Welcome to the Chaos . . .

When Donald Trump was President the first time, comedian John Mulaney compared him to a horse in a hospital:

I have no idea what’s going to happen next. And neither do any of you, and neither do your parents, because there’s a horse loose in the hospital. It’s never happened before, no one knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. He’s never been in a hospital before, and he’s as confused as you are.

This time, the horse appears to have learned a thing or two about where the sounds it doesn’t like are coming from. And even if these are the vital areas of the hospital, it intends to trample whatever it has to make these noises stop.

With the OSTP apparently operating in name only now, and other chaos I’ll go into below, science has been kicked to the curb. And hopes for a rational government aligned with scientific interests and access politics have been dashed.

In 2012, I wrote:

We may look back years from now and see more clearly how OA was responsible for drawing scientific publishing away from scientists and academics, and putting it increasingly in the hands of funding bureaucracies and government officials. . . . As one recent proprietary report from Outsell has stated, “Politics has found us.” The implications of this simple statement bear careful consideration. . . . government intrusion can come in many guises, but financial aspects are the most palpable. We have already have governmental reviews of prices and publication policies in multiple countries. As economic issues arise — from fiscal cliffs to austerity budgets to currency crises — governmental funding swings hard and heavy and unpredictably.

So, here we are, with a new, ideological, and chaotic Administration bringing the flailing weight of unpredictability and ignorance to bear on the scientific establishment via a barely considered and highly politicized pause to spending.

A federal judge placed a temporary block on the efforts to cease grant funding, but the block is administrative and only in effect until February 3rd.

A lot of damage has already been done, and the ferocity of the new Administration is undaunted — later yesterday, the Executive Branch began its attempt to purge the federal workforce, something promised in the Project 2025 document Trump pretended he knew nothing about during the election.

This memo was entitled, “Fork in the Road,” the same wording Elon Musk used in the subject line of the email he sent Twitter employees when he acquired the company.