Is Trump Taking Lessons From Pisters?
By
Leonard Zwelling
By definition, MD Anderson is a monarchy. There is no congress. There are no courts. The president’s power is unchecked and singularly unquestioned.
I should know. I questioned the power of an MD Anderson president on a regular basis. It eventually got me fired. You see I was supposed to be the overseer of MD Anderson’s adherence to federal research regulations (human subjects research, animal care and use, biosafety) along with policies on conflict of interest and research misconduct. The president I served had his own ideas about conflicts of interest and human subjects research. His ideas about the latter did not comply with the Federal Code of Regulations. We had the debate about this for years. Until I was gone. Then he was gone. Then things got worse at Anderson.
To make a long story short, if, as MD Anderson president, you neither lose money, nor commit a crime, nor break one of the Ten Commandments, nor create an uproar with the faculty, nor ignore the UT Chancellor, you will probably survive.
In other words, if you don’t screw up, you can be MD Anderson king for a long time and it’s good to be king. I do believe that Dr. Pisters has learned from his predecessors and is likely to have a good long run atop the Anderson piranha-filled food pyramid by keeping his low profile, ignoring the faculty, and hiring people who will never challenge him as I did John Mendelsohn.
I think Mr. Trump would like to do the very same thing in Washington. The equivalent of the MD Anderson faculty at the federal level seems to be Congress. Mr. Trump has neutered Congress with the threat of primary challenges and of losing his favor in the majority of GOP members. Dr. Pisters has done it with the threat of dismissal for a lack of professionalism that has been underwritten by the Texas Legislature.
Undoubtedly, the current Supreme Court (the Board of Regents equivalent) will give Mr. Trump everything that he wants. If that Court goes along with the Trump proposal to limit birth right citizenship in direct contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment, then you will know that all the rest of the lower court rulings against Mr. Trump will be reversed.
Finally, there’s the Executive Branch of the federal government which Mr. Trump is paring back with the help of the government expert Elon Musk. Dr. Pisters has not had to pare back his executive branch, the 25,000 or so employees who are not faculty. But he might very soon. If the indirect cost rate on federal grants really drops to something between 15 and 25%, Dr. Pisters will either have to find cash to make up the difference, decrease the amount of research being done, or decrease his overhead, most of which is that 25,000 people. He too may have to trim his executive branch. Maybe Mr. Musk will come to Texas. Oh wait, Space-X is here.
Either way, Mr. Trump is working hard and effectively to turn the federal government into a mirror-image of MD Anderson. Mr. Trump wants to be king.
With his soon anticipated coronation, Mr. Trump, has begun the process of carving up the world with his fellow despots in China and Russia. To go to Saudi Arabia for the onset of peace talks with Russia about Ukraine without the participation of Ukraine looks really bad and is, at best, rude. As someone said on TV today, “with peace talks, if you are not at the table, you are on the table.”
I understand that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are very satisfied with the way things are going in the first month of his second term. I believe that he has correctly identified the problems he needs to address. He believes that there are simple solutions for these problems—in Gaza, in Ukraine, and at home. It was also said by H. L. Mencken that “for every complex problem there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
I believe that both Mr. Trump and Dr. Pisters might want to heed that advice.
