Courtesy My Erstwhile Anon(s).: Here Is At Least One Take On Tangerine 2.0's "Anti-Science" Bias -- In His Executive Order Passels, This Week.

It has taken us a moment here, to find free time to put this and an all-new graphic together -- but it is courtesy of my long reading / suffering Anon.(s). . . thanks go to them for showing me it. I likely never would have seen it, in the blizzard of Sharpie scribbles this week alone.

So it is, that Trump/Vance (and Musk, clearly!) want to prevent real life sciences researchers and policy experts from sharing what they've learned -- with one another. And, to stymie the award of a very large number of already green-lit, and pending federal life science research grants. [To the extent that Tangerine 2.0 wishes to emphasize differing research goals, that is within his ambit, at 1600 Penn.]

But the wholesale mothballing of ALL science efforts, for disease mitigation, for example -- or new mRNA vaccines work, in particular -- should be beyond his remit. This agency at right -- and other related agencies -- were created, and specifically funded by long-ago Congressional Acts. So the argument runs that only the US House, by legislation (as keeper of the purse strings) can authorize what amounts to a near-shut-down. Here's the latest story on what's happening:

. . .Confusion and anxiety is rippling through the US health-research community this week following Donald Trump taking office as the 47th US president. His administration has abruptly cancelled research-grant reviews, travel and trainings for scientists inside and outside the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public biomedical funder. Adding to the worry: the Trump team appears to have deleted entire webpages about diversity programmes and diversity-related grants from the agency’s site. . . .

Researchers who spoke to Nature say that although a short, daylong pause in communications at US agencies has occurred in the past when new administrations have started, to reorient strategy, the reach and length of the Trump team’s — it is set to last until at least 1 February — is unprecedented. Without advisory-committee meetings, the NIH cannot issue research grants, temporarily freezing 80% of the agency’s US$47-billion budget that funds research across the country and beyond.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” says Carole LaBonne, a developmental biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has received funding from the agency for more than 20 years. . . .

As we've previously said -- to the extent he targets DEI programs (or people), there exists strong precedent for challenging him in the courts, but this portends nothing near the slam dunk thumping that his preposterous "end birthright citizenship" Sharpie saw. The law here is in fact. . . murkier. So the focus has to be. . . on getting the word out, over the din/chaos/lies of what he always serves up.

Unfortunately, that is going to be a tall order, well into February / March. Damn.

Onward, just the same.

नमस्ते