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With catch-all reports, a variety of government announcements and speeches, and an opaque bill drafting process, ascertaining just what the Loi de programmation pluriannuelle de la recherche (LPPR) consists of has been a challenge. Rather than an identified political object, criticism has been met with a plethora of heterogeneous, vague and (sometimes) contradictory statements, which have the effect of weakening it due to the lack of an identified opponent. And the publication of the bill revealed only some of the LPPR’s contents, the devil being in the detail. This article, therefore, sets out to report on the main results of a study carried out to define what the LPPR is. It is based on a qualitative content analysis of a corpus of reports, various technical documents from the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, and government speeches.