Comment by nxobject
5 months ago
No. This isn't about grant dollars actually being rescinded while the research is in process – you can't do that.
It's about a senator attempting to lead his own "investigation" into grants awarded during the Biden administration, and using shoddy methodology to do so.
This shouldn't be conflated, either, with how the NSF and NIH have currently flagging grant proposals in review for immediate rejection.
Thanks, you're completely correct that these funds already been dispersed (in many cases years ago). I didn't notice that at all.
That said, I would add some context to your complaint about Cruz. I have nothing positive to say about that man, perhaps beyond him being quite good at seeing which way the winds are blowing, but he is the head of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation [1] whose jurisdiction explicitly includes "Science, engineering, and technology research and development and policy." So there is probably no more appropriate individual to be spearheading such investigations, for better or for worse.
And yeah their methodology was described here [2] on page 38. I agree it's far from stellar, but I'd argue that it seems like the system for distributing the grants was the underlying flaw. So far as I can tell it seems like they didn't have any sort of point system, so I have no clue how they were trying to be remotely impartial or consistent (let alone accountable) with who and which proposals were funded. If proposals were being funded or rejected as whimsically as that report would suggest, then it's probably inevitable that efforts to find bad apples would end up just as blunt.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Committee...
[2] - https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092...