I suspect that projects are always vetted against ideology, because everyone has one and everyone believes that his own is correct. I doubt that one could get NSF funding for a study of racial differences in IQ. I am certain that one could not get it for any ‘research’ based on the idea that the Earth is 7,000 years old. That seems like a really good thing!

I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?

Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.