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Comment by avs733 | Hacker News Reader

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I’m an academic scientist part of a really large government funded research grant that employs hundreds of people. Last time, we had to fire half our staff immediately right up front because they said they were cutting our funding. They ended up not cutting our funding at all, but we had already fired everyone so it was lose lose- the Government spent the money but the research couldn’t be done. Just plain bad leadership.

Where did the money go then?

At the very least, some went to unemployment benefits, I’d expect.

We hired new people with less experience and restarted the projects, but in a lot of cases the projects were set back years with no reduction in the cost.

Sounds like bad leadership on the part of your project. To outsiders that don’t understand the details why fire people before the actual budget cuts?

It was the policy of the granting federal agency- it was not our choice, we had to immediately start operating on the president's proposed low budget in case it were to pass, rather than spend money that might never exist.

This happened because Trump's administration essentially copy and pasted Heritage Foundation materials rather than carefully think through a realistic budget.

Here’s another example: would you start building a house today knowing the price of every input material might jump 20% to 200%?

It's even worse than that: it's more like buying unrefundable materials to build a house today on an account/invoice, knowing you will likely be unemployed before the bill comes due, but after the materials are delivered. You're spending money up front that you don't have, and may never have.

If you spend full budget for the first half of the fiscal year, but a final budget gets passed later that cuts your budget in half- you get no remaining money for the year, and then end up firing everyone, instead of half. This is why the federal agencies have the policy of immediately acting on the lowest proposed budget, instead of waiting to see what happens.

I've had two grants in a row get killed for political reasons, and a third is on the chopping block. What really kills me is that we get through the unpleasant, unproductive scaling up part, are about to hit our stride, and then...gone.

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