Dr. Holden Thorp

Well, normally, and for the last 80 years, I think this is what has made American science

dominant in the world, we have had a system where the review of scientific projects by the peers of the scientists who proposed them have always taken precedence over any political considerations about the science itself.

And that is a vision that goes back 80 years to when someone named Vannevar Bush proposed to Harry Truman how this all should be set up.

And the idea was that the curiosity and scientific judgment

of scientists was going to get us to science that would be better for the United States than if we allowed it to be drawn into the political process, which would have two problems.

One is we could do science that isn't that meritorious just for a political agenda, or we'd have to deal with the fact that political administrations change back and forth all the time, and that would make it very hard to sustain projects long enough to have them pay off.

And I think any analysis would say that the promise of what was envisioned in 1945 has been realized up until two years ago when the U.S.

was the dominant place for science in the world.

Now what is being proposed is that politicians would have much more control over the science that gets done, including being able to cancel any project without cause at any time that has been evaluated according to the normal processes using funds that were appropriated by Congress.

And those cancellations could be done by the executive branch.

And that is something new.

And if you go down from there, there is a regular political review that would be required of every single project.

And then that feeds off into a lot of other problems where international collaborations would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, and lots of things that get away from the idea that

Science is a public good that serves everyone and is best when it's judged on the science itself and not the political ideas of the day.

Yeah, a lot of people are drawing that connection, and I think it's a fair one.

I tend to be an optimist, so I'm hoping that we haven't quite reached that point yet because we have a few more controls in place than were present in the case that you imagined.

But it's certainly important for us to mobilize and make sure that people know that the scientific community

objects to this.

And I think the challenge with that is something like OMB is really in the weeds.

I mean, most scientists, to the extent that they might follow this, they might look and see whether the amounts appropriated for the agencies were the same or hopefully a little bit higher than they were the year before and then kind of forget about it because normally OMB just complies with the wishes of Congress and disperses the money.