A draft ruling on how research is funded in the Unites States aims to keep the scientific community on a very short leash.

On 29 May, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a 412-page rule that would place scientific research largely under the supervision of political appointees. Peer review – the mechanism by which the United States has allocated research funding since the Second World War – is to be reduced to an ‘advisory’ role, with the appointees, not scientists or program officers, personally approving every discretionary grant.

Moreover, those appointees would be expressly forbidden to defer to the experts they replace. Awards must ‘demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities’, and ongoing grants could be cancelled at any moment, without any finding of fraud or failure, simply because an appointee had decided they no longer align with the administration’s aims.

The OMB’s new rule can be viewed as further evidence of the political capture of previously nonpartisan institutions. The preamble denounces decades of peer-reviewed work as ‘woke’, ’neo-Marxist’ and ‘anti-American’. Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, there is something unmistakably Lysenko-ist in a state that proposes to decide, by fiat, what will count as truth.

But this interpretation leaves the more revealing question unasked: what kind of politics finds a rule like this attractive? No constituency in American life is clamouring for less scientific research. There is no movement demanding fewer cancer trials, slower vaccine development or dimmer telescopes. The states whose laboratories stand to lose the most are often represented by........

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