1 00:00:00,751 --> 00:00:03,912 Nikolai Vavilov was the best botanist in the world. 2 00:00:03,912 --> 00:00:06,533 Not in the Soviet Union, in the world. 3 00:00:06,634 --> 00:00:18,358 He spent decades collecting seeds, traveled to five continents, built the largest seed bank on Earth, in Leningrad, because he understood something simple and kind of enormous. 4 00:00:18,359 --> 00:00:25,301 If you preserve the genetic diversity of plants, you can feed people through famine, through blight, through anything. 5 00:00:25,422 --> 00:00:29,253 He collected over 380,000 seed samples. 6 00:00:29,274 --> 00:00:34,858 He went to Afghanistan, to Ethiopia, to Mexico, to the mountains of Central Asia. 7 00:00:34,858 --> 00:00:45,055 He understood that wild ancestors of our crops carried genetic resilience that domesticated varieties had lost, and that someday, maybe not now, maybe not for a 8 00:00:45,055 --> 00:00:48,908 generation, we would need those genes desperately. 9 00:00:48,908 --> 00:00:50,109 He believed in evidence. 10 00:00:50,109 --> 00:00:56,513 He believed you test a theory, and then the theory either holds up or the theory doesn't hold up, right? 11 00:00:56,513 --> 00:00:57,818 And then a man named 12 00:00:57,818 --> 00:01:05,704 Trophim Lysenko decided that genetics was bourgeois, Western, politically suspect. 13 00:01:05,704 --> 00:01:17,934 Lysenko had a theory about what wheat, sorry, that made Joseph Stalin happy, and being agreeable to Stalin turned out to matter more than being right. 14 00:01:18,185 --> 00:01:25,110 So they didn't argue with Vavilov, they didn't hold a debate, they didn't run the experiment, they arrested him. 15 00:01:25,110 --> 00:01:26,501 nineteen forty. 16 00:01:26,835 --> 00:01:28,596 Vavilov was taken into custody. 17 00:01:28,596 --> 00:01:33,920 He was interrogated for hundreds of hours and eventually sentenced to death. 18 00:01:33,920 --> 00:01:39,744 Then it was commuted, and then he was left in a prison cell in Saratov. 19 00:01:40,184 --> 00:01:48,130 The man who spent his life thinking about how to feed people, he died in prison in 1943 of starvation. 20 00:01:48,130 --> 00:01:49,331 Let me say that again. 21 00:01:49,331 --> 00:01:56,115 The world's leading expert on agriculture and famine starved to death in a cell. 22 00:01:56,181 --> 00:01:59,173 Because his science was politically inconvenient. 23 00:01:59,173 --> 00:02:01,413 And here's the part I can't stop thinking about. 24 00:02:01,474 --> 00:02:03,774 They didn't have to prove him wrong. 25 00:02:03,791 --> 00:02:05,315 Like that was never the point. 26 00:02:05,315 --> 00:02:17,441 The point was to control the ideas and whether or not they were allowed to exist, to put the checkbook and the prison key in the hands of people whose only qualification was 27 00:02:17,441 --> 00:02:18,581 loyalty. 28 00:02:18,721 --> 00:02:20,282 Vavilov was right, by the way. 29 00:02:20,282 --> 00:02:23,308 Lasinko's theories produced crop failures, famine. 30 00:02:23,308 --> 00:02:25,479 The science didn't care about politics. 31 00:02:25,479 --> 00:02:26,499 The science never does. 32 00:02:26,499 --> 00:02:27,719 It's science. 33 00:02:27,799 --> 00:02:29,220 That was eighty years ago. 34 00:02:29,220 --> 00:02:31,760 A different country, a different system. 35 00:02:32,161 --> 00:02:35,562 I want you to hold on to that cell in Saratov, right? 36 00:02:35,562 --> 00:02:39,483 Because the mechanism, the actual logic of it, is back. 37 00:02:39,643 --> 00:02:45,565 And it's in a four hundred and twelve page document filed in Washington this spring. 38 00:03:01,241 --> 00:03:02,171 This is the overlap. 39 00:03:02,171 --> 00:03:06,782 This is the show about systems of power, labor, and American injustice. 40 00:03:06,782 --> 00:03:07,502 I'm Joshua. 41 00:03:07,502 --> 00:03:08,883 I'm very glad you're here. 42 00:03:08,883 --> 00:03:10,184 Will's out again this week. 43 00:03:10,184 --> 00:03:13,824 I've been thinking about federal grant regulations a lot. 44 00:03:13,845 --> 00:03:18,566 Which is a sentence I never expected to say out loud, and yet here we are. 45 00:03:18,646 --> 00:03:20,299 Here's the overlap, right? 46 00:03:20,300 --> 00:03:21,271 Here's what happened. 47 00:03:21,271 --> 00:03:33,209 On May 29th, 2026, the Office of Management and Budget, we've talked about this before, OMB, Russ Vaught, the Prince of Darkness, published a proposed rule in the Federal 48 00:03:33,209 --> 00:03:33,999 Register. 49 00:03:33,999 --> 00:03:38,942 Docket number OMB twenty twenty six zero zero three four. 50 00:03:38,942 --> 00:03:42,344 Four hundred and twelve pages. 51 00:03:42,465 --> 00:03:48,728 The dry official title is Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance. 52 00:03:48,769 --> 00:03:49,589 I know. 53 00:03:49,892 --> 00:03:51,842 I know how that sounds, but stay with me. 54 00:03:51,843 --> 00:04:01,226 Because what's inside those 412 pages is one of the most significant power grabs over American knowledge that I've ever read about. 55 00:04:01,226 --> 00:04:06,747 And almost nobody is talking about it because they buried it in the most boring language that they could find. 56 00:04:06,747 --> 00:04:08,088 And that's not an accident. 57 00:04:08,088 --> 00:04:09,668 That's the strategy. 58 00:04:09,968 --> 00:04:12,329 Let me tell you about what it actually does. 59 00:04:12,469 --> 00:04:16,090 Right now, when a scientist wants federal money, say 60 00:04:16,367 --> 00:04:23,323 To study pancreatic cancer or Alzheimer's or why a bridge collapsed, they have to write a proposal. 61 00:04:23,323 --> 00:04:27,527 And a panel of other scientists, experts in the field, they review that. 62 00:04:27,527 --> 00:04:30,309 They ask, is this good science? 63 00:04:30,309 --> 00:04:31,850 Is the method sound? 64 00:04:31,850 --> 00:04:34,412 Will this teach us something true? 65 00:04:34,712 --> 00:04:38,576 Now, the panel has no political stake in the outcome. 66 00:04:38,576 --> 00:04:43,773 They're not asking whether the research makes a politician comfortable, they're asking whether 67 00:04:43,773 --> 00:04:46,395 Whether or not it's going to advance human knowledge. 68 00:04:46,395 --> 00:04:46,916 That's it. 69 00:04:46,916 --> 00:04:52,070 Like that's the only criteria for what it actually does. 70 00:04:52,321 --> 00:04:53,121 That's the system. 71 00:04:53,121 --> 00:04:54,862 It's called peer review. 72 00:04:54,862 --> 00:05:02,285 It's been the foundation of American research and kind of all research since the end of the Second World War. 73 00:05:02,345 --> 00:05:04,406 The OMB rule changes that. 74 00:05:04,406 --> 00:05:16,712 So, under this rule, even after scientists say yes, even after the experts approve it, big green check mark, a political appointee in Washington gets to look at the project and ask 75 00:05:16,712 --> 00:05:18,833 a completely different question. 76 00:05:18,913 --> 00:05:19,453 Not 77 00:05:19,453 --> 00:05:21,374 Is this good science? 78 00:05:21,374 --> 00:05:27,197 But does this demonstrably advance the president's policy priorities? 79 00:05:27,678 --> 00:05:30,619 And if the answer is no, kill it. 80 00:05:30,620 --> 00:05:31,660 It gets worse. 81 00:05:31,660 --> 00:05:38,504 The rule lets the government cancel any active grant mid-study, quote, for convenience. 82 00:05:38,784 --> 00:05:42,587 It bans funding what they call gender ideology. 83 00:05:42,587 --> 00:05:45,354 It restricts international collaboration. 84 00:05:45,354 --> 00:05:49,626 It requires e-verify for every grant employee. 85 00:05:49,626 --> 00:06:00,030 And it lets the government terminate an award at any time it decides the research no longer serves, and I'm quoting the national interest as it exists at the time of 86 00:06:00,030 --> 00:06:00,902 termination. 87 00:06:00,902 --> 00:06:02,033 There's key to that, right? 88 00:06:02,033 --> 00:06:06,505 The national interest as it exists at the time of termination. 89 00:06:06,505 --> 00:06:08,806 That's going to come up again and again and again and again. 90 00:06:08,806 --> 00:06:11,737 So put it on save, press the save button on that and and 91 00:06:11,737 --> 00:06:15,188 And hold that in the back of your mind while while you you hear me out. 92 00:06:15,189 --> 00:06:22,211 This one covers 1.1 trillion to trillion in federal grants with a T trillion. 93 00:06:22,211 --> 00:06:23,432 So why now? 94 00:06:23,632 --> 00:06:25,613 Why this episode this week? 95 00:06:25,613 --> 00:06:33,957 Because the the public comment period closes July 13th, and the rule is set to take effect on October first of this year. 96 00:06:33,957 --> 00:06:36,759 This is happening right now while you are listening to this. 97 00:06:36,759 --> 00:06:40,720 And here's the thing: to understand why this is so dangerous. 98 00:06:40,824 --> 00:06:52,018 You have to understand where the rules it's replacing come from, why they existed w like in the first place, because someone eighty years ago fought very hard to keep politicians' 99 00:06:52,018 --> 00:06:55,029 hands off of the checkbook of science. 100 00:06:55,029 --> 00:06:56,610 And they had a good reason. 101 00:06:56,870 --> 00:06:58,210 So let's go back. 102 00:06:58,211 --> 00:07:06,874 It's nineteen forty five, the war is ending, and a man named Venevar Bush, not that guy, sits down to write a report. 103 00:07:06,894 --> 00:07:10,086 Now you might not know Venevar. 104 00:07:10,086 --> 00:07:13,037 You're familiar with Bush, not the same family, but you should. 105 00:07:13,037 --> 00:07:17,138 Venevar Bush ran American science during the Second World War. 106 00:07:17,138 --> 00:07:20,048 He oversaw the Manhattan Project's research apparatus. 107 00:07:20,048 --> 00:07:29,142 He was the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated work across more than 300 universities and research institutions. 108 00:07:29,142 --> 00:07:33,103 He employed around 30,000 people at its peak. 109 00:07:33,283 --> 00:07:38,364 Radar, penicillin mass production, proximity fuses. 110 00:07:38,444 --> 00:07:43,426 The technologies that won the war came out of his like overview. 111 00:07:43,426 --> 00:07:52,630 He was functionally the most powerful scientists in our country, and he understood something that the war had just proven beyond any argument. 112 00:07:52,790 --> 00:07:54,670 Science wins wars. 113 00:07:54,871 --> 00:07:57,071 Science saves lives. 114 00:07:57,072 --> 00:08:01,153 And science only works when scientists are free. 115 00:08:01,154 --> 00:08:05,055 So Roosevelt, before he died, he asked Vanavar a question. 116 00:08:05,306 --> 00:08:10,720 The wartime research machine, should we keep it going in peacetime? 117 00:08:10,720 --> 00:08:12,782 And if so, how? 118 00:08:12,783 --> 00:08:18,087 Now Vannevar's answer became a report called Science, The Endless Frontier. 119 00:08:18,207 --> 00:08:22,651 He delivered it to President Truman in July of nineteen forty five. 120 00:08:22,651 --> 00:08:29,876 And it's, I think, one of the most important documents in American history, even though most people have probably never heard of it. 121 00:08:30,337 --> 00:08:31,459 Here's the core idea. 122 00:08:31,459 --> 00:08:32,392 The argument 123 00:08:32,392 --> 00:08:33,302 That Vannevar made. 124 00:08:33,302 --> 00:08:39,416 I'm calling him Vannevar because I don't want to keep referring to him by his last name, Bush, so uh stick with me. 125 00:08:39,416 --> 00:08:45,599 The federal government basically should pay for basic scientific research, like a lot of it. 126 00:08:45,739 --> 00:08:48,801 But the government should not direct that research. 127 00:08:48,801 --> 00:08:50,961 That money comes from Washington. 128 00:08:51,002 --> 00:08:57,365 The decisions about what to study, how to study it, what counts as a good question, those come from scientists. 129 00:08:57,365 --> 00:08:58,285 Why? 130 00:08:58,686 --> 00:09:01,405 Because Vannevar had watched what happened. 131 00:09:01,405 --> 00:09:08,521 When you mix politics and science, he saw it in Germany, he'd seen it in the Soviet Union, he knew. 132 00:09:08,881 --> 00:09:14,205 When the state decides what's true, science dies, and then people die. 133 00:09:14,206 --> 00:09:15,588 So he proposed a wall. 134 00:09:15,588 --> 00:09:16,509 I know. 135 00:09:16,509 --> 00:09:20,252 A wall between the checkbook and the laboratory. 136 00:09:20,653 --> 00:09:27,628 The taxpayer funds the work, the experts judge the work, the politicians stay the hell out of it. 137 00:09:27,629 --> 00:09:34,735 Now that report led directly to the creation of the National Science Foundation, which was established by Congress in 1950. 138 00:09:34,915 --> 00:09:44,363 It set the template, merit-based, peer-reviewed, federal funding that actually built the modern American Research University. 139 00:09:44,564 --> 00:09:53,982 The template that spawned the National Institute of Health's extramural research program that seeded the great state research universities from Michigan to Berkeley to North 140 00:09:53,982 --> 00:09:54,972 Carolina. 141 00:09:55,018 --> 00:10:01,334 Every cancer drug that you have ever taken, every vaccine, the internet, by the way, all came out of this system. 142 00:10:01,334 --> 00:10:09,668 It was originally called ARPANET, which is what became the modern internet, and it was a defense advanced research project agency project. 143 00:10:09,668 --> 00:10:13,044 I don't know if you you followed that, but that's DARPA. 144 00:10:13,225 --> 00:10:20,211 It was funded on exactly the model that Vannevar envisioned government money, scientific judgment. 145 00:10:20,211 --> 00:10:21,836 The GPS in your phone. 146 00:10:21,836 --> 00:10:28,521 The treatment that kept your grandmother grandma alive for an extra 10 years, all of it was built on Vannevar Bush's wall. 147 00:10:28,522 --> 00:10:32,165 Now, as always, I I'm gonna make myself clear. 148 00:10:32,165 --> 00:10:33,766 The wall was never perfect. 149 00:10:33,766 --> 00:10:37,378 Politics is it's a creeping weed. 150 00:10:37,618 --> 00:10:43,422 It finds its way in and around the edges of everything all the time. 151 00:10:43,583 --> 00:10:49,137 You had the red scare in the nineteen fifties, which damaged careers and redirected the work. 152 00:10:49,138 --> 00:10:54,109 There were funding fights, there were congressional overrides, but the principle behind it held, right? 153 00:10:54,109 --> 00:10:55,660 The principle itself was sacred. 154 00:10:55,660 --> 00:11:02,531 And that that's it it's so many things that that this current administration doesn't really understand is that the principle is sacred. 155 00:11:02,531 --> 00:11:05,452 And and hey, that makes me sound like a conservative. 156 00:11:05,812 --> 00:11:13,485 But but ultimately, when you're dealing with science, things that should exist outside of the political realm, the principle is autonomy. 157 00:11:13,485 --> 00:11:14,780 The principle 158 00:11:14,780 --> 00:11:20,162 Is the ability to work on what furthers science, not what furthers an agenda, right? 159 00:11:20,162 --> 00:11:27,905 So you don't let a political appointee just veto a science work, a scientist work, because the the the topic is inconvenient. 160 00:11:27,905 --> 00:11:39,433 And you've heard a lot of this come out of this uh the the Elon Musk thing about, you know, getting money allocated toward better things. 161 00:11:39,579 --> 00:11:40,309 in our government. 162 00:11:40,309 --> 00:11:42,131 I forget the name, Doge, yeah. 163 00:11:42,131 --> 00:11:44,211 Department of Government Efficiency. 164 00:11:44,272 --> 00:11:51,175 They were cutting these programs left and right, one of which was the screwworm that we're now seeing invade Texas cattle. 165 00:11:51,435 --> 00:11:53,166 But another example, right? 166 00:11:53,507 --> 00:11:55,928 So the principle was sacred. 167 00:11:55,928 --> 00:12:02,431 You don't let a political appointee decide what science should be funded. 168 00:12:02,432 --> 00:12:06,265 And the reason that this was sacred, the reason that that the Vannevar Bush guy 169 00:12:06,265 --> 00:12:13,100 built this wall on purpose is because he had a living example of what happens when there's no wall. 170 00:12:13,101 --> 00:12:18,715 The example was happening in real time in the Soviet Union, and his name was Lysenko, right? 171 00:12:18,715 --> 00:12:21,047 I told you about Vavilov at the top. 172 00:12:21,327 --> 00:12:24,530 He was a botanist who starved in a cell. 173 00:12:24,530 --> 00:12:28,052 Let me give you the full machine he died inside of. 174 00:12:28,513 --> 00:12:32,175 So Trophim Lysinko was an agronomist. 175 00:12:32,556 --> 00:12:35,468 Not a great one, but he had a theory. 176 00:12:35,678 --> 00:12:40,764 Okay, now if you're not familiar with agronomy, which, you know, why would you be? 177 00:12:40,764 --> 00:12:51,853 ag, obviously being from agricultural, it's just the applied science and technology of making and using plants for few food and fuel and fiber and and how to how to restore the 178 00:12:51,853 --> 00:12:55,647 land like in the you know the breadbasket of the United States and such. 179 00:12:55,647 --> 00:13:00,586 so he was an agronomist and and he had a theory that basically that you could change 180 00:13:00,586 --> 00:13:04,690 The heritable traits of crops by exposing them to certain conditions. 181 00:13:04,690 --> 00:13:08,533 The wheat could be trained basically to survive the cold. 182 00:13:08,533 --> 00:13:11,555 And the process that he called vernalization. 183 00:13:11,556 --> 00:13:22,586 Now look, I know where this comes from, and even today, uh, Russian and Slavic families will leave their children out in the snow as babies because they believe it strengthens 184 00:13:22,586 --> 00:13:24,088 their immune system. 185 00:13:24,088 --> 00:13:26,854 so uh I can see where he kind of got this from. 186 00:13:26,854 --> 00:13:27,374 Right? 187 00:13:27,374 --> 00:13:29,055 But it's called vernalization. 188 00:13:29,055 --> 00:13:32,977 And it is absolute pseudoscientific nonsense. 189 00:13:32,977 --> 00:13:39,939 It contradicted everything that geneticists had established about how plant heredity actually works. 190 00:13:40,099 --> 00:13:49,191 And we're gonna go back all the way to Gregor Mendel, if you remember doing the the Punnett Squares and Mendel, and it he he was around the eighteen sixties, right? 191 00:13:49,191 --> 00:13:55,191 And and if you forward through the rediscovery of Mendel's laws at the turn of the twentieth century, 192 00:13:55,191 --> 00:13:57,912 The basic science of this was settled. 193 00:13:57,913 --> 00:14:02,135 Organisms inherit traits through discrete genetic pathways. 194 00:14:02,135 --> 00:14:07,338 You can't just train an organism to pass on an acquired characteristic. 195 00:14:07,338 --> 00:14:13,491 It would be like, you know, an elephant can't breathe underwater, so if you just drown it, it will develop gills, right? 196 00:14:13,491 --> 00:14:14,311 That's not how this works. 197 00:14:14,311 --> 00:14:15,982 That's not how any of this works. 198 00:14:16,162 --> 00:14:18,343 And it was never how it worked. 199 00:14:18,343 --> 00:14:22,205 But Lasinko's theories had had kind of two things going for it. 200 00:14:22,205 --> 00:14:24,338 One, it was optimistic. 201 00:14:24,338 --> 00:14:26,822 It was it was a a new promise. 202 00:14:26,822 --> 00:14:37,871 It basically promised that the USSR and the Soviet agriculture could be transformed very quickly, very cheaply, you know, by sheer positivity alone. 203 00:14:37,871 --> 00:14:47,529 So there were no expensive breeding programs, no patent, you know, patient genetic selection, just expose the seeds to cold water, and then the next generation is gonna is 204 00:14:47,529 --> 00:14:50,079 gonna tolerate cold water better and better. 205 00:14:50,079 --> 00:14:51,440 I mean, that's it. 206 00:14:51,441 --> 00:14:53,111 That was the the entire promise. 207 00:14:53,111 --> 00:14:55,972 And two, it kind of fit the ideology, right? 208 00:14:55,972 --> 00:15:04,674 The idea that that your environment is going to shape everything, that you can mold any organism or any person with the right conditions. 209 00:15:04,674 --> 00:15:11,556 So it was very appealing to a regime built on the idea of remaking human nature. 210 00:15:11,807 --> 00:15:13,027 So Stalin liked it. 211 00:15:13,027 --> 00:15:17,778 And once Stalin liked it, the question of whether it was true kind of got tossed. 212 00:15:17,960 --> 00:15:20,848 You know, the the baby was tossed out with the bath water. 213 00:15:21,099 --> 00:15:30,215 So from nineteen forty eight to nineteen sixty five, classical genetics was effectively outlawed in the Soviet Union, not debated, just outlawed. 214 00:15:30,255 --> 00:15:42,523 The All Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August of nineteen forty eight passed a resolution basically declaring Mendelian genetics as anti Marxist and banned it from 215 00:15:42,523 --> 00:15:44,144 Soviet institutions. 216 00:15:44,144 --> 00:15:47,906 And if you taught it, it could essentially end your entire teaching career. 217 00:15:47,947 --> 00:15:50,656 Practicing it even could end your freedom. 218 00:15:50,656 --> 00:15:57,278 More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were either fired or imprisoned, or worse, some of them were just shot. 219 00:15:57,279 --> 00:16:03,681 The state decided what science was legitimate, because I don't know, it has electrolytes. 220 00:16:03,922 --> 00:16:08,603 And that the the reason that they selected that was never about evidence. 221 00:16:08,603 --> 00:16:10,624 It was just about loyalty. 222 00:16:10,625 --> 00:16:13,687 And here's what you should understand the crop failures were real. 223 00:16:13,687 --> 00:16:15,507 The famines were real. 224 00:16:15,507 --> 00:16:17,878 Lasinko's methods just didn't work. 225 00:16:18,202 --> 00:16:27,734 Because reality doesn't take orders, you know, like you can imprison a geneticist, but you can't imprison genetics, because that's how science works. 226 00:16:27,995 --> 00:16:30,975 But the the regime didn't really care. 227 00:16:31,036 --> 00:16:34,176 Because the the actual goal was never good harvests. 228 00:16:34,176 --> 00:16:36,477 The actual goal was control. 229 00:16:36,497 --> 00:16:42,179 Control over what counted as knowledge, control over the people who produced it. 230 00:16:42,179 --> 00:16:47,600 And control, seems like, is its own reward, even when it costs you. 231 00:16:47,844 --> 00:16:49,945 Your entire regime. 232 00:16:49,946 --> 00:16:54,790 When political cow power can't win on the merits, it just rewrites the rules. 233 00:16:54,790 --> 00:16:56,691 It moves the goalposts. 234 00:16:56,942 --> 00:16:57,642 That's the pattern. 235 00:16:57,642 --> 00:16:58,323 So hold on to it. 236 00:16:58,323 --> 00:16:59,694 We're going to come back to it. 237 00:16:59,694 --> 00:17:03,546 The Soviets didn't sit down with Vavilov and say, you know, show us your data. 238 00:17:03,546 --> 00:17:05,217 Let's compare it to Lysinko's. 239 00:17:05,217 --> 00:17:07,439 Let's run a controlled experiment. 240 00:17:07,439 --> 00:17:07,769 Right. 241 00:17:07,769 --> 00:17:09,580 They never did any of that. 242 00:17:09,580 --> 00:17:16,604 Because if they'd done that, they would have lost in the marketplace of ideas, as they say. 243 00:17:16,625 --> 00:17:18,046 Vavilov had the evidence. 244 00:17:18,046 --> 00:17:19,066 He had decades of it. 245 00:17:19,066 --> 00:17:21,418 He had the largest seed bank on earth. 246 00:17:21,418 --> 00:17:26,441 He had the entire field of international genetics supporting this guy. 247 00:17:26,925 --> 00:17:29,176 So they didn't debate him because they didn't have to. 248 00:17:29,176 --> 00:17:34,658 They controlled the checkbook and they controlled the prisons, and that was enough. 249 00:17:34,659 --> 00:17:37,060 Did they know Lysinko's theories wouldn't work? 250 00:17:37,060 --> 00:17:38,481 At a certain point, yes, right. 251 00:17:38,481 --> 00:17:43,323 Like I mean, at a certain point it became obvious because famines are not subtle things. 252 00:17:43,423 --> 00:17:49,225 But knowing the truth and being willing to fund the truth are two very different things. 253 00:17:49,266 --> 00:17:50,386 And the gap, right? 254 00:17:50,386 --> 00:17:55,778 That gap right there is the whole purpose and the whole story behind this episode. 255 00:17:55,779 --> 00:18:03,634 Vannevar Bush built the wall between the laboratory and the government to keep America out of that gap. 256 00:18:03,995 --> 00:18:14,842 For eighty years, more or less, that wall held, and now there's a four hundred and twelve page document trying to tear it down, brick by brick, in language so boring, monotonously 257 00:18:14,842 --> 00:18:18,524 boring, that they're hoping that you're not gonna read it. 258 00:18:18,785 --> 00:18:21,206 About like Project 2025. 259 00:18:21,207 --> 00:18:23,598 So let me introduce you to the man who 260 00:18:23,598 --> 00:18:24,768 Holding the sledgehammer. 261 00:18:24,768 --> 00:18:27,369 His name is Russ Vott, like I said. 262 00:18:27,369 --> 00:18:33,210 He's the director of the OMB, and he is more than anyone the architect of what we're talking about. 263 00:18:33,410 --> 00:18:37,671 Vott wrote the OMB chapter of Project 2025. 264 00:18:37,711 --> 00:18:47,275 If you're not familiar with it by now, it's the Heritage is foundation for New Gilead and also the apparent playbook of the current administration. 265 00:18:47,475 --> 00:18:52,096 But in it he describes what he thinks the OMB should be. 266 00:18:52,347 --> 00:18:57,860 His words he called it the keeper of the commander's intent. 267 00:18:58,111 --> 00:18:59,632 Let's sit with that for a second. 268 00:18:59,632 --> 00:19:02,054 Commander's intent. 269 00:19:02,055 --> 00:19:03,996 That's military language. 270 00:19:04,116 --> 00:19:09,860 The commander gives the intent, and everyone below executes it without question. 271 00:19:10,081 --> 00:19:14,483 That is how Russ Vaught sees the agency that controls the federal checkbook. 272 00:19:14,765 --> 00:19:21,470 Not as a neutral administrator of taxpayer money, but as an instrument of one man's desire. 273 00:19:21,850 --> 00:19:26,233 And the OMB rule, this docket, OMB twenty twenty six-three four. 274 00:19:26,410 --> 00:19:28,171 Is how he makes that real. 275 00:19:28,172 --> 00:19:32,956 So let's walk through this slowly because the mechanism is the whole thing, as they say. 276 00:19:32,956 --> 00:19:36,449 The rule takes something called the Uniform Guidance. 277 00:19:36,449 --> 00:19:41,562 That's two CFR Part 200, the rule book of how federal grants work. 278 00:19:41,562 --> 00:19:44,474 It was established in 2013 and it does two things. 279 00:19:44,474 --> 00:19:46,176 First, it just renames it. 280 00:19:46,176 --> 00:19:49,468 It's now known as the Uniform Grants Regulation. 281 00:19:49,848 --> 00:19:52,430 Second, and this is the important part. 282 00:19:52,430 --> 00:19:58,174 It completely reclassifies it from guidance into binding regulation. 283 00:19:58,195 --> 00:19:59,676 Now, why does that matter? 284 00:19:59,956 --> 00:20:02,439 Because guidance is flexible. 285 00:20:02,439 --> 00:20:04,921 Guidance is advisory. 286 00:20:04,921 --> 00:20:17,272 When an agency operates under guidance, there is meaningful room for courts to step in and say, look, you deviated from the the guidance unreasonably or inconsistently or without a 287 00:20:17,272 --> 00:20:19,603 rational scientific explanation. 288 00:20:19,604 --> 00:20:22,035 Binding regulation has the force of law. 289 00:20:22,035 --> 00:20:32,359 So by converting it one, like converting one of those words into the other, Vaught is hardening political control into something that's a lot harder to challenge in court. 290 00:20:32,419 --> 00:20:40,561 He's not just changing the policy, he's changing the legal terrain on which any future challenge can be fought. 291 00:20:40,562 --> 00:20:42,583 So what does that rule require? 292 00:20:42,703 --> 00:20:47,284 It requires political appointees, not scientists, conduct. 293 00:20:47,384 --> 00:20:53,846 what's called a pre-issuance review of every discretionary grant. 294 00:20:53,847 --> 00:21:06,284 Before any money goes out, a guy that Donald Trump selects, or in this case Russ Vaught, but he believes in a s single unitary theory, so really Donald Trump, has to certify that 295 00:21:06,284 --> 00:21:11,465 the grant, quote, demonstrably advances the president's policy priorities. 296 00:21:11,466 --> 00:21:15,127 57.4 billion, blah ba billion. 297 00:21:15,169 --> 00:21:20,501 In combined NIH and NSF funding now runs through that political filter. 298 00:21:20,501 --> 00:21:25,562 I I'm trying not to put too fine of a point on it, but let me put a slightly finer point on it. 299 00:21:25,822 --> 00:21:36,205 A panel of cancer researchers can review a proposal, agree it's brilliant, agree it could save lives, and a political appointee with no scientific training can look at it and say, 300 00:21:36,205 --> 00:21:39,307 nah, this doesn't advance the president's priorities. 301 00:21:39,307 --> 00:21:40,147 Dead. 302 00:21:40,398 --> 00:21:42,759 The scientist's judgment is irrelevant at that point. 303 00:21:42,759 --> 00:21:45,281 The evidence is irrelevant at that point. 304 00:21:45,281 --> 00:21:50,943 The only thing that matters is whether the work can be mapped into a political agenda. 305 00:21:51,194 --> 00:21:52,875 That's Lysenko, right? 306 00:21:52,875 --> 00:21:54,256 That's the exact same machine. 307 00:21:54,256 --> 00:21:57,738 The cr the criteria is no longer, is it true? 308 00:21:57,738 --> 00:21:59,639 It's is it loyal? 309 00:21:59,890 --> 00:22:01,671 And that doesn't stop at the beginning. 310 00:22:01,671 --> 00:22:08,885 The rule allows mid award termination, meaning canceling that grant in the middle of an active study. 311 00:22:09,166 --> 00:22:20,311 Whether the award no longer well sorry, not whether, but whenever the award no longer serves the natural national interest as it exists at the time of termination. 312 00:22:20,651 --> 00:22:22,012 And there it is again. 313 00:22:22,012 --> 00:22:24,383 As it exists at the time of termination. 314 00:22:24,383 --> 00:22:25,892 You know what that means? 315 00:22:26,073 --> 00:22:30,555 It means the rules can change after you've already started the work. 316 00:22:30,835 --> 00:22:34,817 You can be three years into a five-year study on Alzheimer's. 317 00:22:34,818 --> 00:22:44,333 You've hired postdocs, you you've enrolled patients, you've built your methodology on the assumption and the funding is stable, you followed every single requirement, and one day 318 00:22:44,333 --> 00:22:50,897 the natural national interest as it exists decides that your work is inconvenient and it's over. 319 00:22:51,057 --> 00:22:56,200 No cause, no process, no appeal that can move fast enough to save the study. 320 00:22:56,451 --> 00:23:02,744 The rule also bans grant money from being used for gender ideology, which, you know. 321 00:23:03,152 --> 00:23:06,263 Undefined, kind of deliberately. 322 00:23:06,264 --> 00:23:08,125 So it can mean whatever you need it to mean. 323 00:23:08,125 --> 00:23:17,950 It restricts international collaboration, which is a particularly damaging because modern science is global by necessity, like when COVID happened. 324 00:23:17,950 --> 00:23:23,173 We had to to actually discuss these things scientifically with Chinese scientists. 325 00:23:23,594 --> 00:23:25,214 Because we were all hurting from it. 326 00:23:25,214 --> 00:23:29,198 But why wouldn't you, from a science perspective, desire to? 327 00:23:29,199 --> 00:23:34,752 Have scientists collaborate across the borders with the science being the priority. 328 00:23:35,003 --> 00:23:45,579 The most important research on infectious disease, on on climate change, on rare genetic disorders, that that works across borders on purpose, right? 329 00:23:45,579 --> 00:23:51,972 Like because no single country has a monopoly on expertise or on just data. 330 00:23:52,393 --> 00:23:56,245 The ban on international collaboration doesn't just slow down research. 331 00:23:56,496 --> 00:23:58,947 It kneecaps the entire model. 332 00:23:58,947 --> 00:24:08,649 It bans open access publishing charges, which means that the public that paid for the research has a harder time reading the research. 333 00:24:08,900 --> 00:24:19,063 And it requires e-verify enrollment for every grant employee, adding an administrative burden that will fall hardest on the smallest institutions, the regional universities, the 334 00:24:19,063 --> 00:24:25,024 HBCUs, the community college research programs that are basically barely keeping the lights on as it is. 335 00:24:25,025 --> 00:24:27,856 Now, why does this still happen? 336 00:24:27,857 --> 00:24:32,559 And that's that's what I've been thinking about since I started researching this topic. 337 00:24:32,580 --> 00:24:33,840 We did this. 338 00:24:33,940 --> 00:24:35,541 We learned this lesson. 339 00:24:35,562 --> 00:24:38,423 Venevar Bush wrote it down in nineteen forty five. 340 00:24:38,423 --> 00:24:46,029 We watched the Soviets starve their own people because they put loyalty over peer reviewed evidence. 341 00:24:46,030 --> 00:24:47,771 And we know how this ends. 342 00:24:48,022 --> 00:24:50,012 So why are we doing it again? 343 00:24:50,012 --> 00:25:00,119 I think the honest answer, and why you should be pissed off, is that they tried to do this the fast way first, and the courts stopped them. 344 00:25:00,439 --> 00:25:03,791 So now they're doing it the slow way, the one that really hurts. 345 00:25:03,791 --> 00:25:04,402 Watch this. 346 00:25:04,402 --> 00:25:12,487 In 2017, during the first Trump term, the administration proposed capping NIH indirect cost reimbursement at 10%. 347 00:25:12,487 --> 00:25:13,427 That 348 00:25:13,683 --> 00:25:21,898 That's the the money universities get for the infrastructure of research, the labs, the lights, the safety systems, the staff. 349 00:25:22,158 --> 00:25:23,518 And Congress rejected it. 350 00:25:23,518 --> 00:25:27,460 So in February of twenty twenty five, they just didn't ask Congress. 351 00:25:27,640 --> 00:25:31,942 NIH just announced unilaterally a fifteen percent cap. 352 00:25:32,193 --> 00:25:38,587 Replacing rates that had been individually negotiated averaging twenty seven to fifty eight percent. 353 00:25:38,848 --> 00:25:45,992 For a place like Johns Hopkins, that's one hundred thirty six million dollars gone overnight. 354 00:25:46,453 --> 00:25:48,074 Now the courts blocked it. 355 00:25:48,273 --> 00:25:59,282 Judge Angel Kelly in Massachusetts issued a permanent injunction found that the National Institute of Health violated federal statute, was arbitrary and capricious, and 356 00:25:59,282 --> 00:26:05,626 Skipped the required rulemaking and violated the Constitution's ban on retroactive rules. 357 00:26:05,877 --> 00:26:10,741 The First Circuit upheld it unanimously in January of 2026 of this year. 358 00:26:10,741 --> 00:26:21,118 Then, starting in early 2025, the administration just started terminating grants, thousands of them, across the Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, other 359 00:26:21,118 --> 00:26:27,621 agencies, basically saying that DEI content, gender research, COVID studies that they didn't like. 360 00:26:27,621 --> 00:26:33,353 $780 million in National Institute of Health Grants alone. 361 00:26:33,734 --> 00:26:39,306 And then the courts block those two over and over as illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act. 362 00:26:39,306 --> 00:26:40,617 So here's the new pattern. 363 00:26:40,617 --> 00:26:42,518 They try the blunt force way. 364 00:26:42,518 --> 00:26:44,219 The courts say no, you can't do that. 365 00:26:44,219 --> 00:26:44,919 It's against the rules. 366 00:26:44,919 --> 00:26:48,020 So they're just like, okay, well, we're gonna change the rules. 367 00:26:48,481 --> 00:26:53,683 And that's what OMB 2026-0034 actually is. 368 00:26:53,934 --> 00:26:59,866 It's the administration's attempt to achieve through rulemaking that it could not achieve through brute force. 369 00:26:59,866 --> 00:27:06,948 To rewrite the rule book so that the next round of cuts, the political vetoes, the mid-study terminations will all be legal. 370 00:27:06,948 --> 00:27:08,808 And it's all going to be baked in. 371 00:27:08,808 --> 00:27:12,309 And it'll be much, much harder to challenge. 372 00:27:12,509 --> 00:27:17,450 When political power cannot win on its own merits, it just rewrites the rules of the game. 373 00:27:17,451 --> 00:27:18,458 One more thing. 374 00:27:18,458 --> 00:27:22,576 The preamble to this rule, the part where they they justify it, doesn't cite. 375 00:27:22,576 --> 00:27:24,907 Independent scientific assessments. 376 00:27:25,088 --> 00:27:28,350 It doesn't cite neutral administrative review. 377 00:27:28,350 --> 00:27:35,794 It cites heritage foundation reports, partisan Senate documents, White House fact sheets. 378 00:27:36,135 --> 00:27:42,258 They're using the regulatory process to launder a political agenda into binding law. 379 00:27:42,419 --> 00:27:46,371 And they're citing their own propaganda as the evidence for doing so. 380 00:27:46,622 --> 00:27:51,254 The Heritage Foundation runs on about a hundred million dollars a year. 381 00:27:51,255 --> 00:27:59,359 And Project twenty twenty five is quoted in the federal rule book as justification for who gets to do science in America. 382 00:27:59,360 --> 00:28:00,760 That is where we are. 383 00:28:01,011 --> 00:28:04,143 Let me tell you what this looks like when it lands on actual people. 384 00:28:04,624 --> 00:28:06,546 Not theory, not docket numbers, people. 385 00:28:06,546 --> 00:28:09,208 Harvard University, April 2025. 386 00:28:09,208 --> 00:28:10,970 Now I know Harvard, right? 387 00:28:10,970 --> 00:28:13,813 Hard to feel sorry for the richest university in America. 388 00:28:13,813 --> 00:28:14,253 I get it. 389 00:28:14,253 --> 00:28:21,800 But stay with me because what happened at Harvard is the the clearest example we have of a machine working exactly as designed. 390 00:28:21,800 --> 00:28:27,655 The administration, through a federal anti-Semitism task force, made a list of demands. 391 00:28:27,814 --> 00:28:33,485 Changes to Harvard's governance, its hiring, its admissions, and Harvard just said no. 392 00:28:33,705 --> 00:28:36,106 Like we're an independent university, no. 393 00:28:36,426 --> 00:28:42,567 So the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and 60 million in contracts. 394 00:28:42,567 --> 00:28:48,130 And then federal agencies sent termination letters across more than 900 research projects. 395 00:28:48,130 --> 00:28:49,110 900. 396 00:28:49,110 --> 00:28:56,692 Let me tell you about what some of these projects were: Alzheimer's research, cancer research, heart disease. 397 00:28:56,822 --> 00:28:58,753 Veterans mental health. 398 00:28:59,256 --> 00:29:00,507 Veterans mental health. 399 00:29:00,507 --> 00:29:11,982 The government cut funding for research into helping veterans as punishment because a university wouldn't let political appointees rewrite it at its admission policies. 400 00:29:11,983 --> 00:29:20,867 The retaliation is so like blatant, it's so naked in front of our eyes that a federal judge by the name of Allison Burrows. 401 00:29:20,918 --> 00:29:29,301 Ruled in September of 2025 that it was illegal, straight up illegal retaliation for protected First Amendment activity. 402 00:29:29,301 --> 00:29:31,322 It violated the APA. 403 00:29:31,662 --> 00:29:34,644 It violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 404 00:29:34,644 --> 00:29:40,045 She ordered more than $2.6 billion restored to Harvard. 405 00:29:40,046 --> 00:29:42,367 And the administration filed an appeal. 406 00:29:42,767 --> 00:29:50,172 Their argument on appeal, and I want you to hear this, their argument was that agencies can revoke support based on shifting, quote. 407 00:29:50,172 --> 00:29:52,344 Agency priorities. 408 00:29:52,595 --> 00:29:55,318 Shifting agency priorities. 409 00:29:55,569 --> 00:30:01,201 That's the polite version of the national interest as it exists at the time of termination. 410 00:30:01,201 --> 00:30:02,421 That's the whole game. 411 00:30:02,421 --> 00:30:09,543 We can cut your funding anytime our priorities shift, and our priorities shift whenever it's convenient. 412 00:30:09,794 --> 00:30:15,135 As of 2026, that case is still on appeal and Harvard's grants are still frozen. 413 00:30:15,456 --> 00:30:20,137 That means Alzheimer's research, veterans' mental health research still frozen. 414 00:30:20,138 --> 00:30:23,398 Now, let me tell you about a case that's harder to wave away because it's 415 00:30:23,398 --> 00:30:25,619 It's not Harvard, it's New York. 416 00:30:25,619 --> 00:30:35,382 Letitia James, you might know her, she's the attorney general of New York, in April 2025 sued the Trump administration, joined by fifteen other attorneys general. 417 00:30:35,382 --> 00:30:36,512 I always have trouble with that. 418 00:30:36,512 --> 00:30:42,784 Attorney General's attorneys general, it's attorneys general over the National Institute of Health grant terminations. 419 00:30:43,164 --> 00:30:50,348 So starting in March of 2025, NIH had been canceling grants, research on LGBTQ plus health. 420 00:30:50,348 --> 00:30:59,162 On vaccine hesitancy, on health disparities, and the termination letters just slapped DEI studies on them with zero factual basis. 421 00:30:59,263 --> 00:31:00,523 They didn't read the research. 422 00:31:00,523 --> 00:31:02,424 They didn't evaluate the science. 423 00:31:02,424 --> 00:31:05,765 They saw a topic they didn't like and they stamped it and they killed it. 424 00:31:06,166 --> 00:31:12,049 In New York alone, that was more than four and a half million dollars to SUNY. 425 00:31:12,159 --> 00:31:18,973 that's the Scientific University of New York, the State University of New York, public university, public research. 426 00:31:19,017 --> 00:31:21,959 Killed by a label, DEI. 427 00:31:21,960 --> 00:31:27,224 Judge Young heard the case and in June 2025, he ruled a bench ruling. 428 00:31:27,224 --> 00:31:31,988 He found that the terminations arbitrary and capricious under the APA. 429 00:31:32,429 --> 00:31:43,017 Potentially discriminatory, he blocked the NIH from terminating the grants and vacated eleven separate NIH and HHS memos that had been used to make the cuts. 430 00:31:43,017 --> 00:31:44,418 Eleven memos. 431 00:31:44,659 --> 00:31:47,760 That's how much bureaucratic machinery they'd built. 432 00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:53,321 Just to kill research on topics that they found politically distasteful. 433 00:31:53,572 --> 00:31:56,252 And here's the thing about Judges Young ruling. 434 00:31:56,452 --> 00:31:59,893 He didn't just find it illegal, he understood what it was. 435 00:32:00,053 --> 00:32:01,984 This isn't like budget management. 436 00:32:01,984 --> 00:32:12,416 This is the state deciding which questions Americans are allowed to ask, which diseases are allowed to be studied, which populations are allowed to be helped. 437 00:32:12,856 --> 00:32:15,727 So the administration appealed to the Supreme Court. 438 00:32:16,155 --> 00:32:25,070 And in August of 2025, the court, five to four, that's a commonly recurring theme as well, stayed the district court's judgment. 439 00:32:25,310 --> 00:32:26,891 But watch how they did it. 440 00:32:26,931 --> 00:32:29,653 They didn't say the terminations are fine. 441 00:32:29,653 --> 00:32:35,536 They said something a little bit more clever, and because it's more clever, it's more dangerous. 442 00:32:35,536 --> 00:32:41,159 They said the district courts probably don't have jurisdiction to hear these challenges at all. 443 00:32:41,160 --> 00:32:44,362 Basically, they said they belong in a court of federal claims. 444 00:32:44,613 --> 00:32:49,346 And that's a venue that's much, much harder for a researcher or a university to access. 445 00:32:49,346 --> 00:32:58,282 It's much slower, much more expensive, less able to move fast enough to save a study that's dying in real time. 446 00:32:58,683 --> 00:33:03,106 A venue where the government has significant structural advantages, right? 447 00:33:03,106 --> 00:33:06,388 Where the procedural clock runs against the plaintiff. 448 00:33:06,729 --> 00:33:12,703 Where by the time you actually get to a ruling, the lab's dark, the graduate students have already moved on and they've graduated. 449 00:33:12,704 --> 00:33:16,286 In other words, the Supreme Court didn't rule that the cuts were legal. 450 00:33:16,287 --> 00:33:19,028 They just took away the courtroom where you could fight them. 451 00:33:19,329 --> 00:33:24,351 And that ruling is the foundation the OMB rule is built on. 452 00:33:24,351 --> 00:33:28,713 The administration learned that if you can't win the argument, you just change where it happens. 453 00:33:29,014 --> 00:33:31,685 And if changing the venue isn't enough, you change the rules. 454 00:33:31,685 --> 00:33:36,677 You codify the termination power into binding regulation. 455 00:33:36,798 --> 00:33:41,830 You cite the Supreme Court stay as your legal cover, and you make the next round bulletproof. 456 00:33:42,081 --> 00:33:43,591 Now think back to Saratov, right? 457 00:33:43,591 --> 00:33:46,522 To to Vavilov in that cell starving. 458 00:33:46,523 --> 00:33:50,224 The difference between then and now is real. 459 00:33:50,284 --> 00:33:51,594 And I don't I don't want to flatten it. 460 00:33:51,594 --> 00:33:54,165 Nobody is imprisoning American scientists, right? 461 00:33:54,165 --> 00:33:55,565 Nobody's being executed. 462 00:33:55,565 --> 00:33:56,446 I'm not saying that. 463 00:33:56,446 --> 00:33:57,786 I I want to be clear about that. 464 00:33:57,786 --> 00:34:04,068 But the logic, the actual operating framework is the exact same. 465 00:34:04,328 --> 00:34:07,489 The state decides which knowledge is legitimate. 466 00:34:07,740 --> 00:34:16,027 The criteria is loyalty, not truth, and the people who produce inconvenient knowledge get cut off, defunded, and erased from the record. 467 00:34:16,028 --> 00:34:17,989 Vavilov lost his freedom. 468 00:34:18,350 --> 00:34:26,977 The American scientist loses their grant, their lab, their graduate students, and fifteen years of work that dies when the funding stops. 469 00:34:27,198 --> 00:34:31,822 The veteran loses the treatment that the canceled study was three years from finding. 470 00:34:31,822 --> 00:34:34,794 The Alzheimer's patient or their family really 471 00:34:34,955 --> 00:34:44,581 The people who are watching and waiting, they lose the chance that a study being run right now, today, is three years from changing everything. 472 00:34:44,962 --> 00:34:48,864 And that chance just disappears quietly, legally. 473 00:34:49,305 --> 00:34:52,827 The state can't imprison genetics, right? 474 00:34:52,827 --> 00:34:55,989 And it can't imprison Alzheimer's research either. 475 00:34:56,249 --> 00:35:00,432 The disease doesn't care about the president's policy priorities. 476 00:35:00,433 --> 00:35:03,064 The disease just keeps killing people. 477 00:35:03,368 --> 00:35:07,832 While the research that might have stopped it sits frozen in appeal, and that's the cost, right? 478 00:35:07,832 --> 00:35:09,957 That's that's who pays for this. 479 00:35:10,208 --> 00:35:11,758 So here's the through line. 480 00:35:11,759 --> 00:35:14,420 And I'm gonna pull it all the way through here. 481 00:35:14,540 --> 00:35:22,203 In 1948, the Soviet Politburo didn't debate Lysenko's genetics on the merits. 482 00:35:22,223 --> 00:35:24,644 They couldn't win that debate, so they didn't have it. 483 00:35:24,644 --> 00:35:30,687 They outlawed the competing science, they imprisoned the scientists, they made loyalty the test for truth. 484 00:35:31,167 --> 00:35:34,628 In twenty twenty five, the Trump administration couldn't win in court. 485 00:35:34,809 --> 00:35:38,460 Their grant terminations were blocked again and again as illegal. 486 00:35:38,774 --> 00:35:40,496 So they didn't accept the limit. 487 00:35:40,496 --> 00:35:53,308 They're rewriting the entire regulation itself, converting guidance into binding law, embedding political loyalty as a condition of every single grant, legalizing termination 488 00:35:53,308 --> 00:35:54,668 without cause. 489 00:35:54,729 --> 00:35:56,170 Different mechanism. 490 00:35:56,290 --> 00:35:57,571 Same logic. 491 00:35:58,052 --> 00:36:02,555 When the political power can't win on the merits, it just rewrites the rules. 492 00:36:02,806 --> 00:36:14,404 And so what's so corrosive about this version, because it's it's almost more insidious than what the Soviets did, the Soviets were honest about it in a particularly horrible 493 00:36:14,404 --> 00:36:15,334 way. 494 00:36:15,655 --> 00:36:19,388 They said the science is forbidden, and they they drew the line in public. 495 00:36:19,388 --> 00:36:21,238 They passed a resolution. 496 00:36:21,239 --> 00:36:27,943 They named the enemy, there was a clarity to the brutality of it that at least you kind of know where you stood. 497 00:36:27,944 --> 00:36:29,515 This is quieter. 498 00:36:29,516 --> 00:36:35,623 This is a four hundred and twelve page administrative language vomitous document. 499 00:36:35,874 --> 00:36:39,026 This is the word guidance becoming the word regulation. 500 00:36:39,026 --> 00:36:49,793 This is a phrase like demonstrably advance the president's policy priorities sitting in a federal register notice that almost no one will ever read. 501 00:36:50,074 --> 00:36:53,956 This is the kind of violence of this bureaucracy. 502 00:36:53,957 --> 00:37:01,662 The kind that doesn't kick down your door, it just stops returning your calls, stops cutting your check quietly, legally, forever. 503 00:37:01,762 --> 00:37:03,143 Because it's quiet. 504 00:37:03,143 --> 00:37:04,634 It's procedural. 505 00:37:04,795 --> 00:37:08,659 Because it reads like a compliance manual rather than a manifesto. 506 00:37:08,659 --> 00:37:12,041 People don't treat it as the emergency that it is. 507 00:37:12,342 --> 00:37:15,784 And look, that's that's the truly dark genius of this. 508 00:37:16,025 --> 00:37:21,540 The standard that they invented, this gold standard science, that's from Executive Order 14303. 509 00:37:21,540 --> 00:37:22,381 It sounds great, right? 510 00:37:22,381 --> 00:37:25,854 I mean, who could be against gold standard science? 511 00:37:26,154 --> 00:37:31,759 Except it's not defined by scientists, it's divine dis defined by political appointees. 512 00:37:32,046 --> 00:37:38,690 It's a standard with no content except whatever the people in power need it to mean on any given day. 513 00:37:39,050 --> 00:37:45,714 It's the perfect tool, and it sounds like rigor, this stuff we're taught to to use in our scientific method. 514 00:37:45,715 --> 00:37:47,485 It functions like a loyalty oath. 515 00:37:47,485 --> 00:37:55,640 You invoke the gold standard to approve the research you like and deny the research you don't like, and you don't have to explain the difference in terms that anyone can 516 00:37:55,640 --> 00:37:59,002 challenge because the standard itself is whatever you say it is. 517 00:37:59,253 --> 00:38:05,986 And this matters because beyond this one rule, beyond this one administration, because the thing about Vannevar Bush's wall, right? 518 00:38:05,986 --> 00:38:10,308 The ball the wall between the checkbook and the lab is that it protected everyone. 519 00:38:10,308 --> 00:38:15,070 It protected research, the left likes, and research the right likes. 520 00:38:15,070 --> 00:38:19,351 It protected the system itself from whoever happened to be in power. 521 00:38:19,352 --> 00:38:27,345 And once you knock down that wall, once you establish that a political appointee can veto science based on the president's priorities. 522 00:38:27,527 --> 00:38:31,408 That power doesn't disappear when the president changes, it just changes hands. 523 00:38:31,409 --> 00:38:35,491 The next administration inherits the remote control and then the one after that. 524 00:38:35,491 --> 00:38:38,412 You're not building a tool for your side. 525 00:38:38,452 --> 00:38:42,093 You're building a tool for whoever holds the office forever. 526 00:38:42,494 --> 00:38:50,348 And you're betting that you're always going to be the one holding it, which shows what they think this next next election is going look like. 527 00:38:50,348 --> 00:38:53,809 They believe that they're going to continue to be in power. 528 00:38:54,060 --> 00:38:55,252 And that bet, right? 529 00:38:55,252 --> 00:39:03,694 That that bet that you're gonna continue being the one holding it has never in the history of human power ever paid off. 530 00:39:03,945 --> 00:39:13,273 And the deeper point is this a free society needs a place where the truth can be pursued, regardless of whether that truth is convenient to the people in charge. 531 00:39:13,274 --> 00:39:14,595 That's not a luxury, right? 532 00:39:14,595 --> 00:39:16,297 Like that's that's load bearing. 533 00:39:16,297 --> 00:39:24,484 That's how we cure diseases, it's how we catch our own mistakes, it's how a country corrects course before it drives off of a cliff. 534 00:39:24,735 --> 00:39:35,224 When you make the the truth a political question, when funding flows only to the facts that flatter power, you don't just damage science, you blind the entire society. 535 00:39:35,224 --> 00:39:39,067 You start steering by ideology instead of evidence. 536 00:39:39,328 --> 00:39:47,694 And I ideology doesn't care if the bridge is actually safe or if the drug actually works, or if the crop will actually grow. 537 00:39:47,694 --> 00:39:51,177 Lasinko's wheat didn't grow, but the famine came anyway. 538 00:39:51,177 --> 00:39:53,729 Reality always sends that bill. 539 00:39:53,980 --> 00:39:55,411 And that's what this rule is risking. 540 00:39:55,411 --> 00:39:57,422 It's not frozen grants. 541 00:39:57,443 --> 00:39:59,904 It's not just defunded labs. 542 00:40:00,305 --> 00:40:04,228 It's the slow blinding of a country that used to be able to see. 543 00:40:04,479 --> 00:40:06,440 So here's what I want you to pay closer attention to. 544 00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:15,187 Not the headlines, the dockets, the boring stuff, the four hundred and twelve page documents with titles like regulation for federal financial assistance. 545 00:40:15,187 --> 00:40:17,829 Because that's where the real power moves now. 546 00:40:17,829 --> 00:40:20,831 Not in the speeches, in the rulemaking. 547 00:40:20,831 --> 00:40:27,015 They have learned that the public doesn't read the fine print, and they're building their whole strategy on that bet. 548 00:40:27,016 --> 00:40:34,519 The single most absurd thing in this entire story, it's that phrase the national interest as it exists at the time of termination. 549 00:40:34,770 --> 00:40:35,840 Sit with what that says. 550 00:40:35,840 --> 00:40:39,781 It says we can cancel your work whenever we want for whatever reason we want. 551 00:40:39,781 --> 00:40:47,924 The justification is just whatever we happen to believe is in the national interest at the exact moment that we decide to cancel you. 552 00:40:47,924 --> 00:40:49,084 It's circular. 553 00:40:49,224 --> 00:40:50,364 It's unfalsifiable. 554 00:40:50,364 --> 00:40:54,245 Like it is a logical, perfect circle. 555 00:40:54,246 --> 00:40:57,386 It means nothing and it means everything. 556 00:40:57,387 --> 00:41:00,387 The natural national interest is whatever they say it is. 557 00:41:00,388 --> 00:41:01,556 Whenever they say it. 558 00:41:01,556 --> 00:41:03,257 That's not a standard, that's a mood. 559 00:41:03,257 --> 00:41:04,958 That's a vibe check. 560 00:41:04,959 --> 00:41:13,464 And they want to give a mood the power of law over a trillion dollars and over which diseases we're allowed to cure. 561 00:41:13,715 --> 00:41:17,197 That's the shitty rotten logic of this whole thing right there in one phrase. 562 00:41:17,197 --> 00:41:19,048 They didn't even bother to hide it. 563 00:41:19,299 --> 00:41:23,713 So a couple of things, the kind I'd I'd tell you over a drink. 564 00:41:23,713 --> 00:41:31,058 One, if you know anyone, a friend, a cousin, anyone who works at a university, a lab, a research hospital, ask them what they're moving offshore. 565 00:41:31,419 --> 00:41:33,380 Because the smart ones already are. 566 00:41:33,761 --> 00:41:36,543 International collaboration is already in the crosshairs. 567 00:41:36,543 --> 00:41:46,099 So the best researchers are quietly building partnerships in Canada, in the EU, places where the checkbook isn't a remote control yet. 568 00:41:46,369 --> 00:41:48,621 So find out where the science is going. 569 00:41:48,621 --> 00:41:52,042 That tells you everything about where this is headed. 570 00:41:52,063 --> 00:41:55,084 Two, read the document for yourself. 571 00:41:55,105 --> 00:41:55,922 Not to comment. 572 00:41:55,922 --> 00:41:58,579 I I'm gonna tell you to do the civics class thing. 573 00:41:58,579 --> 00:42:00,849 Uh yes, you should comment. 574 00:42:00,989 --> 00:42:04,391 You can find it, just Google it. 575 00:42:04,632 --> 00:42:09,005 But read it because the comments, the the the comments from the administrators, right? 576 00:42:09,005 --> 00:42:13,428 The university councils, the people who actually run grant programs. 577 00:42:13,610 --> 00:42:17,911 They say the quiet part out loud in ways the news is not ever going to. 578 00:42:17,912 --> 00:42:21,403 The technical objections are where the truth lives, right? 579 00:42:21,403 --> 00:42:27,615 Go read what the Grant administrators are absolutely mortified about. 580 00:42:27,615 --> 00:42:33,837 Because it's more more honest than any, you know, political pundit or or listening to me on a podcast. 581 00:42:34,097 --> 00:42:42,489 And three, next time someone tells you a policy fight is too boring or too technical to matter, remember that too boring to matter. 582 00:42:42,565 --> 00:42:44,976 Is exactly the camouflage. 583 00:42:44,977 --> 00:42:56,125 The most consequential power grabs of our lifetime are going to be written in the most boring, tedious, administratively nerdy language available on purpose. 584 00:42:56,205 --> 00:42:58,486 Your boredom is the weapon. 585 00:42:58,727 --> 00:43:00,589 Refuse to be bored by it. 586 00:43:00,589 --> 00:43:05,692 Vavilov starved in a cell because his science was inconvenient. 587 00:43:05,993 --> 00:43:07,514 We are not there. 588 00:43:07,514 --> 00:43:09,564 But the people who wrote this rule. 589 00:43:09,564 --> 00:43:14,196 Are studying the same playbook and they're hoping that you won't notice. 590 00:43:14,357 --> 00:43:15,397 Notice. 591 00:43:15,878 --> 00:43:17,059 This has been The Overlap. 592 00:43:17,059 --> 00:43:18,319 I'm Joshua. 593 00:43:18,520 --> 00:43:20,321 Hopefully, we'll be back next week. 594 00:43:20,321 --> 00:43:23,343 You can find us at FOF.foundation. 595 00:43:23,343 --> 00:43:24,773 That's FOF.foundation. 596 00:43:24,773 --> 00:43:26,404 We're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. 597 00:43:26,404 --> 00:43:28,286 Give us a five-star rating if you don't mind. 598 00:43:28,286 --> 00:43:32,508 And do me a favor: take care of each other and read the fine print. 599 00:43:32,509 --> 00:43:34,169 Bye.