When you have lots of people whose livelihoods depend on the gravy train, who can't be sure that what they are working on is fraudulent because they are so specialised, who would take that risk?
Its all about funding. And in the US basically all funding comes from the same source - government, military or corporations - what I think of as the governance system.
It’s very weird to me that science now equals vaccines and home-mandates, and it also equals advice given with little data. Science is way way bigger, and is an idea not a particular set of people or current beliefs. It also has brought untold value of taking us out of the dark ages but apparently that’s been normalized so much it’s no longer valued.