For me, the heart of the issue, or the issue giving rise to all other issues, is that whenever science and technology are made subservient to politics, the outcome is likely to be bad. It puts people without knowledge in charge of people with knowledge. Technological decisions are determined by personal and politicla criteria. Children command the adults and madness ensues. This isn't to say that there aren't bad techs, or that there aren't good managers. But it is to say that you cannot make good decisions without the knowledge prerequisite for those decisions. And the consequences nearly always travel downward to the people who tried to prevent them.
I say all this having once worked fifteen years in the deepest chamber of hell, international defense contracting, where everything is always political.