Arguing that a background in empirical research irreparably biases one toward reality, the Trump administration has proposed a new regulation stripping grant authority from scientists. The Office of Management and Budget will instead entrust public science funding to political appointees whose minds remain gloriously uncluttered by the rigid dogma of the scientific method.
One must marvel, albeit with the exhausted detachment of a spectator at a particularly grueling avant-garde theater production, at the sheer aesthetic audacity of the Office of Management and Budget; for in demanding the authority to cancel pre-existing scientific grants on political whims, the Donald Trump White House has achieved a philosophical disruption not seen since Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum first rudely insisted that humanity ought to observe the physical world before drawing conclusions about it. The OMB’s newly proposed regulation, which reassigns the distribution of billions in federal research funding away from peer-reviewing scientists and toward loyalist political appointees, functions as a sweeping rejection of Bacon’s tedious empiricism. It is a bold, if utterly terrifying, return to a more imaginative era of statecraft, wherein the behavior of cellular structures and the atmospheric concentration of carbon might once again be dictated by the magnificent, unyielding fiat of the sovereign.
To fully parse the administration’s bureaucratic mise-en-scène, one must look past the immediate panic of the scientific community—a demographic chronically burdened by its own literalism—and recognize the proposal as an exquisite manifestation of what the French structuralist aesthetician Étienne Souriau termed l'instauration, or the bringing into existence of a reality through the sheer bureaucratic refusal to fund its alternatives. Why, the administration essentially asks, should the public purse subsidize the observation of phenomena that the executive branch finds distasteful? This epistemological pivot was articulated with striking, almost brutalist clarity by the architects of the regulation.
We cannot have individuals who are financially and intellectually beholden to the periodic table making impartial decisions about how American tax dollars are spent.
Much like the breathtakingly unhinged narrative architecture of the third season of Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules—in which the central cast simply refuses to acknowledge the objective reality of a recorded infidelity, thereby forcing the universe to bend to their collective delusion—the OMB’s new grant-cancellation powers represent a triumph of sheer will over the mundane constraints of evidence. The political appointee, unburdened by a doctorate or the suffocating strictures of laboratory ethics, is free to look at a multi-million-dollar proposal for mRNA synthesis and ask the only question that truly matters in contemporary American governance: Does this molecule serve the administration's messaging strategy? If it does not, the grant is summarily terminated; a bureaucratic decapitation that is, in its own grim way, a masterpiece of performance art.
By officially categorizing scientific expertise as a disqualifying prejudice, the unitary executive reclaims its rightful dominion over the natural world; the White House has elegantly collapsed the boundary between the laboratory and the campaign rally. Future generations, should the newly politicized laws of thermodynamics permit them to exist, will undoubtedly look back on this OMB regulation as the moment the American state finally freed itself from the tyranny of the observable universe, choosing instead to fund a bespoke reality where gravity, virology, and climate dynamics politely await confirmation from a Senate-confirmed deputy secretary before daring to act.