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.
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.
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.
Literally everything the current administration has claimed was going on in academia and research and government more generally is actually what they wanted to impose.
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.
Nah, it was going on before, for the same reasons, just not openly. You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant.
These just make it more fixed it into rules as opposed to doing it with plausible deniability like before.
A law which will be used from the opposite side just as well, as soon as the power switches hands again.
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.
"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.
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.
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 sad 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.
It was quite overt before as well. There was a section in grant applications, broader impacts, where you literally had to describe how your research would, amongst other things "[broaden the] participation of underrepresented groups". [1] As if seeking out the best of the best to collaborate with, independent of their checkboxes, was somehow undesirable. It's the nature of relying on government programs and funding - you become subject to the whims of politicians.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "[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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
During the Biden administration, it was important to spice up your application with words like "diversity". Now it's the opposite. I wish we could get beyond it, but for now I wish people would quite pretending that this kind of thing hasn't happened before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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" ;)
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?
I assure you, the rest of the world will be better off. Most of the worlds population (I think this is fair to say, at least in absolute numbers, not GDP) does not hold the US in very high regard. Many of the innovations of the last decade or two have not made most people’s life’s better, _especially_ from tech. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions, but the world really does not need the US (my opinion).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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 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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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".
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.
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.
Trump is like a modern day Al Capone, but with dementia.
All those cancel-at-any-moment-in-time or ICE gunning down US citizens or "war versus Iran", next day no war, nope, it is war, no, it is not. Dementia ruling here. At the same time a few pocket away tons of money. This is like the chaos version of game, but ... stupid.
It's also interesting how quickly the USA becomes a de-facto country run by a mafia. Granted, this was obvious to many people for decades, and history shows that too, but it is fascinating how few internal blocks they have to a dementia king. It is like the ultimate pillage crew. How much money can they pillage? Anyone still remember Epstein by the way? How did he have that much money? Only two people organised sexy parties with the superrich? That story makes sense to anyone? Why is only Ghislaine in prison? Seems a bit bold to claim two people organised naughty parties involving underage people for the superrich.
Yeah, the USA has a few problems here ... thankfully dementia king is in bad health, but eyeliner-boy may simply take over without an election. Best democracy ever ...
Hasn’t the government always had final say on grants?
Also it really is sad to see “Hacker” News be “World News”. More Zig and less White House, please. Redditors have infiltrated. The rate of political posts have increased dramatically since 2016 election.
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 .
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.
More of the same at this point.
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.
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.
As long as you don't step out line of course.
>> What researcher in their right mind would move their research and their future to the USA to join this clown rodeo?
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.
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.
The Chairman will have the final say
Do you mean zombie-homelander?
Literally everything the current administration has claimed was going on in academia and research and government more generally is actually what they wanted to impose.
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.
This is how everything has been. They are telling on themselves.
Election fraud, “The Swamp”, all of it. It was a roadmap.
Remember, every accusation is an admission. It's been proven time and time again with this admin.
Nah, it was going on before, for the same reasons, just not openly. You mispoke on that issue? No grant. You were of the wrong political perssuassion? No grant. Hurt the feelings of X group? No grant.
These just make it more fixed it into rules as opposed to doing it with plausible deniability like before.
A law which will be used from the opposite side just as well, as soon as the power switches hands again.
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.
>"Today’s administration is formalizing Soviet-style political reviews of science."
He who kills the dragon becomes one.
"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?
Those two situations are different.
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.
Ever served on an NSF panel?
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.
Whether knowingly or unknowingly, your post is factually wrong.
> A law which will be used from the opposite side just as well, as soon as the power switches hands again.
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.
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.
You’re thinking tactically.
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.
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 sad outrage noises. This is a very unserious party in the face of a very serious political problem.
> That court will live for many years.
Fuck 'em, pack the court.
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.
Option C is, yknow, pass law (and ratify amendments) s.t. the interpretive power of the court is less of a factor
As for B. Yes definitely. That's a massive improvement over letting the Republicans be the arbiters for the rest of our lives.
Ya, I think the only way out is to just split the country in two. The red states can go their own way without massive subsidies from the blue states.
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.
It was quite overt before as well. There was a section in grant applications, broader impacts, where you literally had to describe how your research would, amongst other things "[broaden the] participation of underrepresented groups". [1] As if seeking out the best of the best to collaborate with, independent of their checkboxes, was somehow undesirable. It's the nature of relying on government programs and funding - you become subject to the whims of politicians.
[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/funding/information/dcl-broader-impacts/...
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.
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.
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.
In my country white males actually started to believe in their own bullshit so they let a little Jewish girl take the medical exam as a joke.
They immediately regretted it but the results were already printed in the newspapers. The rest as they say is history.
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.
> "[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.
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.
Ask any scientists, and you will find that no, grants weren’t being cancelled randomly, and no, scientists were living in fear of that.
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?
its apples and ebola
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
> all viewpoints covered from you populace
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.
But the research becomes how much coffee can someone drink before it's unhealthy type studies.
The study you mention can be founded with pen and paper. No expensive trials or heavy equipment or team needed.
> 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.
> The best of the best involves people from underrepresented groups
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.
It’s much cleaner now. “How does your work financially benefit the principal or his cronies? Dude, are you buying a Dell?”
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.
During the Biden administration, it was important to spice up your application with words like "diversity". Now it's the opposite. I wish we could get beyond it, but for now I wish people would quite pretending that this kind of thing hasn't happened before.
Here's a more concise summary of the proposed changes: https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-change...
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.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/most-important-problem.asp...
The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313687
If you want to stay a scientist, you have to emigrate. The art of continually licking the right asses to keep funding going is not science.
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.
On a gdp basis, which heavily favours the US, the US is not even the top dog. It's just above Belgium and below South Korea.
Absolute values would favor the US, not a percent of gdp.
> Emigrate where? And why do you assume that the country you're gonna emigrate to will have the funds necessay to fund the research?
If the choice is between $0 in the US and >$0 someplace else, you emigrate to >$0 if you want to continue your research.
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.
I wonder where you suggest researchers go that is both granting funding and not attaching similar or more stringent strings to the money?
Well, for most "someplace else", the choice is =$0 too.
You don't think the rest of the world is doing funded research?
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.
>I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that
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.
1/10th?
US: $848B (2024)
EU: $508B (2024)
---
UK: $102B (2023)
Switzerland: $22B (2023)
Norway: $8.2B (2024)
OECD "Gross domestic spending on R&D"
"R&D" is not the same as "grants supporting fundamental science."
Europe.
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.
That number is for the United States, not the United States government
> USG spends over $900 Billion every year
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 think his main point was that the art of continually licking the right asses to keep funding going is not science.
Licking asses to get grants has been the full time job of tenured faculty for decades. Peer review just means they lick each other’s asses.
the US used to spend. Now borligarchs decide.
Does the US spend that much anymore? How much are you willing to compromise the integrity of your research to get your slice of what’s left?
Hasn’t academia always been that way?
It was better not perfect but there is value even just in keeping up the pretense
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.
My point wasn’t bias but butt kissing. There is always butt kissing, and academia has some of the worst petty politics.
Yes but in ways whose solutions admit some level of creativity or ingenuity
Boots. Licking boots.
These boots are made for walking!
There is a lot of private funding available with a broad range of targets and boundaries.
If we aren't funding progress with our tax dollars then what are we even doing?
I don't think China needs the kind of scientists disproportionately affected by the bad orange man's vendetta.
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.
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”…
You mean Vaccine researchers? Or renewable energy researchers?
oh, don't be coy.
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/NSF-Terminated-Award...
I wouldn't even need to cherry pick.
Some of those titles look so satirical it's difficult to believe they're real:
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.
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?
It’s sad to watch my country commit suicide. Not only will my compatriots be poorer for it, but the rest of the world will be too.
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.
You can't make this up.
Tell that to the people of Alabama who just had their primary election results cancelled
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.
Russia is a de-jure democracy, just like the US. In fact I'm not sure what difference there is between them.
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" ;)
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.
Good hyperbole
It remains to be seen whether this is just the start of a 30 year run. Although with Trumps health I don’t think he will make it that long.
We are just on a slightly different timeline. I guess we are lucky that our current leader is an incredibly unhealthy 80 year old.
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.)
> One big difference is that the US has been led by four different people since 2000 instead of one.
But those four puppets served the same ruling class interests, and they manufactured consent for each other the whole time.
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?
I assure you, the rest of the world will be better off. Most of the worlds population (I think this is fair to say, at least in absolute numbers, not GDP) does not hold the US in very high regard. Many of the innovations of the last decade or two have not made most people’s life’s better, _especially_ from tech. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions, but the world really does not need the US (my opinion).
Yes and no. I think the current Ebola outbreak would not be happening if the US was still committed to global health.
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.
NSFL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XasTcDsDfMg
USAID was, among many other things, working on educating folks about this.
Education, cultural sensitivity, etc. are health issues.
The world should be more independent and self sufficient. It will be better in the long run.
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.
You mean the 17th ebola outbreak in the DRC?
U.S. government funding generates a lot of scientific and medical breakthroughs outside of what people on this forum would call “tech”.
So the US won the cold war and eventually decided to emulate their defeated opponent. It's quite a character arch.
It looks like at the moment Russia is winning in the end: Links between Trump associates and Russian officials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
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.
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.
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?
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/college-endowment-tax...
> would people here actually support or help design a 501(c)(3)-style vehicle for public-benefit science and technology funding?
Why a hypothetical? Plenty of options available to donate to or to contribute otherwise. Not help built it, help grow and maintain it.
> 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 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.
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.
Then you would just fake your results in order to steal someone's grant
Pssht - Let them fight..
> “The document would also ban…block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.”
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/
Useless russian-troll-style argument:
- 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.
> "Useless russian-troll-style argument"
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.
So...as a scientist, I can lose my funding if I exercise my free speech and publicly disagree with Trump?
What is this, North Korea?
>What is this, North Korea? Given how mind-numbingly servile the ruling party is to their autocrat, it sure looks like North Korea sometimes.
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.
Ahh, so I should study vaccines and autism and tylenol
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.
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.”
if the Dems don't also take back the Senate, this country is done
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
Ever notice how there really always just enough Democrats in the senate to tank a progressive bill? The Senate needs to go honestly.
I'm so tired of this guy
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".
It is all fascinating to me.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331511
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.
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.
A friend in a prestigious European university said that applications were up in basically all fields
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.
Win win for Europe and the USA, both get what they want.
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.
They were polled, on election day. Most Americans want this, or didn't care enough to stop it. Potato, potahto.
This idea that the only way a citizen can disagree what their government is doing is by voting on election day needs to die.
It's the same old "vote with your dollar/feet" solecism, applied to politics.
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.
Doesn't change the fact that the US voted for this.
Were they? I thought they also voted for the "No new wars" guys. Oh wait
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.
That’s why they put on such a big parade for him. Trump is essentially the fulfillment of their strategy, and is easily played by stroking his ego
if you wait by the river long enough the bodies of your enemies will float by
Remember when the director of NIH, an unlicensed MD, lied to congress two months ago and swore the award letters were coming? I do.
Trump is like a modern day Al Capone, but with dementia.
All those cancel-at-any-moment-in-time or ICE gunning down US citizens or "war versus Iran", next day no war, nope, it is war, no, it is not. Dementia ruling here. At the same time a few pocket away tons of money. This is like the chaos version of game, but ... stupid.
It's also interesting how quickly the USA becomes a de-facto country run by a mafia. Granted, this was obvious to many people for decades, and history shows that too, but it is fascinating how few internal blocks they have to a dementia king. It is like the ultimate pillage crew. How much money can they pillage? Anyone still remember Epstein by the way? How did he have that much money? Only two people organised sexy parties with the superrich? That story makes sense to anyone? Why is only Ghislaine in prison? Seems a bit bold to claim two people organised naughty parties involving underage people for the superrich.
Yeah, the USA has a few problems here ... thankfully dementia king is in bad health, but eyeliner-boy may simply take over without an election. Best democracy ever ...
Hasn’t the government always had final say on grants?
Also it really is sad to see “Hacker” News be “World News”. More Zig and less White House, please. Redditors have infiltrated. The rate of political posts have increased dramatically since 2016 election.
Very sad to see Hacker News discussing science funding. This has nothing to do with the hacker ethos of maximizing corporate profit.
Yeah it is as if this website is by a VC.
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
I have been here longer than you. I just rotate accounts after around 1000 karma (this account will be thrown away too soon)
If that's the case how are you confused by the content in HN front-page?
I am not confused. Sad. Go analyze the front pages for yourself with llm, it is becoming more political.
Wouldn't it be great if our leadership wasn't so batshit crazy and we could just talk about the latest update to the coolest new framework?
My Canadian girlfriend, who’s totally real, by the way, believes you.
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.
True, but that is democracy for you.
It sure was.
I think Mike Masnick said it best here:
> " 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.
Places like HN don't necessarily become political of their own choice. Policy is forced on them, so they can no longer avoid it.
> 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.
I will take an invite
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 .
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.
Could oversight like this lead to politics overriding science?
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.
The old way is a magnet pulling everything toward the industrial military consumer complex.
This new direction turns the magnet around and pushes away everything else.