of research and development after WWII, built upon the existing foundation of expertise in our universities (thanks, Vannevar Bush!). The government knew it would take long-term training and money and resources to create, and part of that was a system of federal grants to researchers with additional funds to the research institutions to build and maintain their infrastructure, which are called indirect costs. You don’t get anything for free! You want to encourage biologists to study the genome, well, you’re going to have to ask a university to maintain a large animal care facility, and hire people to keep an eye on the ethics of such research, and hire accountants to manage the expenses, and veterinarians to keep the animals healthy, and secretaries to help write up the work, and you’re going to have to pay publishers to disseminate it. It’s not cheap.

It’s true that there is some administrative bloat — Harvard is filthy rich, and I think they’ve been gaming the system to inflate those indirect costs — and the article at the link points out that there are a lot of regulations that could be streamlined, but to do that streamlining in a way that retains the useful necessities requires detailed analysis and careful pruning. Only an idiot would think you can just slash all indirect costs to the bone in one crude, extreme cut without totally disrupting all research at American universities.

Enter the idiot.

Musk doesn’t have the slightest clue what he is doing.

Yes, he is cutting funding for cancer research. He’s imposing a blanket, indiscriminate cut for all research. He’s going to gut a whole generation of scientists, a wound it would take decades to recover from, if there was any recovery possible. I suspect that instead of repair what’s going to happen is we’re going to replace universities with bible colleges, pandering to the populist idea that we can pray cancer away.