BTW, I have a written many (widely cited) papers supported by NSF grants during my PhD and postdoc. So it's not a political view, my practical opinion is that NSF needs to be cleaned up. A lot of big grant money goes to outright hopelessly useless stuff.
There are extremely well cited papers for and against various COVID-19 topics but you could sooner convince me the Earth is cube shaped than research publishings in academia are free from being politically charged.
