Anti-DEI fight just beginning, NIH cuts wont kill bioscience and other commentary

Amid the Trump anti-DEI push, notes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald, “private and public entities are also calibrating their language to preserve as much of the pre-Trump status quo as possible.” Schools like the University of California and the University of Pennsylvania are shamming compliance with Trump directives around fairness and standards.Yes, the “administration can flag certain words and phrases essential to the antiracist project.

It can eliminate them from official executive branch pronouncements.” But “professional antiracists in faculties and bureaucracies won’t cede power without a fight.” “Uprooting the diversity ideology constitutes an existential threat.” “After this first round of executive orders and funding decisions, the Trump administration will have to get even more creative in combating a poisonous worldview.The battle is just beginning.”Critics’ claims that Trump-proposed cuts to National Institutes of Health indirect funds “will annihilate biomedical scientific research” just “don’t stand up under scrutiny,” explains Zachary R.

Caverley at Reason.“In the era before the NIH was spreading federal money,” US biomedical-science “was not hurting for private support”; “the public sector’s role” in research achievements “is often overstated.” Notably, the “chief innovator” of mRNA vaccine tech, Katalin Karikó, “was roadblocked for years in academia” before creating the Pfizer vaccine “in the private sector.” Public funding plainly “is not necessarily the crucial factor for scientific advancement and innovation.” “In practice, the private sector drives new technologies,” since it does “have motivation to invest in basic research.”“Lawsuits targeting industries such as energy, agriculture and manufacturing have become en vogue for populist politicians — and billionaire donors,” lament Alex Daniel & Tom Stebbins at USA Today.

Yet these officials are “rack...