Latest / The Overlap / Controlling the Checkbook: Science Under Attack

Transcript

Controlling the Checkbook: Science Under Attack · The Overlap

• 0:00
  Nikolai Vavilov was the best botanist in the world.
• 0:03
  Not in the Soviet Union, in the world.
• 0:06
  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.
• 0:18
  If you preserve the genetic diversity of plants, you can feed people through famine, through blight, through anything.
• 0:25
  He collected over 380,000 seed samples.
• 0:29
  He went to Afghanistan, to Ethiopia, to Mexico, to the mountains of Central Asia.
• 0:34
  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
• 0:45
  generation, we would need those genes desperately.
• 0:48
  He believed in evidence.
• 0:50
  He believed you test a theory, and then the theory either holds up or the theory doesn't hold up, right?
• 0:56
  And then a man named
• 0:57
  Trophim Lysenko decided that genetics was bourgeois, Western, politically suspect.
• 1:05
  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.
• 1:18
  So they didn't argue with Vavilov, they didn't hold a debate, they didn't run the experiment, they arrested him.
• 1:25
  nineteen forty.
• 1:26
  Vavilov was taken into custody.
• 1:28
  He was interrogated for hundreds of hours and eventually sentenced to death.
• 1:33
  Then it was commuted, and then he was left in a prison cell in Saratov.
• 1:40
  The man who spent his life thinking about how to feed people, he died in prison in 1943 of starvation.
• 1:48
  Let me say that again.
• 1:49
  The world's leading expert on agriculture and famine starved to death in a cell.
• 1:56
  Because his science was politically inconvenient.
• 1:59
  And here's the part I can't stop thinking about.
• 2:01
  They didn't have to prove him wrong.
• 2:03
  Like that was never the point.
• 2:05
  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
• 2:17
  loyalty.
• 2:18
  Vavilov was right, by the way.
• 2:20
  Lasinko's theories produced crop failures, famine.
• 2:23
  The science didn't care about politics.
• 2:25
  The science never does.
• 2:26
  It's science.
• 2:27
  That was eighty years ago.
• 2:29
  A different country, a different system.
• 2:32
  I want you to hold on to that cell in Saratov, right?
• 2:35
  Because the mechanism, the actual logic of it, is back.
• 2:39
  And it's in a four hundred and twelve page document filed in Washington this spring.
• 3:01
  This is the overlap.
• 3:02
  This is the show about systems of power, labor, and American injustice.
• 3:06
  I'm Joshua.
• 3:07
  I'm very glad you're here.
• 3:08
  Will's out again this week.
• 3:10
  I've been thinking about federal grant regulations a lot.
• 3:13
  Which is a sentence I never expected to say out loud, and yet here we are.
• 3:18
  Here's the overlap, right?
• 3:20
  Here's what happened.
• 3:21
  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
• 3:33
  Register.
• 3:33
  Docket number OMB twenty twenty six zero zero three four.
• 3:38
  Four hundred and twelve pages.
• 3:42
  The dry official title is Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.
• 3:48
  I know.
• 3:49
  I know how that sounds, but stay with me.
• 3:51
  Because what's inside those 412 pages is one of the most significant power grabs over American knowledge that I've ever read about.
• 4:01
  And almost nobody is talking about it because they buried it in the most boring language that they could find.
• 4:06
  And that's not an accident.
• 4:08
  That's the strategy.
• 4:09
  Let me tell you about what it actually does.
• 4:12
  Right now, when a scientist wants federal money, say
• 4:16
  To study pancreatic cancer or Alzheimer's or why a bridge collapsed, they have to write a proposal.
• 4:23
  And a panel of other scientists, experts in the field, they review that.
• 4:27
  They ask, is this good science?
• 4:30
  Is the method sound?
• 4:31
  Will this teach us something true?
• 4:34
  Now, the panel has no political stake in the outcome.
• 4:38
  They're not asking whether the research makes a politician comfortable, they're asking whether
• 4:43
  Whether or not it's going to advance human knowledge.
• 4:46
  That's it.
• 4:46
  Like that's the only criteria for what it actually does.
• 4:52
  That's the system.
• 4:53
  It's called peer review.
• 4:54
  It's been the foundation of American research and kind of all research since the end of the Second World War.
• 5:02
  The OMB rule changes that.
• 5:04
  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
• 5:16
  a completely different question.
• 5:18
  Not
• 5:19
  Is this good science?
• 5:21
  But does this demonstrably advance the president's policy priorities?
• 5:27
  And if the answer is no, kill it.
• 5:30
  It gets worse.
• 5:31
  The rule lets the government cancel any active grant mid-study, quote, for convenience.
• 5:38
  It bans funding what they call gender ideology.
• 5:42
  It restricts international collaboration.
• 5:45
  It requires e-verify for every grant employee.
• 5:49
  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
• 6:00
  termination.
• 6:00
  There's key to that, right?
• 6:02
  The national interest as it exists at the time of termination.
• 6:06
  That's going to come up again and again and again and again.
• 6:08
  So put it on save, press the save button on that and and
• 6:11
  And hold that in the back of your mind while while you you hear me out.
• 6:15
  This one covers 1.1 trillion to trillion in federal grants with a T trillion.
• 6:22
  So why now?
• 6:23
  Why this episode this week?
• 6:25
  Because the the public comment period closes July 13th, and the rule is set to take effect on October first of this year.
• 6:33
  This is happening right now while you are listening to this.
• 6:36
  And here's the thing: to understand why this is so dangerous.
• 6:40
  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'
• 6:52
  hands off of the checkbook of science.
• 6:55
  And they had a good reason.
• 6:56
  So let's go back.
• 6:58
  It's nineteen forty five, the war is ending, and a man named Venevar Bush, not that guy, sits down to write a report.
• 7:06
  Now you might not know Venevar.
• 7:10
  You're familiar with Bush, not the same family, but you should.
• 7:13
  Venevar Bush ran American science during the Second World War.
• 7:17
  He oversaw the Manhattan Project's research apparatus.
• 7:20
  He was the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which coordinated work across more than 300 universities and research institutions.
• 7:29
  He employed around 30,000 people at its peak.
• 7:33
  Radar, penicillin mass production, proximity fuses.
• 7:38
  The technologies that won the war came out of his like overview.
• 7:43
  He was functionally the most powerful scientists in our country, and he understood something that the war had just proven beyond any argument.
• 7:52
  Science wins wars.
• 7:54
  Science saves lives.
• 7:57
  And science only works when scientists are free.
• 8:01
  So Roosevelt, before he died, he asked Vanavar a question.
• 8:05
  The wartime research machine, should we keep it going in peacetime?
• 8:10
  And if so, how?
• 8:12
  Now Vannevar's answer became a report called Science, The Endless Frontier.
• 8:18
  He delivered it to President Truman in July of nineteen forty five.
• 8:22
  And it's, I think, one of the most important documents in American history, even though most people have probably never heard of it.
• 8:30
  Here's the core idea.
• 8:31
  The argument
• 8:32
  That Vannevar made.
• 8:33
  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.
• 8:39
  The federal government basically should pay for basic scientific research, like a lot of it.
• 8:45
  But the government should not direct that research.
• 8:48
  That money comes from Washington.
• 8:51
  The decisions about what to study, how to study it, what counts as a good question, those come from scientists.
• 8:57
  Why?
• 8:58
  Because Vannevar had watched what happened.
• 9:01
  When you mix politics and science, he saw it in Germany, he'd seen it in the Soviet Union, he knew.
• 9:08
  When the state decides what's true, science dies, and then people die.
• 9:14
  So he proposed a wall.
• 9:15
  I know.
• 9:16
  A wall between the checkbook and the laboratory.
• 9:20
  The taxpayer funds the work, the experts judge the work, the politicians stay the hell out of it.
• 9:27
  Now that report led directly to the creation of the National Science Foundation, which was established by Congress in 1950.
• 9:34
  It set the template, merit-based, peer-reviewed, federal funding that actually built the modern American Research University.
• 9:44
  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
• 9:53
  Carolina.
• 9:55
  Every cancer drug that you have ever taken, every vaccine, the internet, by the way, all came out of this system.
• 10:01
  It was originally called ARPANET, which is what became the modern internet, and it was a defense advanced research project agency project.
• 10:09
  I don't know if you you followed that, but that's DARPA.
• 10:13
  It was funded on exactly the model that Vannevar envisioned government money, scientific judgment.
• 10:20
  The GPS in your phone.
• 10:21
  The treatment that kept your grandmother grandma alive for an extra 10 years, all of it was built on Vannevar Bush's wall.
• 10:28
  Now, as always, I I'm gonna make myself clear.
• 10:32
  The wall was never perfect.
• 10:33
  Politics is it's a creeping weed.
• 10:37
  It finds its way in and around the edges of everything all the time.
• 10:43
  You had the red scare in the nineteen fifties, which damaged careers and redirected the work.
• 10:49
  There were funding fights, there were congressional overrides, but the principle behind it held, right?
• 10:54
  The principle itself was sacred.
• 10:55
  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.
• 11:02
  And and hey, that makes me sound like a conservative.
• 11:05
  But but ultimately, when you're dealing with science, things that should exist outside of the political realm, the principle is autonomy.
• 11:13
  The principle
• 11:14
  Is the ability to work on what furthers science, not what furthers an agenda, right?
• 11:20
  So you don't let a political appointee just veto a science work, a scientist work, because the the the topic is inconvenient.
• 11:27
  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.
• 11:39
  in our government.
• 11:40
  I forget the name, Doge, yeah.
• 11:42
  Department of Government Efficiency.
• 11:44
  They were cutting these programs left and right, one of which was the screwworm that we're now seeing invade Texas cattle.
• 11:51
  But another example, right?
• 11:53
  So the principle was sacred.
• 11:55
  You don't let a political appointee decide what science should be funded.
• 12:02
  And the reason that this was sacred, the reason that that the Vannevar Bush guy
• 12:06
  built this wall on purpose is because he had a living example of what happens when there's no wall.
• 12:13
  The example was happening in real time in the Soviet Union, and his name was Lysenko, right?
• 12:18
  I told you about Vavilov at the top.
• 12:21
  He was a botanist who starved in a cell.
• 12:24
  Let me give you the full machine he died inside of.
• 12:28
  So Trophim Lysinko was an agronomist.
• 12:32
  Not a great one, but he had a theory.
• 12:35
  Okay, now if you're not familiar with agronomy, which, you know, why would you be?
• 12:40
  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
• 12:51
  land like in the you know the breadbasket of the United States and such.
• 12:55
  so he was an agronomist and and he had a theory that basically that you could change
• 13:00
  The heritable traits of crops by exposing them to certain conditions.
• 13:04
  The wheat could be trained basically to survive the cold.
• 13:08
  And the process that he called vernalization.
• 13:11
  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
• 13:22
  their immune system.
• 13:24
  so uh I can see where he kind of got this from.
• 13:26
  Right?
• 13:27
  But it's called vernalization.
• 13:29
  And it is absolute pseudoscientific nonsense.
• 13:32
  It contradicted everything that geneticists had established about how plant heredity actually works.
• 13:40
  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?
• 13:49
  And and if you forward through the rediscovery of Mendel's laws at the turn of the twentieth century,
• 13:55
  The basic science of this was settled.
• 13:57
  Organisms inherit traits through discrete genetic pathways.
• 14:02
  You can't just train an organism to pass on an acquired characteristic.
• 14:07
  It would be like, you know, an elephant can't breathe underwater, so if you just drown it, it will develop gills, right?
• 14:13
  That's not how this works.
• 14:14
  That's not how any of this works.
• 14:16
  And it was never how it worked.
• 14:18
  But Lasinko's theories had had kind of two things going for it.
• 14:22
  One, it was optimistic.
• 14:24
  It was it was a a new promise.
• 14:26
  It basically promised that the USSR and the Soviet agriculture could be transformed very quickly, very cheaply, you know, by sheer positivity alone.
• 14:37
  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
• 14:47
  gonna tolerate cold water better and better.
• 14:50
  I mean, that's it.
• 14:51
  That was the the entire promise.
• 14:53
  And two, it kind of fit the ideology, right?
• 14:55
  The idea that that your environment is going to shape everything, that you can mold any organism or any person with the right conditions.
• 15:04
  So it was very appealing to a regime built on the idea of remaking human nature.
• 15:11
  So Stalin liked it.
• 15:13
  And once Stalin liked it, the question of whether it was true kind of got tossed.
• 15:17
  You know, the the baby was tossed out with the bath water.
• 15:21
  So from nineteen forty eight to nineteen sixty five, classical genetics was effectively outlawed in the Soviet Union, not debated, just outlawed.
• 15:30
  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
• 15:42
  Soviet institutions.
• 15:44
  And if you taught it, it could essentially end your entire teaching career.
• 15:47
  Practicing it even could end your freedom.
• 15:50
  More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were either fired or imprisoned, or worse, some of them were just shot.
• 15:57
  The state decided what science was legitimate, because I don't know, it has electrolytes.
• 16:03
  And that the the reason that they selected that was never about evidence.
• 16:08
  It was just about loyalty.
• 16:10
  And here's what you should understand the crop failures were real.
• 16:13
  The famines were real.
• 16:15
  Lasinko's methods just didn't work.
• 16:18
  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.
• 16:27
  But the the regime didn't really care.
• 16:31
  Because the the actual goal was never good harvests.
• 16:34
  The actual goal was control.
• 16:36
  Control over what counted as knowledge, control over the people who produced it.
• 16:42
  And control, seems like, is its own reward, even when it costs you.
• 16:47
  Your entire regime.
• 16:49
  When political cow power can't win on the merits, it just rewrites the rules.
• 16:54
  It moves the goalposts.
• 16:56
  That's the pattern.
• 16:57
  So hold on to it.
• 16:58
  We're going to come back to it.
• 16:59
  The Soviets didn't sit down with Vavilov and say, you know, show us your data.
• 17:03
  Let's compare it to Lysinko's.
• 17:05
  Let's run a controlled experiment.
• 17:07
  Right.
• 17:07
  They never did any of that.
• 17:09
  Because if they'd done that, they would have lost in the marketplace of ideas, as they say.
• 17:16
  Vavilov had the evidence.
• 17:18
  He had decades of it.
• 17:19
  He had the largest seed bank on earth.
• 17:21
  He had the entire field of international genetics supporting this guy.
• 17:26
  So they didn't debate him because they didn't have to.
• 17:29
  They controlled the checkbook and they controlled the prisons, and that was enough.
• 17:34
  Did they know Lysinko's theories wouldn't work?
• 17:37
  At a certain point, yes, right.
• 17:38
  Like I mean, at a certain point it became obvious because famines are not subtle things.
• 17:43
  But knowing the truth and being willing to fund the truth are two very different things.
• 17:49
  And the gap, right?
• 17:50
  That gap right there is the whole purpose and the whole story behind this episode.
• 17:55
  Vannevar Bush built the wall between the laboratory and the government to keep America out of that gap.
• 18:03
  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
• 18:14
  boring, that they're hoping that you're not gonna read it.
• 18:18
  About like Project 2025.
• 18:21
  So let me introduce you to the man who
• 18:23
  Holding the sledgehammer.
• 18:24
  His name is Russ Vott, like I said.
• 18:27
  He's the director of the OMB, and he is more than anyone the architect of what we're talking about.
• 18:33
  Vott wrote the OMB chapter of Project 2025.
• 18:37
  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.
• 18:47
  But in it he describes what he thinks the OMB should be.
• 18:52
  His words he called it the keeper of the commander's intent.
• 18:58
  Let's sit with that for a second.
• 18:59
  Commander's intent.
• 19:02
  That's military language.
• 19:04
  The commander gives the intent, and everyone below executes it without question.
• 19:10
  That is how Russ Vaught sees the agency that controls the federal checkbook.
• 19:14
  Not as a neutral administrator of taxpayer money, but as an instrument of one man's desire.
• 19:21
  And the OMB rule, this docket, OMB twenty twenty six-three four.
• 19:26
  Is how he makes that real.
• 19:28
  So let's walk through this slowly because the mechanism is the whole thing, as they say.
• 19:32
  The rule takes something called the Uniform Guidance.
• 19:36
  That's two CFR Part 200, the rule book of how federal grants work.
• 19:41
  It was established in 2013 and it does two things.
• 19:44
  First, it just renames it.
• 19:46
  It's now known as the Uniform Grants Regulation.
• 19:49
  Second, and this is the important part.
• 19:52
  It completely reclassifies it from guidance into binding regulation.
• 19:58
  Now, why does that matter?
• 19:59
  Because guidance is flexible.
• 20:02
  Guidance is advisory.
• 20:04
  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
• 20:17
  rational scientific explanation.
• 20:19
  Binding regulation has the force of law.
• 20:22
  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.
• 20:32
  He's not just changing the policy, he's changing the legal terrain on which any future challenge can be fought.
• 20:40
  So what does that rule require?
• 20:42
  It requires political appointees, not scientists, conduct.
• 20:47
  what's called a pre-issuance review of every discretionary grant.
• 20:53
  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
• 21:06
  the grant, quote, demonstrably advances the president's policy priorities.
• 21:11
  57.4 billion, blah ba billion.
• 21:15
  In combined NIH and NSF funding now runs through that political filter.
• 21:20
  I I'm trying not to put too fine of a point on it, but let me put a slightly finer point on it.
• 21:25
  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,
• 21:36
  nah, this doesn't advance the president's priorities.
• 21:39
  Dead.
• 21:40
  The scientist's judgment is irrelevant at that point.
• 21:42
  The evidence is irrelevant at that point.
• 21:45
  The only thing that matters is whether the work can be mapped into a political agenda.
• 21:51
  That's Lysenko, right?
• 21:52
  That's the exact same machine.
• 21:54
  The cr the criteria is no longer, is it true?
• 21:57
  It's is it loyal?
• 21:59
  And that doesn't stop at the beginning.
• 22:01
  The rule allows mid award termination, meaning canceling that grant in the middle of an active study.
• 22:09
  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.
• 22:20
  And there it is again.
• 22:22
  As it exists at the time of termination.
• 22:24
  You know what that means?
• 22:26
  It means the rules can change after you've already started the work.
• 22:30
  You can be three years into a five-year study on Alzheimer's.
• 22:34
  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
• 22:44
  the natural national interest as it exists decides that your work is inconvenient and it's over.
• 22:51
  No cause, no process, no appeal that can move fast enough to save the study.
• 22:56
  The rule also bans grant money from being used for gender ideology, which, you know.
• 23:03
  Undefined, kind of deliberately.
• 23:06
  So it can mean whatever you need it to mean.
• 23:08
  It restricts international collaboration, which is a particularly damaging because modern science is global by necessity, like when COVID happened.
• 23:17
  We had to to actually discuss these things scientifically with Chinese scientists.
• 23:23
  Because we were all hurting from it.
• 23:25
  But why wouldn't you, from a science perspective, desire to?
• 23:29
  Have scientists collaborate across the borders with the science being the priority.
• 23:35
  The most important research on infectious disease, on on climate change, on rare genetic disorders, that that works across borders on purpose, right?
• 23:45
  Like because no single country has a monopoly on expertise or on just data.
• 23:52
  The ban on international collaboration doesn't just slow down research.
• 23:56
  It kneecaps the entire model.
• 23:58
  It bans open access publishing charges, which means that the public that paid for the research has a harder time reading the research.
• 24:08
  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
• 24:19
  HBCUs, the community college research programs that are basically barely keeping the lights on as it is.
• 24:25
  Now, why does this still happen?
• 24:27
  And that's that's what I've been thinking about since I started researching this topic.
• 24:32
  We did this.
• 24:33
  We learned this lesson.
• 24:35
  Venevar Bush wrote it down in nineteen forty five.
• 24:38
  We watched the Soviets starve their own people because they put loyalty over peer reviewed evidence.
• 24:46
  And we know how this ends.
• 24:48
  So why are we doing it again?
• 24:50
  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.
• 25:00
  So now they're doing it the slow way, the one that really hurts.
• 25:03
  Watch this.
• 25:04
  In 2017, during the first Trump term, the administration proposed capping NIH indirect cost reimbursement at 10%.
• 25:12
  That
• 25:13
  That's the the money universities get for the infrastructure of research, the labs, the lights, the safety systems, the staff.
• 25:22
  And Congress rejected it.
• 25:23
  So in February of twenty twenty five, they just didn't ask Congress.
• 25:27
  NIH just announced unilaterally a fifteen percent cap.
• 25:32
  Replacing rates that had been individually negotiated averaging twenty seven to fifty eight percent.
• 25:38
  For a place like Johns Hopkins, that's one hundred thirty six million dollars gone overnight.
• 25:46
  Now the courts blocked it.
• 25:48
  Judge Angel Kelly in Massachusetts issued a permanent injunction found that the National Institute of Health violated federal statute, was arbitrary and capricious, and
• 25:59
  Skipped the required rulemaking and violated the Constitution's ban on retroactive rules.
• 26:05
  The First Circuit upheld it unanimously in January of 2026 of this year.
• 26:10
  Then, starting in early 2025, the administration just started terminating grants, thousands of them, across the Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, other
• 26:21
  agencies, basically saying that DEI content, gender research, COVID studies that they didn't like.
• 26:27
  $780 million in National Institute of Health Grants alone.
• 26:33
  And then the courts block those two over and over as illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act.
• 26:39
  So here's the new pattern.
• 26:40
  They try the blunt force way.
• 26:42
  The courts say no, you can't do that.
• 26:44
  It's against the rules.
• 26:44
  So they're just like, okay, well, we're gonna change the rules.
• 26:48
  And that's what OMB 2026-0034 actually is.
• 26:53
  It's the administration's attempt to achieve through rulemaking that it could not achieve through brute force.
• 26:59
  To rewrite the rule book so that the next round of cuts, the political vetoes, the mid-study terminations will all be legal.
• 27:06
  And it's all going to be baked in.
• 27:08
  And it'll be much, much harder to challenge.
• 27:12
  When political power cannot win on its own merits, it just rewrites the rules of the game.
• 27:17
  One more thing.
• 27:18
  The preamble to this rule, the part where they they justify it, doesn't cite.
• 27:22
  Independent scientific assessments.
• 27:25
  It doesn't cite neutral administrative review.
• 27:28
  It cites heritage foundation reports, partisan Senate documents, White House fact sheets.
• 27:36
  They're using the regulatory process to launder a political agenda into binding law.
• 27:42
  And they're citing their own propaganda as the evidence for doing so.
• 27:46
  The Heritage Foundation runs on about a hundred million dollars a year.
• 27:51
  And Project twenty twenty five is quoted in the federal rule book as justification for who gets to do science in America.
• 27:59
  That is where we are.
• 28:01
  Let me tell you what this looks like when it lands on actual people.
• 28:04
  Not theory, not docket numbers, people.
• 28:06
  Harvard University, April 2025.
• 28:09
  Now I know Harvard, right?
• 28:10
  Hard to feel sorry for the richest university in America.
• 28:13
  I get it.
• 28:14
  But stay with me because what happened at Harvard is the the clearest example we have of a machine working exactly as designed.
• 28:21
  The administration, through a federal anti-Semitism task force, made a list of demands.
• 28:27
  Changes to Harvard's governance, its hiring, its admissions, and Harvard just said no.
• 28:33
  Like we're an independent university, no.
• 28:36
  So the administration froze $2.2 billion in grants and 60 million in contracts.
• 28:42
  And then federal agencies sent termination letters across more than 900 research projects.
• 28:48
  900.
• 28:49
  Let me tell you about what some of these projects were: Alzheimer's research, cancer research, heart disease.
• 28:56
  Veterans mental health.
• 28:59
  Veterans mental health.
• 29:00
  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.
• 29:11
  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.
• 29:20
  Ruled in September of 2025 that it was illegal, straight up illegal retaliation for protected First Amendment activity.
• 29:29
  It violated the APA.
• 29:31
  It violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
• 29:34
  She ordered more than $2.6 billion restored to Harvard.
• 29:40
  And the administration filed an appeal.
• 29:42
  Their argument on appeal, and I want you to hear this, their argument was that agencies can revoke support based on shifting, quote.
• 29:50
  Agency priorities.
• 29:52
  Shifting agency priorities.
• 29:55
  That's the polite version of the national interest as it exists at the time of termination.
• 30:01
  That's the whole game.
• 30:02
  We can cut your funding anytime our priorities shift, and our priorities shift whenever it's convenient.
• 30:09
  As of 2026, that case is still on appeal and Harvard's grants are still frozen.
• 30:15
  That means Alzheimer's research, veterans' mental health research still frozen.
• 30:20
  Now, let me tell you about a case that's harder to wave away because it's
• 30:23
  It's not Harvard, it's New York.
• 30:25
  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.
• 30:35
  I always have trouble with that.
• 30:36
  Attorney General's attorneys general, it's attorneys general over the National Institute of Health grant terminations.
• 30:43
  So starting in March of 2025, NIH had been canceling grants, research on LGBTQ plus health.
• 30:50
  On vaccine hesitancy, on health disparities, and the termination letters just slapped DEI studies on them with zero factual basis.
• 30:59
  They didn't read the research.
• 31:00
  They didn't evaluate the science.
• 31:02
  They saw a topic they didn't like and they stamped it and they killed it.
• 31:06
  In New York alone, that was more than four and a half million dollars to SUNY.
• 31:12
  that's the Scientific University of New York, the State University of New York, public university, public research.
• 31:19
  Killed by a label, DEI.
• 31:21
  Judge Young heard the case and in June 2025, he ruled a bench ruling.
• 31:27
  He found that the terminations arbitrary and capricious under the APA.
• 31:32
  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.
• 31:43
  Eleven memos.
• 31:44
  That's how much bureaucratic machinery they'd built.
• 31:47
  Just to kill research on topics that they found politically distasteful.
• 31:53
  And here's the thing about Judges Young ruling.
• 31:56
  He didn't just find it illegal, he understood what it was.
• 32:00
  This isn't like budget management.
• 32:01
  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.
• 32:12
  So the administration appealed to the Supreme Court.
• 32:16
  And in August of 2025, the court, five to four, that's a commonly recurring theme as well, stayed the district court's judgment.
• 32:25
  But watch how they did it.
• 32:26
  They didn't say the terminations are fine.
• 32:29
  They said something a little bit more clever, and because it's more clever, it's more dangerous.
• 32:35
  They said the district courts probably don't have jurisdiction to hear these challenges at all.
• 32:41
  Basically, they said they belong in a court of federal claims.
• 32:44
  And that's a venue that's much, much harder for a researcher or a university to access.
• 32:49
  It's much slower, much more expensive, less able to move fast enough to save a study that's dying in real time.
• 32:58
  A venue where the government has significant structural advantages, right?
• 33:03
  Where the procedural clock runs against the plaintiff.
• 33:06
  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.
• 33:12
  In other words, the Supreme Court didn't rule that the cuts were legal.
• 33:16
  They just took away the courtroom where you could fight them.
• 33:19
  And that ruling is the foundation the OMB rule is built on.
• 33:24
  The administration learned that if you can't win the argument, you just change where it happens.
• 33:29
  And if changing the venue isn't enough, you change the rules.
• 33:31
  You codify the termination power into binding regulation.
• 33:36
  You cite the Supreme Court stay as your legal cover, and you make the next round bulletproof.
• 33:42
  Now think back to Saratov, right?
• 33:43
  To to Vavilov in that cell starving.
• 33:46
  The difference between then and now is real.
• 33:50
  And I don't I don't want to flatten it.
• 33:51
  Nobody is imprisoning American scientists, right?
• 33:54
  Nobody's being executed.
• 33:55
  I'm not saying that.
• 33:56
  I I want to be clear about that.
• 33:57
  But the logic, the actual operating framework is the exact same.
• 34:04
  The state decides which knowledge is legitimate.
• 34:07
  The criteria is loyalty, not truth, and the people who produce inconvenient knowledge get cut off, defunded, and erased from the record.
• 34:16
  Vavilov lost his freedom.
• 34:18
  The American scientist loses their grant, their lab, their graduate students, and fifteen years of work that dies when the funding stops.
• 34:27
  The veteran loses the treatment that the canceled study was three years from finding.
• 34:31
  The Alzheimer's patient or their family really
• 34:34
  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.
• 34:44
  And that chance just disappears quietly, legally.
• 34:49
  The state can't imprison genetics, right?
• 34:52
  And it can't imprison Alzheimer's research either.
• 34:56
  The disease doesn't care about the president's policy priorities.
• 35:00
  The disease just keeps killing people.
• 35:03
  While the research that might have stopped it sits frozen in appeal, and that's the cost, right?
• 35:07
  That's that's who pays for this.
• 35:10
  So here's the through line.
• 35:11
  And I'm gonna pull it all the way through here.
• 35:14
  In 1948, the Soviet Politburo didn't debate Lysenko's genetics on the merits.
• 35:22
  They couldn't win that debate, so they didn't have it.
• 35:24
  They outlawed the competing science, they imprisoned the scientists, they made loyalty the test for truth.
• 35:31
  In twenty twenty five, the Trump administration couldn't win in court.
• 35:34
  Their grant terminations were blocked again and again as illegal.
• 35:38
  So they didn't accept the limit.
• 35:40
  They're rewriting the entire regulation itself, converting guidance into binding law, embedding political loyalty as a condition of every single grant, legalizing termination
• 35:53
  without cause.
• 35:54
  Different mechanism.
• 35:56
  Same logic.
• 35:58
  When the political power can't win on the merits, it just rewrites the rules.
• 36:02
  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
• 36:14
  way.
• 36:15
  They said the science is forbidden, and they they drew the line in public.
• 36:19
  They passed a resolution.
• 36:21
  They named the enemy, there was a clarity to the brutality of it that at least you kind of know where you stood.
• 36:27
  This is quieter.
• 36:29
  This is a four hundred and twelve page administrative language vomitous document.
• 36:35
  This is the word guidance becoming the word regulation.
• 36:39
  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.
• 36:50
  This is the kind of violence of this bureaucracy.
• 36:53
  The kind that doesn't kick down your door, it just stops returning your calls, stops cutting your check quietly, legally, forever.
• 37:01
  Because it's quiet.
• 37:03
  It's procedural.
• 37:04
  Because it reads like a compliance manual rather than a manifesto.
• 37:08
  People don't treat it as the emergency that it is.
• 37:12
  And look, that's that's the truly dark genius of this.
• 37:16
  The standard that they invented, this gold standard science, that's from Executive Order 14303.
• 37:21
  It sounds great, right?
• 37:22
  I mean, who could be against gold standard science?
• 37:26
  Except it's not defined by scientists, it's divine dis defined by political appointees.
• 37:32
  It's a standard with no content except whatever the people in power need it to mean on any given day.
• 37:39
  It's the perfect tool, and it sounds like rigor, this stuff we're taught to to use in our scientific method.
• 37:45
  It functions like a loyalty oath.
• 37:47
  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
• 37:55
  challenge because the standard itself is whatever you say it is.
• 37:59
  And this matters because beyond this one rule, beyond this one administration, because the thing about Vannevar Bush's wall, right?
• 38:05
  The ball the wall between the checkbook and the lab is that it protected everyone.
• 38:10
  It protected research, the left likes, and research the right likes.
• 38:15
  It protected the system itself from whoever happened to be in power.
• 38:19
  And once you knock down that wall, once you establish that a political appointee can veto science based on the president's priorities.
• 38:27
  That power doesn't disappear when the president changes, it just changes hands.
• 38:31
  The next administration inherits the remote control and then the one after that.
• 38:35
  You're not building a tool for your side.
• 38:38
  You're building a tool for whoever holds the office forever.
• 38:42
  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.
• 38:50
  They believe that they're going to continue to be in power.
• 38:54
  And that bet, right?
• 38:55
  That that bet that you're gonna continue being the one holding it has never in the history of human power ever paid off.
• 39:03
  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.
• 39:13
  That's not a luxury, right?
• 39:14
  Like that's that's load bearing.
• 39:16
  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.
• 39:24
  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.
• 39:35
  You start steering by ideology instead of evidence.
• 39:39
  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.
• 39:47
  Lasinko's wheat didn't grow, but the famine came anyway.
• 39:51
  Reality always sends that bill.
• 39:53
  And that's what this rule is risking.
• 39:55
  It's not frozen grants.
• 39:57
  It's not just defunded labs.
• 40:00
  It's the slow blinding of a country that used to be able to see.
• 40:04
  So here's what I want you to pay closer attention to.
• 40:06
  Not the headlines, the dockets, the boring stuff, the four hundred and twelve page documents with titles like regulation for federal financial assistance.
• 40:15
  Because that's where the real power moves now.
• 40:17
  Not in the speeches, in the rulemaking.
• 40:20
  They have learned that the public doesn't read the fine print, and they're building their whole strategy on that bet.
• 40:27
  The single most absurd thing in this entire story, it's that phrase the national interest as it exists at the time of termination.
• 40:34
  Sit with what that says.
• 40:35
  It says we can cancel your work whenever we want for whatever reason we want.
• 40:39
  The justification is just whatever we happen to believe is in the national interest at the exact moment that we decide to cancel you.
• 40:47
  It's circular.
• 40:49
  It's unfalsifiable.
• 40:50
  Like it is a logical, perfect circle.
• 40:54
  It means nothing and it means everything.
• 40:57
  The natural national interest is whatever they say it is.
• 41:00
  Whenever they say it.
• 41:01
  That's not a standard, that's a mood.
• 41:03
  That's a vibe check.
• 41:04
  And they want to give a mood the power of law over a trillion dollars and over which diseases we're allowed to cure.
• 41:13
  That's the shitty rotten logic of this whole thing right there in one phrase.
• 41:17
  They didn't even bother to hide it.
• 41:19
  So a couple of things, the kind I'd I'd tell you over a drink.
• 41:23
  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.
• 41:31
  Because the smart ones already are.
• 41:33
  International collaboration is already in the crosshairs.
• 41:36
  So the best researchers are quietly building partnerships in Canada, in the EU, places where the checkbook isn't a remote control yet.
• 41:46
  So find out where the science is going.
• 41:48
  That tells you everything about where this is headed.
• 41:52
  Two, read the document for yourself.
• 41:55
  Not to comment.
• 41:55
  I I'm gonna tell you to do the civics class thing.
• 41:58
  Uh yes, you should comment.
• 42:00
  You can find it, just Google it.
• 42:04
  But read it because the comments, the the the comments from the administrators, right?
• 42:09
  The university councils, the people who actually run grant programs.
• 42:13
  They say the quiet part out loud in ways the news is not ever going to.
• 42:17
  The technical objections are where the truth lives, right?
• 42:21
  Go read what the Grant administrators are absolutely mortified about.
• 42:27
  Because it's more more honest than any, you know, political pundit or or listening to me on a podcast.
• 42:34
  And three, next time someone tells you a policy fight is too boring or too technical to matter, remember that too boring to matter.
• 42:42
  Is exactly the camouflage.
• 42:44
  The most consequential power grabs of our lifetime are going to be written in the most boring, tedious, administratively nerdy language available on purpose.
• 42:56
  Your boredom is the weapon.
• 42:58
  Refuse to be bored by it.
• 43:00
  Vavilov starved in a cell because his science was inconvenient.
• 43:05
  We are not there.
• 43:07
  But the people who wrote this rule.
• 43:09
  Are studying the same playbook and they're hoping that you won't notice.
• 43:14
  Notice.
• 43:15
  This has been The Overlap.
• 43:17
  I'm Joshua.
• 43:18
  Hopefully, we'll be back next week.
• 43:20
  You can find us at FOF.foundation.
• 43:23
  That's FOF.foundation.
• 43:24
  We're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• 43:26
  Give us a five-star rating if you don't mind.
• 43:28
  And do me a favor: take care of each other and read the fine print.
• 43:32
  Bye.