I can give a different perspective. It is not because of politicization IMO - at least not in the hard sciences. The problem comes from way up, from Congress be

I can give a different perspective. It is not because of politicization IMO - at least not in the hard sciences. The problem comes from way up, from Congress because the immediate impact of science is not obvious. Especially, for basic sciences the impact takes decades to be really felt. But then how do you do promotions? How do you judge output? Worse still, how does US Congress justify spending taxpayer dollars. Rather than acknowledging that any short term measurement of the quality of science is a fool's errand, we have doubled down on meaningless metrics like impact factors and h-indices. And this is what we have as a result.