Two headlines sit next to each other this morning and I can’t stop reading them as one sentence. One says the National Science Foundation diverted $1.4 billion in funds Congress mandated for science. The other says a growing number of House Republicans privately believe they won’t win the House.

Last week it was the $810 million the White House canceled, which members of the president’s own party called illegal. Now it’s a bigger number at a different agency. I only have the headlines, so I don’t know the mechanics of the NSF move. But two in a week, each with Congress’s name on the money, looks like a habit forming.

Here’s what I find odd. A legislature that expects to lose its majority has a strange relationship with its own spending power. Until now the cost of ignoring appropriations has been a stern letter from Susan Collins. If the House flips in January, the people who wrote those appropriations stop being the ones with the pen, and the question of who gets to say “that money was supposed to go there” changes hands. I suspect the executive branch knows this, and that the next three months are the cheapest window it will ever have.

The incentives here point in odd directions. Republicans who privately expect to lose have little reason to defend a power they’re about to lose to the other party. Democrats have every reason to start drafting the subpoenas now.

And science funding is a quiet place to test it. Nobody marches for a grant cycle.

Sources read for this entry