If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.
The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.
Besides the brutal impact on those already invested in the American research community, this is one more nail in the coffin when it comes to competing for new talent. What researcher in their right mind would move their research and their future to the USA to join this clown rodeo?
It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.
Canada has a fairly tough points system around their immigration doesn't it? Lone, high income developers are what it seems the system is made to attract, but a whole family?
My wife is an academic surgical subspecialist and had no difficulties with immigration from the U.S. to Canada. At the time I was taking a pause in my career to homeschool our daughter. This was over a decade ago. The points system fluctuates dynamically according to the needs of the labour market, so things may be different now. But I was even issued an open work permit at the time. And different labour categories may have different situations.
Thanks for commenting with your experience - that helps frame it somewhat, that a skilled worker may qualify their family. The proof of funds requirement seems like the term used, referred to here [1]. Still a lot of money but less than I was directly told recently, so it is possible word of mouth may have exaggerated this a tad.
If you don't my asking, was your wife's profession, rather than her income directly, taken into account significantly? Thanks again
With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.
Saudi Arabia or UAE maybe, but these don't even try to pretend to be socially and politically liberal.
Academic salaries are lower in the US relative to industry salaries than in most other countries. While the nominal sums are high, the salaries are low relative to housing costs. Particularly because good universities tend to be in expensive areas. When you compare two academics in similar positions in the US and Europe, the European is more likely a homeowner.
Yeah, but you can pull some coin in R01 grants here in a way that you simply cannot in other countries. Shared facilities is another factor. Schools will throw down for a new cryo EM. Might be fully funded by a couple donors along with an entire building around it for the cost of putting up a brass sign with their name by the door. Other nations might be still using soviet equipment.
NIH grants are pretty good, but they have not kept up with inflation. ERC grants are better, unless you are in a country with particularly high salaries. NSF grants are not that special.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. (The US spends more on R&D in general.) European academics are also less dependent on government funding. While European old money has long found it prestigious to fund arts and sciences, US donors are more likely to fund education or buildings.
European academics have continued to immigrate to the US, mostly because there is less competition for resources. It's easier to get a faculty position or a grant in the US, because you are competing against fewer people. Because academic jobs are worse in the US relative to the alternatives, fewer Americans are willing to pursue an academic career. That leaves opportunities for immigrants who have already chosen the academia and are willing relocate.
> With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.
Gross compensation yes. But if you begin deducting stuff like the absurd American housing costs, private healthcare, saving up for deductibles, the need to own, insure, fuel and maintain a car to do everything because almost nothing is accessible by public transport, retirement savings, everyday stuff such as restaurants being made much more expensive than what's on the paper because of mandatory tipping, saving up for your children's academic degree while paying off your own student debt, hell saving up for having a child (just the birth will be 20k out of pocket [1]), saving up for times of un(der)employment... suddenly most of Europe becomes pretty affordable if you are not on FAANG levels of compensation.
Can you provide some calculations of being able to afford anything at all for a, say, software developer earning 80k per-year in Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam and compare that to 280k in the Valley? Some of those are completely terrible (SWEs I know who work in Paris can't even afford to rent in the city itself and there is no realistic way for them to ever buy anything in there), others are okayish but definitely not great. And most of those supposed benefits you listed are payed by outrageous taxes on so-called "middle" class, which (surprise!) are exactly those SWEs (others you just disingenuously omitted like retirement contributions which would be close to 20% of your salary in Munich while simultaneously highlighting 401k).
> Can you provide some calculations of being able to afford anything at all for a, say, software developer earning 80k per-year in Paris, Berlin or Amsterdam and compare that to 280k in the Valley?
I did just that in a sibling comment. 80k is upper class in Germany, solid middle class can be achieved at 60k.
So you conveniently omitted that your wife was also contributing? Is being "solid middle class" in Germany assumes to ever be able to buy your own apartment (preferably not a a 60m^2 shoe-box)?
I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US.
It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks. And it is far more useful for me to be able to say and show that I have a high salary, for access to credit and resources, private investments that give me the best shot of escaping a permanent underclass.
Of course, I don't want to budget, nobody wants to given the choice, so I pay for the conveniences and assurances that I can afford.
But even if the margins are smaller, the absolute numbers are great. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck due to debt and lifestyle inflation, then you are really saving thousands of dollars a month. potentially many thousands. a single one of those is enough to travel around the world, it's just the irony that we have to come back to the US very soon in order to continue making that money. its enough to attempt to make a homerun in our capital markets on a equity name.
So, sorry commonwealth and Europe, you really don't compete on that front for people that don't already have capital. The wages are just too low.
In fact, the wages are ironically sooooo low that their main selling point - social welfare - is at parity to Americans on welfare! Who do have healthcare without premiums in some states, subsidized higher education in some cities, and more. So the systems aren't really as different as billed. Saying it another way, a European/Commonwealth citizen making their same salary in USD would get the same benefits in some parts of US, just losing all of their social standing in the process.
And finally, when Americans do earn their freedom back, with unlimited sums of money, Europe and Commonwealth countries once again become uncompelling, because the US has a more expensive, larger, funner version of everything those countries have to offer, while our US Gentry experience a different form of social welfare supporting themselves.
The incentives to really exit the US system aren't quite there. As another person mentioned, Switzerland is closest. Switzerland and schengen access is pretty appealing to me as well.
> I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US.
If you're very young, single and childless, sort of. You can pick the lowest tier of health coverage from your employer which is often fully covered by the employer and have no other major costs. If you're young and single and healthy this can work out. Of course, if you have some kind of accident or medical emergency, expect to be bankrupted, which is not how it works in other countries.
But once you have to cover childcare and school and university, and the lack of time off for parents (add expensive babysitters on top of daycare and school) and pay for good medical coverage for a whole family and of course contribute maximums towards retirement because social security won't be there and so on. Suddenly that large gross salary is mostly gone and what little is left over isn't very different from what may be left over from a much smaller salary in a different country.
And of course here in the US we get to work our nice 60 to 80 hour weeks instead of a regular 40 hours and disconnect from work. And we might two weeks vacation, if you can afford to take it, instead of 4 to 6 weeks.
>in the US we get to work our nice 60 to 80 hour weeks
That is hardly the norm, if you work in the hottest AI startup or some field of quant then sure, but average SWE do work the same 40 hour week. Lack of paid vacation is true tho.
yes you’re right, the single and child free person is in the best position to relocate to Europe yet can take the chance at more in the US during that time while the family is definitely not taking that chance, which is my point. The incentives are off.
European companies could offer higher salaries with a wholesale structural adjustment in their culture, and the US could offer healthcare higher education and child care in a wholesale structural adjustment
But right now the wrong things are different to really be compelling to tale advantage
> I've done that math too and the other reality is that most of those costs are optional in the US.
It really depends on your situation. I am living alone in an apartment that costs 60% of the median rent in my metro area and my generous healthcare plan ($1500 deductible, $3000 max OOP) is fully paid by my employer, short and long term disability insurance paid for by my employer, and my car will be paid off in 3 months. I am able to save around half of my income, but my sister and BIL have three kids and a house and they spend almost all of their money. Their combined income is probably 2.5-3x of what I make, but by myself I have a higher net worth than them. They’ll probably surpass me in net worth once they can stop paying for daycare and get their student loans cleared, they just have a lot of expenses I don’t.
> It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks.
That's the thing. Temporarily. Sure, you can save on healthcare with a high deductible and in-network-only plan. But then, all it needs to wipe you out is a bad traffic accident - say, you run a red light by accident, get t-boned at high velocity and airlifted to the next hospital. You're at fault, the hospital is out of network, the HEMS ride isn't covered anyway. Your car is toast, you're out of work for months and fired sooner than later.
In Germany? HEMS is covered by your health insurance. You get full pay for 6 weeks (and 70% afterwards) while out sick. Your boss can't (realistically) fire you without an insane lot of effort that most don't bother. All in all, you only have to eat the cost of the totaled car.
But your average SWE? That's more like 130k in the US [1] vs 61k in Germany [2]. In Germany, that's about 3500€ net (after taxes, retirement and health insurance - that is deducted from gross wages here) per month, of which you spend about 1500-1800 on cost of living (in Munich, the most expensive city in Germany by far), so about 1700-2000 in disposable income. You don't need a car because everything is walkable and a flatrate for all public transit across Germany is about 63€ a month.
Let's do the math for the US, California. Net pay is 87k/y or 7250/mo [3]. Of that, subtract ~600$ for a PPO plan (it's still not as good as Germany's default which does not have anything comparable to "in network", but good enough) and ~200$ for an average 2400$/y deductible. A 10% contribution to a 401k, 725$ a month. 2500$ for a 1-br apartment [4]. Now add in 100$ a month for car insurance (VW Golf) and 399$ in leasing rates for that VW Golf, then you're at 2.700$ a month in disposable income. But since you still have to pay half a grand a month on your average student loan [5], whoops, 2.200€ a month in disposable income left.
And frankly, making 200-500$ a month more in disposable income? That is not that much of a difference, particularly once you begin factoring in the "soft factors". Here in Germany, you can't be fired at-will, you'll always have to be paid for at least three months, that's one huge uncertainty off my back. You don't have to fear your kid getting shot (12 children a day die in the US from gun violence), you don't have to fear surprise bills when dealing with medical emergencies, you don't have to fear ICE picking you up and deporting you, you don't have to save up for the privilege of your child attending university because that's free in Germany.
If you're lucky and/or well-connected enough to land a job at FAANG/AI? By all means, go for the US. But for everyone else? Come here to Europe. Life's better here. Especially if you or your children are LGBT - or, given the recent anti-abortion crusade that bans lifesaving healthcare in many states, if you carry an uterus.
Why would you use a PPO? The average SWE can be on an HMO. HMO's are fine. I have never once regretted choosing an HMO.
Additionally, you're using the average software engineer salary in the US but then picking California for rent. The article you linked says country wide you'd expect $1950 for renting a 1-bedroom not the $2500 number you are picking for a studio in the bay area.
So you're off by something like $1000 per month (edit: I admit I am simply looking at what I pay for HMO, it's possible that is somehow unrepresentative but I doubt it) by picking the most expensive health plan and mixing up national salaries vs very expensive areas.
The gun violence risk is vastly overblown. The page you are linking to cites a study where gun deaths are being accumulated for ages 1 to 24 years old. Gun deaths are highly non-random and concentrated in older ages and in very specific areas (largely related to gang activity). The average software engineer with family is not going to run into any of that unless they are in the habit of leaving loaded weapons around the house.
> 1500-1800 on cost of living (in Munich, the most expensive city in Germany by far)
Care to clarify how you came up with that budget? Rent an apartment, pay amenities and buy groceries for 1500 EUR in Munich? Like, the one which is in Bavaria (just in case you have some similarly named city located somewhere in ex-GDR)? I expect some hilarious mental gymnastics TBH...
> Care to clarify how you came up with that budget? Rent an apartment, pay amenities and buy groceries for 1500 EUR in Munich?
My US example only included housing as well, simply because I have zero idea how much Americans pay for food, phones and internet.
In any case, a quick search for apartments in Munich (where I lived until last year) shows you quite a bunch of options (way) below that price range [1].
My net worth is close to 1M in the US and I can’t afford a $3000/month mortgage payment (median $450k house with 10% down). Well I could afford it but I need to max out my 401k so I don’t starve when I retire, and stocks don’t need maintenance, insurance, and property tax payments.
Still, until Trump started his latest round of madness, we had a huge brain drain from the EU to US and not vice versa. Were they all stupid?
They weren't. Our highly taxed and relatively stagnant economies are more affordable & attractive for poorer people, but the well-paid professional class was simply better off in the US. Especially with some optimizations, such as: get your professional degree for free in Germany, then move to the US for its high salaries without a debt to pay.
> until Trump started his latest round of madness, we had a huge brain drain from the EU to US and not vice versa.
Well, now with Trump and his madness, suddenly Europe or Canada become a lot more attractive. It simply is not worth it any more to stay in the US, and if the Democrats don't make a landslide in the midterms... get the fuck out as long as you still can.
Yes. Bell Labs are a shadow of their former glory, when Bell could lavishly fund it, having a quasi-socialist telecommunications monopoly. Private companies don't like to fund research outside of their own domain -- that has been offloaded to federal funding, but (as seen here) it's getting a lot more strings attached.
Well, any research related to weapons programs. Jobs/grants in the fields of laser research, AI, material sciences, mathematics, chemistry and aerospace are safe... so long as you dont talk to outsiders.
Friends on ML/AI hiring committees at top tier university are seeing foreign profs turn away record offers. Same for applied math relevant to material science.
I expect you are right at the most specialized end of the spectrum (and certainly industrial labs in those areas), but I wonder if anyone can speak directly to where we are still globally competitive.
It depends. There are two populations, true "Americans" born in the country... and everyone else. The true Americans do not want to leave. If they do, it is about pay/taxes and if you ask them they will generally expect to come back to America eventually. The US remains very competitive for retaining such people.
But for bringing elite minds from outside the country? Heck no. Sure, for the right price they will come, but few want to bring their families to actually stay. Ask someone like a surgeon or physicist whether they want to work in the US or Canada/UK. They will say something like "ya, to make bank for a few years, but long-term I would rather live in Toronto than New York, Vancouver rather than Seattle." The perception of the US by people outside the US is not something America pays much attention to these days. It is suffering.
Yes. Having "foreign contacts" is bad, even family members. If the family was somewhere like china then these would be called "adversarial foreign contacts". Culture has changed in the last ten years. People with grandparents in china are having significant problems when applying for jobs/clearances.
>> A foreign national spouse who is a citizen of the United Kingdom will be evaluated very differently from a foreign national spouse who is a citizen of China or Russia. Both must be disclosed fully, but the national security concern level is substantially different. Applicants with significant ties to adversarial countries face more intensive investigations and, in some cases, may not be eligible for certain programs even if their individual loyalty is not in question.
My father was a Ph.D., a research scientist at a large state university. After understanding how political everything is under the surface, he cautioned me from ever working in a field that depended on government funding. "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.
"Political" in the context of research funding generally doesn't mean what it means under this administration. Administrations have always shifted priorities as far as what scientific fields they want to fund, and individual PMs have also made more opinionated choices. This is normal and expected. A DARPA PM is limited to a 7-year term to ensure that fresh blood constantly enters the system. What's happening now is political in the "partisan political" sense, where specific grants are being killed because they violate political priorities or because the researchers spoke up against the President. This is new.
ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.
Some people think that as long as they "don't make waves", they'll be safe from creeping fascism.
It's not true, because The people who want power will just make a typo—or do a stupid keyword match—and now Harry Buttle is gone. They have no incentive to be consistent or accurate.
> "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.
The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".
Well the current administration has about 2.5 years to go, and depending on mid-terms they may spend the last two years of that occupied with impeachments and complete legislative gridlock in addition to the normal lame-duck loss of power. So we'll see what comes next.
I'll be happy if we are not in a civil war after the midterms, because I suspect all these funds Trump has been setting up for J6ers and ICE is to disrupt voting in districts going blue.
As someone actually in the field at a research university, who regularly applies for grants and has served on study section review boards for NIH federal grants, I have to do a strong disagree. Has it ever happened? Sure. Is it the norm? Not until now.
Also as someone who lost a grant from this administration for supposed DEI (it was fucking biology, but ignorant fucks didn't give a shit), I also want to say fuck them.
This cuts both ways: grants are more valuable as political favors when they are immune to cancellation, and grants with objectively-established value are harder to terminate without political blowback.
This is a lesson I've learned over thirty years. If the GOP says "the Democrats are doing X" then you can be assured the winning Republican plans to do X (or already has.) It inoculates them. Crushing academic free speech is just one of several X's.
If someone is lying about what someone else did, it’s often either what they are doing or plan to do. It’s true in most situations and administrations, but objectively worse in the current. (Ignoring the whole marginalized vs anti-DEI arguments, which I consider SOP for a new administration with new goals.)
As well, any new rulings or laws that are designed to expire right before an election are almost always the mechanisms used for those abuses claimed as being perpetrated by others. And the number of things designed this way seem to be stacking up relatively quickly.
The reasoning is quite straightforward, “I want to make sure you can’t do the things I was just doing to you.” Otherwise there wouldn’t be a reason for policies that are good for everyone to expire at the end of a presidential term.
You did exactly what GP was commenting on - conflating something that happened occasionally in the past with policy that mandates it should happen every time today.
Yes, grants were given and revoked for political purposes in the past.
But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur. Today’s administration is formalizing Soviet-style political reviews of science.
It’s scary, and it’s a mistake to hold up occasional (but serious!) mistakes from the past to justify systematic evil today.
>But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur.
Small consolation for those excluded. It wasn't "occasional (but serious!) mistakes" it was systematic ideological control.
I'd say explicit is better than implicit. Less hypocrisy, and more transparency. And at least now that this shit is officially set as word to paper, and is out in the open, the other side, when in power, can dismantle it and make into law guarantees that such wrongthink persecution wont happen again.
But they wont. They'll use the same mechanism of "appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink".
Because it was never about the principle. It was about doing it convertly as long as they politically/ideologically controlled those establishments. Controlling them through government power will suit them too, as much as it suits the other side.
"You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant."
Are you talking about not getting the grant in the first place, or are you talking about grants being cancelled after they had been approved and you had taken the money and started doing the funded work?
They are different situations, but both are equally applicable here. 1. Grants can be canceled at will. 2. All grants are approved or denied by political appointees, who are instructed to only treat peer review as advisory considerations.
This is so wrong-headed of a statement that I’m actually shocked.
Do you even know how grants work?
You’re speaking about scoring designed to ensure that all Americans (any sex, poverty level, ability, creed) benefit from the use of tax payer money. This was a metric that was well understood AND EXPLICITLY EXPLAINED.
There was NO relationship between that and canceling grants.
Edit: less incendiary. I am just very upset with how confident people are saying things that are absolutely wrong for internet points.
>There was NO relationship between that and canceling grants.
And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).
I spoke about how grants were already being connected to ideological pressure, both government and organisational, private sector grands: "You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant."
That pressure was on even after they were handed. That's the same kind ideological gate-keeping, just not from an official appointee, but spread out in ideologically motivated peer review, academic acceptance mechanisms, (and going into the private grants, sponsors), etc.
Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.
>> There was NO relationship between that and canceling grants.
> And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).
> That pressure was on even after they were handed
There is a scoring matrix that simply requires grantees not to ignore huge portions of the nation in their research. You didn't even need to score highly here if you scored highly elsewhere. Just not pretend that people with disabilities or other non-majority groups are deserving of attention in taxpayer-funded research.
> Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.
It was always open and towards the goal of supporting America.
If you cannot understand what is different, I think there is little hope in writing to you.
I respond for the benefit of those who may not already understand how this process works and who aren't carrying water for a political party.
One of the explicit goals of the NSF is to train the next generation of scientists. Part of that is making sure that you're creating a rich pipeline of people who are going to do innovative things. Broadening participation is much more about things like getting more (usually younger) people from all walks of life interested in joining your field. Which is basically an unmitigated good -- first, the obvious advantage that having more people who want to be in a field is good for it from the perspective of choosing the best folks. And second, the less obvious but perhaps more important thing that people with different perspectives often end up thinking about problems differently. It's not nearly as helpful to have 1000 people all focused on chasing the same problems with the same toolbox of solutions as it is to have 1000 people focused on different problems with different ideas of how to approach them.
I say this as a professor at a top computer science department. I have _never_ felt limited in my ability to collaborate with the best folks in my area. Ever. I do! And it's great! And I also believe strongly it's important to make sure we are growing those next generations of amazing people, because the thing that makes research awesome is working with them.
Also, tickbox "I've considered this issue" questions which don't actually stop you from receiving grant funding with a team of middle aged, white male citizens from privileged educational backgrounds is not remotely the same as a clause enabling the administration to arbitrarily cancel your contract mid way through your project.
Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.
Now that's double standard here, isn't it? Putting up questions on forms that require you to reveal your political pole and follow the politics of one party to answer isn't really kosher in any academic environment.
Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.
This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.
Yeah, me pointing out the people exactly like me totally can and do fill in boxes like this and secure grants is totally "insulting a race and sex". I thought it was supposed to be the libs who were grievance mongers desperate to feel discriminated against...
Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employ too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.
If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?
That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.
It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.
Except, of course, that it isn't a matter of simply filling in checkboxes stating how research is going to contribute towards Americans' greatness. It's a matter of mass retrospective cancellation of research funding and the replacement of peer review with commissar review by the sort of people that can't tell the difference between transgenic and transgender and block the publication of studies if they don't align with the administration's position on vaccines
Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.
Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...
I would say this is exactly where you want that kind of policy. At the bottom, where you’re cultivating what will end up at the top. You want the diversity of ideas for exactly the reasons you stated.
People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.
Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.
The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical to punishing people for having a different set of implicitly unwanted checkboxes. You are trying to combat discrimination by engaging in discrimination. Discrimination is discrimination, even if well intended.
And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.
> The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical
Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.
Why are you having a hard time understanding this?
> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.
Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?
I don’t really disagree with the closing quip about those guys’ (lack of) qualifications. But I think what upsets a lot of people (including me) is that if you’re Asian or white, and male, graduating with a 4.5 and doing literally everything right, the Democrats tell us it’s virtuous to have a quota system screen you out of the most competitive schools so that someone of an “underrepresented” race/gender expression, someone who has not achieved the same, can get in.
It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.
I’m not convinced my demographic is discriminated against so much as the playing field is levelled to some degree, because discrimination already occurred in our favour.
The nice thing about regulated discrimination is that it can be an editable, transparent, public document that can be voted on and driven by data. This is better, even if imperfect, than the kind we have when we’re not honest about it.
I’m not saying it’s perfect or wholly good. Just, arguably better. I see a lot of problems with it. It’s a bandaid on deep social and systemic problems.
If anything I appreciate that it’s in the open.
Regardless, I’ve done well in my career at times someone else could have done better. I saw it when I managed hiring processes. Discrimination was everywhere. But I was there, I was white, I was male. That was good enough. I certainly wasn’t the best for the job. There’s something wrong with that in my opinion. I should have had to try harder at times. It would have been better for everyone. How do we fix that?
> "[broaden the] participation of underrepresented groups". [1] As if seeking out the best of the best to collaborate with... was somehow undesirable.
Are those mutually exclusive? I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't track to me. Finding the diamonds in the rough in underrepresented groups is part of finding the best of the best to collaborate with.
You are misreading how Broader Impacts (BI) works. From your link:
> Some examples that illustrate contributions in each of the five areas are given below. Proposals need not address all of these areas, and PIs are advised to focus on those areas in which they are well prepared to make meaningful contributions.
"Broadening participation of underrepresented groups" is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it. I had proposals funded that focused on workforce development, for example. I saw others focus on science communication to the public (now forbidden in the memo this post is about!).
Proposals that passed grant panels were first and foremost always those that would great science. At ~10:1 oversubscription rates or more, proposals don't pass without it. The BI component needed to be credible but could be handled lots of ways.
Fundamentally, Congress recognized when defining BI as a component for merit review in the NSF that fundamental science only pays off in the long term. BI is a pragmatic choice to ensure that grants also yield near-term benefits to society as well.
>is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it.
Irrespective of whatever was going on in academia I take issue with this. Everyone who has a) a double digit number of brain cells b) has ever dealt with government approval in any capacity c) is't just a straight up liar knows that if the requirements set forth by a panel with discretionary authority says to do items 1-5 that you will not be approved without doing all of them, (unless of course you have the right last name or connections).
If you don't believe me watch any local board's meetings for the next 6mo and research everyone who comes before it after finding what outcome they got.
This has nothing to do with academia, DEI or what the other items on the list of requirements were. This is just how the sausage is made. It's all the same steps even if some factories are a little dirtier than others. So yeah, I 100% believe that if someone unconnected didn't pay the right lip service to the right things in every single one of the items in the list they would not get the outcome they wanted even if theoretically their stuff could have been approved with only 4/5 boxes checked. The approvers are not going to stick their necks out like that with no reason.
> Irrespective of whatever was going on in academia I take issue with this. Everyone who has a) a double digit number of brain cells b) has ever dealt with government approval in any capacity c) is't just a straight up liar knows that if the requirements set forth by a panel with discretionary authority says to do items 1-5 that you will not be approved without doing all of them, (unless of course you have the right last name or connections).
I regularly submit workforce participation plans for government construction projects that have minority and women labor hour goals with 100% white male labor hours and receive approval to proceed. Things are not as black and white in reality as the media has led you to believe. I deal with state and local municipal and county governments regularly, my state’s Dept of Labor and Industry does not care what your last name or company is.
Government, and taxation/subsidies in general, have and always will be a tool to encourage one thing and discourage the other.
A lot of research won't be profitable for years to come or is even unlikely to be profitable at all, so you funding sources are limited. The government, having no profit motive, can encourage this kind of research by funding it. Typically the hope is that it'll lead to increased productivity or innovation down the line.
You don't have to be a statistician to see that not all groups of the populace are represented equally among scholars. If you want all viewpoints covered from you populace, wouldn't that mean you want to try and push for inclusion there? That doesn't mean everything has to be inclusive but you sure can incentivize it
This is the core of the issue. We don’t actually want all viewpoints represented because that wouldn’t by itself produce any value.
You want someone to come up with the fundamental theorems of Calculus, linking the area of a curve with its anti-derivative, because that’s incredibly useful. Generically grabbing everyone’s view isn’t a competitive strategy. You need to be selective on things that are intrinsically useful and promote that.
Ah, the ever present “nothing to see here” take. What this government is doing is worse than it’s ever been. At least before when you had your grant it wouldn’t be randomly cancelled at any time.
But it would/could be. That's the broader point before it was hidden now its not. Poltical entities need to accept the current state or rewrite rules that benefit all.
many scientists were annoyed at having to add some boilerplate to basic research about social impacts of their work. would any of them prefer the 'corrective action' of cancelling research based on political animosity towards the host institution or general dislike of academia at all?
> As if seeking out the best of the best to collaborate with, independent of their checkboxes, was somehow undesirable
The best of the best involves people from underrepresented groups. These policies exist to counteract the cronyism and “doesn’t look like me”-ism inherent to the way people make choices. We know people don’t hire and collaborate with the best of the best, because when looking for the best they see it easiest in people with similar backgrounds and perspectives as themselves.
It’s a shame the culture war cooked your brain on this one.
Sounds like your brain was cooked by sound bites over reason and statistics! Culture war indeed!
In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.
I’m afraid I can’t parse much of what you’re trying to convey. I can say that we’re talking about science granting right now, not silicon valley jobs. Nobody was talking about wealthy bigots, that’s all you.
You’re straw-manning your own misconception of the reason for inclusivity, not the reason I gave.
Inspiring specific groups to follow a career path by showing them people on that path is “representation” not inclusivity. Representation matters because it’s easier (not impossible, as you suggest the argument is) to see yourself e.g. as a nurse or a teacher if you have seen male nurses or teachers succeeding.
Representation matters, but not nearly as much as the opposite side of things - who gets opportunities. Which is what I was talking about.
Btw one of the major groups that have benefitted from the dreaded “DEI” in universities has been white men. They are an under-represented group in many post-secondary settings.
> Representation matters, but not nearly as much as the opposite side of things - who gets opportunities.
You're acting like these things aren't intertwined.
You can't adjust the lever of representation without affecting who gets opportunities.
You can believe what you want about the merits of adjusting those levers but to pretend like you can limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous. Be honest and say you think it's worth it.
> You can't adjust the lever of representation without affecting who gets opportunities.
For sure they are intertwined. More inclusion = more representation, and vice versa. But you’re saying representation is pointless because people can enter fields they don’t see themselves represented in and I am saying i think representation is a (positive) side effect not the goal. You can argue that it’s pointless all you want but idgaf because to me it’s a side effect.
> limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous
I agree. Limiting your pool is a bad idea. That’s literally why inclusivity is a good thing. Because people self-limit the pool to people who look like them, and because other societal barriers limit the pool by excluding people. Actively acting to include people broadens the pool, it doesn’t limit it.
If you think on the scale of an individual hire or grant, i guess i can see how it would seem like limiting the pool - but zoom out like two steps and you’d see that’s not true.
Broader Impacts sections can be quite, well broad.
You can put in there standard things like “we will design new grad and undergrad courses that train new students in this tech that we will develop”.
You can put wider-impact things like “we will partner with local community colleges to integrate the results of this research in their XYZ course”, or “we will design summer research programs with recruitment from community colleges”.
And yes, you can (or used to be able to) include things like “we will partner with high schools with high populations of underrepresented demographics to do outreach and involve students in research”.
Clearly, there’s a large variety of things that fall under broader impact, and scientists weren’t required to pick only the “wokest” policies.
Please don’t comment on things you don’t know much about.
That’s not a test of whether the changes are bad; it’s a test of the Democrats’ character. We know the changes are bad. If subsequent administrations do nothing to reverse them, then they are bad too.
You’re thinking tactically. I actually thing the democrats will try to put the Trumpist stuff back in the box. They may not be able to. The rule of law requires trust and that’s gone, and will only be rebuilt by time.
The reactionary Supreme Court has changed the character of the executive. That court will live for many years. The executive branch exists to represent the will of the chief executive. We’ve normalized criminal behavior with the abuse of pardons and crushed the institution of DOJ.
These guys opened a very stupid Pandora’s box. The long game is brutal. When we need to start dismantling the military, that’s going to impact some places pretty severely, for example. The science and tech edge will be gone in a decade.
Have the Democrats ever put any power-grab instruments back in any boxes? I don't remember a time they have, and I don't think they'll start now. They are meek cowards.
New York neutered the power of appointed officials and authorities after Robert Moses.
As the other poster mentioned, the post-Vietnam Church committee was a democratic party-led, bipartisan committee that effectively heeled the CIA and exposed many of the pretty dark abuses committed in that era.
They joined Republicans in limiting presidential power after Watergate. Granted, these limitations usually come after gross abuses. But these are gross abuses, and there's no reason to think they won't get grosser.
It seems to me that the right wingers have a pretty detailed strategy as you can see with Project 2025. I don’t see anything similar on the left wing. I think it’s pretty crazy that even with the current chaos the democrats still aren’t able to craft a coherent message why people should vote FOR them instead of just voting against the republicans. They look purely reactive. No clear message on health care, no message on affordability. Just nothing. And on the local level the message seems to be “have sympathy for the guy who broke your car window and popped in your yard”.
Also ignore all the obvious unabridgeable cultural differences like the non stop calling indian scammers harassing your parents. Reality is the best vaccacine to alot of ideology. The cofabulations to new wrongs about ancient wrongs they do nothing but advocate for the right.
> It seems to me that the right wingers have a pretty detailed strategy as you can see with Project 2025. I don’t see anything similar on the left wing. I think it’s pretty crazy that even with the current chaos the democrats still aren’t able to craft a coherent message why people should vote FOR them
This is the worst part. The Democrats have nothing but outrage and protest. They don’t have a written Democrat Project 2029. Their action plan is as thin as a Reddit post.
The right spent decades working on their strategy, who to target/convert, how to do it, what they would do once in power, and how quickly: and they wrote it down. What the fuck are the Democrats doing? Holding little signs up in protest in Congress and having little press conferences where they make meek outrage noises. This is a very unserious party in the face of a very serious political problem.
A) this court has a number of originalists, more likely to reject grabs for power than more progressive judges. There's worse things than a court that tries to adhere to the constitution when the executive branch and Congress both routinely do not.
B) do you really want to get to a place where the arbiters get politically reset and degraded every time the pendulum swings? This is the equivalent of a courtroom where a defendant or plaintiff can threaten to fire the judge or add their cousin as a co-judge.
I strongly recommend everyone listen & consider Jamelle Bouie's The Supreme Court is Corrupt. This is What We Can Do About It.https://youtu.be/hY279-A2fC4
The supreme court had a very limited role originally. And it's only by grants of Congress that they are allowed the staff, the ability to hear what cases they want to, and assorted other privileges. Beyond just packing the court, Congress could do a ton to rescind the power of these corrupt fiends who've gotten so far at tearing down the United States & gutting our nation, as they and their Leonard Leo/Federalist Society foes of America have lusted for for so long.
It's not just the Supreme Court either. Jamelle also effectively addresses so much of the incredibly vulgar court/judge shopping that makes a single judge North District of Texas such an incredibly popular and active venue, a political powerhouse that reliably will undo anything Federalist Society foes of America & government dislike. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-...
> If they don’t, you know that they also agreed with it - this handwringing now is just for show.
No, the left should use the things right broke to abuse the right—just like the right is breaking everything to abuse the left. Otherwise the right will never learn why breaking things is a bad idea, and they’ll just keep on breaking everything like they have been for my entire life and before.
This will only result in the abuse of the populous by the powerful, not right or left. Right and left are illusions that are at best distractions from the powerful class asserting their interests to the detriment of the lower classes. That's all there is. Always was, always will be. Both left and right have eroded this whilst claiming to do the opposite.
Pretty sure the right generally believes the left has been doing the same.
Previously, it was a more libertarian and constitutional argument: progressive causes since the new deal have assumed powers not granted.
More recently this has completely flipped to a populist culture war argument that the left, in excesses seen in the DEI hayday before COVID, has lost its mind and began attacking and punishing people.
My point isn't to argue "no you" but to instead invalidate your point about lessons and outcomes. The centers of these two tribes exist in separate realities and experiences. Escalating is unlikely to have the effect of bringing those perspectives together.
That seems like all the more reason to fight fire with fire. Right now its an existential fight so if MAGA can't be reasoned with then the only option is to fight back by ay means available.
> Pretty sure the right generally believes the left has been doing the same.
That’s all the more reason to do it. The right believes lots of things that aren’t so, so learning what abuse actually is might stop them from crying wolf in the future.
Complete ignorance on your part, both about the degree of sexual dimorphism, and your apparent, assumed position that gender diverse identities do not have biological origins. There is insufficient data to make firm conclusions, but I will note that brain differences are observed.
There are two developmental pathways for sexual reproduction:
- one produces small mobile gametes
- one produces large immobile gametes
There can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism in different species ends up on one pathway or the other, there can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism on either pathway develops, and there can be plenty of variation in how an individual on either pathway behaves. But in sexually reproductive organisms, there are only two pathways.
A male who wants to obey stereotypical feminine stereotypes in behaviour and dress is free to do so, but it doesn’t make him any kind of female, or a different kind of male.
No biologist is an essentialist for long. Sorry, the author makes a good argument that there are only two sexes if and only if you ou define sex by the specific definition of gametes. The author is not wrong within that limited scope. But, what really matters is the phenotype of sex, which is not binary, is highly overlapping, and is a complex developmental phenomenon.
When people get all up in arms being anti trans, they are not getting up in arms about people not respecting the gametes... They are getting up in arms because they don't like it that the expression of sex phenotypes is heterogenous, overlapping, and scary, and that makes their small minds feel funny. Because they want to pretend that the world can be categorized into simple boxes that alleviate their anxiety, and gives them a sense of control. No, they don't even fucking know what a gamete is, for the most, and we sure as hell didn't know 200 years ago.
If you want to define biological sex as only being the gametes, fine. But that is a small thing. It's a definition that has little relevance. All the phenotypic variability in the expressed biology, phenotypic expression that depends on multifactorial developmental processes that can go in any of a billion different directions, that, while informed by sex chromosomes, are also affected by other non sex chromosomes genes, and also from variability in environmental exposures, which can affect the timing and dosing of sex hormones during development that actually DIFFERENTIATES thr biology? This article, and your perspective, only finds solid ground by limiting what biological sex encompasses to such a small piece of territory, that ceding that kingdom loses nothing meaningful, certainly not in how bodies are made, how sex is expressed and lived in, and to what matters in shaping their lives, personalities, who they feel akin to, and everything else. Have the gamete, who gives a shit? Get it?
Are humans as simple as cars though? And why does sexuality get represented by the energy source n your analogy? Why doesn’t sexuality get represented by other characteristics? Perhaps because “there’s only two kinds - sedans and pickups” sounds a little silly?
You didn’t read my linked article. And you are still trying to shoehorn an entire spectrum of biological expression which is a function of chromosomes, genes, hormones, fully or partially developed sex organs and secondary sexual characteristics, into two buckets - which are really just two “blessed” combinations of the above characteristics.
The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
> which are really just two “blessed” combinations of the above characteristics.
Nope. Not what I said at all. Nothing I said in any way related to the idea that some combinations were “blessed”. Merely that there are two pathways. Individuals may travel those two pathways in numerous ways, but until someone discovers a third gamete, there are only two pathways.
> The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
Very true! No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries or behaviour changes, reality persists - males in dresses are still male, females in suits are still female.
The part where he’s chosen to ignore all the physical developmental factors that contribute to how sexuality is expressed in the body and focus solely on gametes in order to fit the world into a preconceived notion of “male” and “female”.
I’ll give an analogy. Male and female are to biology as orbitals are to nuclear physics. A really, really useful shorthand. But they do not describe actual physical electrons “orbiting” a nucleus. Don’t mistake the shorthand for the reality. Scientific shorthand is generally not useful for reasonably discussing edge cases.
There are exceptional individuals, in every population. Just like there is a non-zero chance that a baseball thrown at a wall will pass through a wall due to a quirk of quantum fluctuation (10^-10^32 chance or whatever), the utility of the differentiation point is a matter of perspective (including intent). Bimodal does not exclude these individuals, but does imply the spectrum has limits (which it does).
Arguing about what two people, of differing perspective, think won't change either's views without associating a utility that has not been considered.
If you’re legitimately comparing the probability of sexual non-dimorphism in the population to the chance of a thrown baseball passing through a wall, then there’s not much likelihood the of an objective discussion here.
For the record, various studies conclude the ratio of individuals that are neither 46,XX nor 46,XY as being anywhere between 0.02% to 1.3% of the population. Or roughly 10^30 more likely than throwing a baseball through a solid wall (based on your stated likelihood).
I don't think any practicing scientist of any political persuasion will think these are good for science.
Science progresses by sharing knowledge openly and publicly, so others can evaluate it, criticize it, and build on it. These severe restrictions on collaboration, publication, and public communication will damage science's naturally open, merit-based culture.
We will all suffer due to lost discoveries--maybe not today, but over years and decades.
Why does science need to be through the government? Irrespective of the proposal, science research is just as open after this change as before so long as it's funded by private citizens who can control the channels through which they donate to this work.
On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a concern from the average citizen*. I don't think most of us want to be under a dictator or go back to having a king.
That means the only practical option is to act of our own volition and support science through vocal advocacy and private money. In this way, we can each donate to the research we care about the most with maximum academic freedom.
It was realized some time ago that having citizens decide to "donate to the research we care about" was not the most efficient way to get the most important research done. So we switched to a system where we pool our resources (taxes), and then use a somewhat complex process (described in TFA) to decide how to allocate them to possible research.
Everyone knows that many things that are not directly beneficial to society would go unfunded because humans optimize for what’s around them, and things that are self-interested.
There isn’t even alignment. One person wants to fund science, the other wants to fund high speed rail, the other wants farm subsidies, one wants social security and the other wants the military. Government balances all of that together. Of course people will make value judgements about their pet interests and declare the other aspects to be better funded separately.
Given the apparent low levels of scientific literacy among the U.S. public, I can’t imagine their ability to discern priorities or worthwhile lines of investigation would be any more useful than a coin toss. Or worse.
>Private citizen fund scientific research [under threat of prison or deadly force.]
I mean I'm not inherently opposed to laws or government, but I think a lot of people need to be more measured and considerate of what they are using tax money for when it is being taken from their fellow citizens at gunpoint.
I agree. This administration is ground zero for mismanagement of funds and outright corruption. Just look at the director of the FBI and former secretary of DHS. Both have used and continue to use tax payer money for personal use. It should make every tax payer livid.
It does make me livid, just as much as the waste of taxpayer money on pointless (and sometimes outright racist) research here makes me livid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335722
Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.
Sure that’s fine. They funded research that you think is wasteful and you would like to have tools to provide that feedback. The issue with this OMB change is that it is not that. The OMB change is a change that allows the administration to cancel any grant for any reason without answering to citizens about it.
BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?
Again, the status quo is that funding recommendations are made by expert peer review by PhD scientists. Political appointees literally do not have the knowledge to make the calls this policy directs them to.
That’s even worse, the incentives are completely misaligned for a political appointee vs unelected civil service workers who are just carrying out their jobs.
ignoring a gratuitous reference to use of force, absolutely. having a discussion as society about what we are funding is in fact democracy. sadly there is an issue in the sciences in that lay people may have difficulty seeing the benefit of connecting the dots. but we should try. and as flawed as it is, the adversarial system we have in the US is at least a forum for those discussion.
using grep to defund grants that contain words we don't like is the exact opposite of measured and considerate. so is punishing scientists for the sin of working for a 'woke' institution. in fact all this seems extremely punitive, and not in the spirit of optimizing outcomes for costs at all.
note that this policy explicitly removes the requirement to provide any kind of rationale. that sort of directly contradicts the notion that this is a measured discussion about priorities.
Private capital is good at funding research that is likely to provide a short-term return on investment. It's not so good at funding basic research, where most of the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs come from. These provide a huge return on investment, but it nets out to society at large on time scales of decades or centuries.
Contrary to what you said, there is actually quite a bit of private philanthropic funding for research, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. The vast majority of it seems to go to medical research, in particular cancer and Alzheimer's. That's obviously a good thing, but my point here is that we can't necessarily depend on private philanthropy to distribute funds optimally.
I'm generally a fan of Cato and a libertarian approach to economics, but I'm still not convinced that we should be spending zero public money on basic research. I would like to see a decent amount going into mathematics and theoretical physics for example, and I doubt those fields would stay afloat on donations.
Emigrate where? And why do you assume that the country you're gonna emigrate to will have the funds necessay to fund the research? US grants are the biggest and most generous in the world. I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that. Other option is China but as a foreigner, you will never get a grant there unless you work for someone else.
> I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that
Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.
Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.
You're comparing the sum of those European countries to the US.
Scientists have two easy avenues if they are currently in the US, the US or their home country. Immigration to work in a foreign nation is not always easy and takes time.
I know scientists who want to move back home but can't because where they are from doesn't have funding for the research they do. Even with the uncertain federal funding it's still more viable than many places around the world.
Any country that doesn't openly say that it will bar funding to grant applications that include any word from a given list of words. Which, of the countries on this planet, is quite a few.
Interestingly, if the US stopped spending you’d need the top 17 remaining countries to double their spending to absorb the American science industry. Doubling is a tall order and seventeen is a large number. Most likely fewer scientists will find employment in government funded academia if this came to be.
Europe is the obvious answer. As others have posted, your numbers here are way off. And on the flip side, there's now some major programs actively encouraging this with special grants, support, relocation bonuses: e.g. ATRAE in Spain, EURAXESS, "Choose Europe For Science", Max Planck Transatlantic Programme.
Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).
I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.
Getting the government together is absolutely something we should do. If you are serious about science and technology then there are funds available and moving to Europe is not necessarily the only strategy. Do you really think that scientists who move to Europe to practice will be the people who turn America back around?
The chaos is affecting pretty much all areas of science, not just the controversial ones. I work in non-controversial, pretty run-of-the-mill chemistry research and the attacks on the NSF have certainly impacted our funding situation. Very long delays in proposal review, complete pivoting to AI, etc. I have co-workers panicking over the green card changes. And the overall morale is pretty grim everywhere.
Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.
Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.
I work for an org that makes research software for chemistry and other branches of science and it's definitely hit us in sales. No one wants to spend money if they don't know if they're going to get or keep the grants they petitioned for.
Oh I’m sure we could commiserate about that. I think we work in vaguely the same area.
Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.
We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.
Well if they want to stop all improvements to their electric car industry that is letting them out compete European, Japanese and US manufacturers, solar panels have clearly not been important to them, and their rocket programs don’t need anyone working on transfer orbits and god forbid anyone describes the materials they test as “diverse”…
The first item on the list is 44M for quantum materials. Can you please explain why cancelling it is in the national interest of the US? Other than the fact that Harvard didn't admit Daddy's favorite boy?
Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.
If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.
Well it could be worse because in the end it's still a democracy, for how long that's yet to be seen.
Look at Russia, they jumped off a cliff to protect a regime from democracy, and people are checked out - they take no accountability and still act confused of why Russia is being despised - all while accelerating economic and demographic decline with more than one million casualties in a special 3 day military operation.
Democracy is about more than elections. Having a functioning public sphere, justice system, and media are all part of it too. From a Northern European perspective, the US hasn't been a functioning democracy for quite a while now — it's just becoming more and more obvious now that the republicans have stopped even pretending those principles and institutions are important.
The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.
Just this week, the federal court that originally had the case ruled that the gerrymandered map was unconstitutional, using a theory totally separate from what the Supreme Court used to strike down the original ruling. So democracy's still got a little life in it.
Captain Obvious here, but the number of defenestrations (or generally mysterious "suicides" of people not agreeing enough with the government) is much higher in Russia than in the US.
In the US you might get your funds cancelled, in Russia you'll get your life cancelled instead - and not in the metaphorical sense.
Also as incompetent as the current US government is, the incompetence of the Russian government is on a whole different level (the "3 days to Kyiv" are taking longer than the whole "Great Patriotic War").
> Russia is a de-jure democracy
As is North Korea, it must be even more democratic than the rest of the world because it calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)
They have a head start on you, but you're catching up quickly! Worth remembering they have been shooting peaceful protestors recently in the US too.
Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.
I'm not from the US and neither do I try to defend the current US government.
Just pointing out that Putin has systematically turned Russia into a full-blown fascist autocracy, but even in Russia this took nearly two decades until all opposition was crushed.
MAGA has the same goal (turning the US into a fascist autocracy), but I bet it will be much harder and would take much longer to dismantle the checks-and-balances system in the US as completely as Putin did in Russia.
USA has had 3 different presidents from opposing parties just in the last 15 years. Putin hasn't allowed a challenger in nearly 30 years and he actively bans them, imprisons them, or kills them. It's a big difference.
> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.
One big difference is that the US has been led by four different people since 2000 instead of one. Another big difference is that it's legal for Americans to insult political leaders, wish bad things upon them, or demand an end to their stupid wars.
If you weren't aware of these differences, I'd encourage you to radically change your media diet; there are unfortunately many outlets which find it advantageous to exaggerate how bad the US is and deemphasize how bad dictatorships are. (Some are paid Russian propaganda, I've seen a shocking number of people send me RT links as though they're a legitimate news source.)
What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"? I'm familiar with the Noam Chomsky book Manufacturing Consent, but this book was about the dynamics that shape coverage decisions in mass media, not some concrete process which Person X could perform "for" Person Y.
I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests. If the funding rules for scientific grants are changing, and defenders of the old rules argue that this is a terrible change that will cause huge problems, how can it be that both the old rules and the new rules serve the same interests?
> What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"?
> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.
Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:
This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.
Covid is a great example, because outside of hyperpartisan spaces, it was not a polarizing topic at the time these pieces were written. As the second link details, by 2022, the American people strongly felt that there were more important problems to tackle and we would have to eventually accept Covid as a fact of life. Ms. Doubleday perceives her problem to be with "the press" because she's out of touch, and doesn't realize that they're simply reporting what most Americans want and how most Americans feel.
People who are concerned about "corporatism" have the same problem. I often see them get confused and frustrated when the news presents "big government" as a scary thing that people are worried about - doesn't everyone know big business is the more important concern? Most Americans don't agree with them (https://news.gallup.com/poll/701054/perceived-threat-big-bus...), but if all your friends think big business sucks and government programs are great, it's hard to know that this is something you should check.
Russia at this point has no functioning democratic institutions, and even political institutions - for example at this point no document inherited or signed by the regime is worth anything.
That's why they're considered a rogue state at the moment.
So at best you can say the Russian regime claims Russia is a democratic, that's not de jure, because for it to be de jure you'd need institutions to make sure it was in fact de jure.
There's none, just signs with the name on the wall, and people roleplaying.
To be fair it also heavily leverages those breakthroughs to maintain geopolitical power. Get on the US' badside (by, e.g., having resources you're not willing to allow to be exploited) and suddenly you're cut off from research, patents, data, etc. People often think of brain drain as being a natural consequence of the US providing more research funding but the US very actively seeks to undermine other nations' efforts to create similar talent-building projects. As a researcher, if you are at all associated with a domestic talent project you will be barred from access to research/funding. Often, your only option is to move to the US
The Ebola virus is not simply a health issue but a cultural and eudcational "problem" too. There is a reason people eat bushmeat because 1, it's their culture 2, they would otherwise have nothing to eat especially not meat protein.
Yes, the one authorities are struggling to contain because of recent withdrawal of resources, and consequently predicted to be more prolonged and at greater risk of wider spread.
To what goal? USAID and similar programs always had the indirect benefit of opening up foreign markets to the USA. It's just short-sighted out of sheer economic considerations - and that's ignoring the ridiculous recklessness of pulling the rug under millions of people. Hundreds of thousands have died due to the USAID cuts; those deaths could have been prevented by approaching this in a more professional manner.
Stability. In 'decentralized' systems, if any entity does something dumb, the impact is localized and consequently negligible. By contrast in centralized systems, one misstep by the central power can trigger catastrophic consequences. Another benefit of decentralized systems is that sometimes those dumb things end up being brilliant, and so we end up with a much richer system with a better idea of what works and what doesn't work, what's stable and what isn't, and so on.
Decentralized systems also help local entities develop and grow into their own. Necessity is the mother of invention and centralized systems largely remove the necessity of local expertise which cripples efforts to advance it. This is the 17th declared major outbreak of ebola in the DRC. One would think that by the time you've had a few major ebola outbreaks, let alone 16, you'd be building up a rich body of expertise, knowledge, and competence, but that does not really seem to be the case.
Musk: “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”
“As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.”
“Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.”
“As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO.”
How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.
This may seem extreme, but it must be considered in the full context of the package of policy proposals that would also eliminate the grants themselves. This balances out any concerns of bias. See you in 50 years when we read about the consequences (on European electronics.) :')
Though most of the people who say that kind of thing about Europe seem to have no problem with the people doing this kind of thing that is under discussion.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
It's a mix of bias, cluelessness and straight sociopathic malice that culminates into this insanity. We urgently need to establish a name and maybe even a pathological classification for it! People effected by this personality disorder should not be in any positions of power but eligible for professional help, therapy. If you disagree with this, then first seek a secondary professional medical oppinion from a Trump University Dr. med., before responding.
You were downvoted but yes, hoping a state-controlled, authoritarian, single party politically led, genocidal government will ”step up” to better less-political research is faith without reason and ignorant of history
People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), it had operated for the previous century under the spoils system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system.
The notion of "governance by putatively neutral experts" was a progressive reform of the early-to-mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. Rolling the government back to 1880-1910--when the modern administrative state was just a twinkle in Woodrow Wilson's racist eye--would hardly be a bad thing. That was a time of tremendous progress in America economically and technologically.
He's not commending it. He's using it to point out that the reaction, "Well, america had a good run i guess? Hope china can step up and fill the gap," is simplistic, hyperbolic and maybe a little hysterical.
Ah I read it as “the US was corrupt before, and that was OK because GDP was growing! So we are just returning to our roots now”
Now understanding the good faith argument better, doesn’t it even further support the ascendancy of China? The argument is: despite rampant spoils system corruption, the US eclipsed Great Britain on the strength of a large population with low trade barriers alone (both internal and external)
But China is now the country with the largest population and low trade barriers. So aren’t they playing the role of 1800s USA and we the role of Great Britain here in 2026?
Aside, I appreciate the content of your post, but it really does distract your point to sling insults like hysterical towards other commenters
Implying that this particular story ("WH proposes rules") is the final piece of evidence that might cause a reasonable person to conclude that the US is finished as world power does strike me as maybe a little hysterical.
If someone has an extremely simplistic view of how our society works and where our power comes from, then it is regrettable for that someone to even offer a prediction in public about whether our society's power will wane or (continue to) wax, especially a prediction as confident as "Well, america had a good run i guess? Hope china can step up and fill the gap."
And I love how Rayiner got downvoted severely for daring to point out that predicting the effects of this move ("WH proposes rules") is not as easy or as simple as many here seem to think it is.
Final piece of evidence? Of course not. But it's part of a stream of news for some time now that points in the same direction.
(And I have no idea why Rayiner was downvoted. I'm happy for them though—for sticking to principles and posting what may well be downvoted to oblivion. It's something I have become more comfortable with myself.)
Insinuating that the administrative state is racist by genetic fallacy while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow is hypocritical enough for me to disregard his opinion.
The administrative state wasn’t merely created by the same progressives that gave us eugenics. It has its roots in the same dim view of the common man and how much agency they should be given. Woodrow Wilson and other progressives were deeply skeptical of democracy. He wrote about the how the “unphilosophical bulk of mankind” didn’t know what was good for them. And his solution to that was to have the government run by experts insulated from democratic politics: https://faculty.fiu.edu/~revellk/pad3003/Wilson.pdf.
That’s still the same mentality that underlies the modern administrative state.
> while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow
Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts. Within just a few terms!
> went to the Supreme Court…racially segregated voting districts
How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself?
> the administrative state
I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why. I understand your appeal to history, but what could be a better approach than hiring on merit while also making those employees accountable to political appointees? Just replacing the entire ranks of government every 4 years?
> How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself?
In both cases, republicans were the ones that wanted to enforce the civil rights laws. Democrats were the ones who wanted to violate the civil rights laws by treating people differently based on race. In SFFA they wanted universities to be able to discriminate against applicants based on race, and in Louisiana v. Callais, they wanted to draw racially segregated voting districts.
> the administrative state I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why.
Because the criteria we use for “merit” are degrees from elite universities, membership in professional organizations, etc. So while I think merit-based hiring for government is desirable in theory, what I think happens in practice is the emergence of a definable class of credentialed professionals, entry into which gatekept by non-government institutions like Harvard, etc. That turns over tremendous amounts of power to people and institutions that aren’t democratically accountable. And I don’t buy the premise that these credentialed professionals are any less political than anyone else. They, and the institutions they are affiliated with, have cohesive interests and pursue those interests in government.
I think it’s better to do what Trump did in 2024: get on stage with the people he intends to appoint to top jobs, and have them talk about what they want to do. Let voters see the team they’re voting for. Look, I also think RFK is a nutjob. But the response to that should be for the Democratic candidate in 2028 to get on stage with who they intend to appoint to HHS. Let them talk about their credentials and expertise and what they intend to do. Let them explain why RFK is a disaster and has made voters worse off. I think that’s a fantastic way for a democracy to operate.
> in Louisiana v. Callais, they wanted to draw racially segregated voting districts.
30 years of jurisprudence since Thornburg v. Gingles disagrees with this framing. That unanimous decision found racial districts a necessarily race-conscious remedy to race-targeted harm: republican gerrymandering of cohesive black communities in the south. Which was the same harm at play in 2026 Louisiana.
If you think a race-conscious remedy is more racist than race-targeted harm, you must also believe that minority communities have no right for representation. If that’s the case, be plain about your beliefs. Either way please stop publicly mistaking cause for effect regarding this topic of “racially segregated voting districts”
But there was no “race-targeted harm” in Louisiana v. Callais. You’re wrong about the facts of that case. The original Louisiana map, with one black majority district, was a computer-drawn map and there was no evidence lawmakers had used race in creating the map. There was no compact district that would give you a second black-majority district in the state. The second district they had to add was quite gnarly: https://louisianaradionetwork.com/2024/01/16/35175/
Louisiana v. Callais nowhere prohibits using a race conscious remedy to fix a specific, race-conscious harm. It’s totally compatible with that principle.
> you must also believe that minority communities have no right for representation
They are entitled to the same “representation” as everyone else: being able to vote for a representation in a district drawn without regard to race. They’re not entitled to “representation” in the sense of a racial quota system for districts. Minority groups will generally have fewer majority-minority districts in a state than their share of the state population. If they are evenly distributed, there may be no majority-minority districts. That’s just how math works.
> [blah, blah, progressives are the real racists, blah]
I never argued that you don’t believe this. I guess you’re disputing the word “insinuating”? Fine, you’re explicitly saying the administrative state is racist.
> Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts.
Nice tu quoque but I’m neither a Democrat nor a liberal. You make this mistake with people a lot! Have you considered not assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal?
The person I actually replied to wondered why you got downvoted. Thanks for the demonstration.
Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power. Common sense would indicate that we became a power despite the cronyism, not because it, and you've provided nothing to support your wildly counter intuitive claim.
This is your comment basically:
People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), tuberculosis was a leading cause of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
The advancement of antibiotics did not happen until the mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. It would be a great idea to rollback science to that time when we didn't have all these life saving vaccines and antibiotics.
> Your comment suggests you think cronyism was in some part responsible for America's rise as a global power.
Not at all. My comment was that America’s good run began a century before the 20th century practice of administration through independent experts. Thus, such administration cannot be a necessary condition for America’s “good run” as OP suggested.
That's fair, but I think your original comment could be much more clearly written.
"There was a spoils system in the late 1800s. It sure would be great if we could go back to that time." Technically these can be interpreted as unrelated statements (as apparently the statements are in your original comment), but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system.
> but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system
Except I explicitly referred to “[r]olling the government back,” specifically “the modern administrative state.” The two systems being compared are the old system where the executive branch was politically accountable (but suffered from patronage jobs), and the new system presided over by experts (but who are insulated from political signals).
My point is that the old system, with its shortcomings, empirically produced good results, as good as the new system, with its shortcomings. That’s not an argument that the spoils system was great in isolation. But it’s possible that political appointees aren’t as incompetent as you assume. Or credentialed experts aren’t as competent as you assume. Or that the gains from more administrative competence are outweighed by the loss of responsiveness to political signals.
Worth noting that the period you indicate is a an example of an America largely deploying inventions from the UK (e.g. the steam engine, steam locomotive, etc.).
The latter part of the 20th century and first part of this century is a story more of the US driving invention and deploying those inventions.
The techniques needed to go from lesser power to leading power are different from those needed to advance as a leading power. For Lebron to stay on top, he has to do different things than any of us would need to do to get into the NBA.
Different circumstances & different goals require different strategies.
Wow, it's not often that you get to see someone unironically defend cronyism and nepotism as a goal to be reached rather than a cancer to be eradicated. I guess it really does take all strokes.
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
I believe in a country where the top 75% or so of people vote and that directly influences the administration of government. You want a country where 100% of people vote, but their vote is merely a suggestion to the credentialed professionals and lawyers that actually run the country. I am by far the more egalitarian one.
Sure, if you think Americans are sheep to be herded—what Woodrow Wilson called the “unphilosophical bulk of humanity”—by credentialed experts who make the important decisions, you have no problem with the dumbest, least responsible people voting. Because in your model voting is just a signal of approval/disapproval, not genuine self governance. You can’t afford to do that if you think the effect of people’s votes should be direct and not filtered through an expert class that second guesses them.
The only reason this user won't defend that point is the HN rules. From what I remember, he strongly believes that the majority wants should be respected, so it's not that far-fetched to imagine that they would defend slavery if 51% of the voters wanted that.
And the USSR experienced tremendous economic and technological progress under Stalin, propelling it to an industrial and military superpower second only to the US.
Similarly, Germany experienced great economic growth under the Third Reich.
To each his own, I guess, but personally I'll take a less corrupt and more equitable country over a wealthy and powerful one any day.
While there are also other reasons for the great progress of USSR under Stalin, it is likely that the most important cause was provided by the benefits that USSR got from being among the victors of WWII.
After the war, USSR incorporated totally or partially many countries and they transformed the remaining Eastern European countries into vassal states.
Especially during the first decade after WWII, USSR has stolen huge amounts of resources from those territories, in various forms, starting with what the Red Army had robbed during their so-called "Liberation" actions, then with huge so-called "War reparations" extracted from the countries that the Soviet Union itself had attacked, so they had been forced to attempt to defend themselves, but eventually they had to pay a lot for daring to do this, and then with various profits extracted from mixed companies established in the vassal states after the war and from various unbalanced contracts for economic exchanges with USSR.
The most affected was East Germany, from where entire factories have been moved to Russia, machine by machine and tool by tool, where they constituted the bases for new industries that were developed in USSR after the war. (While USA had no need to take entire factories to be able to reproduce the German technologies, they also took from West Germany many samples of industrial products, together with their manufacturing documentation, which were given to certain American companies, which then expanded after WWII in domains where previously Germany had exclusivity or domination. An example is the technology of magnetic recording, which became important after the war not only for audio and video recording, but also for the first electronic computers.)
While in some countries dictatorships have achieved economical progress mainly by internal means, under Stalin the greatest achievements were based on plundering most of their former neighbors, while the Soviet Union greatly expanded territorially, mostly at its west, but also at its east.
The US also became the dominant superpower because of WW2, since much of the rest of the world powers suffered tremendous destruction - even those that won the war. Also, most of the western world's gold was sent to the US (they didn't fight WW2 for free) which allowed the USD to become the world's dominant trade and reserve currency.
Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.
If you don't have stable-duration grants, if you can't publish, if you can't present there's no reason for PhD's, p-docs or junior faculty to become involved. Going to do wonders for extra-US facilities and groups.
Don't worry, everybody. This will take some time to have an effect. In the meantime, the people who actually make this country great will consign these criminals to the dustbin of history. It happened in 1890, you will see it happen soon, and I am there for it. I just hope it happens faster this time. I don't have 40 years to wait.
I'm betting in that particular time and place you couldn't privately conduct scientific research under Lysenkoism. It had to be approved by the government to exist at all. I'm no historical expert nor USSR expert though.
If these rules go into effect, is it not true that individuals, state governments, and non-governmental organizations could still fund scientific research that the federal government won't fund?
Of course there's still research that only the federal government could fund. A big example is e.g. DARPA and the Internet. Imagine if that was only funded and supported by a few states.
The average american on the street does not know how grant applications were approved before this change and they will continue to not know how grant applications are approved after this change.
Grants are important because they fuel the process by which we create highly trained scientists. It's not a day to day concern (except for the people who depend on them), in the short term, but would have longer term effects.
I understand that there are people in the US who do not think that this is important and actually would prefer fewer scientists that are more poorly trained. There is nothing more infuriating then believing the world is flat and having some egghead prove it isn't.
I know grants are important. You know grants are important. When I say “academic” I mean not immediately relevant to most ordinary people who are trying to lay their mortgage etc. That’s a different group that the MAGA cult people who believe grants are a waste of public funds.
May I propose an alternative for our politicians? Rather that saying “you better take your medicine like a grown up and be responsible and vote for our side” try being _actually compelling_ for a change.
That’s it. Just offer the people what they want and stop catering to the ownership class.
You mean American voters have a clientele mentality.
Let me remind you any of you could run for a seat. You don't need to belong to any political party. You can even rise through the ranks inside a party. Trump is even an example of a complete outsider turning upside-down one of the two main parties!
Your complaint sounds a lot like "we tried nothing and we ran all out of ideas".
non voters were the largest bloc and its understandable since lawmakers are largely unresponsive to their material needs. (bigger military budget every year, no universal healthcare plan, etc)
This = this person is clearly morally corrupt, displaying a pattern of behaviour over decades of being untrustworthy, a liar, and taking advantage for personal gains.
People decided to elect that person, it's part of the package.
people in america have low political involvement after years of politicians ignoring their material needs. non-voters are the biggest group of voters. i think it’s by design.
I mean, Trump was all but outright saying "I am going to be comically terrible"; the people voting for him presumably knew at least the broad strokes of what they'd be getting, if not the fine detail.
But they're not willing to give up their 3rd Starbucks or the day or the door dash delivery or Amazon prime. They all too overworked. Only poors go to protests.
You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.
Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants - some might say theology - of the field. It’s basically a cartel for keeping a field of study alive, regardless of its value. True innovation happens when people collaborate outside their fields.
Steelman aside, there probably are better ways to solve this problem systematically than just let a politically appointee have final say. If we were serious about this problem, smart people thinking about scientific policy probably have some great ideas that are not being listened to.
> Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants
Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.
So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.
Alzheimer’s research would probably be the easiest one to point to.
And I’d argue all fields could use more dissenting opinions and new options. I don’t know if this would be the path to that but keep in mind there have been many things historically where someone needed to take a leap of faith to go against the current dogma.
Academia is full of dissenting opinions, it is the wet dream of any tenured professor to break tradition and create a new field or area of research and become the lead in it.
Consensus is a thing, but science is not one institution, is a bunch of different warring factions of people trying to get published and cited and funding.
>You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.
Maybe we need to strengthen civic/philanthropic infrastructure around Science and Technology to reduce reliance on government funding cycles.
Science and Educational purposes are valid 501(c)(3) purposes. A donation to a 501(c)(3) that funds open-source scientific software, public STEM education, basic research, science grants, or public-interest tech research can be deductible.
Up to 60% of Adjusted Gross Income can be tax-deductible as charitable contributions to a qualified 501(c)(3) with itemization, depending on the contribution type.
This would create a non-partisan defined/dedicated non-profit funding layer with serious governance that will benefit all sides. Might be possible to go global.
This would need serious structure: independent board, conflict-of-interest rules, grant review, public reporting, no private benefit, and probably fiscal sponsorship first.
Maybe this deserves a separate Ask HN to avoid derailing this thread: would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?
Problem is that the current administration is ALSO going after 501c3s. They just changed the rules for reporting via 990 tax forms (that non-profits in the US use to report their activities) to make them far more detailed and require more details about where and how money is being spent. On the surface, most people read that and think "good, more information is better" but what ends up happening is that foundations and other large donors may shift the way they give due to the new ruling, which will leave huge swaths of non-profits without funding.
Arguably, these vehicles do exist... in the form of 501(c)(3) university endowments. They endow professorships and graduate fellowships, pay for facility buildouts and infrastructure, and provide a strong pipeline of financial aid to allow talented undergraduates to pursue research rather than needing to repay debt immediately after graduation. And unused funds are invested in public and private markets, ensuring minimal waste and sustainable capital growth. And non-profit universities have strong and time-tested governance rules on many if not all of the dimensions specified.
But these very endowments have been special cased as additionally taxable, despite that status, under the 2025 OBBBA, resulting in research budget cuts [0].
Would independent endowments as you describe them be more immune?
- With no workers working, no worker fraud problem, sure. If you cut core scientific processes, politicize science, and destablize paycheck predictability enough to chase everyone good out of science, then yes any small amount of waste is also caught in the cuts.
- This seems to increase what you call bad "fun": Increases abuse of tax funding being corruptly given to projects advocated by political appointees despite rejection by scientific peer review. Vicious feedback loop.
Surprise! I'm just a middle-age American reading HN with his coffee trying to wrap my head around the topic. I don't think this remark helps anyone understand your argument. Doth protest too much.
I'm wondering if you're focused on the "approved" science, and missing the idea this corruption is riding on the back of even a "small amount of waste", and an overall rejection of scientific activities in the face of the replication crisis. All part of the schism of your facts and our facts insanity.
R1 work generally doesn't have a replication crisis, and generally incrementalism is the bigger issue there, which is in turn tied to penny pinching
The bigger issue is failure to significantly increase r&d funding, vs last decade+ shrinkages and Trump-era eating of the young, and focuses like you now propose suggest a continuation of such economy-inhibiting thinking. Also, note how your post was goalpost moving. This in turn is classic trolling with asymmetric effort, so I don't see your response in good faith.
Plenty of scientists can and will work in industry roles or quit entirely. It’s already a crazy proposition and should not be made any harder. Finding funding can be a brutal and continuous challenge that demotivates many.
Similarly, I know several scientists who were born in Europe but were long-term residents of the US running university labs here who already moved back to Europe last year, when it became pretty obvious where this was all heading.
If I were a young unencumbered scientist, I say this as someone born and raised in the US and having lived in EU for awhile, I would be going anywhere but the States. I’d rather take 1/4 the money to not be a part of whatever disgusting thing is happening currently.
The Trump 2.0 administration was already easily the most corrupt in American history well before these rules were proposed.
To their credit(?) they don't even try to hide it, they are just fully corrupt out in the open, because they know the cultists who support them will support anything they do.
It’s always the poor and uneducated voters that get the blame. It’s never the actual billionaires who got Trump elected and who control everything he does and much of the media zeitgeist because, you know, 100s of billions can really flood the zone. I don’t think you’re evil for being fooled, but try to think a bit deeper about where power and blame lie. It’s not uneducated rural folk the median yuppie finds uncool.
Why not both? I read an article recently about the Texas Senate race and one Republican voter they interviewed said it was about "the immigrants and the guns." So low information voters get a pass because they're awash in right wing propaganda? What happened to the oft cited right wing value of "personal responsibility"?
You don't need God's intervention. If you trust the scientific establishment to make decisions on how to allocate taxpayer dollars, then vote for an executive who promises to do that. Definitely don't vote for the guy who campaigned on taking discretion away from unelected bureaucrats.
Many of us did vote for sane ideas, like allowing scientists to make decisions about science. For instance, we knew RFK Jr would be a disaster and here we are, dealing with a resurgence of preventable diseases.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
Perhaps if we'd had "unelected bureaucrats" in the 1800s, we would have done even better? Hard to say, really.
We had all these "unelected bureaucrats" post-WWII, and we did quite well in the following decades.
Scientists and academics fleeing the US is a new phenomenon, driven in no small part by these "unelected bureaucrats" being fired and replaced by political loyalists.
While you're correct in saying that we had lots of success before the establishment of the administrative state, it doesn't then follow that we'd have more (or better) success by abolishing it now. It seems like the opposite is slowly becoming true.
I still think we should allow for grant hunting. If you can disprove a paper, you get the grant money attached to it. Make it a economic worthy endavour to destroy bad science.
this proposal is an extension of the WH crackdown on what it sees as misuse of USG funds for things that are deemed not in the best interests of the USG.
Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:
1. prevention of DEI related grants
2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies
3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)
4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research
5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants
6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology
It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.
Am I wrong for thinking “good” for a lot of those points? Many are either harmful (I still haven’t heard what we actually expect to gain from gain-of-function research that makes up for the potential cost) to absolute wastes of taxpayer dollars.
At a US conference last year, people thronged a session that talked about studying in Korea. This would be an empty room at, pretty much, any point in the past several decades.
The amount of capability that America is burning is impressive. I suspect that people outside of academia are not as alarmed, since its not part of daily life.
However it matters the same way that a drug discovery today is life saving 10 years down the line, after its gone through all the processes to go to market.
The PHD level domai experts that will enter the labor market about ten years from now are the generation that enters college now. Some of the best teachers and advisors will no longer be at US institutuons by then. So this expert pool will shrink, setting back companies working on cutting edge stuff that drives economic growth. The full impact of the current science policy will take time to materialize, but it will have a big effect beyond academia.
> any grant program would need to be “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”
From a naive perspective, this sounds a lot like the breeding ground for Lysenkoism (Stalin-approved). In that example, aligning science to the party line led to a couple of famines. I say naive because there were other factors at play (e.g. it was forbidden to criticize Lysenko's theories).
The natural state of all human political systems is autocracy. It takes constant vigilance to keep the train on the tracks and avoid that low energy state. The problem is that we only really see the consequences of these kinds of immensely stupid policies once every few generations. Nobody alive was around the last time we had this argument, so we get to do it all over again.
After all the work to build a meritocracy and professional non political expert bureaucracy… in only a year they have reintroduced the spoils system. Politicians will now be given budgets to reward supporters with the financial spoils of their power. So gross
The thing about this is it’s incredibly easy for a denied institution to claim legal standing to challenge the governments scientific funding decisions. The institutions that get funds (universities) are well resourced. Society in general seems gradually less tolerant of trying to appease Trump - so they will likely sue instead of appease.
So they’ll be sued. The theories will be tested and we’ll see exactly where the line is (eventually). And probably somewhere uncomfortable, given SCOTUS.
There are legitimate ways agency political appointees can set funding priorities. Like this year we’ll focus on Alzheimer’s. But of course, we should take the least charitable reading of this - that it’ll likely be used for shenanigans. Punish enemies. Award cronies. Go after junk science, etc.
As the article says, legal action up to this point has been based on the fact that the government created policies that didn't follow its own rules under, for example, the Administrative Procedures Act.
So now the administration is attempting to follow those rules to create these new procedures, which they believe will then be lawful.
If they are successful, challenges would have to be made judicially based on non-procedural grounds, or through Congress.
Yes, but even following APA, the order doesn't have the strength of statute.
They can follow APA to come up with all kinds of illegal rules. And the actual rules are so broad they could be used from anything sane to something that might be just political revenge.
The actual language:
> “As part of the merit review process, Federal agencies must perform pre-issuance reviews to ensure that Federal award proposals selected for funding are consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest.”
Neither cited countries are/were communist, they are authoritarian. That’s the political system of government, capitalism and communism is the economic system.
Marx’s idea of communism required a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Lenin took that notion and, under the pretence of needing absolute power to prevent a counter-revolution, turned it into the totalitarian regime of the USSR. Since then, communism and totalitarianism have gone hand in hand.
With the aside that most of this bored me stupid 40 years past and still does today ...
Marx's "dictatorship" as used by Marx back in the days of late nights in the British Libraries wasn't the authoritarian "dictatorship" we associate with the term today.
In the 19th century, the term "dictatorship" did not yet have the modern connotation of an authoritarian, autocratic one-man rule. Its meaning was derived from the ancient Roman dictatura, a constitutionally sanctioned office for a magistrate granted extraordinary powers during an emergency. For Marx and Engels, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not a specific form of government but a term for the class content of the state that would follow a proletarian revolution.
Sure, Lenin had a hard on for authoritarian behaviour and started the USSR trend of dangling a communist utopia as a reward for grinding through petty nitpicking committees and even more hard core authoritarians .. but that's more the bait and switch of human greed than any necessary coupling of communes and boot first hierarchies.
Yeah, I wasn't quite clear there. That's what I meant, that Lenin is the one who took the "emergency powers until communism is established" interpretation of "dictatorship of the proletariat", and turned it into "all the powers until forever". But that interpretation is effectively what became synonymous with communism just about everywhere — the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea... Curiously enough none of the Communist states ever really transitioned from that intermediate state to full communism.
IF YOU ARE A SMART PERSON LOOKING TO DO SCIENCE AND OR RESEARCH: DO NOT COME TO THE USA.
They want to turn this place into a the real life version of idiocracy? So be it. The lay voter needs to see what voting badly does. They need to see consequences. The cure for cancer could be there in this research. WHO knows what could become of real mRNA research. But no. We just want to believe the world is 6k years old and some donor is gonna tell some begging scientists they get their funding or not.
When the constitution was first written up, senators were all appointed. People had to fight to amend the constitution to allow us to even vote for senators. And the presidency was definitely not meant to have as much impact as it does today. The whole thing seemed drawn up to give the "vibes" of a democracy while protecting elite interests. In fact James Madison basically explicitly admits this in Federalist No. 10. He supposed that true democracy would result in people voting to redistribute wealth and, the founding fathers all being bourgeois, that just wouldn't do.
I'm very involved in obtaining and performing on gov grants, and I can say pretty categorically the US is going from the best place to do science, to possibly the worst (in developed democratic countries). And we're only 1.5 years into this shit show.
(Unless you're doing science for military development. Then the funding spigot is open.)
And to those who say "oh, it's the same as it was before, just different ideologies" -- no, it is not at all the same. Not even comparable.
how this this reconcile with the general conservative glee over the defeat of the Chevron defence? wasn't the rationale there that bureaucrats shouldn't be deciding on policy without consulting congress? Roberts even made a little speech about how whipsawing policy back and forth every 4 years wasn't helping anyone.
It seems seeding chaos is the only thing these guys know how to do. What happens (or happened) when the shoe is on the other foot and the other guy wants to push climate science and vaccines? Run to Texas courts to stop the federal government? Thereby wasting lot of time doing nothing.
I can only say Bravo to Americans who think this constant fighting is somehow going to help the country.
I think we all need to be honest with ourselves about the fact that they are very clearly not intending to ever allow the shoe to be on the other foot.
The upcoming midterms are very plausibly the last free and fair elections we will ever have in this country. As deeply unpopular as this administration is right now, the Democrats will need an enormous amount of luck for the size of historic landslide it will require to take the house and senate, and even then they need to do so by enough that they can impeach and convict.
That is just about the only plausible path towards preserving democracy at this point. And I’m not really holding out hope.
I’d be happy to be told that I’m wrong. So please, tell me I’m wrong.
> and have the might of the U.S. military brass behind him
Would he, though? I know the top US military brass have gone through some changes during this administration, but if the military sees a lawful impeachment and lawful conviction, I think enough would refuse (clearly illegal) orders to keep Trump in the White House.
Honestly I'd be more worried about the loyalists at the top of the FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service, etc.
Either way, it's incredibly improbable that Democrats will control a supermajority of the Senate next year (or, failing that, have enough Republican support to convict), so we probably won't have to find out what happens in this scenario.
> I think enough would refuse (clearly illegal) orders
The military executes clearly illegal orders to attack civilians on speedboats in the Pacific a couple of times a week. Not infrequently, they also kill the occupants when they are surrendering.
People’s opinions only matter so far as they have to care about elections. Not having to worry about those sorts of nuisances is entirely the plan and they are frighteningly near succeeding at it.
I think you're wrong. I don't know that for a fact, of course, but I'm not that pessimistic.
I don't think Democrats will win the Senate this fall (though there's a chance they will, and I'd be happy to be wrong here). The House is reasonably likely. Either way, they won't have the supermajority needed to convict on impeachment.
Trump is doing a lot to try to destabilize elections and put his thumbs on the scale. His recent order telling USPS not to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone not on some list that the federal government is compiling is troubling. The SAVE Act is troubling, but fortunately still hasn't gained enough support to pass (though it's far from settled that it, or something like it, won't).
But I think a big strength in the US is that all elections, even for federal offices, are administered by the states. The federal government does have some constitutional say in how they're administered, but changes there generally require acts of Congress (which is hard, even with GOP control), and I expect any and all executive orders around election matters to be challenged in court, and hopefully largely thrown out. Red states will continue to do what they usually do to disenfranchise voters they don't like; nothing new there. Blue states will continue to be blue, and will do what they need to do to keep things as sane as possible. Purple states are a more difficult proposition, but there are few enough of them that it's easier for people to keep an eye on what's going on in them.
I think we'll know a lot more after we see what happens during the midterms (not by the outcomes, but in seeing what happens with the electoral process). I wouldn't expect the 2028 elections to be significantly different than what we see this fall. If the courts disagree with election-related changes the GOP have been trying to impose for this year, it's unlikely they'll be more amenable to them in two years.
I expect that the GOP (and MAGA folks in general) will reject the results of the 2028 presidential election if a Democrat wins. They'll dial up the "big steal" lies again, just as in 2020, and will push even harder with that narrative. Hopefully the law changes since then around vote certification will help avoid a repeat of all the crap we saw around that event. Will institutions stand up to that misinformation campaign? I'm not sure. I hope so, I think so, but I'm not sure. I'm cautiously leaning toward optimism.
I am sure China is loving what the US/Trump is doing. Already China is about to take the lead in medical research and I think it is ahead in renewable energy.
With this, I guess the US will end up as a third rate country much quicker.
Berlin "boutique" tech consultancy, we are seeing a noticable increase in Israeli and US engineers into our hiring pipeline. The braindrain from the autocratic countries is real.
I think most Americans, if polled, would prefer to be the global hub of scientific research, instead of an isolated silo of research that only follows a politically approved agenda.
I would guess that if you polled voters on election Day, and asked them why they voted for Trump, science funding wouldn't even come up as a topic. They would probably talk about high prices, or criminal aliens, or how they didn't like Harris.
They voted for a massive grab-bag of obviously bad stuff. They may not have examined every single item in it, but they obviously wanted this style of bad stuff to happen. This action is aligned with their revealed preferences.
That was kind of my point. They actively voted for a lot of bad stuff, but it was framed in a very different way. They voted for things like ending the tyranny of woke liberalism, and believe that end is so essential to achieve that it justifies essentially abandoning the rule of law. What they did not vote for is the long-term consequences of supporting that position.
What?! They most certainly did vote for those consequences! Why infantilize these voters? Nobody robbed them of the agency needed to see that an obvious criminal tyrant was worse than a woman, twice. They just didn't care. It's ugly and depressing to imagine them not caring about things that matter to them intimately, but here we all are.
I mean they might well prefer it, and a lot of other things, but the Republicans have done such an incredible job propagandizing everyone into "guvernment bad" thinking that they refuse to pay for it, because (mostly) Republicans have spent decades running on a platform of how the Government sucks and can't do anything, to get elected, and then set about making their Government suck and not be able to do anything. Then they go home and tell their dumbass constituents about how nothing in the Government works, and they're so propagandized against any reasonable sources of information they believe them, and vote for them, and rinse and repeat.
They've been doing this for like 70 years at this point and it's frankly a testament to how strong our institutions were that they're still kind of functioning, in the same way a 1999 Corolla you haven't gotten an oil change on since the Clinton admin is still kind of functioning.
And no I'm not going to do the song and dance for both sides. Yes, plenty of Democrats suck and I would love to see them ousted, but by and large the party consistently in power when the U.S. is in decline of it's own making is the Right. Something something facts don't care about your feelings.
No it's worse than that. Your grant application must be actively aligned with their political agenda. If you are polite, deferential and apolitical but you want to study climate change you will be rejected.
And gas stoves, why wind turbines are bad for golf courses, the effects of nuclear weapons on hurricanes, the favorability decline of Robert E Lee, invisibility for stealth fighters, the rapid death of the US farmer due to solar panels, and the impact of tariffs on consumer prices...
Unfortunately, these are agency rules. Congress can intervene, but only with major legislative action, which is unlikely. There will be hearings and Senators will express great concern, but the Administration will probably be able to do whatever they want. If anything slows this down, it will be the courts.
The courts have truly been the last line of defense.
Congress being neutered is not an accident, hopefully it will be less fucked if the power balance shifts.
And as the OP is inherently political in what it's calling out, that is not the motivation -- it's the science. I get the fact that in the end, everything's political but partisanship itself is a cancer on the body politic. Just as we seem to be in late-stage capitalism, we are entering late-stage democracy. It pains me that we effectively arrive here by choice.
Congress neutered itself, largely because it has been politically less risky to let the Executive branch do whatever they want, then either cheer it on or rage against it depending on party and what drives donations so congress members can get reelected.
I agree that it's fundamentally broken but I've been around to see it work and watch it fail.
The executive branch obviously is going to wield as much power as it can, but only one party is actually advocating for the executive as king.
So yes, both parties are the same when it comes to the corruption of the party leadership, but there are distinctly different platforms and ideals espoused -- and that difference matters.
We are very much in uncharted waters and the rules have been thrown out the window. At the risk of repeating myself, wherever we are it is effectively collectively by choice. It's all about hearts and minds, but really hearts. I've come to the horrific realization that hate and stupidity are easily weaponized (I'm a slow learner), but hopefully that can be outnumbered.
> I've come to the horrific realization that hate and stupidity are easily weaponized
The FDR coalition was literally southern segregationists, immigrants, and black people, all in the same party. If "hate and stupidity" wasn't a barrier to people voting together in their material self-interest in 1936, it sure as hell isn't a barrier in 2026.
And where do you see common grounds material self-interest shaping todays political landscape?
People need a shared narrative of eg. a problem to solve, to come together. The right wing narrative today is deliberatetly targeted against any imaginary enemy, that does not subscribe to the narrative, which excludes/targets basically all left leaning people, all out groups. With this tribalistic setup in the centre, common ground is impossible.
Wow man, FDR twice in a week and both cases awkwardly used.
But yes, he wielded populism masterfully. As you made a point about southern segregationists it should be noted that it was general economic populism without emphasis on race.
When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy where once race was a top tier issue that hate and stupidity was weaponized to move all of those segregationists to the Republican Party.
Rayiner, once again your point does not land because it is not cogent. Not only that, you missed the whole point of "hate and stupidity" as literally a unifying force as a tribal fury that is directed towards "others". In a contemporary case, it is against "liberals". I can only assume that you might have personal insight into this.
Your counterargument rests on the premise that nobody thought to weaponize "hate and stupidity" until the 1970s. That's not cogent.
> When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy
The concept of the “southern strategy” is not cogent. The backlash against the 1964 civil rights act happened in the 1968 election, when Wallace won 13% of the vote and 5 states. But all the Wallace states voted for Carter in 1976, along with all the other southern states besides Virginia. The south was Carter’s base—he only won the election by 2 points and lost New England, the midwest, and the west coast. Then three of the Wallace states voted for Clinton in 1992, plus several other southern states. Clinton also wouldn’t have won without the south. Your theory is that the reliable republican lean of the south states in the 1990s due to events that happened decades earlier. That’s a stupid idea.
The realignment instead lines up with the transition of southern economies from agricultural to industrial/services economies, i.e., the transition from “the south” to “the sunbelt.” That economic strategy is based on siphoning jobs from the northeast and midwest through low taxes and deregulation. That’s why Carter still won all the “solid south” (except Virginia) in 1976, and Clinton still won three of the five Wallace states in 1992. Virginia was the first southern state to transition to a sunbelt economy, followed by the piedmont south, with the deep south states like Louisiana and Kentucky trailing behind.
If Congress wants to earmark that money for a particular purpose it can enact that into legislation. If it wants to empower the executive to make the decision, they can do that too.
Those are the only people who get to decide. Congress can’t turn over the expenditure of taxpayer funds to people who aren’t politically accountable.
Congress won't stop the executive because the party that won the executive also won Congress by almost 4 million votes. That's not a sign of the system not working, it's a sign of the system working as intended.
No, that's not accurate. Trump has subverted Congressional leadership to his dictatorship, and they routinely abuse their power to stop Congress from voting on things Trump finds politically inconvenient. The House is in recess right now to dodge a vote on the Iran War that Trump would be sure to lose.
> Congress won't stop the executive because the party that won the executive also won Congress by almost 4 million votes
I remember when Nixon stepped down because his own party could not support his transgressions. The Republican party did this. That is a sign of the system working as intended.
You claim to be radicalized by a pair of lawsuits against Trump, like out of every legal issue he was entangled with it was those two that convinced you that the Democrats were evil?
Guess what? The Democrats suck and their party leadership is just as complicit in the protection of the oligarchy as the GOP's. But what happened with those Trump lawsuits wasn't a weaponization, it was blowback on a man who has been sued over 4000 times and has been shown to embrace criminal behavior when it suited him. Same thing with his two impeachments.
What I believe really radicalized you is the Federalist Society. And just in my other comment about how kids want to belong, so do adults (it's a human thing). And your desire to belong and be part of the elite power base you have put your lot in with the Monarchists.
Bear in mind that the founding-era practice originalism anchors to was voting rights for white male property owners. It took three constitutional amendments to override that. The Federalist Society's originalist framework treats those amendments as the ceiling — not a foundation for further expansion of rights. That's a methodology with predictable winners and losers, and I'd note you're unlikely to be among the winners.
This is one of many reasons why originalism is a weaponized mechanism rather than some noble hewing to principles.
The Constitution is what makes this country great -- being a nation of laws of mankind vs living under the whims of a monarchy of a god-gifted king.
I get a research grant after peer review. The grant funds my salary and propels my career. I criticize Trump publicly about his graft. Trump tells them to pull my grant. My career takes a hit, and I lose my house.
Or I can be a chickenshit, and praise Trump and have a career, however pathetic. I routinely ask them to approve my results before publishing, just in case. I apply for grants looking at vaccines and autism. Every Friday, I spend an hour talking about how Trump is America's chosen one.
American moderates are amazing. "Let's see how suburban republicans feel about this that Trump has done! He's really spoiled his chances next election!" You guys have been waiting for the non-fascist republican voter for more than a decade at this point.
The executive branch does not hold the power of the purse, and the fact that you can casually use that phrase in reference to the executive branch shows how far we’ve fallen as a country in a decade.
This Congress has deferred to the president so hard, it's difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Based on recent primaries the R party is only becoming more sycophantic.
At times they don't even cotify their subservience through the usual measures like legislation and committees, except where needed to slap down any roadblocks to the unitary executive.
They (Republicans in Congress) are all terrified of Trump, with some good reason (not that this excuses their dereliction of duty in any way).
It doesn't matter how aligned you are with his worldview, how much you vote alongside his wishes, if you aren't 100% loyal to him personally at all times you're politically dead in the Republican party in much of the US.
While Trump's ability to sway normal elections is next to non-existent anymore (see: the vast majority of special elections held since his inauguration where Republicans are getting roflstomped by Democrats), his endorsement still decides Republican primaries because there's still a lot of brainwashed Republican cultists on the Trump train.
Even aside from who manages the purse, accountability doesn't need to mean being able to defend every single funding decision. That would be a sign of bad management in any business, for instance. To me it means competently managing an institution.
Science? Maybe in an ideal world. However, how science actually gets done has always been at the mercy of social, cultural, institutional, and/or economic pressures.
> Public funding should be guided by public oversight, not career bureaucrats.
Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?
Unless you're advocating for mass direct democracy, with public votes on everything under the sun, a certain level of delegation is inescapable at scale.
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
The country runs on the principles of the constitution, not the institutional principles of science. Control over spending of taxpayer funds always must remain within the political system.
Voters can always choose to turn over those decisions to scientists they trust. For much of the 20th century, that’s what voters did. But if they don’t trust the priorities of the current scientific establishment, they can also choose to put that control back in the hands of political appointees. The institutional principles of science cannot override the prerogative of voters to decide how their money is spent.
Only if voters remain loyal to the administration that does that, in which case that's exactly what should happen. If you want taxpayer dollars, you should make nice with the people taxpayers elect to represent them.
I do not intend to live in a country where supposedly unelected organizations think they have independent jurisdiction to spend public money independently of the political system.
That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would like to make. I would submit that people flying on planes, using cell phones and computers, and going to the doctor don't want that, even if they think they do.
> That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constitutional structure.
What you're overlooking is that everything is just people. Political appointees are people. But "institutions" are also people. "Science" is just people. And the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?
The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power. People in the scientific establishment--people with degrees from universities and credentials from professional organizations--cannot be granted power to spend taxpayer money independent of the political system. They only have power over those decisions to the extent the political system chooses to confer that power.
The political system, representing the taxpayer (primarily via Congress), has always dictated scientific strategy--do we build the Superconducting Supercollider or cancel it; do we return a sample from Mars or not; do we sequence the human genome. How big a budget do we devote to medical research compared to physics, etc. Scientists advocate, but politicians decide.
However, the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day tactical decisions have before been made through expert peer review, by scientists. Given a fixed and finite budget set by Congress, what is the best way to make discoveries?
Having been on grant review panels, it's brutal--at 5 or 10:1 oversubscription rates, your peers will find any flaw in your proposal.
Political appointees are deeply unqualified to make these judgments. To take a very specific example: the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is headed by Michael Kratsios. He has a BA in politics and has never written a scientific publication. (Every prior OSTP head was a PhD scientist.) The OMB memo says he and those like him should decide what to fund without deferring to scientists. How is he going to assess which of 50 proposals on (say) "hypothalamic SH2B1 neurocircuits and SH2B1 signal transduction pathways" is the good one?
He can't, so he'll either choose AI or graft. Both are destructive to our once world-leading scientific enterprise.
The division of responsibility you describe has no legal significance. All decision-making authority ultimately rests and must rest with the political system. Of course, the political system may choose to delegate certain decisions to experts and panels and whatnot. But that's a choice. The institutional principles of science are irrelevant except to the extent the political decision-makers find those principles persuasive (which they often do).
Our laws actually are written to reflect more or less what I'm describing. The laws governing HHS grants, for example, provide for various expert committees and whatnot. But they also provide the appointed director of the HHS tremendous discretion to override those decisions. That's not new--those laws are decades old.
My take is that they shed their blood to have their own nation and they're entitled to structure their affairs however they please. It that's also what precipitated my family to leave. Just because Bangladeshis have the right of self determination doesn't mean we have to or want to live in a country with them.
The statement, "everything is just people" begs the question. That question is about appropriate roles.
No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.
Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.
That's exactly what I meant when I said: "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
Within that framework, the institutional principles of "science" are irrelevant, except insofar as those principles are persuasive to political actors and ultimately voters.
The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades. The left is skeptical of revolving doors between expert agencies and corporations and corporate sponsorship of scientific studies, while the right is skeptical that experts' politics aren't coloring their work. And in such an environment, it's entirely within voters' rights to elect political actors who promise to delegate fewer decisions to scientists.
You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.
>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades
The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.
Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.
> You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.
That's at best a misunderstanding of the GP's argument, at worst a bad-faith response. GP said:
> "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending. Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
I don't like this state of affairs, but it seems to be an entirely legal one, consistent with the constitution and how our political system is set up. It sucks, but in 2024 the people decided that this is who they wanted in charge.
> The left generally trusts science and the scientific community
I'm not sure that's actually true in general. The left certainly is much more trusting of scientists than the right, but that trust is not absolute, and things have happened (like initial COVID response, as an example) to erode some of that trust.
> while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth.
No. Analyze the thread more carefully, particularly the original comment to which I replied. Should help any good faith reader to see that it's the opposite.
>That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending
You'll see that I actually introduced that fact originally to clearly delineate the roles, whereas GP was blurring / reassigning them to make his point. I added that Congress's other major role here is in oversight, which corrects the GP's assertion that political appointees are needed for accountability to the people. i.e. I'm saying that mechanism exists, Consitutionally. That destroys his primary argument—that this is about accountability.
You seemed to have overlooked that fact (in addition to my other points), in much the same style as GP. Perhaps his rhetoric has worked on you a bit here.
>Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
That is not what's happening here, and reads like a complete misunderstanding or calculated twisting. The "in this case" bit is actively misleading. The OMB already executes spend management. There is no special "case" here. The regime is using the OMB to politicize the process by claiming it was partisan—i.e. using the same well-worn tactic in its ongoing attack on science and other matters.
>I'm not sure that's actually true in general
Of course it's true. Statistically.
>that trust is not absolute
Never the assertion. Immaterial.
>and things have happened (like initial COVID response
In fact, the left experienced a temporary bounce in scientific confidence during the initial COVID response, before settling down to pre-pandemic baselines. Meanwhile, the right experienced a roughly 20 point drop in confidence that has persisted.
> The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power.
It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.
There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.
It seems like your argument is proving way too much. If next President announces that he feels rural hospitals are an inefficient use of resources, and so all residency programs outside of major metro areas are cancelled, would you accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion? To me it would sound like an obvious campaign of retribution against groups he finds it politically convenient to punish. (A campaign of retribution I will happily support, if Trump gets away with things like this - but I'd prefer to avoid going down that road!)
I mean, if that's what the law allows, then sure, that would be a valid thing for the next president to do. It would be bad for the country to do so, but plenty of things that are bad for the country are legal for the government to do.
We'd have no choice but to accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion, assuming that actually is the case (I don't know the law related to this, so I can't say). We can be upset at that decision, but we'd still have to accept it as legitimate.
> It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution.
How many times has this administration blatantly ignored the Constitution, starting with, for a simple example, separation of powers?
You're all locked in on "scientists should be beholden to the government, as that is the lay and law of the land" which ignoring the rather large mote that is "this current government couldn't give one single fuck about following the laws of the land", like issuing directives to federal agencies to consider federal court rulings as "advisory" or "not final" or "not applicable".
When the corruption of the law of the land starts at the top, you're busy insisting that those trying to follow the stated intention of the institutions that employ them ignore that because, well, what RFK Jr or worse, Stephen Miller, are the way we do things now, law, constitution be damned.
I don't think any of that is relevant to the argument. The fact of the matter is that Congress controls spending of taxpayer dollars, and at times has delegated some of the details of that to the executive branch.
There's no law that says "only scientists and subject matter experts can decide where grant money goes". Congress has largely left it up to the executive branch to set up a group of people, with whatever qualifications it wants (such as "loyal sycophant to the president"), to make these decisions.
I agree that this administration has taken a huge dump on the constitution, but that's a completely separate issue.
We can be angry that this what's happening, and adamant that scientists and experts should be making these decisions, but the people elected a Congress and President that wants to go another way, and that's how our system of government is set up.
We'll have to do better this November and in 2028 if we want to change things.
It's never a valid argument to say that we should ignore the law in one context because someone isn't following the law in a completely different context.
The question of whether scientists should have independence from the political system in deciding how to spend taxpayer funds is one that can be answered entirely starting from the principles of our republican government, without any consideration of what else the current administration may or may not be doing.
> The country is supposed to run on the principles of the constitution
FTFY
But then your counter is likely some form of originalism as you've been instructed. The current administration and it's pet SCOTUS have no interest in the Constitution or they wouldn't be so hell bent on making POTUS king for life. A mad king at that.
It's refreshing to see there actually be positive movement on accountability from the bureaucracy of the US federal government. I work very hard for almost four months every year to earn the money to pay taxes (whether I want to do that or not) that seem to disappear into the ether. I'd love to have some visibility into what is working, not working, and what is being redirected to some arbitrary bureaucrat's particular intrigues.
Having incentive to produce useful outcomes seems like it would be something folks would be in support of, but it appears many here think this is the end of the world just because it's Trump doing it. At least there's consistency in that regard. Le sigh.
"Intuit IRS" has a ring to it. In the same umbrella org as Turbo Tax, for the obvious revenue-growth synergy, and long-term strategic alignment that unlocks tax-payer value.
> The OMB is headed by Russell Vought, lead architect of Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan for the Trump administration.
This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
The OMB writes the budget to enact federal policy. And critically, no federal regulation can exist with the OMB approving it. By making this appointment explicitly political, they have carte blanche to completely rewrite all federal regulations to be exclusively conservative ones. This would have been crazy to attempt before, but with Trump 2.0, this is the new norm.
One of the things they are doing right now (it's been approved and the rules are now active and legal, so it is now happening) is converting 50,000 civil servant jobs into political appointments. This means having a job in government no longer serves the whole nation, it's now an ideological function to serve a single political party. Literally weaponizes the federal government to punish opposing political views and enforce one view on everyone (there's no other point to political appointment). And if the party in charge ever changes, it now means everyone will be laid off and replaced. Every few years. So nothing will ever get done in government now, except for extreme short-term pushes for radical political agendas, because nobody will stay long enough to know how the government works to do anything else. Move fast and break things with the largest economy in the world, radical political agendas, and 380M people.
The OMB also can review and block all proposed legislation going to Congress, vet all official congressional testimony, and block any agency from publicly disagreeing with the President. Military generals, health officials, science experts, ecologists, intelligence directors... they can block all of them from giving any testimony to Congress. That's an actual power the OMB has.
They can also block money Congress has already allocated, meaning that your representatives in government are now completely useless, because whatever party is in the Executive can nerf anything your reps have passed. The Supreme Court could do something about it, but won't, because it's now a Conservative Supermajority. There is no reason for them to disagree because they already ideologically agree.
Finally, the OMB can issue a rule that every agency that wasn't officially under the Executive before, has to submit all its rules for Executive approval. Meaning the Executive would control all government agencies.
In any other context, in any other country, this would be called a single-party authoritarian coup. When they create rules that outlaw other political parties (that's what authoritarian governments do to retain single party control) - and assuming the democrats don't just give up - it will be the official start of civil war. Coming to you Fall 2028.
> This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
Not sure what you mean. Lots of people have been talking about it since he was appointed to the role. I've known about it and been pissed about it for quite a long time now.
Imagine being in the eye of the hurricane. Every day your country is slipping into a fucking shit show but you have to delude yourself that everything will be fine because the alternative is becoming "tank man".
you have strong opinions about this place for someone who joined less than 2 years ago... In my >13y active on HN I can tell you politics has always been present. It's just more likely for political topics to end up in flamewar, meaning they will get down ranked quickly. In general those stories don't stay long in the front page
They've always had the final say on issuing grants, but it was handled by career scientists rather than political appointees. Canceling grants in process is extremely rare.
Since many of those grants concern science and tech it does seem relevant to this site.
> " Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)"
> ...but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”
> When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
The current "Tech" culture, also traces its roots to people who very much didn't like the way things were done in corporate offices in places like NY.
Thats why Google used to have statements like do no evil, and it mattered to those early recruits. Things were built, with the intention to make things better for people.
The leaders of AI companies talk constantly about democracy and other values, while new CS grads are being told they will have no jobs.
For the record, I really wish HN was not as politically active. However this change is downstream of the environment.
> Also it really is sad to see “Hacker” News be “World News”. More Zig and less White House, please.
I have been on this website for 17 years (ugh that's scary), and people have been posting variations of this remark the entire time. It's a tiresome sort of post the thousandth time.
Politics have always been a consistent part of this website: it's a big part of the world that hackers live in, and barring rule enforcement to the contrary, hackers will always find politics interesting and want to talk about it.
If you want a website with a more narrow focus, there's always lobste.rs.
Somewhat true. But as politics has accelerated to consume other interests, and HN has become disillusioned with startups it has gotten worse.
It illustrates to me how quickly everyone gets wrapped up in the current thing. There is no principle about which content is allowed or not. Entire threads representing alternative views are removed.
For example, In 2018 I remember you could not say a single thing critical of Elon or Tesla .
The relation between world changing science and investment seems to be brutally of, so any change to whatever we have is good change. Scieence needs to be deideologized and if that cant happen, at least there needs to a politically diverse ecosystem where the results (with predictionpower and duscoveries not cultural dominance) speak for themselves.
This means research projects will be optimised for political boasting.
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
"less research intro trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding"
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
Being curious definitely leads to discoveries. But important discoveries can also be made by saying "Topic X, if better understood, might lead to a cure for cancer - let's look into (and fund) that".
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
Shrimp running treadmills, specifically, wasn't idle curiosity driven blue sky research though - it was tied to creating real metrics for measuring impact of change in marine environments on the health of the food we eat.
It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.
That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.
I see your point, that donors could influence political appointees to nix certain research topics for their own benefit.
How often does that actually happen, and wouldn't other institutions pick up the slack in most cases? (i.e. high value research doesn't cease to be high value just because one type of grant or institution refuses to fund it; it would therefore be attractive to other institutions/researchers)
Some benefits of having political appointees in the loop are that the pubic perceives (not necessarily 'gets') greater value from public research funding, and the people responsible for the funding (political appointees) are closer to the actual spending and are more involved in the allocative process, which should mean fewer expensive, hard-to-justify topics.
Consider one basic question: how much high-impact research do you think this would incentivize into global warming? Or is the looming global ecological catastrophe not high-impact enough?
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
How is this different than adding DEI requirements, the inability to study schedule 1 drugs, or the restrictions placed under the Dickey-Wicker amendment?
Federal grants have always been subject to politics.
It's different because it explicitly prohibits deferring to peer reviewers and explicitly requires that grants must "advance the President's policy priorities". Previous restrictions were guiderails for or additional screens on top of the underlying merit-based review; now the merit-based review is secondary and the primary criterion is whether the President's minions like the proposal.
> “We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” says Colette Delawalla, founder of the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”
If you want to be independent of the government, don't take money from the government. If you are mad because you don't agree with how the government is making decisions, say so. But don't pretend it has anything to do with "government overreach"
Science has often been funded by private and state benefactors. Regardless of the source, it's most often successful when the funds have few or no strings attached.
Perhaps more political oversight will make research more accountabile to the population at large. In this era I suspect it's far more likely to benefit the few, those born into power and fame who are consolidating their power. Scientists with resources and accountable only to other scientists are uniquely dangerous to those unwilling to give up their power.
Yeah, it's a little disingenuous to make an argument like that. This isn't overreach; it seems like it's completely allowed by the law written when Congress delegated spending decisions around these kinds of grants to the executive branch.
We may not like it (I certainly don't), but this is one of the times when Trump seems to actually be acting within his authority, and not pushing at or past those limits.
If you are politically connected, or stay in an narrow lane of approved work, you get your grant. But if you stray from the politically approved path, or appear disloyal to our First Citizen and the Party, then your grant will be canceled.
The remaining supporters of the incumbent party like to claim that they aren't actually doing anything worse than in the past, and if anything they are just cracking down on things that they see as subjectively bad, so it's fine. And there's an element of truth in that: so much of American policy for a long time has been subject to agency interpretation and judicial review, and there was always room for political maneuvering and corruption in the system. Where the truth becomes a lie is the omission that this is the systematic ramping up from something that happens occasionally in a mostly-functioning system, to something that happens constantly and is systematically designed to facilitate corruption and politicization.
It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.
If you don't my asking, was your wife's profession, rather than her income directly, taken into account significantly? Thanks again
[1] https://prepareforcanada.com/blog/managing-money/financial-f...
With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.
Saudi Arabia or UAE maybe, but these don't even try to pretend to be socially and politically liberal.
Europe spends more on academic research than the US, both in absolute terms and as a fraction of GDP. (The US spends more on R&D in general.) European academics are also less dependent on government funding. While European old money has long found it prestigious to fund arts and sciences, US donors are more likely to fund education or buildings.
European academics have continued to immigrate to the US, mostly because there is less competition for resources. It's easier to get a faculty position or a grant in the US, because you are competing against fewer people. Because academic jobs are worse in the US relative to the alternatives, fewer Americans are willing to pursue an academic career. That leaves opportunities for immigrants who have already chosen the academia and are willing relocate.
Gross compensation yes. But if you begin deducting stuff like the absurd American housing costs, private healthcare, saving up for deductibles, the need to own, insure, fuel and maintain a car to do everything because almost nothing is accessible by public transport, retirement savings, everyday stuff such as restaurants being made much more expensive than what's on the paper because of mandatory tipping, saving up for your children's academic degree while paying off your own student debt, hell saving up for having a child (just the birth will be 20k out of pocket [1]), saving up for times of un(der)employment... suddenly most of Europe becomes pretty affordable if you are not on FAANG levels of compensation.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-have-a...
I did just that in a sibling comment. 80k is upper class in Germany, solid middle class can be achieved at 60k.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340349
It is 100% possible for me to have a high salary in the US and save most of it while temporarily exposing myself to larger risks. And it is far more useful for me to be able to say and show that I have a high salary, for access to credit and resources, private investments that give me the best shot of escaping a permanent underclass.
Of course, I don't want to budget, nobody wants to given the choice, so I pay for the conveniences and assurances that I can afford.
But even if the margins are smaller, the absolute numbers are great. If you aren't living paycheck to paycheck due to debt and lifestyle inflation, then you are really saving thousands of dollars a month. potentially many thousands. a single one of those is enough to travel around the world, it's just the irony that we have to come back to the US very soon in order to continue making that money. its enough to attempt to make a homerun in our capital markets on a equity name.
So, sorry commonwealth and Europe, you really don't compete on that front for people that don't already have capital. The wages are just too low.
In fact, the wages are ironically sooooo low that their main selling point - social welfare - is at parity to Americans on welfare! Who do have healthcare without premiums in some states, subsidized higher education in some cities, and more. So the systems aren't really as different as billed. Saying it another way, a European/Commonwealth citizen making their same salary in USD would get the same benefits in some parts of US, just losing all of their social standing in the process.
And finally, when Americans do earn their freedom back, with unlimited sums of money, Europe and Commonwealth countries once again become uncompelling, because the US has a more expensive, larger, funner version of everything those countries have to offer, while our US Gentry experience a different form of social welfare supporting themselves.
The incentives to really exit the US system aren't quite there. As another person mentioned, Switzerland is closest. Switzerland and schengen access is pretty appealing to me as well.
If you're very young, single and childless, sort of. You can pick the lowest tier of health coverage from your employer which is often fully covered by the employer and have no other major costs. If you're young and single and healthy this can work out. Of course, if you have some kind of accident or medical emergency, expect to be bankrupted, which is not how it works in other countries.
But once you have to cover childcare and school and university, and the lack of time off for parents (add expensive babysitters on top of daycare and school) and pay for good medical coverage for a whole family and of course contribute maximums towards retirement because social security won't be there and so on. Suddenly that large gross salary is mostly gone and what little is left over isn't very different from what may be left over from a much smaller salary in a different country.
And of course here in the US we get to work our nice 60 to 80 hour weeks instead of a regular 40 hours and disconnect from work. And we might two weeks vacation, if you can afford to take it, instead of 4 to 6 weeks.
That is hardly the norm, if you work in the hottest AI startup or some field of quant then sure, but average SWE do work the same 40 hour week. Lack of paid vacation is true tho.
European companies could offer higher salaries with a wholesale structural adjustment in their culture, and the US could offer healthcare higher education and child care in a wholesale structural adjustment
But right now the wrong things are different to really be compelling to tale advantage
It really depends on your situation. I am living alone in an apartment that costs 60% of the median rent in my metro area and my generous healthcare plan ($1500 deductible, $3000 max OOP) is fully paid by my employer, short and long term disability insurance paid for by my employer, and my car will be paid off in 3 months. I am able to save around half of my income, but my sister and BIL have three kids and a house and they spend almost all of their money. Their combined income is probably 2.5-3x of what I make, but by myself I have a higher net worth than them. They’ll probably surpass me in net worth once they can stop paying for daycare and get their student loans cleared, they just have a lot of expenses I don’t.
That's the thing. Temporarily. Sure, you can save on healthcare with a high deductible and in-network-only plan. But then, all it needs to wipe you out is a bad traffic accident - say, you run a red light by accident, get t-boned at high velocity and airlifted to the next hospital. You're at fault, the hospital is out of network, the HEMS ride isn't covered anyway. Your car is toast, you're out of work for months and fired sooner than later.
In Germany? HEMS is covered by your health insurance. You get full pay for 6 weeks (and 70% afterwards) while out sick. Your boss can't (realistically) fire you without an insane lot of effort that most don't bother. All in all, you only have to eat the cost of the totaled car.
Yes, for FAANG during Covid and now AI.
But your average SWE? That's more like 130k in the US [1] vs 61k in Germany [2]. In Germany, that's about 3500€ net (after taxes, retirement and health insurance - that is deducted from gross wages here) per month, of which you spend about 1500-1800 on cost of living (in Munich, the most expensive city in Germany by far), so about 1700-2000 in disposable income. You don't need a car because everything is walkable and a flatrate for all public transit across Germany is about 63€ a month.
Let's do the math for the US, California. Net pay is 87k/y or 7250/mo [3]. Of that, subtract ~600$ for a PPO plan (it's still not as good as Germany's default which does not have anything comparable to "in network", but good enough) and ~200$ for an average 2400$/y deductible. A 10% contribution to a 401k, 725$ a month. 2500$ for a 1-br apartment [4]. Now add in 100$ a month for car insurance (VW Golf) and 399$ in leasing rates for that VW Golf, then you're at 2.700$ a month in disposable income. But since you still have to pay half a grand a month on your average student loan [5], whoops, 2.200€ a month in disposable income left.
And frankly, making 200-500$ a month more in disposable income? That is not that much of a difference, particularly once you begin factoring in the "soft factors". Here in Germany, you can't be fired at-will, you'll always have to be paid for at least three months, that's one huge uncertainty off my back. You don't have to fear your kid getting shot (12 children a day die in the US from gun violence), you don't have to fear surprise bills when dealing with medical emergencies, you don't have to fear ICE picking you up and deporting you, you don't have to save up for the privilege of your child attending university because that's free in Germany.
If you're lucky and/or well-connected enough to land a job at FAANG/AI? By all means, go for the US. But for everyone else? Come here to Europe. Life's better here. Especially if you or your children are LGBT - or, given the recent anti-abortion crusade that bans lifesaving healthcare in many states, if you carry an uterus.
[1] https://www.indeed.com/career/software-engineer/salaries
[2] https://www.kununu.com/de/gehalt/softwareentwickler-in-15019
[3] https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator?salary=130000&from=yea...
[4] https://sfist.com/2026/05/28/average-rent-for-san-francisco-...
[5] https://admissions.usf.edu/blog/how-much-college-debt-is-too...
[6] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/resources/gun-violence-fact...
Additionally, you're using the average software engineer salary in the US but then picking California for rent. The article you linked says country wide you'd expect $1950 for renting a 1-bedroom not the $2500 number you are picking for a studio in the bay area.
So you're off by something like $1000 per month (edit: I admit I am simply looking at what I pay for HMO, it's possible that is somehow unrepresentative but I doubt it) by picking the most expensive health plan and mixing up national salaries vs very expensive areas.
The gun violence risk is vastly overblown. The page you are linking to cites a study where gun deaths are being accumulated for ages 1 to 24 years old. Gun deaths are highly non-random and concentrated in older ages and in very specific areas (largely related to gang activity). The average software engineer with family is not going to run into any of that unless they are in the habit of leaving loaded weapons around the house.
Care to clarify how you came up with that budget? Rent an apartment, pay amenities and buy groceries for 1500 EUR in Munich? Like, the one which is in Bavaria (just in case you have some similarly named city located somewhere in ex-GDR)? I expect some hilarious mental gymnastics TBH...
My US example only included housing as well, simply because I have zero idea how much Americans pay for food, phones and internet.
In any case, a quick search for apartments in Munich (where I lived until last year) shows you quite a bunch of options (way) below that price range [1].
[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/bayern/muenchen/wo...
They weren't. Our highly taxed and relatively stagnant economies are more affordable & attractive for poorer people, but the well-paid professional class was simply better off in the US. Especially with some optimizations, such as: get your professional degree for free in Germany, then move to the US for its high salaries without a debt to pay.
Well, now with Trump and his madness, suddenly Europe or Canada become a lot more attractive. It simply is not worth it any more to stay in the US, and if the Democrats don't make a landslide in the midterms... get the fuck out as long as you still can.
what about private companies making profits luring researchers?
Well, not all research is publicly funded. I think private funding is still fine for the most part. But yes, public research is dying a painful death.
I expect you are right at the most specialized end of the spectrum (and certainly industrial labs in those areas), but I wonder if anyone can speak directly to where we are still globally competitive.
But for bringing elite minds from outside the country? Heck no. Sure, for the right price they will come, but few want to bring their families to actually stay. Ask someone like a surgeon or physicist whether they want to work in the US or Canada/UK. They will say something like "ya, to make bank for a few years, but long-term I would rather live in Toronto than New York, Vancouver rather than Seattle." The perception of the US by people outside the US is not something America pays much attention to these days. It is suffering.
outsiders like... their immediate family back home?
https://clearedjobs.net/guides/security-clearance-foreign-co...
>> A foreign national spouse who is a citizen of the United Kingdom will be evaluated very differently from a foreign national spouse who is a citizen of China or Russia. Both must be disclosed fully, but the national security concern level is substantially different. Applicants with significant ties to adversarial countries face more intensive investigations and, in some cases, may not be eligible for certain programs even if their individual loyalty is not in question.
Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.
ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.
It's not true, because The people who want power will just make a typo—or do a stupid keyword match—and now Harry Buttle is gone. They have no incentive to be consistent or accurate.
We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.
The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".
Also as someone who lost a grant from this administration for supposed DEI (it was fucking biology, but ignorant fucks didn't give a shit), I also want to say fuck them.
What could go wrong?
Definitely not more corruption.
Definitely not more uncertainty that kills gross fixed capital formation.
That's how its always been, it's just that most people are not attuned to academic politics.
As well, any new rulings or laws that are designed to expire right before an election are almost always the mechanisms used for those abuses claimed as being perpetrated by others. And the number of things designed this way seem to be stacking up relatively quickly.
The reasoning is quite straightforward, “I want to make sure you can’t do the things I was just doing to you.” Otherwise there wouldn’t be a reason for policies that are good for everyone to expire at the end of a presidential term.
Election fraud, “The Swamp”, all of it. It was a roadmap.
Yes, grants were given and revoked for political purposes in the past.
But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur. Today’s administration is formalizing Soviet-style political reviews of science.
It’s scary, and it’s a mistake to hold up occasional (but serious!) mistakes from the past to justify systematic evil today.
He who kills the dragon becomes one.
Small consolation for those excluded. It wasn't "occasional (but serious!) mistakes" it was systematic ideological control.
I'd say explicit is better than implicit. Less hypocrisy, and more transparency. And at least now that this shit is officially set as word to paper, and is out in the open, the other side, when in power, can dismantle it and make into law guarantees that such wrongthink persecution wont happen again.
But they wont. They'll use the same mechanism of "appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink".
Because it was never about the principle. It was about doing it convertly as long as they politically/ideologically controlled those establishments. Controlling them through government power will suit them too, as much as it suits the other side.
Are you talking about not getting the grant in the first place, or are you talking about grants being cancelled after they had been approved and you had taken the money and started doing the funded work?
Those two situations are different.
[1] https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...
Do you even know how grants work?
You’re speaking about scoring designed to ensure that all Americans (any sex, poverty level, ability, creed) benefit from the use of tax payer money. This was a metric that was well understood AND EXPLICITLY EXPLAINED.
There was NO relationship between that and canceling grants.
Edit: less incendiary. I am just very upset with how confident people are saying things that are absolutely wrong for internet points.
And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).
I spoke about how grants were already being connected to ideological pressure, both government and organisational, private sector grands: "You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant."
That pressure was on even after they were handed. That's the same kind ideological gate-keeping, just not from an official appointee, but spread out in ideologically motivated peer review, academic acceptance mechanisms, (and going into the private grants, sponsors), etc.
Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.
> And I didn't say it was (though, such scoring has been also a powerful weapon against certain grants being granted, the scoring criteria not always interpreted and used in a politically neutral way - that was just the marketing pitch).
Your own words, not mine:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340780
> That pressure was on even after they were handed
There is a scoring matrix that simply requires grantees not to ignore huge portions of the nation in their research. You didn't even need to score highly here if you scored highly elsewhere. Just not pretend that people with disabilities or other non-majority groups are deserving of attention in taxpayer-funded research.
> Research funding has never been insulated from politics. The difference is now a part of the overall approval becomes openly and transparently political.
It was always open and towards the goal of supporting America.
If you cannot understand what is different, I think there is little hope in writing to you.
I respond for the benefit of those who may not already understand how this process works and who aren't carrying water for a political party.
I say this as a professor at a top computer science department. I have _never_ felt limited in my ability to collaborate with the best folks in my area. Ever. I do! And it's great! And I also believe strongly it's important to make sure we are growing those next generations of amazing people, because the thing that makes research awesome is working with them.
Especially not when said administration has a track record of cancelling things because they Ctrl-Fed outgroups they considered to be the enemy and discovered a completely irrelevant Latin prefix in someone's abstract.
Trying to reframe them as "we didn't REALLY mean it!" (while also insulting a race and sex) doesn't help your case.
This is what the communist leads of universities did here in eastern europe and it was disgusting back then as well.
Honestly, if filling in those boxes with anything other than a diatribe against the suitability of women and minorities and poor people to do research is "following the politics of one party" now, that says more about the conformance demanded by the other party than the science. Good to hear you're much happier now they're in charge and introducing formal komissar roles to ensure that any studies whose results contradict RFK Lysenko Jr or reference transgenic mice or Transjordan or employ too many research assistants with funny foreign names are liable to be defunded before publication.
That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.
It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.
Nobody honestly believes the two are equivalent.
Ultimately an argument that an application question with option for researchers to state they have an equal opportunities policy is as much of an imposition as legislating for studies to be retrospectively defunded if the clinical outcomes don't align with the administrations' preferred pseudoscience says more about you than it does about past politicization of science...
People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.
Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.
And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.
Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.
Why are you having a hard time understanding this?
> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.
Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?
It was idiotic to squander the talent of the best and brightest Black people that way 75 years ago, and it’s just as idiotic to use race and gender as a factor in admissions or employment today.
The nice thing about regulated discrimination is that it can be an editable, transparent, public document that can be voted on and driven by data. This is better, even if imperfect, than the kind we have when we’re not honest about it.
I’m not saying it’s perfect or wholly good. Just, arguably better. I see a lot of problems with it. It’s a bandaid on deep social and systemic problems.
If anything I appreciate that it’s in the open.
Regardless, I’ve done well in my career at times someone else could have done better. I saw it when I managed hiring processes. Discrimination was everywhere. But I was there, I was white, I was male. That was good enough. I certainly wasn’t the best for the job. There’s something wrong with that in my opinion. I should have had to try harder at times. It would have been better for everyone. How do we fix that?
They immediately regretted it but the results were already printed in the newspapers. The rest as they say is history.
Are those mutually exclusive? I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't track to me. Finding the diamonds in the rough in underrepresented groups is part of finding the best of the best to collaborate with.
> Some examples that illustrate contributions in each of the five areas are given below. Proposals need not address all of these areas, and PIs are advised to focus on those areas in which they are well prepared to make meaningful contributions.
"Broadening participation of underrepresented groups" is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it. I had proposals funded that focused on workforce development, for example. I saw others focus on science communication to the public (now forbidden in the memo this post is about!).
Proposals that passed grant panels were first and foremost always those that would great science. At ~10:1 oversubscription rates or more, proposals don't pass without it. The BI component needed to be credible but could be handled lots of ways.
Fundamentally, Congress recognized when defining BI as a component for merit review in the NSF that fundamental science only pays off in the long term. BI is a pragmatic choice to ensure that grants also yield near-term benefits to society as well.
Irrespective of whatever was going on in academia I take issue with this. Everyone who has a) a double digit number of brain cells b) has ever dealt with government approval in any capacity c) is't just a straight up liar knows that if the requirements set forth by a panel with discretionary authority says to do items 1-5 that you will not be approved without doing all of them, (unless of course you have the right last name or connections).
If you don't believe me watch any local board's meetings for the next 6mo and research everyone who comes before it after finding what outcome they got.
This has nothing to do with academia, DEI or what the other items on the list of requirements were. This is just how the sausage is made. It's all the same steps even if some factories are a little dirtier than others. So yeah, I 100% believe that if someone unconnected didn't pay the right lip service to the right things in every single one of the items in the list they would not get the outcome they wanted even if theoretically their stuff could have been approved with only 4/5 boxes checked. The approvers are not going to stick their necks out like that with no reason.
I regularly submit workforce participation plans for government construction projects that have minority and women labor hour goals with 100% white male labor hours and receive approval to proceed. Things are not as black and white in reality as the media has led you to believe. I deal with state and local municipal and county governments regularly, my state’s Dept of Labor and Industry does not care what your last name or company is.
A lot of research won't be profitable for years to come or is even unlikely to be profitable at all, so you funding sources are limited. The government, having no profit motive, can encourage this kind of research by funding it. Typically the hope is that it'll lead to increased productivity or innovation down the line.
You don't have to be a statistician to see that not all groups of the populace are represented equally among scholars. If you want all viewpoints covered from you populace, wouldn't that mean you want to try and push for inclusion there? That doesn't mean everything has to be inclusive but you sure can incentivize it
This is the core of the issue. We don’t actually want all viewpoints represented because that wouldn’t by itself produce any value.
You want someone to come up with the fundamental theorems of Calculus, linking the area of a curve with its anti-derivative, because that’s incredibly useful. Generically grabbing everyone’s view isn’t a competitive strategy. You need to be selective on things that are intrinsically useful and promote that.
The study you mention can be founded with pen and paper. No expensive trials or heavy equipment or team needed.
its apples and ebola
The best of the best involves people from underrepresented groups. These policies exist to counteract the cronyism and “doesn’t look like me”-ism inherent to the way people make choices. We know people don’t hire and collaborate with the best of the best, because when looking for the best they see it easiest in people with similar backgrounds and perspectives as themselves.
It’s a shame the culture war cooked your brain on this one.
In fact, we see this now in Silicon Valley where 80% of workers are foreign born. Not a representative group of Americans by any stretch, and we see a lot of negativity towards folks Silicon Valley will never interact with as a result. And who are the wealthy bigots? Not the richest people in the history of the world. No, those other bad folks in the poor states who deserve it. They aren't under-represented.
If there are no martian biologists because of systemic discrimination, why would the best if the best biologists include a martian.
The argument defeats itself. I don't understand why people keep repeating this lie instead of the truth.
The only way this makes sense is if you think the only way someone can be inspired by someone else is if they look the same.
Inspiring specific groups to follow a career path by showing them people on that path is “representation” not inclusivity. Representation matters because it’s easier (not impossible, as you suggest the argument is) to see yourself e.g. as a nurse or a teacher if you have seen male nurses or teachers succeeding.
Representation matters, but not nearly as much as the opposite side of things - who gets opportunities. Which is what I was talking about.
Btw one of the major groups that have benefitted from the dreaded “DEI” in universities has been white men. They are an under-represented group in many post-secondary settings.
You're acting like these things aren't intertwined.
You can't adjust the lever of representation without affecting who gets opportunities.
You can believe what you want about the merits of adjusting those levers but to pretend like you can limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous. Be honest and say you think it's worth it.
For sure they are intertwined. More inclusion = more representation, and vice versa. But you’re saying representation is pointless because people can enter fields they don’t see themselves represented in and I am saying i think representation is a (positive) side effect not the goal. You can argue that it’s pointless all you want but idgaf because to me it’s a side effect.
> limit your pool of people to a smaller group of people and not affect the apex of the talent pool is disengenous
I agree. Limiting your pool is a bad idea. That’s literally why inclusivity is a good thing. Because people self-limit the pool to people who look like them, and because other societal barriers limit the pool by excluding people. Actively acting to include people broadens the pool, it doesn’t limit it.
If you think on the scale of an individual hire or grant, i guess i can see how it would seem like limiting the pool - but zoom out like two steps and you’d see that’s not true.
You can put in there standard things like “we will design new grad and undergrad courses that train new students in this tech that we will develop”.
You can put wider-impact things like “we will partner with local community colleges to integrate the results of this research in their XYZ course”, or “we will design summer research programs with recruitment from community colleges”.
And yes, you can (or used to be able to) include things like “we will partner with high schools with high populations of underrepresented demographics to do outreach and involve students in research”.
Clearly, there’s a large variety of things that fall under broader impact, and scientists weren’t required to pick only the “wokest” policies.
Please don’t comment on things you don’t know much about.
This is the real test. If these changes are so bad, will someone campaign bare on overturning these? Will the “other side” change it?
If they don’t, you know that they also agreed with it - this handwringing now is just for show.
The reactionary Supreme Court has changed the character of the executive. That court will live for many years. The executive branch exists to represent the will of the chief executive. We’ve normalized criminal behavior with the abuse of pardons and crushed the institution of DOJ.
These guys opened a very stupid Pandora’s box. The long game is brutal. When we need to start dismantling the military, that’s going to impact some places pretty severely, for example. The science and tech edge will be gone in a decade.
As the other poster mentioned, the post-Vietnam Church committee was a democratic party-led, bipartisan committee that effectively heeled the CIA and exposed many of the pretty dark abuses committed in that era.
All tactics, no strategy is the way of things currently - on the right especially, but on the left to some extent too. It’s maddening.
This is the worst part. The Democrats have nothing but outrage and protest. They don’t have a written Democrat Project 2029. Their action plan is as thin as a Reddit post.
The right spent decades working on their strategy, who to target/convert, how to do it, what they would do once in power, and how quickly: and they wrote it down. What the fuck are the Democrats doing? Holding little signs up in protest in Congress and having little press conferences where they make meek outrage noises. This is a very unserious party in the face of a very serious political problem.
B) do you really want to get to a place where the arbiters get politically reset and degraded every time the pendulum swings? This is the equivalent of a courtroom where a defendant or plaintiff can threaten to fire the judge or add their cousin as a co-judge.
The supreme court had a very limited role originally. And it's only by grants of Congress that they are allowed the staff, the ability to hear what cases they want to, and assorted other privileges. Beyond just packing the court, Congress could do a ton to rescind the power of these corrupt fiends who've gotten so far at tearing down the United States & gutting our nation, as they and their Leonard Leo/Federalist Society foes of America have lusted for for so long.
It's not just the Supreme Court either. Jamelle also effectively addresses so much of the incredibly vulgar court/judge shopping that makes a single judge North District of Texas such an incredibly popular and active venue, a political powerhouse that reliably will undo anything Federalist Society foes of America & government dislike. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-...
No, the left should use the things right broke to abuse the right—just like the right is breaking everything to abuse the left. Otherwise the right will never learn why breaking things is a bad idea, and they’ll just keep on breaking everything like they have been for my entire life and before.
Previously, it was a more libertarian and constitutional argument: progressive causes since the new deal have assumed powers not granted.
More recently this has completely flipped to a populist culture war argument that the left, in excesses seen in the DEI hayday before COVID, has lost its mind and began attacking and punishing people.
My point isn't to argue "no you" but to instead invalidate your point about lessons and outcomes. The centers of these two tribes exist in separate realities and experiences. Escalating is unlikely to have the effect of bringing those perspectives together.
That’s all the more reason to do it. The right believes lots of things that aren’t so, so learning what abuse actually is might stop them from crying wolf in the future.
https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...
There are two developmental pathways for sexual reproduction: - one produces small mobile gametes - one produces large immobile gametes
There can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism in different species ends up on one pathway or the other, there can be plenty of variation in how an individual organism on either pathway develops, and there can be plenty of variation in how an individual on either pathway behaves. But in sexually reproductive organisms, there are only two pathways.
A male who wants to obey stereotypical feminine stereotypes in behaviour and dress is free to do so, but it doesn’t make him any kind of female, or a different kind of male.
When people get all up in arms being anti trans, they are not getting up in arms about people not respecting the gametes... They are getting up in arms because they don't like it that the expression of sex phenotypes is heterogenous, overlapping, and scary, and that makes their small minds feel funny. Because they want to pretend that the world can be categorized into simple boxes that alleviate their anxiety, and gives them a sense of control. No, they don't even fucking know what a gamete is, for the most, and we sure as hell didn't know 200 years ago.
If you want to define biological sex as only being the gametes, fine. But that is a small thing. It's a definition that has little relevance. All the phenotypic variability in the expressed biology, phenotypic expression that depends on multifactorial developmental processes that can go in any of a billion different directions, that, while informed by sex chromosomes, are also affected by other non sex chromosomes genes, and also from variability in environmental exposures, which can affect the timing and dosing of sex hormones during development that actually DIFFERENTIATES thr biology? This article, and your perspective, only finds solid ground by limiting what biological sex encompasses to such a small piece of territory, that ceding that kingdom loses nothing meaningful, certainly not in how bodies are made, how sex is expressed and lived in, and to what matters in shaping their lives, personalities, who they feel akin to, and everything else. Have the gamete, who gives a shit? Get it?
Compare to: "If it burns diesel, it's a truck, if it burns gasoline, it's a car. Thus, there are only two kinds with no overlap, easy peasy."
The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
Nope. Not what I said at all. Nothing I said in any way related to the idea that some combinations were “blessed”. Merely that there are two pathways. Individuals may travel those two pathways in numerous ways, but until someone discovers a third gamete, there are only two pathways.
> The thing about reality is that it persists no matter how stridently one denies it.
Very true! No matter how many drugs or how many surgeries or behaviour changes, reality persists - males in dresses are still male, females in suits are still female.
I’ll give an analogy. Male and female are to biology as orbitals are to nuclear physics. A really, really useful shorthand. But they do not describe actual physical electrons “orbiting” a nucleus. Don’t mistake the shorthand for the reality. Scientific shorthand is generally not useful for reasonably discussing edge cases.
Wrong.
https://archive.is/2025.02.21-160254/https://www.scientifica...
I happen to subscribe to bimodal - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLH-y2nLocw but I understand why the dimorphic viewpoint has utility.
There are exceptional individuals, in every population. Just like there is a non-zero chance that a baseball thrown at a wall will pass through a wall due to a quirk of quantum fluctuation (10^-10^32 chance or whatever), the utility of the differentiation point is a matter of perspective (including intent). Bimodal does not exclude these individuals, but does imply the spectrum has limits (which it does).
Arguing about what two people, of differing perspective, think won't change either's views without associating a utility that has not been considered.
For the record, various studies conclude the ratio of individuals that are neither 46,XX nor 46,XY as being anywhere between 0.02% to 1.3% of the population. Or roughly 10^30 more likely than throwing a baseball through a solid wall (based on your stated likelihood).
I don't think any practicing scientist of any political persuasion will think these are good for science.
Science progresses by sharing knowledge openly and publicly, so others can evaluate it, criticize it, and build on it. These severe restrictions on collaboration, publication, and public communication will damage science's naturally open, merit-based culture.
We will all suffer due to lost discoveries--maybe not today, but over years and decades.
On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a concern from the average citizen*. I don't think most of us want to be under a dictator or go back to having a king.
That means the only practical option is to act of our own volition and support science through vocal advocacy and private money. In this way, we can each donate to the research we care about the most with maximum academic freedom.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
Everyone knows that many things that are not directly beneficial to society would go unfunded because humans optimize for what’s around them, and things that are self-interested.
There isn’t even alignment. One person wants to fund science, the other wants to fund high speed rail, the other wants farm subsidies, one wants social security and the other wants the military. Government balances all of that together. Of course people will make value judgements about their pet interests and declare the other aspects to be better funded separately.
The USG is quite often the only group able and willing to fund most projects.
I mean I'm not inherently opposed to laws or government, but I think a lot of people need to be more measured and considerate of what they are using tax money for when it is being taken from their fellow citizens at gunpoint.
Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.
BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?
>BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?
Yes, especially when they're the sort of people who support taking my tax money to fund idiotic and outright racist "research".
Russ Vought was not elected either.
using grep to defund grants that contain words we don't like is the exact opposite of measured and considerate. so is punishing scientists for the sin of working for a 'woke' institution. in fact all this seems extremely punitive, and not in the spirit of optimizing outcomes for costs at all.
note that this policy explicitly removes the requirement to provide any kind of rationale. that sort of directly contradicts the notion that this is a measured discussion about priorities.
Contrary to what you said, there is actually quite a bit of private philanthropic funding for research, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. The vast majority of it seems to go to medical research, in particular cancer and Alzheimer's. That's obviously a good thing, but my point here is that we can't necessarily depend on private philanthropy to distribute funds optimally.
https://www.cato.org/blog/governments-should-not-fund-resear...
I'm generally a fan of Cato and a libertarian approach to economics, but I'm still not convinced that we should be spending zero public money on basic research. I would like to see a decent amount going into mathematics and theoretical physics for example, and I doubt those fields would stay afloat on donations.
This comment reflects a level of ignorance that would make Dunning & Kruger facepalm.
The idea that you compare a democratically elected government’s taxes… to that of an unelected tyrant show a complete lack of perspective.
Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.
Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.
Scientists have two easy avenues if they are currently in the US, the US or their home country. Immigration to work in a foreign nation is not always easy and takes time.
If the choice is between $0 in the US and >$0 someplace else, you emigrate to >$0 if you want to continue your research.
Way off, it's way closer, even if we're just talking EU. EU (the body) alone is about 200 billion/year. EU member states are like 1-1.5 trillion/year.
US: $848B (2024)
EU: $508B (2024)
---
UK: $102B (2023)
Switzerland: $22B (2023)
Norway: $8.2B (2024)
OECD "Gross domestic spending on R&D"
We fund science, research and we have accelerated programs for researchers affected by these kinds of things.
If you're interested, email me (see profile). I have been helping Americans emigrate to Europe (for free) for several years.
If you spend $900 Billions on BS you will lose to other countries that only spend 1/100th of that.
Quantity over quality doesn’t work in science because reality doesn’t care who paid how much.
I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.
Edit: don’t forget how he’s forcing NSF headquarters to move. All the NSF, not just the “bad” research.
Almost everyone has entertained the idea of leaving the US for more stability, which is required for research.
Unfortunately, getting money from industry isn’t much easier in my opinion.
We have some software projects we want to spin out into a small business or non-profit (because federal funding…), but industry is absolutely cold right now. Had a few very promising partners lined up, but it all evaporated last spring. Between tariffs, AI spending, and now oil, everyone is reluctant to spend.
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
I wouldn't even need to cherry pick.
Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.
If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.
Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
Strengthening Inclusion by Change in Building Equity, Diversity and Understanding (SICBEDU) in Integrative Biology
An Equitable, Justice-Focused Ecosystem for Pacific Northwest Secondary CS [Computer Science] Teaching
Great to read these are being defunded.
Look at Russia, they jumped off a cliff to protect a regime from democracy, and people are checked out - they take no accountability and still act confused of why Russia is being despised - all while accelerating economic and demographic decline with more than one million casualties in a special 3 day military operation.
You can't make this up.
The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.
In the US you might get your funds cancelled, in Russia you'll get your life cancelled instead - and not in the metaphorical sense.
Also as incompetent as the current US government is, the incompetence of the Russian government is on a whole different level (the "3 days to Kyiv" are taking longer than the whole "Great Patriotic War").
> Russia is a de-jure democracy
As is North Korea, it must be even more democratic than the rest of the world because it calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)
Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.
Just pointing out that Putin has systematically turned Russia into a full-blown fascist autocracy, but even in Russia this took nearly two decades until all opposition was crushed.
MAGA has the same goal (turning the US into a fascist autocracy), but I bet it will be much harder and would take much longer to dismantle the checks-and-balances system in the US as completely as Putin did in Russia.
> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.
Good hyperbole
If you weren't aware of these differences, I'd encourage you to radically change your media diet; there are unfortunately many outlets which find it advantageous to exaggerate how bad the US is and deemphasize how bad dictatorships are. (Some are paid Russian propaganda, I've seen a shocking number of people send me RT links as though they're a legitimate news source.)
But those four puppets served the same ruling class interests, and they manufactured consent for each other the whole time.
I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests. If the funding rules for scientific grants are changing, and defenders of the old rules argue that this is a terrible change that will cause huge problems, how can it be that both the old rules and the new rules serve the same interests?
> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.
Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:
https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/how-the-press-manufactured-co...
Which ultimately led to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240802024326/https://docs.hous...
This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.
People who are concerned about "corporatism" have the same problem. I often see them get confused and frustrated when the news presents "big government" as a scary thing that people are worried about - doesn't everyone know big business is the more important concern? Most Americans don't agree with them (https://news.gallup.com/poll/701054/perceived-threat-big-bus...), but if all your friends think big business sucks and government programs are great, it's hard to know that this is something you should check.
/r/ZeroCovidCommunity continues to be growing community for good reason.
That's why they're considered a rogue state at the moment.
So at best you can say the Russian regime claims Russia is a democratic, that's not de jure, because for it to be de jure you'd need institutions to make sure it was in fact de jure.
There's none, just signs with the name on the wall, and people roleplaying.
NSFL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasTcDsDfMg
Education, cultural sensitivity, etc. are health issues.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/29/friday-briefin...
Decentralized systems also help local entities develop and grow into their own. Necessity is the mother of invention and centralized systems largely remove the necessity of local expertise which cripples efforts to advance it. This is the 17th declared major outbreak of ebola in the DRC. One would think that by the time you've had a few major ebola outbreaks, let alone 16, you'd be building up a rich body of expertise, knowledge, and competence, but that does not really seem to be the case.
Musk: “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”
“As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.”
“Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.”
“As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO.”
How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
Hope china can step up and fill the gap.
The notion of "governance by putatively neutral experts" was a progressive reform of the early-to-mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. Rolling the government back to 1880-1910--when the modern administrative state was just a twinkle in Woodrow Wilson's racist eye--would hardly be a bad thing. That was a time of tremendous progress in America economically and technologically.
> contrasts with a merit system, where offices are awarded or promoted based on a measure of merit, independent of political activity.
What is commendable about this? Why should anyone who isn’t close enough with political winners to get the spoils want this?
Now understanding the good faith argument better, doesn’t it even further support the ascendancy of China? The argument is: despite rampant spoils system corruption, the US eclipsed Great Britain on the strength of a large population with low trade barriers alone (both internal and external)
But China is now the country with the largest population and low trade barriers. So aren’t they playing the role of 1800s USA and we the role of Great Britain here in 2026?
Aside, I appreciate the content of your post, but it really does distract your point to sling insults like hysterical towards other commenters
If someone has an extremely simplistic view of how our society works and where our power comes from, then it is regrettable for that someone to even offer a prediction in public about whether our society's power will wane or (continue to) wax, especially a prediction as confident as "Well, america had a good run i guess? Hope china can step up and fill the gap."
And I love how Rayiner got downvoted severely for daring to point out that predicting the effects of this move ("WH proposes rules") is not as easy or as simple as many here seem to think it is.
(And I have no idea why Rayiner was downvoted. I'm happy for them though—for sticking to principles and posting what may well be downvoted to oblivion. It's something I have become more comfortable with myself.)
That’s still the same mentality that underlies the modern administrative state.
> while longing for a return to the era of Jim Crow
Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts. Within just a few terms!
How is enforcing the two greatest anti Jim Crow laws (VRA and CRA), somehow, equivalent to returning to Jim Crow itself?
> the administrative state
I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why. I understand your appeal to history, but what could be a better approach than hiring on merit while also making those employees accountable to political appointees? Just replacing the entire ranks of government every 4 years?
In both cases, republicans were the ones that wanted to enforce the civil rights laws. Democrats were the ones who wanted to violate the civil rights laws by treating people differently based on race. In SFFA they wanted universities to be able to discriminate against applicants based on race, and in Louisiana v. Callais, they wanted to draw racially segregated voting districts.
> the administrative state I’m trying to understand better, but it just seems like you are very opposed to merit based hiring in government and I don’t understand why.
Because the criteria we use for “merit” are degrees from elite universities, membership in professional organizations, etc. So while I think merit-based hiring for government is desirable in theory, what I think happens in practice is the emergence of a definable class of credentialed professionals, entry into which gatekept by non-government institutions like Harvard, etc. That turns over tremendous amounts of power to people and institutions that aren’t democratically accountable. And I don’t buy the premise that these credentialed professionals are any less political than anyone else. They, and the institutions they are affiliated with, have cohesive interests and pursue those interests in government.
I think it’s better to do what Trump did in 2024: get on stage with the people he intends to appoint to top jobs, and have them talk about what they want to do. Let voters see the team they’re voting for. Look, I also think RFK is a nutjob. But the response to that should be for the Democratic candidate in 2028 to get on stage with who they intend to appoint to HHS. Let them talk about their credentials and expertise and what they intend to do. Let them explain why RFK is a disaster and has made voters worse off. I think that’s a fantastic way for a democracy to operate.
30 years of jurisprudence since Thornburg v. Gingles disagrees with this framing. That unanimous decision found racial districts a necessarily race-conscious remedy to race-targeted harm: republican gerrymandering of cohesive black communities in the south. Which was the same harm at play in 2026 Louisiana.
If you think a race-conscious remedy is more racist than race-targeted harm, you must also believe that minority communities have no right for representation. If that’s the case, be plain about your beliefs. Either way please stop publicly mistaking cause for effect regarding this topic of “racially segregated voting districts”
No, everyone agrees you can have a “race-conscious remedy” if there is a “race-targeted harm.” Lousiana v. Callais says that right on pages 17-18 of the slip op: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf
But there was no “race-targeted harm” in Louisiana v. Callais. You’re wrong about the facts of that case. The original Louisiana map, with one black majority district, was a computer-drawn map and there was no evidence lawmakers had used race in creating the map. There was no compact district that would give you a second black-majority district in the state. The second district they had to add was quite gnarly: https://louisianaradionetwork.com/2024/01/16/35175/
Louisiana v. Callais nowhere prohibits using a race conscious remedy to fix a specific, race-conscious harm. It’s totally compatible with that principle.
> you must also believe that minority communities have no right for representation
They are entitled to the same “representation” as everyone else: being able to vote for a representation in a district drawn without regard to race. They’re not entitled to “representation” in the sense of a racial quota system for districts. Minority groups will generally have fewer majority-minority districts in a state than their share of the state population. If they are evenly distributed, there may be no majority-minority districts. That’s just how math works.
I never argued that you don’t believe this. I guess you’re disputing the word “insinuating”? Fine, you’re explicitly saying the administrative state is racist.
> Last I checked you guys are the ones who went to the supreme court to defend racial discrimination in college admissions and racially segregated voting districts.
Nice tu quoque but I’m neither a Democrat nor a liberal. You make this mistake with people a lot! Have you considered not assuming everyone who disagrees with you is a liberal?
The person I actually replied to wondered why you got downvoted. Thanks for the demonstration.
This is your comment basically:
People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), tuberculosis was a leading cause of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
The advancement of antibiotics did not happen until the mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. It would be a great idea to rollback science to that time when we didn't have all these life saving vaccines and antibiotics.
Not at all. My comment was that America’s good run began a century before the 20th century practice of administration through independent experts. Thus, such administration cannot be a necessary condition for America’s “good run” as OP suggested.
"There was a spoils system in the late 1800s. It sure would be great if we could go back to that time." Technically these can be interpreted as unrelated statements (as apparently the statements are in your original comment), but most people would infer from that they were related and that the reason it would be nice to rollback to the earlier time was the aforementioned spoils system.
Except I explicitly referred to “[r]olling the government back,” specifically “the modern administrative state.” The two systems being compared are the old system where the executive branch was politically accountable (but suffered from patronage jobs), and the new system presided over by experts (but who are insulated from political signals).
My point is that the old system, with its shortcomings, empirically produced good results, as good as the new system, with its shortcomings. That’s not an argument that the spoils system was great in isolation. But it’s possible that political appointees aren’t as incompetent as you assume. Or credentialed experts aren’t as competent as you assume. Or that the gains from more administrative competence are outweighed by the loss of responsiveness to political signals.
The latter part of the 20th century and first part of this century is a story more of the US driving invention and deploying those inventions.
The techniques needed to go from lesser power to leading power are different from those needed to advance as a leading power. For Lebron to stay on top, he has to do different things than any of us would need to do to get into the NBA.
Different circumstances & different goals require different strategies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46885305
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Really, nothing he writes is surprising.
Sure, if you think Americans are sheep to be herded—what Woodrow Wilson called the “unphilosophical bulk of humanity”—by credentialed experts who make the important decisions, you have no problem with the dumbest, least responsible people voting. Because in your model voting is just a signal of approval/disapproval, not genuine self governance. You can’t afford to do that if you think the effect of people’s votes should be direct and not filtered through an expert class that second guesses them.
Similarly, Germany experienced great economic growth under the Third Reich.
To each his own, I guess, but personally I'll take a less corrupt and more equitable country over a wealthy and powerful one any day.
After the war, USSR incorporated totally or partially many countries and they transformed the remaining Eastern European countries into vassal states.
Especially during the first decade after WWII, USSR has stolen huge amounts of resources from those territories, in various forms, starting with what the Red Army had robbed during their so-called "Liberation" actions, then with huge so-called "War reparations" extracted from the countries that the Soviet Union itself had attacked, so they had been forced to attempt to defend themselves, but eventually they had to pay a lot for daring to do this, and then with various profits extracted from mixed companies established in the vassal states after the war and from various unbalanced contracts for economic exchanges with USSR.
The most affected was East Germany, from where entire factories have been moved to Russia, machine by machine and tool by tool, where they constituted the bases for new industries that were developed in USSR after the war. (While USA had no need to take entire factories to be able to reproduce the German technologies, they also took from West Germany many samples of industrial products, together with their manufacturing documentation, which were given to certain American companies, which then expanded after WWII in domains where previously Germany had exclusivity or domination. An example is the technology of magnetic recording, which became important after the war not only for audio and video recording, but also for the first electronic computers.)
While in some countries dictatorships have achieved economical progress mainly by internal means, under Stalin the greatest achievements were based on plundering most of their former neighbors, while the Soviet Union greatly expanded territorially, mostly at its west, but also at its east.
Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.
If these rules go into effect, is it not true that individuals, state governments, and non-governmental organizations could still fund scientific research that the federal government won't fund?
Of course there's still research that only the federal government could fund. A big example is e.g. DARPA and the Internet. Imagine if that was only funded and supported by a few states.
i also think the importance of grants is a bit academic, so not a day to day concern.
I understand that there are people in the US who do not think that this is important and actually would prefer fewer scientists that are more poorly trained. There is nothing more infuriating then believing the world is flat and having some egghead prove it isn't.
That’s it. Just offer the people what they want and stop catering to the ownership class.
Let me remind you any of you could run for a seat. You don't need to belong to any political party. You can even rise through the ranks inside a party. Trump is even an example of a complete outsider turning upside-down one of the two main parties!
Your complaint sounds a lot like "we tried nothing and we ran all out of ideas".
It seems very easy to just blame this on the voter like this.
People decided to elect that person, it's part of the package.
So I don't know. Assuming the American voter can read and and access to the internet, it's kind of pathetic to imply they couldn't have known
America is not exceptional.
You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.
Peer review is a closed system of expertise that doesn’t let you challenge the core tenants - some might say theology - of the field. It’s basically a cartel for keeping a field of study alive, regardless of its value. True innovation happens when people collaborate outside their fields.
Steelman aside, there probably are better ways to solve this problem systematically than just let a politically appointee have final say. If we were serious about this problem, smart people thinking about scientific policy probably have some great ideas that are not being listened to.
Strong claims require strong evidence. The tenants some people want to challenge are climate change, gender identity, renewable energy, vaccinations, etc.
So its a hard bargain, I believe science benefits from being a bit stubborn.
And I’d argue all fields could use more dissenting opinions and new options. I don’t know if this would be the path to that but keep in mind there have been many things historically where someone needed to take a leap of faith to go against the current dogma.
Consensus is a thing, but science is not one institution, is a bunch of different warring factions of people trying to get published and cited and funding.
Are you arguing that or not
Also: tenets
>some might say theology - of the field
Some might, I'm sure! Are you saying that?
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/steelmanning
Personally, I am sympathetic to the idea that science has stagnated. But I do not think this is the solution.
This is a case of correctly diagnosing the problem - but not actually having a real solution
Science and Educational purposes are valid 501(c)(3) purposes. A donation to a 501(c)(3) that funds open-source scientific software, public STEM education, basic research, science grants, or public-interest tech research can be deductible.
Up to 60% of Adjusted Gross Income can be tax-deductible as charitable contributions to a qualified 501(c)(3) with itemization, depending on the contribution type.
This would create a non-partisan defined/dedicated non-profit funding layer with serious governance that will benefit all sides. Might be possible to go global.
This would need serious structure: independent board, conflict-of-interest rules, grant review, public reporting, no private benefit, and probably fiscal sponsorship first.
Maybe this deserves a separate Ask HN to avoid derailing this thread: would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?
But these very endowments have been special cased as additionally taxable, despite that status, under the 2025 OBBBA, resulting in research budget cuts [0].
Would independent endowments as you describe them be more immune?
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/college-endowment-tax...
Why a hypothetical? Plenty of options available to donate to or to contribute otherwise. Not help built it, help grow and maintain it.
This is not just picking which ideas the government supports. This sounds like it’s taking all the “fun” out of having grant funding.
Sure, that’s a flip remark, but doesn’t this have a similar sense of arguments against other government funded programs?
~SNAP food assistance is raising food prices~ [1] or ~SNAP food assistance is my tax dollars going towards anyone who says they’re hungry.~ [2]
And don’t forget to mention the replication crisis.
~Public funded grants let scientists go to parties and publish junk science.~
The cynical would argue it’s proof the scientific community is filled with charlatans milking a system that can’t police itself.
[1]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYNZT43R705/
[2]: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DY2k2MNxf97/
- With no workers working, no worker fraud problem, sure. If you cut core scientific processes, politicize science, and destablize paycheck predictability enough to chase everyone good out of science, then yes any small amount of waste is also caught in the cuts.
- This seems to increase what you call bad "fun": Increases abuse of tax funding being corruptly given to projects advocated by political appointees despite rejection by scientific peer review. Vicious feedback loop.
Surprise! I'm just a middle-age American reading HN with his coffee trying to wrap my head around the topic. I don't think this remark helps anyone understand your argument. Doth protest too much.
I'm wondering if you're focused on the "approved" science, and missing the idea this corruption is riding on the back of even a "small amount of waste", and an overall rejection of scientific activities in the face of the replication crisis. All part of the schism of your facts and our facts insanity.
The bigger issue is failure to significantly increase r&d funding, vs last decade+ shrinkages and Trump-era eating of the young, and focuses like you now propose suggest a continuation of such economy-inhibiting thinking. Also, note how your post was goalpost moving. This in turn is classic trolling with asymmetric effort, so I don't see your response in good faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera
The Trump 2.0 administration was already easily the most corrupt in American history well before these rules were proposed.
To their credit(?) they don't even try to hide it, they are just fully corrupt out in the open, because they know the cultists who support them will support anything they do.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
We had all these "unelected bureaucrats" post-WWII, and we did quite well in the following decades.
Scientists and academics fleeing the US is a new phenomenon, driven in no small part by these "unelected bureaucrats" being fired and replaced by political loyalists.
While you're correct in saying that we had lots of success before the establishment of the administrative state, it doesn't then follow that we'd have more (or better) success by abolishing it now. It seems like the opposite is slowly becoming true.
Among other things this proposal attempts to prevent:
1. prevention of DEI related grants
2. prevention of grants promoting anti-american ideologies
3. prevention of gain-of-function research (think covid-19)
4. prevention of ai-powered social media censorship research
5. prevention of FEMA dollars going to help undocumented immigrants
6. prevention of foreign aid dollars being spent in africa on gender ideology
It would but restrictions directly into the grant awards give strong tools to the USG to suspend the grant and prevent the money being dispersed via a subrecipient.
The amount of capability that America is burning is impressive. I suspect that people outside of academia are not as alarmed, since its not part of daily life.
However it matters the same way that a drug discovery today is life saving 10 years down the line, after its gone through all the processes to go to market.
From a naive perspective, this sounds a lot like the breeding ground for Lysenkoism (Stalin-approved). In that example, aligning science to the party line led to a couple of famines. I say naive because there were other factors at play (e.g. it was forbidden to criticize Lysenko's theories).
So they’ll be sued. The theories will be tested and we’ll see exactly where the line is (eventually). And probably somewhere uncomfortable, given SCOTUS.
There are legitimate ways agency political appointees can set funding priorities. Like this year we’ll focus on Alzheimer’s. But of course, we should take the least charitable reading of this - that it’ll likely be used for shenanigans. Punish enemies. Award cronies. Go after junk science, etc.
So now the administration is attempting to follow those rules to create these new procedures, which they believe will then be lawful.
If they are successful, challenges would have to be made judicially based on non-procedural grounds, or through Congress.
They can follow APA to come up with all kinds of illegal rules. And the actual rules are so broad they could be used from anything sane to something that might be just political revenge.
The actual language:
> “As part of the merit review process, Federal agencies must perform pre-issuance reviews to ensure that Federal award proposals selected for funding are consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest.”
Example: "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats."
Cancel Haitian grants. And also round them up in deportation holding facilities.
Marx’s idea of communism required a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Lenin took that notion and, under the pretence of needing absolute power to prevent a counter-revolution, turned it into the totalitarian regime of the USSR. Since then, communism and totalitarianism have gone hand in hand.
Marx's "dictatorship" as used by Marx back in the days of late nights in the British Libraries wasn't the authoritarian "dictatorship" we associate with the term today.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletaria...Sure, Lenin had a hard on for authoritarian behaviour and started the USSR trend of dangling a communist utopia as a reward for grinding through petty nitpicking committees and even more hard core authoritarians .. but that's more the bait and switch of human greed than any necessary coupling of communes and boot first hierarchies.
Much as, say, the notions of freedom, fairness, and making central north america great again has been a beard for robber barons.
They want to turn this place into a the real life version of idiocracy? So be it. The lay voter needs to see what voting badly does. They need to see consequences. The cure for cancer could be there in this research. WHO knows what could become of real mRNA research. But no. We just want to believe the world is 6k years old and some donor is gonna tell some begging scientists they get their funding or not.
it will take longer than this decade, maybe even next, to restore the brain loss and faith in secure jobs for research
basically this country will just become a highway of non-stop warehouses, alternating ICE prisons vs "AI" datacenters
science, medicine, all research and development just gone to other countries
(Unless you're doing science for military development. Then the funding spigot is open.)
And to those who say "oh, it's the same as it was before, just different ideologies" -- no, it is not at all the same. Not even comparable.
I can only say Bravo to Americans who think this constant fighting is somehow going to help the country.
The upcoming midterms are very plausibly the last free and fair elections we will ever have in this country. As deeply unpopular as this administration is right now, the Democrats will need an enormous amount of luck for the size of historic landslide it will require to take the house and senate, and even then they need to do so by enough that they can impeach and convict.
That is just about the only plausible path towards preserving democracy at this point. And I’m not really holding out hope.
I’d be happy to be told that I’m wrong. So please, tell me I’m wrong.
If you can’t tell, I am not hopeful.
Would he, though? I know the top US military brass have gone through some changes during this administration, but if the military sees a lawful impeachment and lawful conviction, I think enough would refuse (clearly illegal) orders to keep Trump in the White House.
Honestly I'd be more worried about the loyalists at the top of the FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service, etc.
Either way, it's incredibly improbable that Democrats will control a supermajority of the Senate next year (or, failing that, have enough Republican support to convict), so we probably won't have to find out what happens in this scenario.
The military executes clearly illegal orders to attack civilians on speedboats in the Pacific a couple of times a week. Not infrequently, they also kill the occupants when they are surrendering.
A fuckup or two like ICE had and the whole narrative quickly turns to shit and the people push back.
I don't think Democrats will win the Senate this fall (though there's a chance they will, and I'd be happy to be wrong here). The House is reasonably likely. Either way, they won't have the supermajority needed to convict on impeachment.
Trump is doing a lot to try to destabilize elections and put his thumbs on the scale. His recent order telling USPS not to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone not on some list that the federal government is compiling is troubling. The SAVE Act is troubling, but fortunately still hasn't gained enough support to pass (though it's far from settled that it, or something like it, won't).
But I think a big strength in the US is that all elections, even for federal offices, are administered by the states. The federal government does have some constitutional say in how they're administered, but changes there generally require acts of Congress (which is hard, even with GOP control), and I expect any and all executive orders around election matters to be challenged in court, and hopefully largely thrown out. Red states will continue to do what they usually do to disenfranchise voters they don't like; nothing new there. Blue states will continue to be blue, and will do what they need to do to keep things as sane as possible. Purple states are a more difficult proposition, but there are few enough of them that it's easier for people to keep an eye on what's going on in them.
I think we'll know a lot more after we see what happens during the midterms (not by the outcomes, but in seeing what happens with the electoral process). I wouldn't expect the 2028 elections to be significantly different than what we see this fall. If the courts disagree with election-related changes the GOP have been trying to impose for this year, it's unlikely they'll be more amenable to them in two years.
I expect that the GOP (and MAGA folks in general) will reject the results of the 2028 presidential election if a Democrat wins. They'll dial up the "big steal" lies again, just as in 2020, and will push even harder with that narrative. Hopefully the law changes since then around vote certification will help avoid a repeat of all the crap we saw around that event. Will institutions stand up to that misinformation campaign? I'm not sure. I hope so, I think so, but I'm not sure. I'm cautiously leaning toward optimism.
What's Happening to Science in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313687
With this, I guess the US will end up as a third rate country much quicker.
They've been doing this for like 70 years at this point and it's frankly a testament to how strong our institutions were that they're still kind of functioning, in the same way a 1999 Corolla you haven't gotten an oil change on since the Clinton admin is still kind of functioning.
And no I'm not going to do the song and dance for both sides. Yes, plenty of Democrats suck and I would love to see them ousted, but by and large the party consistently in power when the U.S. is in decline of it's own making is the Right. Something something facts don't care about your feelings.
What is this, North Korea?
Wait, maybe not that last one.
Science should be guided by science, not ideology.
Congress being neutered is not an accident, hopefully it will be less fucked if the power balance shifts.
And as the OP is inherently political in what it's calling out, that is not the motivation -- it's the science. I get the fact that in the end, everything's political but partisanship itself is a cancer on the body politic. Just as we seem to be in late-stage capitalism, we are entering late-stage democracy. It pains me that we effectively arrive here by choice.
The system is fundamentally broken.
The executive branch obviously is going to wield as much power as it can, but only one party is actually advocating for the executive as king.
So yes, both parties are the same when it comes to the corruption of the party leadership, but there are distinctly different platforms and ideals espoused -- and that difference matters.
We are never going back to where we were. That is past us now. There is only forward.
The FDR coalition was literally southern segregationists, immigrants, and black people, all in the same party. If "hate and stupidity" wasn't a barrier to people voting together in their material self-interest in 1936, it sure as hell isn't a barrier in 2026.
People need a shared narrative of eg. a problem to solve, to come together. The right wing narrative today is deliberatetly targeted against any imaginary enemy, that does not subscribe to the narrative, which excludes/targets basically all left leaning people, all out groups. With this tribalistic setup in the centre, common ground is impossible.
You’d think democrats would come up with a compelling one.
But yes, he wielded populism masterfully. As you made a point about southern segregationists it should be noted that it was general economic populism without emphasis on race.
When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy where once race was a top tier issue that hate and stupidity was weaponized to move all of those segregationists to the Republican Party.
Rayiner, once again your point does not land because it is not cogent. Not only that, you missed the whole point of "hate and stupidity" as literally a unifying force as a tribal fury that is directed towards "others". In a contemporary case, it is against "liberals". I can only assume that you might have personal insight into this.
> When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy
The concept of the “southern strategy” is not cogent. The backlash against the 1964 civil rights act happened in the 1968 election, when Wallace won 13% of the vote and 5 states. But all the Wallace states voted for Carter in 1976, along with all the other southern states besides Virginia. The south was Carter’s base—he only won the election by 2 points and lost New England, the midwest, and the west coast. Then three of the Wallace states voted for Clinton in 1992, plus several other southern states. Clinton also wouldn’t have won without the south. Your theory is that the reliable republican lean of the south states in the 1990s due to events that happened decades earlier. That’s a stupid idea.
The realignment instead lines up with the transition of southern economies from agricultural to industrial/services economies, i.e., the transition from “the south” to “the sunbelt.” That economic strategy is based on siphoning jobs from the northeast and midwest through low taxes and deregulation. That’s why Carter still won all the “solid south” (except Virginia) in 1976, and Clinton still won three of the five Wallace states in 1992. Virginia was the first southern state to transition to a sunbelt economy, followed by the piedmont south, with the deep south states like Louisiana and Kentucky trailing behind.
Those are the only people who get to decide. Congress can’t turn over the expenditure of taxpayer funds to people who aren’t politically accountable.
If Congress doesn't stop the executive and the Supreme Court overrules any legal blockades then ... I guess they can and are doing so RN.
Congress won't stop the executive because the party that won the executive also won Congress by almost 4 million votes. That's not a sign of the system not working, it's a sign of the system working as intended.
I remember when Nixon stepped down because his own party could not support his transgressions. The Republican party did this. That is a sign of the system working as intended.
You claim to be radicalized by a pair of lawsuits against Trump, like out of every legal issue he was entangled with it was those two that convinced you that the Democrats were evil?
Guess what? The Democrats suck and their party leadership is just as complicit in the protection of the oligarchy as the GOP's. But what happened with those Trump lawsuits wasn't a weaponization, it was blowback on a man who has been sued over 4000 times and has been shown to embrace criminal behavior when it suited him. Same thing with his two impeachments.
What I believe really radicalized you is the Federalist Society. And just in my other comment about how kids want to belong, so do adults (it's a human thing). And your desire to belong and be part of the elite power base you have put your lot in with the Monarchists.
Bear in mind that the founding-era practice originalism anchors to was voting rights for white male property owners. It took three constitutional amendments to override that. The Federalist Society's originalist framework treats those amendments as the ceiling — not a foundation for further expansion of rights. That's a methodology with predictable winners and losers, and I'd note you're unlikely to be among the winners.
This is one of many reasons why originalism is a weaponized mechanism rather than some noble hewing to principles.
The Constitution is what makes this country great -- being a nation of laws of mankind vs living under the whims of a monarchy of a god-gifted king.
Or I can be a chickenshit, and praise Trump and have a career, however pathetic. I routinely ask them to approve my results before publishing, just in case. I apply for grants looking at vaccines and autism. Every Friday, I spend an hour talking about how Trump is America's chosen one.
The executive branch does not hold the power of the purse, and the fact that you can casually use that phrase in reference to the executive branch shows how far we’ve fallen as a country in a decade.
A very sad state of affairs.
At times they don't even cotify their subservience through the usual measures like legislation and committees, except where needed to slap down any roadblocks to the unitary executive.
It doesn't matter how aligned you are with his worldview, how much you vote alongside his wishes, if you aren't 100% loyal to him personally at all times you're politically dead in the Republican party in much of the US.
While Trump's ability to sway normal elections is next to non-existent anymore (see: the vast majority of special elections held since his inauguration where Republicans are getting roflstomped by Democrats), his endorsement still decides Republican primaries because there's still a lot of brainwashed Republican cultists on the Trump train.
My hope is tempered, to say the least.
Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
Voters can always choose to turn over those decisions to scientists they trust. For much of the 20th century, that’s what voters did. But if they don’t trust the priorities of the current scientific establishment, they can also choose to put that control back in the hands of political appointees. The institutional principles of science cannot override the prerogative of voters to decide how their money is spent.
I do not intend to live in a country where supposedly unelected organizations think they have independent jurisdiction to spend public money independently of the political system.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constitutional structure.
What you're overlooking is that everything is just people. Political appointees are people. But "institutions" are also people. "Science" is just people. And the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?
The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power. People in the scientific establishment--people with degrees from universities and credentials from professional organizations--cannot be granted power to spend taxpayer money independent of the political system. They only have power over those decisions to the extent the political system chooses to confer that power.
However, the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day tactical decisions have before been made through expert peer review, by scientists. Given a fixed and finite budget set by Congress, what is the best way to make discoveries?
Having been on grant review panels, it's brutal--at 5 or 10:1 oversubscription rates, your peers will find any flaw in your proposal.
Political appointees are deeply unqualified to make these judgments. To take a very specific example: the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is headed by Michael Kratsios. He has a BA in politics and has never written a scientific publication. (Every prior OSTP head was a PhD scientist.) The OMB memo says he and those like him should decide what to fund without deferring to scientists. How is he going to assess which of 50 proposals on (say) "hypothalamic SH2B1 neurocircuits and SH2B1 signal transduction pathways" is the good one?
He can't, so he'll either choose AI or graft. Both are destructive to our once world-leading scientific enterprise.
Our laws actually are written to reflect more or less what I'm describing. The laws governing HHS grants, for example, provide for various expert committees and whatnot. But they also provide the appointed director of the HHS tremendous discretion to override those decisions. That's not new--those laws are decades old.
No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.
Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.
That's exactly what I meant when I said: "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
Within that framework, the institutional principles of "science" are irrelevant, except insofar as those principles are persuasive to political actors and ultimately voters.
The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades. The left is skeptical of revolving doors between expert agencies and corporations and corporate sponsorship of scientific studies, while the right is skeptical that experts' politics aren't coloring their work. And in such an environment, it's entirely within voters' rights to elect political actors who promise to delegate fewer decisions to scientists.
>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades
The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.
Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.
That's at best a misunderstanding of the GP's argument, at worst a bad-faith response. GP said:
> "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending. Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
I don't like this state of affairs, but it seems to be an entirely legal one, consistent with the constitution and how our political system is set up. It sucks, but in 2024 the people decided that this is who they wanted in charge.
> The left generally trusts science and the scientific community
I'm not sure that's actually true in general. The left certainly is much more trusting of scientists than the right, but that trust is not absolute, and things have happened (like initial COVID response, as an example) to erode some of that trust.
> while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth.
Agreed.
No. Analyze the thread more carefully, particularly the original comment to which I replied. Should help any good faith reader to see that it's the opposite.
>That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending
You'll see that I actually introduced that fact originally to clearly delineate the roles, whereas GP was blurring / reassigning them to make his point. I added that Congress's other major role here is in oversight, which corrects the GP's assertion that political appointees are needed for accountability to the people. i.e. I'm saying that mechanism exists, Consitutionally. That destroys his primary argument—that this is about accountability.
You seemed to have overlooked that fact (in addition to my other points), in much the same style as GP. Perhaps his rhetoric has worked on you a bit here.
>Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
That is not what's happening here, and reads like a complete misunderstanding or calculated twisting. The "in this case" bit is actively misleading. The OMB already executes spend management. There is no special "case" here. The regime is using the OMB to politicize the process by claiming it was partisan—i.e. using the same well-worn tactic in its ongoing attack on science and other matters.
>I'm not sure that's actually true in general
Of course it's true. Statistically.
>that trust is not absolute
Never the assertion. Immaterial.
>and things have happened (like initial COVID response
In fact, the left experienced a temporary bounce in scientific confidence during the initial COVID response, before settling down to pre-pandemic baselines. Meanwhile, the right experienced a roughly 20 point drop in confidence that has persisted.
It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.
There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.
We'd have no choice but to accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion, assuming that actually is the case (I don't know the law related to this, so I can't say). We can be upset at that decision, but we'd still have to accept it as legitimate.
How many times has this administration blatantly ignored the Constitution, starting with, for a simple example, separation of powers?
You're all locked in on "scientists should be beholden to the government, as that is the lay and law of the land" which ignoring the rather large mote that is "this current government couldn't give one single fuck about following the laws of the land", like issuing directives to federal agencies to consider federal court rulings as "advisory" or "not final" or "not applicable".
When the corruption of the law of the land starts at the top, you're busy insisting that those trying to follow the stated intention of the institutions that employ them ignore that because, well, what RFK Jr or worse, Stephen Miller, are the way we do things now, law, constitution be damned.
There's no law that says "only scientists and subject matter experts can decide where grant money goes". Congress has largely left it up to the executive branch to set up a group of people, with whatever qualifications it wants (such as "loyal sycophant to the president"), to make these decisions.
I agree that this administration has taken a huge dump on the constitution, but that's a completely separate issue.
We can be angry that this what's happening, and adamant that scientists and experts should be making these decisions, but the people elected a Congress and President that wants to go another way, and that's how our system of government is set up.
We'll have to do better this November and in 2028 if we want to change things.
The question of whether scientists should have independence from the political system in deciding how to spend taxpayer funds is one that can be answered entirely starting from the principles of our republican government, without any consideration of what else the current administration may or may not be doing.
FTFY
But then your counter is likely some form of originalism as you've been instructed. The current administration and it's pet SCOTUS have no interest in the Constitution or they wouldn't be so hell bent on making POTUS king for life. A mad king at that.
Well no wonder we're so fucked. The constitution is a disaster.
Having incentive to produce useful outcomes seems like it would be something folks would be in support of, but it appears many here think this is the end of the world just because it's Trump doing it. At least there's consistency in that regard. Le sigh.
My question is now: Which company is gonna buy the IRS now?
This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
The OMB writes the budget to enact federal policy. And critically, no federal regulation can exist with the OMB approving it. By making this appointment explicitly political, they have carte blanche to completely rewrite all federal regulations to be exclusively conservative ones. This would have been crazy to attempt before, but with Trump 2.0, this is the new norm.
One of the things they are doing right now (it's been approved and the rules are now active and legal, so it is now happening) is converting 50,000 civil servant jobs into political appointments. This means having a job in government no longer serves the whole nation, it's now an ideological function to serve a single political party. Literally weaponizes the federal government to punish opposing political views and enforce one view on everyone (there's no other point to political appointment). And if the party in charge ever changes, it now means everyone will be laid off and replaced. Every few years. So nothing will ever get done in government now, except for extreme short-term pushes for radical political agendas, because nobody will stay long enough to know how the government works to do anything else. Move fast and break things with the largest economy in the world, radical political agendas, and 380M people.
The OMB also can review and block all proposed legislation going to Congress, vet all official congressional testimony, and block any agency from publicly disagreeing with the President. Military generals, health officials, science experts, ecologists, intelligence directors... they can block all of them from giving any testimony to Congress. That's an actual power the OMB has.
They can also block money Congress has already allocated, meaning that your representatives in government are now completely useless, because whatever party is in the Executive can nerf anything your reps have passed. The Supreme Court could do something about it, but won't, because it's now a Conservative Supermajority. There is no reason for them to disagree because they already ideologically agree.
Finally, the OMB can issue a rule that every agency that wasn't officially under the Executive before, has to submit all its rules for Executive approval. Meaning the Executive would control all government agencies.
In any other context, in any other country, this would be called a single-party authoritarian coup. When they create rules that outlaw other political parties (that's what authoritarian governments do to retain single party control) - and assuming the democrats don't just give up - it will be the official start of civil war. Coming to you Fall 2028.
Not sure what you mean. Lots of people have been talking about it since he was appointed to the role. I've known about it and been pissed about it for quite a long time now.
It is all fascinating to me.
I highly doubt you could do that in the US without being shot.
Since many of those grants concern science and tech it does seem relevant to this site.
> " Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)"
> ...but a few asked questions regarding what Techdirt is focused on these days, and how much we were leaning into covering “politics.”
> When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/why-techdirt-is-now-a-de...
The current "Tech" culture, also traces its roots to people who very much didn't like the way things were done in corporate offices in places like NY.
Thats why Google used to have statements like do no evil, and it mattered to those early recruits. Things were built, with the intention to make things better for people.
The leaders of AI companies talk constantly about democracy and other values, while new CS grads are being told they will have no jobs.
For the record, I really wish HN was not as politically active. However this change is downstream of the environment.
I have been on this website for 17 years (ugh that's scary), and people have been posting variations of this remark the entire time. It's a tiresome sort of post the thousandth time.
Politics have always been a consistent part of this website: it's a big part of the world that hackers live in, and barring rule enforcement to the contrary, hackers will always find politics interesting and want to talk about it.
If you want a website with a more narrow focus, there's always lobste.rs.
It illustrates to me how quickly everyone gets wrapped up in the current thing. There is no principle about which content is allowed or not. Entire threads representing alternative views are removed.
For example, In 2018 I remember you could not say a single thing critical of Elon or Tesla .
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
~ https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/basic-science-curiosity-...
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.
That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.
How often does that actually happen, and wouldn't other institutions pick up the slack in most cases? (i.e. high value research doesn't cease to be high value just because one type of grant or institution refuses to fund it; it would therefore be attractive to other institutions/researchers)
Some benefits of having political appointees in the loop are that the pubic perceives (not necessarily 'gets') greater value from public research funding, and the people responsible for the funding (political appointees) are closer to the actual spending and are more involved in the allocative process, which should mean fewer expensive, hard-to-justify topics.
Yes
> It incentivises high-impact research
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
> common sense says aren't worth the public funding
who is deciding what is "common sense"?
Federal grants have always been subject to politics.
$2.4 million for "Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) Girls in a Robotics Leadership Project"
$1.2 million for "FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers"
$700k for "CAREER: Advancing Equity in Middle School Mathematics by Engaging Students and Families of Color in Participatory Design Research"
Etc., etc., etc.
The first (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2116118) and third (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2144506) were approved as part of the NSF's Directorate of STEM Education, a still-ongoing initiative to ensure the US has a strong talent pipeline of upcoming scientists. It was and remains common for them to toss money at people with kids who otherwise might not be educated well in science; recent Trump-era grants include "Social Mobility through ARkansas Tech program" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527972) and "STEM Journeys - From College to Career" (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award?AWD_ID=2527683). (I suspect we'll agree that the original examples are framed with strange racial overtones, which you could imagine legitimate political guardrails against even if the peer reviewers don't mind.)
The second (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2128991) is core social science research. Virtual meetings had recently become an extremely common phenomenon, and the investigators claim this led them to discovering (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2021.011...) the mechanism behind the then-novel phenomenon of Zoom fatigue.
Sure, of course.
But to even ask the question presumes that politics isn’t already overriding science within the academy, just from a different direction.
This new direction turns the magnet around and pushes away everything else.
If you want to be independent of the government, don't take money from the government. If you are mad because you don't agree with how the government is making decisions, say so. But don't pretend it has anything to do with "government overreach"
Perhaps more political oversight will make research more accountabile to the population at large. In this era I suspect it's far more likely to benefit the few, those born into power and fame who are consolidating their power. Scientists with resources and accountable only to other scientists are uniquely dangerous to those unwilling to give up their power.
We may not like it (I certainly don't), but this is one of the times when Trump seems to actually be acting within his authority, and not pushing at or past those limits.