The prevailing narrative—that scientists are departing academia due to funding cuts—reverses the actual causality. In reality, many universities chose to divert research funds toward administrative expansion and ideological programming well before any budget reductions occurred. As laboratories faced resource constraints, offices dedicated to messaging, branding, and identity-based initiatives proliferated. These were not unintended side effects but deliberate reallocations of institutional priorities. The erosion of scientific capacity is not the result of external scarcity, but of internal decisions to privilege bureaucracy over inquiry. Scientists are not leaving because there is no money—they are leaving because the institutions no longer prioritize science.