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This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.

Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.

See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.

The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under.

Just quoting Wiki since it's quite succinct and accurate on this: "[The Wolf Amendment] prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress."

For another consequence of this law, when China relatively recently carried out a sample return from the Moon, they sought to share the resultant rocks/material with countries worldwide, much like NASA did in the 60s. Except Americans couldn't accept them, at least not without jumping through a million hoops first, due to this law. It's one of the ever more frequent 'I'm going to punch myself in the face because I don't like you' acts by governments.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

Unclear arbitrary rules are the best way to rapidly induce a chilling effect.

If the enemy is the science happening then a lack of clarity is a highly effective tactic.

> They're just randomly flagging

What is the purported legal authority they’re acting under? Some of the housekeeping in the next years will involve pulling those statutes.

See my top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238900

US seems to be learning from China very quick. Congrats.

There is. You can read it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

It’s called ZOG.

I do not know yet if this was NIH tricky wording to insidehighered.com, or if it is really restricted to this one small program.

edit: that said, from my experience, and some reporting, foreign contracts (e.g. a foreign collaborating researcher) have been regularly denied in the new NIH.

> a clarification of longstanding policy, not a new directive

I call BS.

Many graduate students, faculty and post-docs are foreign citizens. So banning them from conducting research could potentially shut down big research projects. It is not surprising to me that the NIH and other funding agencies didn't want to do this. (It is also unsurprising to me that the current administration would have few qualms about disrupting research: we know they don't care, ask the cancer studies that had to be saved with private Foundation funding last year.)

Before you start throwing disruptive rules at projects, you generally want to know that there is a critical security concern for that specific work. Most research just gets published a few months later, so foreign interests can just read it in a journal and download the dataset.

I heard NIH grantees had to always jump through extra hoops when hiring foreign companies or purchasing foreign products

Unfortunately, we are seeing the decline of the USA. The rest of the world is going to move on without us.

Being isolationist or global imperialist implies articulating different strategies and values.

This is an administration that has neither of those.

The enemy is both weak and strong.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism

He changes his mind all the time. No decision will ever be final. It will change depending on what satisfies his whims at that very moment.

They're not mutually exclusive

It's a decent bet that they are truly foolish. I've said this before. If the administration isn't acting as agents of a hostile nation trying to destroy America from within and scuttle its global leadership, they're doing a great job acting like it.

Short of them just turning a nuke on a large city, I can't think of better ways to harm America without fomenting an actual uprising than what they're doing to us today.

Autarky requires imperialism to grab the resources needed to be fully isolationist. So it's really both, until they hit the tipping point to become fully isolated. But this is something else. This is just the anti-science ignorentsia coming together with the xenophobic white supremacists to screw America. They say Trump can't bring people together, but he's done a great job of uniting all the worst people in the country.

Do you have a reference for that? At least based on this, it seems like China's trying to increase collaboration and funding for joint research projects with non-Chinese researchers:

* https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/english/site_1/international/D2/2018...

* https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260107-overseas-scho...

Oh, absolutely. For instance I never thought Lysenkoism would happen again, but the conditions are ripe for it.

Your current understanding also seems a bit warped. The US government provides the source of a lot of research funding but historically exerts little "control". Generally grant applications are evaluated by panels of researchers who don't work for the federal government.

Also, this government funding supports fundamental innovations that private companies wouldn't fund because it's too general and too far from monetizable. But after those breakthroughs happen funded by public research, private industry benefits enormously. This includes most health and medical advances and the science underlying most technological advances. So government funding doesn't conflict with the work being necessary or important, on the contrary, it is possibly more important long-term.

Disclaimer? The government funds some of my research.

that's not entirely true, it is to some degree. by convention there have been a few buffer layers between actual grant allocation and naked politics. funding gets allocated to someplace like NSF, NIH, ONR or DARPA. Those organizations have directorates or area concentrations. Each directorate has a program manager (the terms vary based on org) who puts out request for proposals (grant applications).

The PMs are generally chosen from the sciences, and are responsible for authoring RFPs that meet strategic goals, and negotiate with the PIs (grant recipients) about terms and sizes and such.

So there are really two political realms, above the funding agency, and underneath, and its entire function is reconcile those worlds in a pretty vague way with a certain amount of autonomy given to the PM.

This isn't 100% great, but if you have good PM, some good science does get funding. While this seems like a lot of machinery, if you short circuit all of it, and have the presidents direct flunkies make funding decisions, that basically means that almost no real science gets done.

The US is currently at war by all definitions except a declaration of war.

So, medical research (NIH grants) is in preparation for going to war? Is the US planning on using biological agents?