Professors from the University of Vermont Department of Biology have announced that they'll be suspending all ongoing research studies for the rest of the year and committing available resources to producing clones of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“The way I see it, we have less than two months left of guaranteed federal funding for scientific research. After that, all bets are off,” said molecular geneticist Victoria Clemons, PhD. “It is in our best interests to devote that precious time toward a project that we believe would be of the greatest benefit to the scientific community and humanity at large.”

Thanks to the Vermont senator’s tireless efforts on the campaign trail earlier this year, sanity nearly replaced maple syrup as the state's greatest domestic export, a feat many considered impossible. The 74-year-old self-proclaimed democratic socialist isn't showing signs of slowing down any time soon. However, the scientific community has begun to worry he is susceptible to aging like everybody else.



“Just as with precious research data, it doesn’t hurt to have a couple backups handy, because you never know when you’ll need them in the future,” explained research assistant Taylor Bunningwitz. “The country wasn’t entirely prepared for the Bern in 2016, so we’re gonna make sure we have plenty of nonperishable Bernies on hand for when it is.”

When will that be, exactly? According the latest available data, it could be "a while."

“People tend to assume that time progresses uniformly across the country,” noted data analyst Peggy McPuggins. “When you dig into the data, however, the numbers paint a very different picture. Time actually travels slower, and in some cases even backwards, in various parts of the country.”

For reasons not immediately clear to the scientific community, Sen. Sanders appears to be one of the only forces in nature capable of unifying the flow of time across an entire nation.

“He’s basically the Higgs boson of sanity!” exclaimed graduate student Melvin Slintinksy.

Scientists expect to have a functioning clone of Sanders by late December. Each clone will then be subjected to an intense line of questioning to ensure Sanders' sanity was effectively preserved. Sample questions include “Are women actually people, or just grabbable objects?” and “All your problems are caused by people with darker skin than you — true or false?”

These questions might seem simple, but they have been shown to stump as much as one half of the nation's population.

Clones that pass the sanity test will then be dressed in brown suits and stored on a basketball court until the country is ready for them.

“Hopefully, sanity will prevail during our lifetimes and we’ll never need to unleash these Sanders clones on the unsuspecting public,” said Clemons. “Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if and when that will be the case, so you better believe we’re going to be prepared. In scientific terms, we still have a metric fuck-ton of work to do.”