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.
This cuts both ways: grants are more valuable as political favors when they are immune to cancellation, and harder to terminate when their value is objectively established.
Besides the brutal impact on those already invested in the American research community, this is one more nail in the coffin when it comes to competing for new talent. What researcher in their right mind would move their research and their future to the USA to join this clown rodeo?
It is unbelievable to watch my country give up its most unfair (and yet mostly positive) advantage -- a nearly free option on the top talent of the entire planet. Here's hoping that the increasingly multipolar research world can find ways to be even more efficient in creating new knowledge.
Canada has a fairly tough points system around their immigration doesn't it? Lone, high income developers are what it seems the system is made to attract, but a whole family?
With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.
Saudi Arabia or UAE maybe, but these don't even try to pretend to be socially and politically liberal.
> With a few exceptions like Switzerland, American levels of compensation for highly qualified people just can't be matched anywhere in the Western world.
Gross compensation yes. But if you begin deducting stuff like the absurd American housing costs, private healthcare, saving up for deductibles, the need to own, insure, fuel and maintain a car to do everything because almost nothing is accessible by public transport, retirement savings, everyday stuff such as restaurants being made much more expensive than what's on the paper because of mandatory tipping, saving up for your children's academic degree while paying off your own student debt, hell saving up for having a child (just the birth will be 20k out of pocket [1]), saving up for times of un(der)employment... suddenly most of Europe becomes pretty affordable if you are not on FAANG levels of compensation.
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.
> "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.
The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".
Well the current administration has about 2.5 years to go, and depending on mid-terms they may spend the last two years of that occupied with impeachments and complete legislative gridlock in addition to the normal lame-duck loss of power. So we'll see what comes next.
This is a lesson I've learned over thirty years. If the GOP says "the Democrats are doing X" then you can be assured the winning Republican plans to do X (or already has.) It inoculates them. Crushing academic free speech is just one of several X's.
If someone is lying about what someone else did, it’s often either what they are doing or plan to do. It’s true in most situations and administrations, but objectively worse in the current. (Ignoring the whole marginalized vs anti-DEI arguments, which I consider SOP for a new administration with new goals.)
As well, any new rulings or laws that are designed to expire right before an election are almost always the mechanisms used for those abuses claimed as being perpetrated by others. And the number of things designed this way seem to be stacking up relatively quickly.
The reasoning is quite straightforward, “I want to make sure you can’t do the things I was just doing to you.” Otherwise there wouldn’t be a reason for policies that are good for everyone to expire at the end of a presidential term.
You did exactly what GP was commenting on - conflating something that happened occasionally in the past with policy that mandates it should happen every time today.
Yes, grants were given and revoked for political purposes in the past.
But what percentage of grant proposals were reviewed by an appointed political officer whose sole job was to screen out wrongthink? It did happen, but it was ad hoc and amateur. Today’s administration is formalizing Soviet-style political reviews of science.
It’s scary, and it’s a mistake to hold up occasional (but serious!) mistakes from the past to justify systematic evil today.
"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.
> 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.
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.
They joined Republicans in limiting presidential power after Watergate. Granted, these limitations usually come after gross abuses. But these are gross abuses, and there's no reason to think they won't get grosser.
It seems to me that the right wingers have a pretty detailed strategy as you can see with Project 2025. I don’t see anything similar on the left wing. I think it’s pretty crazy that even with the current chaos the democrats still aren’t able to craft a coherent message why people should vote FOR them instead of just voting against the republicans. They look purely reactive. No clear message on health care, no message on affordability. Just nothing. And on the local level the message seems to be “have sympathy for the guy who broke your car window and popped in your yard”.
Also ignore all the obvious unabridgeable cultural differences like the non stop calling indian scammers harassing your parents. Reality is the best vaccacine to alot of ideology. The cofabulations to new wrongs about ancient wrongs they do nothing but advocate for the right.
> It seems to me that the right wingers have a pretty detailed strategy as you can see with Project 2025. I don’t see anything similar on the left wing. I think it’s pretty crazy that even with the current chaos the democrats still aren’t able to craft a coherent message why people should vote FOR them
This is the worst part. The Democrats have nothing but outrage and protest. They don’t have a written Democrat Project 2029. Their action plan is as thin as a Reddit post.
The right spent decades working on their strategy, who to target/convert, how to do it, what they would do once in power, and how quickly: and they wrote it down. What the fuck are the Democrats doing? Holding little signs up in protest in Congress and having little press conferences where they make meek outrage noises. This is a very unserious party in the face of a very serious political problem.
A) this court has a number of originalists, more likely to reject grabs for power than more progressive judges. There's worse things than a court that tries to adhere to the constitution when the executive branch and Congress both routinely do not.
B) do you really want to get to a place where the arbiters get politically reset and degraded every time the pendulum swings? This is the equivalent of a courtroom where a defendant or plaintiff can threaten to fire the judge or add their cousin as a co-judge.
I strongly recommend everyone listen & consider Jamelle Bouie's The Supreme Court is Corrupt. This is What We Can Do About It.https://youtu.be/hY279-A2fC4
The supreme court had a very limited role originally. And it's only by grants of Congress that they are allowed the staff, the ability to hear what cases they want to, and assorted other privileges. Beyond just packing the court, Congress could do a ton to rescind the power of these corrupt fiends who've gotten so far at tearing down the United States & gutting our nation, as they and their Leonard Leo/Federalist Society foes of America have lusted for for so long.
It's not just the Supreme Court either. Jamelle also effectively addresses so much of the incredibly vulgar court/judge shopping that makes a single judge North District of Texas such an incredibly popular and active venue, a political powerhouse that reliably will undo anything Federalist Society foes of America & government dislike. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-...
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.
If filling those boxes was so easy, you won't have issues filling up republican boxes with content they want to hear to get funding, right?
That's what happens when academia politicizes themselves - they become part of the game. And that means begging for scraps of who ever is currently on the top.
It's horrible... but you said yourself - you just need to fill some boxes correctly.
I would say this is exactly where you want that kind of policy. At the bottom, where you’re cultivating what will end up at the top. You want the diversity of ideas for exactly the reasons you stated.
People get upset as though this policy is dictating that a minority from the corner of the earth with no meaningful experience is going to be mandated into the role of heart surgeon or airplane pilot as well. That’s not how this works. However, those roles themselves stand to benefit from the diversified cultivation at the bottom of the stack, eventually.
Even very intelligent people seem to think inclusive policies mean that incompetent people will be promoted in private industry or government, but frankly, I never witnessed that to any abnormal degree until the people decrying it the most ended up in power. A game show host as president. A Fox News anchor as secretary of war. I can only keep a straight face because I’m so jaded by it.
The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical to punishing people for having a different set of implicitly unwanted checkboxes. You are trying to combat discrimination by engaging in discrimination. Discrimination is discrimination, even if well intended.
And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.
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.
> "[broaden the] participation of underrepresented groups". [1] As if seeking out the best of the best to collaborate with... was somehow undesirable.
Are those mutually exclusive? I know that's a common argument, but it doesn't track to me. Finding the diamonds in the rough in underrepresented groups is part of finding the best of the best to collaborate with.
You are misreading how Broader Impacts (BI) works. From your link:
> Some examples that illustrate contributions in each of the five areas are given below. Proposals need not address all of these areas, and PIs are advised to focus on those areas in which they are well prepared to make meaningful contributions.
"Broadening participation of underrepresented groups" is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it. I had proposals funded that focused on workforce development, for example. I saw others focus on science communication to the public (now forbidden in the memo this post is about!).
Proposals that passed grant panels were first and foremost always those that would great science. At ~10:1 oversubscription rates or more, proposals don't pass without it. The BI component needed to be credible but could be handled lots of ways.
Fundamentally, Congress recognized when defining BI as a component for merit review in the NSF that fundamental science only pays off in the long term. BI is a pragmatic choice to ensure that grants also yield near-term benefits to society as well.
>is only one of the five areas, and no proposal was required to use it.
Irrespective of whatever was going on in academia I take issue with this. Everyone who has a) a double digit number of brain cells b) has ever dealt with government approval in any capacity c) is't just a straight up liar knows that if the requirements set forth by a panel with discretionary authority says to do items 1-5 that you will not be approved without doing all of them, (unless of course you have the right last name or connections).
If you don't believe me watch any local board's meetings for the next 6mo and research everyone who comes before it after finding what outcome they got.
This has nothing to do with academia, DEI or what the other items on the list of requirements were. This is just how the sausage is made. It's all the same steps even if some factories are a little dirtier than others. So yeah, I 100% believe that if someone unconnected didn't pay the right lip service to the right things in every single one of the items in the list they would not get the outcome they wanted even if theoretically their stuff could have been approved with only 4/5 boxes checked. The approvers are not going to stick their necks out like that with no reason.
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.
You’re straw-manning your own misconception of the reason for inclusivity, not the reason I gave.
Inspiring specific groups to follow a career path by showing them people on that path is “representation” not inclusivity. Representation matters because it’s easier (not impossible, as you suggest the argument is) to see yourself e.g. as a nurse or a teacher if you have seen male nurses or teachers succeeding.
Representation matters, but not nearly as much as the opposite side of things - who gets opportunities. Which is what I was talking about.
Btw one of the major groups that have benefitted from the dreaded “DEI” in universities has been white men. They are an under-represented group in many post-secondary settings.
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.
I don't think any practicing scientist of any political persuasion will think these are good for science.
Science progresses by sharing knowledge openly and publicly, so others can evaluate it, criticize it, and build on it. These severe restrictions on collaboration, publication, and public communication will damage science's naturally open, merit-based culture.
We will all suffer due to lost discoveries--maybe not today, but over years and decades.
Why does science need to be through the government? Irrespective of the proposal, science research is just as open after this change as before so long as it's funded by private citizens who can control the channels through which they donate to this work.
On the other hand, if we can't get private citizens to donate to science research, then they are not likely to vote for it either--polls don't register much of a concern from the average citizen*. I don't think most of us want to be under a dictator or go back to having a king.
That means the only practical option is to act of our own volition and support science through vocal advocacy and private money. In this way, we can each donate to the research we care about the most with maximum academic freedom.
It was realized some time ago that having citizens decide to "donate to the research we care about" was not the most efficient way to get the most important research done. So we switched to a system where we pool our resources (taxes), and then use a somewhat complex process (described in TFA) to decide how to allocate them to possible research.
Everyone knows that many things that are not directly beneficial to society would go unfunded because humans optimize for what’s around them, and things that are self-interested.
There isn’t even alignment. One person wants to fund science, the other wants to fund high speed rail, the other wants farm subsidies, one wants social security and the other wants the military. Government balances all of that together. Of course people will make value judgements about their pet interests and declare the other aspects to be better funded separately.
>Private citizen fund scientific research [under threat of prison or deadly force.]
I mean I'm not inherently opposed to laws or government, but I think a lot of people need to be more measured and considerate of what they are using tax money for when it is being taken from their fellow citizens at gunpoint.
I agree. This administration is ground zero for mismanagement of funds and outright corruption. Just look at the director of the FBI and former secretary of DHS. Both have used and continue to use tax payer money for personal use. It should make every tax payer livid.
It does make me livid, just as much as the waste of taxpayer money on pointless (and sometimes outright racist) research here makes me livid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335722
Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.
ignoring a gratuitous reference to use of force, absolutely. having a discussion as society about what we are funding is in fact democracy. sadly there is an issue in the sciences in that lay people may have difficulty seeing the benefit of connecting the dots. but we should try. and as flawed as it is, the adversarial system we have in the US is at least a forum for those discussion.
using grep to defund grants that contain words we don't like is the exact opposite of measured and considerate. so is punishing scientists for the sin of working for a 'woke' institution. in fact all this seems extremely punitive, and not in the spirit of optimizing outcomes for costs at all.
note that this policy explicitly removes the requirement to provide any kind of rationale. that sort of directly contradicts the notion that this is a measured discussion about priorities.
Private capital is good at funding research that is likely to provide a short-term return on investment. It's not so good at funding basic research, where most of the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs come from. These provide a huge return on investment, but it nets out to society at large on time scales of decades or centuries.
Contrary to what you said, there is actually quite a bit of private philanthropic funding for research, it's just that it's not evenly distributed. The vast majority of it seems to go to medical research, in particular cancer and Alzheimer's. That's obviously a good thing, but my point here is that we can't necessarily depend on private philanthropy to distribute funds optimally.
I'm generally a fan of Cato and a libertarian approach to economics, but I'm still not convinced that we should be spending zero public money on basic research. I would like to see a decent amount going into mathematics and theoretical physics for example, and I doubt those fields would stay afloat on donations.
Emigrate where? And why do you assume that the country you're gonna emigrate to will have the funds necessay to fund the research? US grants are the biggest and most generous in the world. I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that. Other option is China but as a foreigner, you will never get a grant there unless you work for someone else.
> I think the USG spends over $900 Billion every year. Europe spends about 1/10th of that
Do you mean that the EU spends 1/10th that, rather than Europe? Because France, Germany and the UK all spend €100-150bn each in grants depending on how you set your definition, and that’s atop the EU’s grant money.
Just eyeballing the figures across different countries, it looks like the USG distributes approximately the same amount in grants per capita as the EU & UK. Certainly not a 90% diff.
You're comparing the sum of those European countries to the US.
Scientists have two easy avenues if they are currently in the US, the US or their home country. Immigration to work in a foreign nation is not always easy and takes time.
I know scientists who want to move back home but can't because where they are from doesn't have funding for the research they do. Even with the uncertain federal funding it's still more viable than many places around the world.
Any country that doesn't openly say that it will bar funding to grant applications that include any word from a given list of words. Which, of the countries on this planet, is quite a few.
Interestingly, if the US stopped spending you’d need the top 17 remaining countries to double their spending to absorb the American science industry. Doubling is a tall order and seventeen is a large number. Most likely fewer scientists will find employment in government funded academia if this came to be.
Europe is the obvious answer. As others have posted, your numbers here are way off. And on the flip side, there's now some major programs actively encouraging this with special grants, support, relocation bonuses: e.g. ATRAE in Spain, EURAXESS, "Choose Europe For Science", Max Planck Transatlantic Programme.
Generally, academia has always had a measure of bias to it. However the bias was never so blatant and never so against producing an environment where good research could feasibly be created. The vast majority of research is non political increments of existing non political increments where the main conflicts are personal beefs among flawed individual PIs and maybe being asked what fig leaf one offers to ensure that the funding doesn’t just go to a bunch of white wealthy straight men. Once you have funding you can be set for years to focus on your work, assuming you don’t do something dumb like make sexist or racist remarks, and even then your funding is generally secure you just might not get a new round 3 years later(probably will though because controversies die pretty fast).
I know a lot of hay and media exists about how academia is yadda yadda biased and anti intellectual. But of course a lot of that is cherry picked examples of controversial figures or individual missteps among individual institutions. This is a bit like taking a classroom with one rowdy asshole and then declaring the whole school must use physical violence as discipline from now on.
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?
Appears it didn't receive any funds since 2022 after being extended for years (so your "daddy" is Biden) and wouldn't get any more money so was canceled to get it off the books.
If anything this shows the list includes regular grants that were canceled for normal reasons, which further demonstrates the cuts were not of real science.
Well it could be worse because in the end it's still a democracy, for how long that's yet to be seen.
Look at Russia, they jumped off a cliff to protect a regime from democracy, and people are checked out - they take no accountability and still act confused of why Russia is being despised - all while accelerating economic and demographic decline with more than one million casualties in a special 3 day military operation.
Democracy is about more than elections. Having a functioning public sphere, justice system, and media are all part of it too. From a Northern European perspective, the US hasn't been a functioning democracy for quite a while now — it's just becoming more and more obvious now that the republicans have stopped even pretending those principles and institutions are important.
The flagrant corruption and voter suppression efforts underway at the moment make the next 2-3 years the final chance to bring it back from the brink. That doesn't just mean a Democrat winning. It means an actual democrat (lowercase) winning and building a coalition to repair what has been broken. I don't personally think that looks very likely, but I hope for all our sakes it can happen.
Just this week, the federal court that originally had the case ruled that the gerrymandered map was unconstitutional, using a theory totally separate from what the Supreme Court used to strike down the original ruling. So democracy's still got a little life in it.
Captain Obvious here, but the number of defenestrations (or generally mysterious "suicides" of people not agreeing enough with the government) is much higher in Russia than in the US.
In the US you might get your funds cancelled, in Russia you'll get your life cancelled instead - and not in the metaphorical sense.
Also as incompetent as the current US government is, the incompetence of the Russian government is on a whole different level (the "3 days to Kyiv" are taking longer than the whole "Great Patriotic War").
> Russia is a de-jure democracy
As is North Korea, it must be even more democratic than the rest of the world because it calls itself "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)
They have a head start on you, but you're catching up quickly! Worth remembering they have been shooting peaceful protestors recently in the US too.
Trump and Hegseth are explicit in their admiration for Putin and Xi. So being technically right here is largely to miss the point. The trajectory the US is on is pretty clear.
USA has had 3 different presidents from opposing parties just in the last 15 years. Putin hasn't allowed a challenger in nearly 30 years and he actively bans them, imprisons them, or kills them. It's a big difference.
> I'm not sure what difference there is between them.
One big difference is that the US has been led by four different people since 2000 instead of one. Another big difference is that it's legal for Americans to insult political leaders, wish bad things upon them, or demand an end to their stupid wars.
If you weren't aware of these differences, I'd encourage you to radically change your media diet; there are unfortunately many outlets which find it advantageous to exaggerate how bad the US is and deemphasize how bad dictatorships are. (Some are paid Russian propaganda, I've seen a shocking number of people send me RT links as though they're a legitimate news source.)
What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"? I'm familiar with the Noam Chomsky book Manufacturing Consent, but this book was about the dynamics that shape coverage decisions in mass media, not some concrete process which Person X could perform "for" Person Y.
I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests. If the funding rules for scientific grants are changing, and defenders of the old rules argue that this is a terrible change that will cause huge problems, how can it be that both the old rules and the new rules serve the same interests?
> What do you mean by "manufactured consent for each other the whole time"?
> I also struggle to see how it can be that different Presidents with often directly contradictory policies could both be serving the same ruling class interests.
Using the polarizing topic of COVID (whose risks remain in 2026) as an example, we can answer both of your questions:
This can be applied to virtually any topic. The party of "good cop" and the party of "bad cop" promise no change from the status quo. Of course, anybody easily distracted by the culture wars will not see the commonality between both corporate parties, by design. These people see a close election and use that as "proof" we still have a functioning democracy.
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.
Musk: “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.”
“As of early February, the U.S. was not providing funding to support testing and port screenings in Uganda because of Trump's freeze on almost all U.S. foreign assistance.”
“Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team," says Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID's response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak.”
“As for the role of the CDC, Spencer says what its officials can do is limited by Trump's order that the CDC not communicate with WHO.”
How the Russian interests have taken over significantly invalidates the purpose and existence of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
But then again, President Biden's administration had multiple grounds to prosecute Trump for crimes committed, whether the attempted coup or espionage with top secret documents or Epstein, and they just did not make it happen in a way that had any effect.
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?
- 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.
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.
how this this reconcile with the general conservative glee over the defeat of the Chevron defence? wasn't the rationale there that bureaucrats shouldn't be deciding on policy without consulting congress? Roberts even made a little speech about how whipsawing policy back and forth every 4 years wasn't helping anyone.
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.
> 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).
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.”
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.
No it's worse than that. Your grant application must be actively aligned with their political agenda. If you are polite, deferential and apolitical but you want to study climate change you will be rejected.
And gas stoves, why wind turbines are bad for golf courses, the effects of nuclear weapons on hurricanes, the favorability decline of Robert E Lee, invisibility for stealth fighters, the rapid death of the US farmer due to solar panels, and the impact of tariffs on consumer prices...
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.
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".
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.