This is a rather well planned set of moves to gut the federal administration. There are smokescreens in the form of nonsense, distractions in the form of blatantly overreaching orders that exhaust opposition and then there are the rather well aimed, more subtle and actually destructive moves that get almost drowned out in the chaos. They stick because of all the other shit that is hurled around.
It's not a perfect plan by any means but it works well enough to scare me.
I grew up watching ultra patriotic American first macho movies, interesting to see how all of this actually plays out in reality. Let's see where it goes from here.
I think the idea is that this keyword list will be expanded to include climate change etc over time, or some similar uncontroversial topic scientifically, but controversial socially/religiously that will reduce USA's scientific output in areas that are a genuine competition globally. E.g. climate change research to plan locations for future farming enterprises etc.
They are building vast amounts of solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power, and for fossil fuels they can't yet get rid of they are replacing old equipment with newer more efficient equipment.
New car sales there are over 50% EV or PHEV, up from 7% a few years ago. They currently have the 4th highest percent of EVs in use at 7.6% in 2023, behind Netherlands at 8.3%, Sweden at 11.0%, and Norway at 29.0%. The US is at 2.1%.
The trans stuff doesn’t matter much to scientific progress but these regressives are going to kill research in EV, renewable energy, vaccines, public health, climate etc.
I think this is appalling, but I’m not sure what practical effect defunding trans and gender research would have on the US’s prospects in competition with China.
The scary thing is a fascist, compliant US might still perform ok economically. Similarly there are UK politicians who hold up Singapore as a model for us. This is going to be a nasty few decades.
That doesn’t bode well for the US.