Trump, Musk, and RFK jr are a horrific combo that has discovered how fragile the institution of science can be — all it takes is handing the keys to funding to a small number of incompetents and ideologs. It’s such a simple thing: decree that a few words are verboten and will get your grant application pulled. Take a look at the complete list of words that will flag a grant for being held. They include “gender,” “disability,” and “race”. They include “female” and “women,” but not “male” or “man”. They include “socioeconomic,” “socio economic,” and “sociocultural”…they really wanted to make sure that they got that one covered.

The NSF has sent out this ridiculous decision tree:

Seriously. You want to know how these bad decisions are sailing through? It’s because there is a petty bureaucracy running the NSF that designs redundant, pointless, stupid diagrams like that. It’s Kafkaesque.

The USC professor who is reporting this says:

These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you’re going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you’re going to control for socioeconomic status – totally standard practice – you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.

The word “systemic” is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran’s Administration, but we can’t study trauma now?

If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word “biased” gets me flagged. You can’t design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA

And then, all the Republicans in congress have predictably caved and are going to approve a manifest madman, “Bobby” as they call him, to control health and human services, while a narcissistic boob, Elon Musk, is running rampant through the country’s finances.

So what next? All political norms have been shredded. Democracy doesn’t matter. Anarchy reigns. The law is irrelevant — do you think the Supreme Court can bring reason back? We’re all helpless, and are reduced to spectators to our rapid, catastrophic destruction. It’s going to get much worse.

Is the only solution a violent overthrow of the Trump regime, a complete dissolution of all of the Trump precedents, and a rewriting of the US Constitution? We have to recognize that the US is broken.

It has long been a desire by the Republicans to meddle in science — let’s filter out the results we don’t like. Nature reports that their desire has been made manifest: US health agency seeks to cut gender-related terms from scientific papers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has mandated that all scientific manuscripts produced by its researchers that are under review at a journal be withdrawn so that certain language relating to gender can be stripped from them.

The directive, sent by the agency’s chief science officer to some staff members on 31 January, is meant to bring the CDC into compliance with an executive order issued last month by US President Donald Trump seeking to restore “biological truth” to the federal government by recognizing only two sexes: male and female. Executive orders can direct agencies inside the federal government but cannot change existing laws.

According to a copy of the e-mail, shared in the newsletter Inside Medicine, manuscripts must not include any mention of terms including ‘gender’, ‘transgender’, ‘pregnant person’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘non-binary’, among others. CDC scientists who co-author papers originating from outside the agency that include these terms are also expected to rescind their authorship.

It’s all very Orwellian. They will dictate what words we’re allowed to use, because they believe that they can bend reality to conform. It doesn’t work that way, though. They’re just going to silence scientists who know better.

The CDC mandate, however, erases mention of queer, intersex and transgender individuals from future literature and seems to legitimize “scientific sexism”, says James Mungin, a biomedical scientist at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who identifies as transgender. Under the new rules, CDC researchers would be unable to share basic demographic data, such as gender identity or sexual orientation, about study participants — omissions that could lead to inaccuracies or ethical breaches if scientists are barred from disclosing why certain participants were removed from a study, Mungin says. Furthermore, gender identity and sexual orientation are nearly impossible to exclude when it comes to the study and treatment of conditions such as HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, potentially causing harm to patients.

“If you’re working in basic science, you might get away with just references to sex, but gender is everywhere in public health,” says Ayden Scheim, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who identifies as trans and studies the health care of marginalized communities. “Unfortunately, I see two things happening: a lot of these withdrawn papers will never be published” because collaborators outside the CDC aren’t going to agree to omit data, Scheim says, “and in the long term, a lot of research that focuses on health inequities for women or LGBTQ+ people will disappear”.

There were a lot of scientists and lay people who threw around terms like “cancel culture” and “censorship” before Trump took office. Where are they now? They were so touchy about criticism or a refusal to platform bad ideas, but I don’t see them even acknowledging that these are actions well beyond anything that has gone before.

If we let them get away with censoring “gay” and “transgender,” what will we do when “climate change” is forbidden, or “evolution”?

Or “Jew”?

Here’s one way to convert America to a tyranny: give up on all those ineffective checks and balances in the Constitution by giving immense power to an unelected person with a novel title and no oversight at all. I’m talking about this fucking guy.

Elon Musk has gleefully accepted the job of wrecking the country.

We are in a constitutional crisis. The richest man on Earth is attempting to seize physical control of government payment systems and use them to shut down federal funding to any recipient he personally dislikes. Elon Musk is directly usurping Congress’s most important authority, the power of the purse.

In an obscenely capitalist country like ours, the power of the purse is absolute. He’s already trampling over privacy concerns to steal everything else.

An astonishing number of laws are seemingly being broken here. Serving as head of the newly-invented body known as DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), a loose representative of the president without any clear role or official title, Musk has been granted access to highly restricted government computer systems. A private citizen with immense corporate interests and many business competitors now appears to have access to every bit of data the government owns. That includes personal data like names, addresses, social security numbers, health information, and welfare information. It also includes business data, such as data about the contracts and work of his direct competitors. It may be the vastest data breach in the history of the world – an industrial tycoon being handed the entire data repository of the United States government.

I wouldn’t expect Trump to care, or even be aware of the problem, but where is AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Ford, Boeing, Bank of America, etc., all those giant companies whose data is being stolen by a jumped-up South African immigrant and competitor? I don’t want my data handed over to Musk, but I’m small potatoes. Some billionaires ought to get on his case.

Unless, of course, they like this part, which involves diminishing the power of the government.

But this violation, appalling as it is, pales next to the greater constitutional harm. In the US, like any other functioning country, the government gets to control the government’s own spending. This power is assigned to Congress. There is an elaborate political process of primaries and elections through which we elect senators and representatives. Those elected representatives then conduct negotiations – often difficult and acrimonious – and decide how to allocate vast sums of money every year. The allocations include trillions of dollars of taxpayer money and additional trillions of dollars of debt. The totals here are literally beyond the human capacity to envision, which is one reason why we have a long, specific process for determining how they’re used. Congress’s authority is paramount, and no one else – no government agency, no branch, not even the president – can simply overrule Congress and use the money for its own purposes.

In case you’re wondering how Musk is going to disembowel government, he’s just blatantly firing people and confiscating rights, even when he has no recognized authority to do so. People are just accepting it.

Much like a gremlin fed after midnight, Elon Musk is staying up late and causing mayhem. As Musk-backed cuts and changes continue to spread across federal agencies, employees have found that many of the bizarre communications that they’re receiving, as well as the unusual dictats transforming their workplaces in the name of DOGE, are happening late at night and on weekends.

On Sunday night, for instance, federal workers received another unusual email encouraging them to quit their jobs and take a “deferred resignation” option where they will supposedly be paid through September 30 while not working. The original message, sent out on January 28 and titled “A Fork in the Road,” generated intense backlash from federal workers and warnings from union leaders that the offer’s terms and legality were on shaky ground. The follow-up email, formatted as a Q&A and unsigned like the original, assured workers the offer was legitimate. (“We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” one passage read, about whether workers can get second jobs during the deferred resignation period. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”)

Before Trump’s second term and Musk’s DOGE, it was “very unusual” to receive such important communications outside of normal working hours, one federal employee said, echoing several others. “Avoiding office hours at all costs, it seems.”

Who needs knives in the night when you’re armed with authoritarian memos? He’s just doing it. No one is stopping him. We need more people to rise up and resist.

So much of what he is doing is ridiculously petty.

Other strange after-hours occurrences tread the line between outrage and black comedy, federal employees say. A worker at an intelligence agency says that unidentified outside staffers arrived to sweep the office of anything they felt was related to DEI, a target of a Trump executive order. That included a plaque, confiscated from a supervisor’s desk, which read, “Be kind to everyone.”

OK. No more kindness. These monsters, and the people who appointed them, and the citizens who voted those people in, need to be treated in kind. Do not accept their officious nonsense. Like this one, from the new secretary of transportation:

Rosa Parks might have a few words to say about that. Shut up and sit in the back of the bus, says Secretary Duffy. You’re a distraction. He’s got air traffic controllers to fire.