NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders
science.org
science.org
I will leave the question of whether this is constitutional to other folks. I will even leave aside the question of whether we can afford to defund science in our current crazy geopolitical environment. The real point here is that this is just plain wrong.
But obviously the new administration is not interested in any sort of nuanced debate, but rather ideological purge.
I would be happy to spend time mentoring URM, etc. But it'd work a lot better if others managed such a program, thought about how to attract them, etc. Specialization is good.
Or just have pay for decent, functional K-12 schools in non-rich districts without housing bubbles?
And how do you find out which programs successfully do that without studying them?
The magic of "just" in a suggestion I guess.
they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o
> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."
Keeping biases in check is a daily exercise. I am aware of many of my own biases and I have to continuously fight back. There are people whose company I enjoy more than others, but I can't let that interfere with my professional judgment.
Since apparently there's no point in testing them for "aptitude" or we don't know how to do so, it makes sense to have other criteria such as broadening participation.
Or, you know, enrol the ones who'd be better on your sports teams, or who look prettier for prospectus photos, or something - just don't fool yourself that you care about some sort of pre-existing "talent".
1- NSF budget is about 10 billions, I always had in mind that it is much more. That's about 0.17% of the total federal budget. If we include DOE R&D funding and NIH we will get to 1%. This is the funding for most of research in science in the US. Seems like not a great area to achieve huge reduction in deficit.
2- Even if we ignore the whole point of DEI and say that we need to end support for some of the projects. You do take your time and evaluate projects that needs to take action. You don't stop all the funding and pause critical support for projects and cause huge problems on medium and long term. And it also hurt the reputation of the country and its competitiveness.
3- The current NSF director was actually appointed by the current setting president in his first term.
The instability this has created has me looking to leave academia as quickly as possible; I'm sure others in similar situations are having the same thoughts. This has wreaked havoc on all of academia.
Sorry to hear that this happened to you. I hope they will provide some way to sort this out soon.
If the dominant ideology changes, it should only affect future grants, not current grants. Ideally, grants that have already been submitted or are close to submission should be evaluated according to the old rules. Otherwise a lot of time and effort will go to waste.
China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
> China looks at America and shows its citizens what an alternative fate could be, and it works.
Not really though. Still, around ~10k PhDs from China get green cards.
I am not sure if it can be quantified.
What about your allies?
GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts Review Criterion to achieve the following goals: (1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United States. (2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce. (3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. (4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry. (5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher development. (6) Improved undergraduate STEM education. (7) Increased public scientific literacy. (8) Increased national security.
That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.
An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.
Institutional Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion - Using no more than one paragraph, describe indicators of institutional commitment to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) within the awardee/subawardee institution(s).
[1] https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/mri-major-research...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
This is an absolutely wild statement, because my experience has been the complete opposite. I've seen a zillion times where a straight white guy was passed over specifically to achieve DEI goals.
I don't think the pro-DEI crowd understands how discriminatory DEI initiatives became in many institutions and how that's the root of the anti-DEI backlash.
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the best X (candidate, project, company, whatever) get rejected because they were unacceptably white and male, so that the job/grant/contract could go to a DEI candidate instead.
Heck, I was on an interview committee where the recruiters and hiring manager openly admitted they weren't interviewing male candidates, and we spent 3 months interviewing 100% of female candidates who applied while hundreds of male applicants got ghosted. That one was more explicit than most, but the same phenomenon has been happening for years at every layer of academia, business and government.
Regardless of which ethnic group, sexual orientation, nationality, etc. I belong to, if I want to get an NSF grant, I have to fill out certain paperwork. And, apparently, it’s expected that I would write how my proposal will make the world a better place based on how it impacts DEI factors. The comment is that it doesn’t actually matter what I say there, since everybody says the same thing. There’s never a case where the NSF isn’t sure about whether to grant funds, and then decides that the way one project impacts DEI makes it better than another project.
For example, I just started in the 90s and worked in tech but I never heard an HR person or hiring manager say “we’re only going to interview applicants of a majority race” but after initiatives, it became common to hear this toward an underrepresented race or gender.
I want a diverse workforce. But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry. I think it’s better to work on systemic fixes (more graduates, more training programs, etc).
Two things can be bad at the same time: implicit racism then and now; explicit racism just now.
It's also illegal under the Civil Rights Act.
This really isn't quite the universal experience many in this crowd seem to make it out to be.
Without DEI measures (as implemented by many American institutions in recent years) such decisions would be more meritocratic.
There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.
And it tends to lead to a specific result: A number of slots are assigned for each group but then the set of people with rich parents are disproportionately from one group, so nepotism fills all of that group's slots. Then you get a 0% reduction in nepotism and instead the people without rich parents, but from the same demographic group, are the ones excluded. Which quite justifiably makes them mad.
Are you certain that "DEI programs" (which themselves are a wide range of things, from explicit preferences to hire veterans in US Government jobs to as described ineffective NSF rigamarole) are causing overall less meritocracy, or is it just a particularly visible form, some less qualified black people are getting in instead of equally unqualified white people, and that's notable, while the well qualified folks who get in but wouldn't be considered otherwise aren't noticed because they don't make the news.
Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".
I'm not accusing you personally of doing this, but equating discrimination with lowered standards is a common tactic to try and stigmatize the acknowledgement of discriminatory DEI practices.
Nothing more than feudalism 2.0
Free speech if you're a billionaire.
I think the news is less that a branch of the executive is complying with executive branch policy, and more that it’s surprising how much of the federal government’s actions are based not in the law and the Constitution, but rather in policy. One man almost sixty years ago creates a policy with a stroke of a pen, and it effectively becomes law; another now removes it with a stroke of a different pen. If the latter is a problem, surely the former was too; if the former was not a problem, then why is the latter?
Speaking of the Constitution, what is the Constitutional basis for this large structure of federal funding for the sciences? Nothing in Article I, Section 8 appears to cover it: the encouragement of science appears to be limited to copyright and patent monopolies.
This is like saying I read the first sentence of the wikipedia article and it doesn't mention something so it must not exist.
Congress authorized it in 1950; it's extremely visible. [1]
> The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is authorized and governed by the "National Science Foundation Act of 1950," as amended, as well as other statutes authorizing NSF activities and making appropriations to the agency.
The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.
Section 7 [2] lets them write laws as well as Section 8 [4] . Section 8 aslo lets them pay for it [3].
[1]: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...
[2]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[3]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
[4]: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-1/#ar...
The Constitution is a collection of statements and they collectively have implications. All of Euclidean geometry is based off of 5 statements. That the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say you can have a Department of the Air Force does not imply having one is unconstitutional.
Many Christians believe in the holy trinity despite that phrase appearing nowhere in the Bible.
Always be skeptical when someone defends only the things they strongly believe in. That goes both ways, for the left and right.
This is with the previous administration was also doing. You were required to buy into the DEI ideology, prove your loyalty to the new religion.
What has been your personal experience with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies in employment?
Mine has been that I watched a few videos that basically said: don't hit on people at work, don't mock people for disabilities, and don't treat people as lesser based on physical attributes.
In other words, don't be an asshole to people at work.
The only people I've seen given preferential treatment at work have been those who suck up to the leadership to get promoted.
I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.
For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.
The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.
> For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation
And as a counterexample, STEM hiring experiments showed a 2:1 bias in favor women: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
Why do you say it is a fallacy when the E in DEI stands for the so called equity, which means exactly that. You seem to be describing equality, which is something that DEI was intended to supersede.
When you look at pre-Trump guidelines for FAA job applications, for example, there is an explicitly described preferential process for hiring from the favored groups.
Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.
There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter
...which shows a specific instance of the religion take hold at Evergreen State.
Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.
But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?
He was fired because he placed himself in a position where at least half the company would refuse to work with him.
The absolutely worst statements are the people who believe that the statement is an ideological litmus test. It never was, and it isn't.
These statements, to a one, are basic HR stuff: discuss your strategies and experiences to not be an asshole and ensure that the diverse people you manage (and they almost certainly are diverse) will be able to get along and work effectively under your management. Boring stuff.
People think its some sort of ideological purity test, write it as such, and get surprised when the statement is evaluated poorly.
If the people writing the calls wanted the same things as the people reviewing the submissions, they would say, "tell us about your experiences with normal HR tasks."
Additionally, I don't think there was an anti-China "smokescreen" used here. Anti-DEI was a central pillar of the Trump campaign, so this purge seems to be fully in line with what was stated explicitly for months in 2024.
Whatever a scientist happens to believe in, these changes would not imperil his ability to receive government funding. But in the previous system, if one felt that unconditional merit was the most fundamental factor in science (and refused to simply lie) he would have been found it much more difficult to secure funding.
This is not true. If I submit a project to study the large-scale effect of DEI policies in institutions, that will get rejected because "anti-DEI" is in the current government's idelogy, as written down in presidential orders.
They are not simply removing the previous ideology and leaving a void in place. There are no voids in power structures.
It does not sound like that. At least, not at the NSF, which is freezing funds until it's had an ideologically-driven purge.
The Office of Science seems to have a better approach, removing the need for the previous administration's PIER plan and ignoring any already submitted
That is literally the opposite of what the linked article claims. They aren't "stripping requirements" placed on funding, they're stripping the actual funds from existing grants, based on new requirements that just happen to be phrased along the lines of the ruling regime's political rhetoric.
Your Orwellian version only makes sense if you assume a priori that the funds were granted incorrectly, which again is sort of the opposite of what science is.
This is the significant part.
Woke ideology was always unpopular when put to the test in the court of public opinion and sometimes even law. Whether it's entertainment products that got reviewbombed for incorporating "diversity", illegal hiring/enrollment quotas that once existed to enforce "inclusion", or the replacing of the word "equality" with "equity" because people started catching on that what was touted as equality actually wasn't.
Now that we have a President (and by extension a party) who was elected to get rid of all that, promises to do so are being kept.
As a Japanese-American, I 300% voted for and support this. Everyone should be judged on merit and merit alone, not whether they have the right skin color, sex organs/preferences, disabilities, or illnesses.
I advise you read through the actual Executive Orders than some false propaganda material of at best questionable value.
What Trump is mandating with his EOs are a move back to judging people strictly by their merit, by their character. We are once again on the path to making Martin Luther King's dream a reality.
Here are the EOs with regards to the subject matter at hand:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/endi...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/refo...
>Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.
>Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.
----
>This Federal Hiring Plan shall: ... prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;
This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
To try to ensure that the people working on the project are selected fairly and on merit, rather than unfairly and on personal prejudice.
Anyhow it had nothing to do with the merit of the project or the team which were obviously already being evaluated. It was nothing but an unrelated ideological conformity test added as a requirement.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20230104150813/https://science.o...
Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.
Just thought I would recommend some reading about this: "The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?" by Michael Sandel.
Basically, think about what the longer-term, overarching effects on society would be in a perfectly-meritocratic society. It likely wouldn't be all unicorns and rainbows.
Here's a review about it: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2020/08/montage-michael-sand...
May not change your mind, but we should always try to expand it :)
The point of my question to the poster was whether they had been part of any such processes.
I do appreciate the point on merit, and have a richer view of it than I may have let on.
In other words a perfect meritocracy isn't Gattaca. It's just a place where your rise isn't going to be directly constrained by things outside of your control, like in Gattaca - being directly rejected because of one's DNA.
In a meritocracy a fool who finds and excels at a niche can thrive, while a genius who doesn't exert himself can languish.
Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.
The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to
- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement
- freeze federal aid across the board
- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI
- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America
- revoke birthright citizenship
Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.
To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.
But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.
No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.
The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.
Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?
A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]
When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".
If a grad student is funded on the project but gets pushed out because of toxic culture, discrimination, or some other kind of marginalization, then that is a waste of research funds and slows down research. Successful teams need to be able to work together effectively and mitigate conflicts. People are diverse, and conflicts are likely to arise because of this: anyone running a research team needs a plan to manage their team, just as they need a plan to manage their data. Its boring HR stuff that is necessary in a diverse society.
At least in a micromanagement situation, the PI might have submitted 3 candidates to a reviewer who would have picked one for them. But no.
Now to be fair, the project leads - I expect - usually have no appetite for all this nonsense and try to cut corners everywhere possible (most likely copy/pasting generic stuff for a start and justifying decisions rather then making the "wrong" ones since they still had an interest in the project achieving its goals) but this was still a waste of time and energy from a point of view of science achieved.
When I say "was", it probably still is because most of this current emergency change will be challenged in court and will need to be redone a couple times. So for now, this is MORE waste of time rather than less.
When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.
The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.
I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.
The Civil Rights Act is exclusively about equality of opportunity and requires affected employers hire without regard to race, religion, and other protected classes. So for instance universities using racial quotas was deemed unlawful precisely because of the Civil Rights Act.
DEI stuff was in a very different spirit that really ran against the ideals of the Civil Rights Act. For instance it compelled affected organizations to specifically endeavour to hire based on the race and other characteristics of applicants. It's not entirely clear to me why it wasn't tossed immediately as being in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
This part is foundational to the rest, and it's straightforwardly untrue. The government agency which most often enforces these two laws is called the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which remains active under the new administration; the new acting chair has given no indication that she intends to stop enforcing the Civil Rights Act or the ADA.
Don't we make movies of the times someone actually got noticed and was able to enrich our society through their merit?
Perhaps I am wrong.
One does not hope to get noticed - they strive to excel on their own or by bringing others in to help them.
Your merit is not what you might achieve, but what you do achieve.
Our constitutional republic is not merely "just blots of ink on paper" but rather alive and well.
Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.
Basically, we deserve it.
"Great" isn't how anyone will describe it once the second-order consequences land. (There won't be many who like it once the first-order consequences land.)
Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.
It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.
Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.
The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.
I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.
I do agree that this is a totally new paradigm, but I would call it more of a popular revolution than a "power/money grab".
I'd also characterize the last system (which you described perfectly btw) as corrupt and ineffective. The most non-political evidence I can offer is the observation that spending decisions only ever went one direction: more spending. This probably seems fair at the "dem vs gop" level but too the taxpayer it was more theft every year.
So this newly emerging system does appear more susceptible to corruption, so I totally agree with you there, but as a taxpayer I am very happy that someone is slowing down spending.
Federal spending went up during our current president's last administration (and down the following administration). It's almost certainly going up again this time. The deficit doubly so.
They’ve literally banned efforts to ensure research is free of discrimination. We’re in opposite world, or at least pretending to be.
It would be useful to show the comparison, rather than claim it. Could you be more specific about this, by at least providing the section that you read, or the EO references?
https://archives.federalregister.gov/issue_slice/1965/9/28/1...
I wonder how his approval will compare with his first term. His final approval rating is the lowest of any president ever: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...
We can count the billions that the government spends on science, period, through the NSF, DOE, DARPA, and NIH. Thus, the fraction spent on pushing ideology is certainly not "countless billions".
Did you miss the last 80 years of anti-communist, pro-capitalist, free-market propaganda? The american government has been the most powerful ideological force in the world for basically all of living memory.
In this case you had things like the Department of Energy requiring Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans to even apply for funding.
The two big differences I see is that that is a wholly inappropriate avenue for ideological enforcement, and that it's also exceptionally divisive.
Things are changing in modern times but historically free markets, capitalism, and so on were very widely shared values. The contemporary equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive. The government pushing it, and frequently in very inappropriate ways (the military also comes to mind) is just very weird.
> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive
Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:
- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.
- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.
- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.
- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.
You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...
Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.
> Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse
How do you make sure your hiring panel is diverse without having diversity quotas for it?
I understand that many people say this, but academics routinely understand government DEI initiatives to be racial quotas. See for example https://archive.is/So06G about the NIH FIRST program. I don't think that DEI is secretly aiming to cripple institutions, but I do think that its advocates genuinely feel racial balancing is a good idea and dissemble about this in contexts where it would be illegal.
Movies tend to exaggerate for a dramatic effect.
Yes, racism existed, segregation existed. The situation you described didn't happen. Katherine G Johnson simply used the bathroom for whites.
Why?
Because a homogenous culture of researchers is less effective.
Because you are not just doing research on a topic, you are also training the next generation of scientists and field experts.
And the implication that the old boys club of white dudes is intrinsically the best "meritocratic" outcome is ridiculous. The history of science is full of people who had to fight that norm and succeed despite it.
> This should greatly reduce the overall bureaucratic nonsense in science and help get back to science simply being science without imposing ideological conformity tests.
Sure, sure. Except for the part where they're also censoring any science topics deemed "woke", where all funding now has to meet the president's ideological conformity test on subject and staff as well.
White individuals are significantly under represented (and even more so in STEM) though it's not for any nefarious reason. Science has traditionally been merit > all. And lots of highly skilled individuals from China, India, and so on are pursuing education and work in the US, which makes the competition for these spots very different than a random sampling of Americans.
[1] - https://www.zippia.com/phd-researcher-jobs/demographics/
This is the case in biological sciences, for instance, the field I am in: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scissors-Diagram-Showing...
I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.
And it is always the same pattern.
https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/dcl-social-behavio...
In this case, the administration believes a lot of the work the NSF funds isn't actually scientific. In that they are correct. The replication crisis has been rolling for 15 years now with no real improvements, largely because the people who distribute the money don't care if it gets used for things that are genuinely scientific or if it gets used for things that merely have the surface level appearance of being scientific. The NSF funds vast amounts of pseudo-science that can be trivially identified and people have been talking about these problems for years with no resolution. Apparently, they need some friction and bureaucracy as otherwise they won't do their jobs correctly. In a free market government intervention isn't required to solve this problem because free actors will just stop funding pseudo-scientific work after a while, but the NSF isn't running a free market, and so the problem just never gets solved.
This article focuses on social science but talks a bit about the general problems at the NSF at the end, and although it was written in 2020 thus at the start of the Biden administration the proposals the author makes for fixes are basically what's happening right now:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
Nobody actually benefits from the present state of affairs, but you can't ask isolated individuals to sacrifice their careers for the "greater good": the only viable solutions are top-down, which means either the granting agencies or Congress (or, as Scott Alexander has suggested, a Science Czar). You need a power that sits above the system and has its own incentives in order: this approach has already had success with requirements for pre-registration and publication of clinical trials. Right now I believe the most valuable activity in metascience is not replication or open science initiatives but political lobbying
...
An NSF/NIH inquisition that makes sure the published studies match the pre-registration (there's so much """"""""""QRP"""""""""" in this area you wouldn't believe). The SEC has the power to ban people from the financial industry—let's extend that model to academia.21
...
It is difficult to convey just how low the standards are. The marginal researcher is a hack and the marginal paper should not exist. There's a general lack of seriousness hanging over everything—if an undergrad cites a retracted paper in an essay, whatever; but if this is your life's work, surely you ought to treat the matter with some care and respect.
Why is the Replication Markets project funded by the Department of Defense? If you look at the NSF's 2019 Performance Highlights, you'll find items such as "Foster a culture of inclusion through change management efforts" (Status: "Achieved") and "Inform applicants whether their proposals have been declined or recommended for funding in a timely manner" (Status: "Not Achieved"). Pusillanimous reports repeat tired clichés about "training", "transparency", and a "culture of openness" while downplaying the scale of the problem and ignoring the incentives. No serious actions have followed from their recommendations.
It's not that they're trying and failing—they appear to be completely oblivious. We're talking about an organization with an 8 billion dollar budget that is responsible for a huge part of social science funding, and they can't manage to inform people that their grant was declined! These are the people we must depend on to fix everything.
As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.
I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.
Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.
>> For academic scientists, the list of banned activities could include efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, collaborations with foreign scientists, and research on more environmentally friendly technologies.
These are not the "vast amounts of pseudo-science" that your comment refers to.
I have nothing against the ideas suggested in the 2020 blog post that you cite... it's just that is not what is happening because of the executive order.
The executive orders do not address bad science.
So overall, I agree with most ideas in your comment but I do not think it is relevant to the current situation. The administration is not trying to fix bad science.
The Republican party controls both houses and the presidency, having already stacked the supreme court, so they get to do whatever they want and there is no balance of powers.
Inevitable consequence of a two-party system with first past the post voting.
All Republicans and all Democrats don’t act and think as one. Take any collection of humans, of any size, and their opinions will be spread across a spectrum.
There are, and always will be, some members in either house and of any party that find it’s in their political interest to debate and pull new laws left or right.
This is especially true under FPTP because each member has to answer to an area, and different areas of a country have baked-in differences in their ideal political outcomes and points of view.
The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.
Seems like cutting taxes and bureacracy does the opposite.
Unless “fascist” and “nazi” means “people I don’t like”.
America would be well advised to avoid this. They'd immediately get a language divide between English and Spanish. The alleged "grand coalitions" of the Democrat and Republican parties would crumble. There might be some consensus in the center which might be large enough but then policies would never change regardless of who you vote for, just like in the times before Trump.
- No, the supreme court is the same size it's always been.
- No, members of congress don't always vote the party line (although this has consistently gotten worse over time)
- No, that's not what "balance of powers" means.
“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869”
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx#:~:text=...
Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.
Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.
Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.
Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.
The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.
2.) missing the point
3.) pedantic
The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.
The President is free to assert his desires. Other parts of the country are free to push back if they choose. This takes filing lawsuits, lobbying Congress, pursuing prosecutions, etc. all of which take time, money, and effort. Which in turn allows short-term disruption to happen as the legal process plays out. Which again, is frustrating.
Political mood is also more fickle than people usually believe at the beginning of a new administration. FDR, LBJ, W, Obama, and many other presidents passed through a time in which conventional wisdom held that they had changed the game and amassed too much power. In every case we can look back and see that while they each have left a legacy that endures, it’s smaller than expected at the time. The pendulum swung the other way later on.
My own opinion on this is that “don’t tell me what to do” is among the most popular political positions among Americans. So for example, to the extent DEI felt like being told what to do, it became unpopular. But now that anti-DEI is in power, I expect the bloom will come off pretty quickly. In part because of overreach by a new administration overestimating their mandate. (As most new administrations do.)
I don't. This has been a long, gradual erosion of constitutional rights, and now the system has crumbled. It may appear to stand, but it's merely resting on the rubble.
SCOTUS is going to rule with GOP doctrine, regardless of what the constitution says. The GOP may pursue legal avenues for their actions in an attempt to not make it so apparent that the country is now under single party, totalitarian rule. But they don't have to (see: news).
It started with minor constitutional violations, like emoluments, and has ended with blatant ones, such as attacking birthright citizenship.
>I think it’s a little early to call the end of the U.S. Constitution.
I totally disagree with this though. It is several generations late to start crying about the end of the US Constitution.
I basically agree with the rest of your comment though, especially the "don't tell me what to do" and the Presidential "honeymoon period".
https://www.statista.com/chart/7658/number-of-executive-orde...
All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.
That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.
It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.
There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.
Tump did 20% of his total, from the first term, in the first 100 days. Biden did just under 1/3 of his total in the first 100 days.
8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.
Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.
Or never. We should be prepared for Term 3 (which is already being floated) or a landslide GOP win in 2026, 2028, and beyond. Expect future Presidential elections to look like '86.
You all are openly admitting that these people are evil geniuses. Keep that in mind when thinking to the future. They are going to continue their evil genius behavior and it's going to keep working.
I’ve said since the beginning that that saving grace (if there is one) of Trump’s first term was that he was disorganized, and he surrounded himself with people who kept him in check to some degree. People who were willing to tell him that he couldn’t do certain things (prime example: White House legal counsel kept Trump from doing the crazy things that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell suggested after he lost the 2020 election).
He’s not going to make that mistake this time, and he’s putting people in power who will do what he wants without question. That’s the scary part of the next four years.
We have been beyond US Constitutional limitations for many lifetimes.
Unfortunately I think the only direction is balkanization of the states. And I don't think that is going to end well.
Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.
But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.
The Republicans did go with the (sadly) popular guy. I guess he was palatable (by the definition that matters) because there was no talk of increasing taxes on high incomes.
Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.
In earlier years I would have been okay living in a red state - not my pref but no big deal. Now I’m no more willing to raise my kids in a deep red state than I am in Russia or China.
Question here for this group. In this day of technology, information is power seems much more relevant. I don't have clear data, but it seems from observation and analysis by others social media played a pretty key role: "fake news", info bubbles, biasing your feeds etc. What are some ideas on reliable ways to provide access to accurate information?
By the same logic, I don't like calling far-left cancel culture "liberal." I'm afraid our partisanship has blinded us to genuine liberal and conservative virtues.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby_clemency_controv... for example.
Hell, look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_Richard_Nixon
Still, it doesn't matter. Telling you, this is the one truth of our reality - the dems are always wrong.
Biden just acted on it.
He could have done a lot better with that legal blanket.
I'm old enough to remember when it was the right wing complaining about "political correctness gone mad".
These are the kinds of issues at stake in terms of the broader impacts criteria:
- Is it good that NSF promotes applications that include historically minority-serving institutions (as opposed to just the same few R1 universities)?
- should NSF prioritize proposals with strong scientific outreach activities aimed at boosting engagement and opportunities in under-represented demographics?
Keep in mind that NSF funding is extremely competitive. It’s not like subpar research is ubiquitously getting funded over better research with lower “broader impacts” scores. Successful proposals excel on both fronts.
2. Where did you get the idea that outreach is not still an important priority? The issue is what is euphemistically called "under-represented demographics" which we understand excludes many Americans on the basis of their race.
Yeah I don't buy that.
I've seen equity directives in universities explicitly asking to hire only underrepresented minorities, or give one third of a candidate's score based on race and gender characteristics (the other two thirds were resume and interview).
I've heard equity hiring quotas given to execs in tech industry. I've heard of pressure to hire/promote minorities.
I've seen what affirmative action did to University admissions. The admissions office reduced Asian Americans score on "likeability". As a result they needed a higher sat score than any other group for admissions. The hiring office essentially said that they did not like Asians.
So sorry, I do not buy the argument that equity initiatives just choose a minority representation from equally qualified samples. Because from what you say, Asian americans wouldn't have been discriminated against.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_(Weimar_Constitutio...
If they do choose to issue stop work orders on already funded grants that will certainly cause chaos across engineering and science in this country. And frankly, it will cede leadership on many topics to China (which is already dominating fields like materials science).
This goes way beyond DEI; that’s just the trap to get insecure white men to agree with it.
The NSF is “reviewing anything that goes against the stated national interest”. What does that even mean.
However, thinking that this crop of politicians would take a nuanced stance on anything at all is idiocy at its purest.
If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.
Think Boxer in the Animal Farm.
Sure, it's not Russia or China, but it's certainly no model democracy. We're definitely heading down the path of authoritarianism / fascism.
Don't forget that 4 years ago there was an armed attempt to overturn the results of an election, spurred on by the losing president who also pressured officials to overturn the results. And then the same politician was given immunity by the justices who he appointed (if it had been any other court they would have been forced to recuse themselves from the case), leading to him being re-elected and then promptly pardoning those who attempted a coup. That's arguably the most anti-democracy event in the history of the US (or at least the last 100 years).
Then when that politician gets in power he starts an loyalty and ideological purge. That's exactly what authoritarian leaders do (and Xi in China did). So yes, we still have checks and balances and our system is not authoritarian, but Trump certainly is and is trying his hardest to centralize as much power and authority as possible in himself, which is again exactly what authoritarian leaders do. Lets call a spade a spade.
Curious to see whether HN is also following suit in changing its window, like every other online medium seems to be doing.
Also, this IS an important discussion, for it's creating social transformation that might hinder our species' ability to solve the difficult challenges ahead.
How do we make sure that minorities and women get the same fair chance at NSF grants as white men, when white men are making most of the decisions? How do we make sure we're funding science that helps everyone, not just those who make the highest decisions?
DEI initiatives are reasonable way to increase the likelihood that a minority is considered for a job and not passed over by endemic racism.
Are they though? Racism is still wrong even when you use it for what you consider worthy goals.
It's amusing how much Democrats bitch and moan when Republicans finally put an end to their racist policies.
First time was with Abraham Lincoln. Now this.
Nothing ever changes.