What's happening inside the NIH and NSF | Hacker News Reader

What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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957 pointsrrock1,536 comments

Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

I think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

I want to believe some will move for lifestyle reasons, but the problem is the post war IPO landscape (post 1980s really) across biotech and ICT has made one stark barrier: USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

You have to be socially smart enough to see that a $100k salary and lifestyle outcome for your remaining working career is enough, if not better than the prospect of uplift into mega-wealth, if your IPR pans out the right way.

For career scientists who were on the NSF grant train, they'd cracked a magic egg open. Beneficial to both them and us, society at large. Well, the other economies do fund research. They fund it badly compared to the NSF, the paperwork burden is less I am sure, but so is the size of the pot and the duration. You may well spend more time hassling next grant, than doing the grant funded work.

I've known US scientists who moved to my economy (OZ) and they say its a great place to live, but they keep ties to US funded research because its what made them attractive to the non-US university or corporate research environment. If that tie is going to be cut, they're competing against one quality only: skill. Sure, a more level playing field. But that, and english language competency aside, it will be a competition against scientists from the rest of the world, who also used to go to the USA and now are seeking jobs in other economies.

There's a lot of other benefits to the USA attracting high skill talent than just salary:

* English language school system so your kids (if you have them) will speak a world language.

* Racially and culturally diverse cultures, cuisines, and communities.

* Exposure to goods from most of the world, even if marked up.

* Availability of international franchises headquartered in other countries in major metros.

* A strong passport that offers visa-free travel to many locations and very favorable visa terms in many others.

and more.

My partner and I are (different) Asians and the higher-skilled members of our family who wanted to emigrate mostly rejected Europe because of non-English language instruction and honestly just feeling racially uncomfortable in most of Europe. I have some family in Germany (who like it there) so it's obviously not impossible, but European ethnostate thinking is just unattractive to a lot of non-Caucasian talent. Canada, UK, and Australia are not like this and have potentially a lot to gain if the US kneecaps its research bureaucracy.

I totally agree with you. Scientist originally from the UK who moved to the Bay Area. Salaries are much much better here

I will say that for myself, money is a means to an end for living a “good” life. I am starting to wonder personally where the line is for the trade off between salary and its ability to translate into a good life here in the US

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky. That very few do achieve this isn't the point: you cannot do it, in almost any other economy.

That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

Most scientists that I know aren't motivated by the prospect of going from $100k-$100m. As long as they have a good wage, they are far more motivated by having decent funding and facilities for their work so they don't have to spend half their time applying for grants.

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires" - John Steinbeck

But how do you expect officials that are so bad at transitioning professionally enough, to be good at maintaining and fostering an economy that will support this financial attractiveness?

I’m a scientist currently on an NSF grant. I am certainly poking around other countries to see what’s out there, and I’m not the only one.

A lot of scientists (at least in my field, computational chemistry) have decent skills that are transferrable to other areas. So I expect quite a few to move on.

There’s not that many jobs going in academia in other countries, and you’ll be looking at a significant pay cut due to the strong US dollar.

Most likely, people who leave academia will be leaving for industry instead.

I do feel for those in the hard sciences, they have become collateral damage in what is mostly a battle between politicians and humanities departments.

Good luck getting 500k+ grants in other countries. If you leave there won't be a shortage of postdocs looking for a new tenure track position.

This is the obvious conclusion. As the US trashes its own research ability other countries can offer good conditions to the scientists. I've never seen an own-goal so great.

I might move somewhere that gave me a person grant. The U.S. works primarily on project grants, where you are funded to do a thing, but that thing doesn't always work, and most of the time it's a bit contrived in order to appeal to the funding agency. (This is probably so the bureaucrats can exert power over what is studied.) The system would work much better if individual scientists got guaranteed salaries to study whatever seemed appropriate, and if you needed money for equipment you can request it. This would lead to more crazy ideas being explored and less derivative, p-hacked slop carried out by graduate student slave labor.

Some of my favorite novels are David Lodge's campus novels, and an element in them is the never-ending lure of American academia for British scholars.

Now it's the EU's turn. Computer science is already becoming very, very French. See you guys in Grenoble.

France is extremely unattractive for research. Lecturers positions suck (high teaching load and you need to speak French). Full-time researcher positions are extremely hard to get, and they pay very little, especially junior position. 2500 euros per month, which isn't enough in Paris and just ok in a smaller city.

As a seventh generation American and 17 year Air Force veteran (long separated), I’m suggesting everybody the US who has any skills, talent, sociability or empathy to leave the United States as quickly as possible.

I think that that’s probably the best route for anybody who is currently in America and doesn’t want to deal with the next 20 to 50 years of total deprivation.

Unfortunately some of us can’t leave so the best most people can do is find some place safe to land.

China, for example, could set up a very European-style English-speaking institute in Hong Kong or Macau with high salaries to attract scientists. Singapore and South Korea too. One day Americans might well follow the money and the research freedom?

China's drowning in their own PhD's. The competition is fierce, and the pressure is enormous. The best and brightest over there are insanely capable men and women.

In all honesty, it's hard to see China wanting many of the PhD's that would be available from the US in a worst case scenario NSF/NIH funding collapse. There may be a place for the top 0.1%? But for 99.9% of PhD's, there are Chinese replacements that are, frankly, better and cheaper.

Hate to bring it back to money like that, but there it is.

Heck, China has a reproduction of Jackson Hole, Wy. (See the documentary Americaville)

The World Wide Web essentially exits due to grants from the NSF and alumni from those grants starting Netscape.

But WWW was made up at CERN, you might as well say it exists due to EEC grants.

the irony of Andreesen now being one of those now gloating over its destruction

I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account.

With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so.

Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider. I also could be talked out of this position but from what I see it seems about accurate.

And really who would choose to stay in 1938 Germany if you could leave. Even if you are some rich upper class Herr Doktor Professor, life for the next 20 years in Germany wasn't that great compared to England or the US. Why risk having your children killed paratrooping into Greenland. The world is still quite beautiful and quite full of kind people.

There were skilled people in the French and Dutch resistances, as well.

I am withdrawing my money from the US stock market. Other people might not give a shit, but I want to invest my money in a functional democracy.

It works better when there is some viable alternative. Research job market is terrible in Europe right now because our governments are trying to make a US like system (project driven and without stability) but without putting the money. There isn't a lot of space in the world to accomodate US brain drain. A bit in Japan, a bit in Europe, most of it in China maybe.

> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

Also, some top scientists who previously would have come to the US, will decide not to.

That's not going to be negative feedback that registers for the decision-makers in the US. But it's good news for competing countries and their institutions. And it's possibly better quality of life, overall, for the scientists who decide to go work somewhere currently more sensible.

as an American I'd be sad to see science move out of my country at the same time I'd be happy and relieved that science continues to flourish and treated with the respect it deserves in other countries (hoping these would be democratic countries with a high regard for human rights such as those of Europe or elsewhere), decentralizing itself away from the US's chronic political issues that show no sign of abating likely for the next few decades at least.

I think this comment confused a few things.

First off, there is no evidence the US will never fund science again.

Second, top scientific positions in the US are at academic labs, not at NIH (bare a few top people spending some time there). The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it.

"The top academic labs in the US get some funding from NIH, but the top ones get it from a ton of sources with NIH not being the bulk of it."

This is wildly field specific.

But does anyone take any science seriously anymore, if the conditions of the US funding would be that don't even mention the topics related to women or climate change?

I think that might be an implicit goal here. With antics around H1B, birthright citizenship, general worsening sentiment against "people who dont look white" and "experts bad, podcasters good" its probably worth while for researchers, scientists and professors to start looking elsewhere outside of the US.

I would think if you are a European national this situation would have a silver lining in perhaps incentivizing European scientific investment to remain at home and strengthen those nations' scientific research institutions and grant programs. If the U.S. sees fit to rework its institutions, that's its own business. If funding in the U.S. dries up, then doesn't it make sense to go your own way and seek funding in your home country?

So I think you're right. This could be a big opportunity for countries to poach some of these scientists or to repatriate those scientists who have left their home countries.

> i think its underappreciated how much of America's modern success comes down to attracting scientists and intellectuals from war torn europe in the 30s-50s.

if you're going to boil down our "success", if you must call it that, to a root cause, it has a lot more to do with our insatiable greed and lack of respect for, well, anything. The talent is just a small detail in the narrative of America and that narrative is driven far more by capital than it is by interesting people.

The talent narrative makes for excellent propaganda, though, neatly whitewashing a violent and hateful culture.

> Seems like a good opportunity for other countries to recruit scientists.

would be if any other country actually put money in research... Well there is China, but in Europe we already have more PhD than research position.

Not just that but capital is attracted there as well to the point there is a glut of it which is probably where at least some of the political problems arise. They literally have more money than sense while innovators elsewhere can't get funding.

Are we to tether it's decline to the different immigrant groups that came after then?

No one other than the USA was really doing that. That's what makes US, US.

I don't think Operation Paperclip was about "attracting".

Hundreds of high-ranking scientists left Germany in the 1930s. The exodus had nothing to do with Operation Paperclip.

https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/5299/The-scientific...

Please, do take the US "talent" away. Most of real world progress and wealth creation comes from engineering style tinkering and copycatting, and not from pure academic style science research. But the latter gets all the hype, media coverage and the Noble prizes. This system of glorified scientific research is a vestige of anti-communist, anti-Soviet era, which is no longer useful, if it ever were.

The smart thing is to outsource pure science research where it's the cheapest, but commercialize it where it's most profitable - that's what China is doing and doing it very well too.

it would be a dumb move. any scientist who moves on a whim so easily to chase money is more likely to not be doing good science.

This is a funny take. As researchers, half of their job was just writing grant applications to get more money. Lab supplies don't grow on trees.

Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country and the dollar is the safest currency to get paid in. Not convinced the desperate folks who want to move despite these are good hires. Anecdotally the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside. This isn’t a large group as you can imagine.

> Not happening. Getting significantly more than $100k is close to impossible in most careers in any other country

There are literally millions of people around the world who earn significantly more than US$100K and don’t work in the US.

e.g. in Australia, many medical specialists earn more than US$200k - it is common for experienced oncologists, cardiologists, paediatricians, gastroenterologists, etc, to earn more than US$200k.

> the only people working any job at all outside of USA that I’ve met were doing that because of their non-US wives not liking it stateside.

Did you accidentally a word? Because if you cross any border literally the first people you meet are border control officers, who work a job outside the USA, most of whom with no interest in living or working in the US.

Incidentally if you travel abroad you will also meet heterosexual women and homosexual men, who don't generally have a wife at all.

The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain:

> The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the details).

> And to put those into perspective, the largest single oulay for the Federal government is Social Security benefits ($1.4 trillion by themselves), with interest on the national debt coming in second at $949 billion, Medicare comes in third at $870 billion, and the Department of Defense fourth at $826 billion and Medicaid next at $618 billion.

Even quoting the NIH/NSF budgets (or their line items) misses the point of the current actions. Yes, they're smaller fractions of the USG budget, but they not immaterial.

This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.

Note: pg appears to be "generally sympathetic" to what Musk is doing here.

https://xcancel.com/paulg/status/1886741943050211408

Thanks for sharing, worth having the full quote I think:

> I'm generally sympathetic to what you're doing. But I hope you will take your time and do it carefully. This isn't just a company. Companies are born and die within the system, and it's ok. But this is the system itself we're talking about here.

PG sounds nervous. I have to imagine there are a lot of nervous conservatives who didn't think it would go this far and are now too scared to stand in the way.

[flagged]

Killing mawmaw to own the libs.

Is that what they are saying?

Social security and Medicare are inexpugnable liabilities.

Everything is expendable if you kick in the door and fire everyone, like USAID. I think they're politically smart enough to not cut off the elderly voters, but who knows.

Unless you don't need any kind of voter anymore

Social security yes, but it seems to me that reducing the cost of Medicare and Medicaid should be very much possible. We need to provide healthcare but it should be possible to make that less expensive

What I find ridiculous is that USA spends more on the interest on the national debt than either on Medicare or on the Department of Defense.

What needs to be overcome? They're directly paid for through payroll taxes.

And it comes to about $120 per tax payer in total. I’ve had dinners that cost more. Give me my science and medicine please.

Gee, I'm still waiting for these proclaimed anti-socialists & anti-marxist to kill the most obviously socialist programs in the country.

Everything is expungable if no one says no.

Of course it’s not about saving money. It’s about extinguishing facts. This is Orwell 101.

So you still believe government-funded research is equivalent to facts in 2025? What about the replication crisis? The political control of research finance e.g. in Alzheimer’s research?

It takes either an extreme amount of naïveté or motivated reasoning to maintain that perspective, IMO.

> The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings.

Of course not. The big gain is for Trump and Musk to say they did something. Regardless of how someone voted, I can’t believe they are still falling for this shtick.

Then why are drug prices in the USA higher than anywhere else?

We're being robbed by these people.

So many brilliant researchers in the US are funded by NSF grants. Even beyond public research, just the private sector benefits just from the training (and associated freedom from not having to chase money and TA) that NSF fellows get is immense.

Injecting dumb politics and refusing grants just because people put the words "biases" in their application is a great way to appeal to Republicans's undereducated voters (see https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... for an example of their idiotic rhetoric) but also a crazy gamble on the US's ability to be a superpower in two decades.

Just look at what happened in France when right-wing governments started defunding research: a slow but massive brain drain of the best minds. What does the current administration think will happen to our economy when they start burning future brains when they're at the seed stage?

No matter what happens in the next few years, the damage is done. It is now known that the next administration could kill your apolitical career with the stroke of the pen if your ideas vaguely support the wrong team.

If you have talent, why deal with the (frequently) middling pay and the existential risk that could follow every election?

So you don't think being forced to include a statement on diversity in every single grant request reviewed by the NIH was "injecting dumb politics" but you do think that being forced to NOT include a statement on diversity in every single grant request is?

There’s a very big difference there between “including a statement in diversity” and “your funding gets pulled because you previously included a statement about diversity”. The new administration is essentially pulling funding from everyone who got grants previously based on those criteria.

Who do you think benefits medium term from our best researchers getting less funding? The toll on our economy will only be visible in 15-20 years, and it will be massive.

Destroying the economy IS the goal it seems like.

These money shark guys that have got a hold of our government and economy since 2007 seem to have a long term plan that is specifically designed to destroy the US economy. Its counter intuitive, since their wealth is directly linked, but they have some kind of plan.

> forced to NOT include

== "not being allowed to include"

i.e. a restriction on free speech with more worrying implications than "injecting dumb politics"

Diversity statements were used to facilitate race-based grant approvals. They should never have been legal.

Compelled speech is far, far, far worse than constricting speech by every conceivable dimension.

Even in day to day interaction, forcing someone to be silent, is far more of a gentler 'social action' than forcing someone to speak.

Really? You see a narrow contextual restriction for irrelevant information in a grant/hiring packet to be worse than compelled speech?

I think people are more concerned about the economic fallout and the illegality of what is being done.

Including statements on diversity, and defunding projects because they have diversity are two very different things.

And yeah, as a white male who sees few women, and even fewer people from minorities other than Chinese and Indian, in the hard sciences (especially computer related), I definitely support efforts to try to include them more. It results in more diverse views of a problem, which often leads to better science.

You call it "injecting dumb politics," but I call it "explaining why I shouldn't believe you'll just hire your buddies." It's an attempt to prevent the grift everyone claims is in research, but it's been politicized by bad-faith non-participants.

Let's not sugarcoat it. DEI is the new N-word. Only people who are covert racists would be bothered by a mere statement about inclusion.

It's very clear once you realize the people perpetrating this don't care one whit for the "economy" writ large, only their personal wealth and that of their cronies. The dumber, meaner and more desperate the population is, the easier the time they think they'll have ruling over them, as unto kings in this new gilded age.

Of course, they forget what came after the gilded age. It's raining stockbrokers - err, oligarchs!

that's bad strategic thinking (obviously) because it places at a huge disadvantage to our main competitors.

What makes you think they care?

To a large degree their wealth is transnational and will move on to the next trough after emptying this one.

I’m in leadership at a place everyone here has heard of. We are in absolute panic behind the scenes.

Why do you think your workplace will be affected?

FWIW this comment would work on almost any HN post.

Hang in there. Hope for the best. Don’t give up.

Yup. 2 weeks down, 190 to go!

1% done

Remember that that is the goal. Acknowledge the data and deal with it as another obstacle.

Also, I'm wondering if multiple universities could band together to file a TRO and/or a class-action lawsuit against the government for something like estoppel.

It's past time these institutions were audited. I had an NSF fellowship and was on numerous NIH grants during my PhD work (Chemist). All of them, even in 2013, had DEI language that made it clear if you were a white/chinese/indian male you were not going to be funded. The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them. It pushed me and almost all of the other chemists (who were generally white/chinese/indian males) in my class to leave the field either after our PhD or post-doc.

I can only speak for my own experience, but this is 100% not what I have seen (as an NIH-funded white male PI, and one of many at my institution and in my field). I just submitted an R01 last week, and can firmly say that there is no "DEI" language in the grant application forms or in the program announcement; anybody who is interested can easily see the kinds of documents that are required in NIH grants: https://grants.nih.gov/grants-process/write-application/samp...

No "DEI" boogeymen in there.

Wow so not a single white/chinese/indian male has been funded since 2013? For over a decade? That's an incredible claim. Literally.

So sex and racial prejudice has to be 100% efficient to be wrong?

you know what they're talking about, don't play dumb

This isn't an auditing. This is a gutting based on senseless and illegal procedures. You want to get rid of DEI, fine. That doesn't mean get rid of the whole agency. This is incredibly alarming.

Here is another perspective, there are many more deserving research proposals than there are grants. Even if they banned all minorities from grant funding there would still be many disgruntled and unfunded scientists languishing without grants.

I think the "many more deserving research proposals" more funding as well. So we should judge the proposals by merit, and not the immutable characteristic of the researcher. By the way, why should tax payers fund grants for foreign countries research and education?

I'm not disputing your personal experience, but I've worked on numerous science-related NIH grants over the past decade and the vast majority of performers were white (sometimes asian) males (myself included).

> The institutions, already, were self sabotaging, doling out tons of taxpayer money, not to the best ideas, but to labs that had a few women of various colors other than white working in them.

I'm calling this complete BS.

I am a male of Indian descent, my PI was white male and we collaborated with a number of Asian male PIs and postdocs. I was in PhD research starting in 2015. All of us were funded.

Quit the BS.

This is an absolute trash take. I've been through the NIH grant process as a white male and there was absolutely 0 mention of diversity, DEI, or whatever other qualifying characteristic of my grant. It came totally down to the content of my proposal. You don't know what you're talking about

This isn't an "audit." It's an extralegal raid.

As Sir Ian Jacob said, the Allies won World War II because "our German scientists were better than their German scientists." Brain drain is a real problem for fascist countries.

So who is fighting the US in WW3?

I guess the only option is everyone.

So should we move to Thailand or Canada or ???

Canada, the EU, Australia, ...

Places with solid research institutions and less-dysfunctional governments.

The problem is that academic hiring is anemic in those places (as it will be in the US very soon, once Trump is done wrecking the NIH, NSF, etc.).

CA, AU, and some EU countries are about to elect conservative governments

Canada where we can be debanked for supporting a protest.

Part of me thinks this is just incompetence. People put in charge to "change" things without knowing what the thing is or does and just randomly mashing buttons.

I contend that there existed too much incompetence across what the government has been funding. I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc

The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society.

Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he is a genius are gullible.

What "competence"? What "efficiency"? What "innovation"? What "accountability"?

There is no accountability or efficiency in unelected technocrats blowing up what was working without a plan or subject matter expertise.

I have no problem with that. I don't even disagree with government waste, we all see it. If what trump and musk did was:

- Audit spending (at USAID or wherever else)

- Come up with details of where there is waste, being transparent about it for the public to see and review

- Use that to recommend change to congress / the president, again in full public view

Then I'd have no issues. The problem is, what's actually happening is:

- Musk and team are in there with no accountability and no transparency. We don't know what he has access to, what was done

- Unilaterally making changes without public review or oversight. It's a "trust me bro" stance.

- From the few things that has been published, many seem to be outright lies (50m on condoms) or extremely biased conclusions (IRS direct filing)

>I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc

Where do you see that? What accountability is present?

This is hopelessly naive.

It's a little from column A and a little from column B.

Incompetence. Mixed in with a fair amount of malevolence. Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

> Mixed in with that rich guy thing of really hating smart people because why do they always keep telling me I'm wrong and embarrassing me in front of people if they were really so smart why aren't they rich like me huh?

I never thought about it like this and it makes so much sense. I have financial (and maybe social) power therefore I should have intellectual power and if you show to people that you have more than I do, then I feel embarrassed and will use my financial (and social) power to make you feel embarrassed.

He has 4yoe though. This is by design.

We all know years of experience doesn't always mean someone is qualified.

Side note: the article's author is Derek Lowe, who also wrote this memetic piece on Chlorine Trifluoride: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...

just two days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42910829

the problems that led to these frauds are structural--no amount of patching the system will fix this.

maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor, which is often painful, but especially painful for people (or code) with an entrenched incentive to continue existing.

i dont mean to defend what the administration is doing but I'm warning that everyone crying doom and gloom and threatening to move abroad, etc. might be eating crow. ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science. bad science is the science equivalent of a zirp.

> no amount of patching the system will fix this.

> maybe we should consider the possibility that we are due for a refactor

People in tech need to stop with those analogies. A government is not a codebase. You can not apply the principles of "refactoring" and "patching" in the same way. It just doesn't work like that. But the problem is we have a bunch of people (some malicious, some clueless) trying to do exactly that.

Precisely. There’s no wisdom in the approach. “I’ll try refactoring - that’s a good trick!” is a poor approach.

You can try it, but the consequences of a poor refactoring? Look to the planned economies and five year plans.

The government is not a codebase; that mistakes its artifacts for its process. And the importance of process - in politics, in government - cannot be overstated.

yes you most definitely can apply these to government, what an insidious comment.

not only does it NEED to be done, people VOTED for it :)

Government is exactly a codebase. Government bureaucracies is essentially constricting human judgement to more robotic code-like behavior, that's the only way to build large systems.

You say government is not like code, then what exactly is it? Can you describe it in an effective way? Or are you just going to raise your hand up and say there's nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about the $2 trillion/year titanic deficit?

Historical governments often needed little beyond an army and a tax collection system. And tax collection system was primarily data gathering and analysis, since if you knew how much property someone owned, you can easily tax them for an appropiate amount.

The tech way of thinking has proven extremely successful in many industries already. That's why tech companies (and tech adjacent ones, like say quant trading, or even index fund trading) have been so economically dominant, and utterly kicked out the traditional MBAs from their pedestals.

Stop being a self hating programmer who despises the mentality of tech.

I'm very pro some systematic auditing/cleaning of out sclerotic waste, but I don't see how anyone can look at the way this is being handled and not be incredibly worried

I think it's the second-order stuff here. Even assuming Musk were to do a fantastic job at just clearing out inefficiency in a smart way (which seems unlikely given the actions he's taken/leaks around cutting funding based on key-word matching etc.), the higher-order point that someone can just buy their way into the President's inner-circle and have complete free-reign to seize government operations and make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system

> make changes with 0 transparency/accountability seems like it does just stupid amounts of harm to the integrity of the system

pray tell who was accountable for the grant issuance in the first place? was congress approving every disbursal? could the citizenry vote up/down on every RO1 or SBIR that went past the NIH desk?

Whatever rational refactor/rewrite you want does not start with `find . -iname 'dei' -delete`.

Refactoring means incrementally changing things in a non-destructive way.

> ironically, the very people most likely to move abroad (in it for the career, not for the principle) are biased to be the types bringing down our system of science.

What the hell are you talking about? I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses, rather than, for instance, helping some corporation abuse human psychology to sell more ads. If there is no money to do the science, I have no choice but to emigrate.

edit: And to give you an example of the science being targeted by these early moves: pulse oximeters have a racial bias leading them to overestimate the oxygen saturation of minorities, which led to deaths during the pandemic. All the work toward addressing that issue at the FDA has now been terminated, because it's related to DEI.

> I chose to get into science for the benefit of the masses

why do you suppose most science benefits the masses?

a stunning amount of science is negative. homme hellinga cheating and claiming a triosephosphate isomerase, for example. stripey nanoparticles, as another. Thousands of western blots that were cleverly edited by unscrupulous postdocs. everything by diderik stapel. anil potti.

those are the ones that got caught. so many more got away with it.

and yes, if you can't tell, i know what the fuck I'm talking about.

> And to give you an example

why dont i give you an example. NIH is responsible for 80% of the budget of an NGO that collaborated with WIV and advocated for GOF research. on the grounds of likely being responsible in part for the deaths of millions worldwide maybe we should suspend funding to the NIH until all of its policies can be reviewed

You might be on to something here.

Yes there is structural issue.

When researchers see that appealing to DEI and inclusion make is easy to gain finding for, allegedly, research that is wasteful and not meritorious, everyone will attempt to do it.

Conversely, when appealing to "equality of white people" becomes more likely to get you funded, everyone will also attempt that. Which is going to be the case going forward. If you do not believe me, DJT has appointed someone at the helm of EEO commission who explicitly does this in their LinkedIn bio.

So the issue is structural, it is not dei or white power.

scientific fraud is absolutely a problem -- a universal problem, because it's inherently a human problem (it's inextricably tied to academic careers, so it's not really a money problem, it's a career problem--in other words, people aren't doing it to get rich, they're doing it to further their career or prestige; that doesn't make it any better, it just makes the context more complicated)

but what the admin is trying to do has nothing to do with "making science right". it has a very clearly stated goal of 1) rooting out anything remotely related to DEI; 2) rooting out anything related to previous investigations into Trump and the Jan6 attempted coup (see purges at FBI, DOJ); 3) cutting government spending (so there's money to pass a promised tax cut); 4) whatever Elon decides he wants to gut

None of these have anything to do with making science more honest and accurate. If that were the goal, you'd probably need to _increase_ funding because you'd need more reproducibility studies.

Refactor. Ha. This is just randomly and mindlessly deleting large chunks of code because you think it's woke.

Not a single personal alive thinks these institutions are perfect. But only morons think haphazardly defunding shit without understanding what you're breaking or what the real-world ramifications might be is a way to fix problems.

The past couple of weeks have historically stupid.

no not because it's woke. because it's broken. this is literally the system that let a person become the President of Stanford a federally granted research professor with years of fabricated data that absolutely fucked some people that i personally know. lets say, negative man-decades of research just among people in my limited circle. i guarantee you this was not an isolated incident

the sooner we cut this shit out, realize consequences, and start over, the better.

But the scientific community identified this failure. They published the evidence against it. And shed light here.

And heck, they did a lot of unrelated great science at the same time.

Science is a process that will have failures, mistakes, errors, and these are subject to natural selection. We can work to make that process sharper, more rigorous, but that's obviously not what the administration is doing. They're attacking science with the full intent of replacing it with a system where lies and fraud reign supreme. In the world of RFK and Donald Trump, lies are just what people do every day for breakfast.

RFK Jr. gets a dozen things wrong on science and tells a dozen lies and funds and pals around with major fraudsters and charlatans every week.

> "They"

they did not. in the case of tessier-levigne, who was responsible for getting him out of there? not the NIH. it was a fucking Stanford undergrad journalism student.

let that sink in. a heroically persistent undergrad had to do the job that the NIH was morally and legally obligated to do.

this "science is self correcting" trope needs to stop being propagated right now. and you can claim eventual self consistency if it resolves a hundred years from now, which would obviously be too little too late. how many people were hurt, how much research dollars were wasted in the meantime. "well, Eventually" is not good enough, and the self correcting slogan is just running cover for entreched interests in the face of their misdeeds.

Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? Allowance for emergency payments to keep the lights on?

This is taxpayers money and these agencies report to the President under the executive power. A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.

And I’m sorry “its not a lot of money” doesn’t fly when all the “its not a lot of money” is $8 trillion dollars. The federal deficit will never get smaller if nobody looks at the “its not a lot of money” line items.

> Allowance for emergency payments to keep the lights on

This article notes that some federally-funded nonprofits "couldn’t access funds to make payroll": https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5115026-white-house-fund...

People rely on their paycheck to pay bills! If anyone stops getting their paycheck, that's not "keeping the lights on". Do you agree that any "review" mustn't prevent anyone from receiving their paycheck?

Federal money is allocated by Congress, and the President is required to spend the money as allocated by Congress. The President does not have authority to cut spending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_fu...

> Ok, so all payments are paused while funding is reviewed? ... This is taxpayers money ... A shocker that government agencies might need account for spending.

Reviewed for what?

Reviewed for whether the spending was authorized by Congress? If Musk finds that money is being spent in ways that are not authorized by Congress, and cuts that spending, great.

Reviewed for whether the money is being used efficiently to accomplish the goals set by Congress? Again, if Musk finds ways to stretch the same amount of money to accomplish more, that's great. For example, if Musk makes USAID more efficient so it delivers more aid for the same amount of money, that would be wonderful.

Or "reviewed" for whether Trump/Musk agree with them? It's illegal for the President to unilaterally cut programs just because he doesn't like them.

This stuff is a rounding error against SS, Medicare, and the military.

8 trillion is the amount the debt rose while Trump was in office last time: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/finance/us-debt-by-president...

How much do you think he will raise it by during this term?

This hurts, but it also presents an opportunity for rebuilding.

An outcome could be a greater diversity of voices influencing research, rather than the NSF and NIH continuing to serve as monoliths.

The NIH is the dominant force in medical research. Remember how theories for Alzheimer’s having an infectious etiology were sidelined for decades? And, to this day, for autoimmune conditions?

Do people recognize what rebuilding entails?

Research labs wholly owned and operated by large corporations were prevalent sources of innovation throughout the 20th century in the United States.

Obvious, probably for Hacker News crowd:

• Bell Labs • Xerox PARC • IBM Watson, Almaden Research • Dow Chemical

I'm missing the big ones from petroleum and agricultural businesses. Aerospace.

I'm willing to believe that a political retreat from 21st century choices looks towards legendary captains of industry, rather than sprawling government bureaucracy, as a source of American greatness.

My attempt to frame this week's gleeful destruction of government institutions as a revitalization of the fountainhead.

But I don't know. It's easier to just call it the same old spiteful hatred of science that is as American as apple pie.

From my basic understanding of Bell labs, the government granted AT&T a monopoly in communications with the condition that they spend a portion of their revenue on public research. The other labs I don’t know much about, but my guess is it was either similar situations or high corporate tax rates incentivizing spending profits on research to decrease their tax burden.

Another win for China. While the US guts its research capacity, China already dominates scientific research (according to Perplexity, 29% of the most highly cited peer reviewed articles are authored by Chinese scientists). Of course all those people who voted for this regime don't believe that there is any benefit to funding science. After all, what did science ever do for them? (OK, except for the science of pick-up trucks - I'll give you that. Oh yes, and the transistor: I think I may have one in my phone. But otherwise: name one thing, bro). Maybe those hats should replace the "A" with a "C".

The slump began from first DJT presidency. US lost the 5G race to China. If deepseek etc. are any indication, they are losing the AI race too. Looking and the prevalence of cheap Chinese EVs all over the world, US is losing on that front too.

Meanwhile MAGA are patting themselves in the back because they are "tired of winning".

Do you not think DEI is harming US research capacity?

What do you honestly think China thinks of our DEI initiatives?

They're laughing at us in Chinese.

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going on in addition to unethical race based preferences.

This is simply a delusion detached from reality. I am a white man in STEM academia. I've never been discriminated against once. None of my white male colleagues have either. They are all successful in academia. And my colleagues who aren't white men are in no way inferior. Just let us vote and ask if we feel discriminated against or oppressed because of DEI. We'll vote no.

It's simply a delusion that DEI is some unmeritocratic disaster. The reality is academia has its pick of top talent regardless of race or gender. I don't know any scientists who buy into this delusion irl. Diversity is a small factor in hiring because the field is already predominantly white men and it's no harder to pick top star talent when you diversify.

Simply insane that you are promoting the destruction of US science, US foreign aid, and so much of the good stuff the US government does, all in the name of a deeply delusional witch hunt.

Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix. Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

Hiring people based on race (white) and gender (male) is what happened _before_ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives.

Do you know what is the original and ultimate identity politics? Enslaving people because you deem them inferior to your own race. The civil war, the civil rights movement, and modern social justice movements are a response to this, not the root of the conflict.

I'm a white guy in academia - not tenured yet - and I cannot fathom the ignorance necessary to believe that white males are at an disadvantage because of university administrators being "woke". Give me a break!

"It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc."

You mention in another comment diversity in admissions but that is not hiring or grants. Do you have any examples of hiring people based on race in academia?

Do you have any verifiable numbers to back up the impact?

I have written a version of this twice and deleted but just can't let this statement stand unopposed. This is, almost inherently at this point, a rant and my last contribution to this thread.

This simply is not the case, I know it is something that you and many others believe is that case but you are being lied to by actual racists. I say that as a white man working in STEM academia. Academia had a long history and tradition of NOT doing meritocracy, but of claiming meritocracy and using bad markers of meritocracy to prove it. The 'DEI work' that people are so concerned about is about trying to make merit based decision making actually merit based. You think that is based on giving some preference, but it isn't - its based on acknowledging and working to eliminate actual prejudice. Its about hiring the best people instead of the person who's advisor is friends with our search chair.

I'll give a concrete example: I ran a hiring search for three faculty members. We did a blind search. The hiring committee did not know the gender, race, ethnicity, or even institutional affiliation of any candidate. The candidates were ranked, the top invited for phone interviews, and then ranked again during the interviews with everyone blind to the first set of rankings. We repeated this for a smalled group of in person interviews The order of the rankings at all three phases matched. More relevant, we interviewed and hired the most diverse crop of faculty we have ever hired. Simply because of the appearance who we hired, two different candidates who were did not received interviews emailed me and my department chair to decry that we had used 'DEI' in our BLIND hiring process. One threatened a lawsuit. We blinded it to race, to gender, to all markers of 'diversity', but the gender and race of who we hired was all the proof that person needed they were less qualified than him.

In other cases, this 'stuff' protects against asshole colleagues and bad science. (1) Diversity statements help us avoid getting sued by students and employees. The statements that wax philosophic about inclusion, that quote MLK, the ones people use to label this as some ideological test, SUCK to read and get applications ignored because they lack serious thought about being a colleague. The good ones, which get noticed, are about how people work effectively with other people, and how they make an effort to understand people as part of working with them. The context, whether its about being Green, Left-handed, or Neurodivergent tell us whether this person has thought about being a mentor to people unlike them, has a capacity to empathize with a student, or is going to be a self-righteous asshole that is going to make us hate faculty meetings even more. They help us know if their grad students are going to be in tears in the chairs office or the parents of an undergrad are calling the dean. (2) They actually tell us a lot about doing good science and getting grants. Theres a long history in medicine of fucking up because of who is in our participant pool. NIH now makes you articulate about how you will not do bad science through lazy recruitment[2]. We've asked questions about this requirement of candidates during interviews. The answers are fun and telling - using coded language to say you won't recruit Black people because they are 'less reliable' is just evidence you don't get it, not that you are some purist doing important work.

That is the DEI you are being propagandized to be against - what it actually is not what you are told it is. It is not hyperbole and you are tired by design - because you are a victim of propaganda. The nonsense narrative that is being pushed is, without concern for the truth, entirely grounded in the assertion that certain groups are unqualified to do intellectual work (c.f.[3]). It is (by design) meant to establish that the mere appearance of a Black Women or a gay person on a faculty is only because they are unqualified. It is meant to exclude people who have always been excluded. It is not about pushing back on (nonexistant) out of control efforts to include them. What is changing is efforts to counteract the actual, long established, clearly evidenced, bias in favor of certain groups of candidates. That is not some ideological project to eliminate people like me because I'm not a minority, that is the thing you want.

[1] https://mbb.yale.edu/news/mbb-radically-changing-how-we-sear... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6053906/ [3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/darren-b...

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DEI is nominally good but its just racism. Not like reverse racism or indirect racism - just racism. There’s really no other way to slice intentionally discriminating based on race.

Whats probably most egregious is the idea that its good because its racist against the right people.

The US has the strongest university and research system in the world. Wrecking that will be one of the worst acts of self-harm ever.

It's also highly discriminatory and ideological. Decades of discrimination will lead people to want to come back and tear it down, you reap what you sow.

It has been wrecked. This is an attempt at fixing it.

Not good

Yep. Destruction of systems (orgs, ...) that take care of us.

Meanwhile, TikTok (et al) tells us to talk about ourselves ... the current focus of attention of the Fifth most popular social network of the citizens of the United States. [1] [2]

Q: how could we have avoided this pathetic crawl into encouraging stupidity?

(Feeling sad, thinking, 'Look at our Works, and cry.')

[1] https://later.com/blog/tiktok-trends/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

I'm interested to see what they find out. It is rare to have such insights into these.

Do you hear that sucking sound? It's biggest brain drain you've ever seen. It already been happening, I know several great scientists who've already left, this BS just kicked it into high gear.

Some ham-fisted troglodytes didn't know what they're doing or the side-effects of their actions (like people dying or intellectual property leaving), but they want credit and approval for "owning the libs" and "efficiency" by smashing things they don't understand and calling it "progress".

This sounds like Hollywood celebs leaving to Canada - no one did. So where will so called top scientists go? Real scientists will continue their work after weeding out. But the DEI, climate, gender studies and other bottom feeders will need to pack for Europe. Or learn a trade.

Thank you for posting this.

Well, here you are, dear Americans, you all have got a chance now to show the rest of the world that you, of all nations, know how to deal right with the chutzpah in your government that has just dropped the mask of democracy, by leveraging the constitution, the law, the right for protest, peaceful or not, and whatever else that is available to a citizen in such cases.

Because you're not akin to those apathetic passive supporters of their criminals-in-power like Russians and Israelis, are you?

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those responsible accountable.

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts.

Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts more than Boeing--but my point is that it's a huge conflict of interest.

A person receiving very large amounts of money from the government is now deciding which parts of the government should be cut in order to "save taxpayers money".

If this sounds like something that would only happen in a place like Russia, or the DRC, it's because it's something that would only happen in those places.

In other democratic countries you go to jail for this sort of thing (i.e., Nicholas Sarkozy in France--not saying the situation is exactly the same, but there's an actual judicial system in place that doesn't exonerate someone just because they're president, like our SCOTUS did).

As an expat in the EU, I have a surreal sense of being a bystander at an ongoing emergency scene. I don’t want to be yet another gawker as this situation is unfolding but am struggling to come up with actions that are within my power to take as a form of protest, resistance, or solidarity.

What are some practical actions that we can take to resist these sweeping changes?

JFK wrote a book called “Profiles in Courage” - no courageous people are around.

The “coup” happened a long time ago. The US has demonstrated that there’s no rule of law at the federal level for some time now. Once the Chief Justice leaned back and tolerated the open sale of the court, that was basically it.

We don’t have the same system of governance anymore… we’re like Italy 1936 or Argentina in 1948 now. We’ll invade Greenland instead of Ethiopia, and skip the funny hats.

The question is do we continue on this trajectory or is there a real coup with tanks on DC streets at some point.

I had an idea in my head about what the word "coup" means and why it is bad and I'm struggling to figure out how it applies to this situation (possibly because being no-American I don't get their news).

My understanding is the USA executive is an obscenely powerful position by the standard of the rest of the Western world and they can also delegate that power to accomplish specific objectives.

Is this a coup of Musk against Trump or the executive doing things its not allowed to do or a coup of the executive against the legislature?

(Maybe tabooing (in the rationalist sense) the word "coup" might help...)

Aside: the article paints a very concerning picture about the consequences of contemptuous ignorant imposition of abrupt blanket rules on valuable complex systems. I thank the OP for posting it.

A “coup” implies an overthrow of the legal structure of power. Who is being overthrown?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/yes-its-a-coup-and-yes-its-tar... (https://archive.is/jSt78)

> Most of us will change the channel or scroll to the next social media clip. Most in the media will “both sides” the end of our democracy into a melisma of euphemisms and equivocations. Most of our political leaders will focus on the pitch for their next fund-raiser email. And if this oblivious, indolent cowardice continues as I fear it will, we will look back on these days of chaos, destruction, hatred and lunacy as only prelude. Unchecked, we are on the path not just to autocracy, but to the worst form of malevolent dictatorship.

> My reaction is not hysteria. It’s not exaggeration. It’s not premature. Where we are is a place we have never been in this country and the threat we face is by no means one that we can survive—because something precious and fragile is at dire risk of being lost.

No, we the people voted for this. This is what democracy looks like.

Large organizations suffer from rot.

They need periodic retrenchment -in the private sector there are economic pressures to re-organize; in the government the tendency is for greater taxation.

Throwing out the baby along with the bath water is not the answer but neither is the status quo.

Funny how democracy works, I recall an election recently not a coup.

Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).

Yes let's call a spade a spade, it's a coup.

Trump is passing as much stuff as quickly as he can to bypass the separation of powers while they catch up.

> deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king

Isn’t it what the head of executive branch supposed to mean?

Trump does exactly how he promised he would do if you elected him, and you guys elected him overwhelmingly to do exactly that.

This is not a coup, because Trump is still in his lawful 2nd and final term. Until then let's call it Gleichschaltung [1], because that's what it is: bringing all aspects of society under totalitarian control.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung

As far as I can tell, Trump is doing things he openly announced he would do for at least a year. So all of this is either a result of robust public support for his policies, or, (my preferred explanation) an even more robust public repudiation of the only alternative that was put forward by the other party, a candidate famous for dropping out before Iowa in 2020 but somehow was coronated the nominee without any voter input.

The thing about democracy is, every person is going to sometimes wildly disagree with what the elected officials do. Declaring it a 'coup' is as silly as when Trump lost in 2020 and declared it a 'rigged election.'

Now, you can make limited inroads to block executive actions with the courts, but even when SCOTUS was friendly to the anti-Trump cause, when that's done to advance an unpopular (majority-disapproved-of) agenda, it is usually a hollow and temporary victory. To get the policies you want, you need to win over voters. That's the part the DNC seems to be completely unaware of. You don't win by insulting, by dunking on the other guys on ~Twitter~ bluesky, or by protesting. You win in a democracy only by convincing the very reasonable middle that you share their values. The DNC has taken a position of "Everyone not already in our tent is evil, fascist, dastardly white supremacists," but to their chagrin, their current tent is under 50% of the voting public and it isn't growing.

A coup? This was a general election and the person who won the election is allowed to choose his staff to run the executive branch. Pretty much everyone in the executive branch except the president and maybe the vice president is unelected. Was it a coup when the current people at the NSF got their jobs?

It seems like some new doctors have arrived and diagnosed the patient with terminal cancer. Being new, they have no experience of surgery so are hacking out the tumor with a blunt instrument, excising good tissue and bad. Some hope the surgeons will improve their skill over time. Some say the patient won’t survive. Some say the patient wouldn’t have survived if they did nothing. Some say the patient never had cancer in the first place.

If you spice up the language and name the doctor Benway you basically wrote a summary of a Burroughs short story :)

Not really.

It’s more like this: Imagine a china shop where you don’t like some of the items or how they’re priced. So, you send an elephant into the shop. The result? The elephant doesn’t just break the pieces you dislike—it smashes everything.

US loss, Europe's win. Same thing with the trade wars and other Trumpian policies. Short term gains to look strong but long term just degrades US soft power and decades of ally building.

US screws up and Europe gains some points is a best case scenario. I don't mean to sound like a patriot, but the US is a big deal and it's currently administered by unsound forces.

Europe doesn’t have the budget.

A warning about the "starve the beast" philosophy: the beast will be very hungry when it breaks free.

Not if it's dead.

As an european I envy so much this great purge - here entire castes build on feeding from grant money, perpetuating DEI, green transition, gender studies etc. Overnight nothing-scientist/ NGO profesionals carreers are over, like in those "AI stole my job" videos. Sadly EU still holds strong perpetuating this grant bottom feeding, poisoning academia and discrediting NGOs.

I'd like to offer: both can be bad. Any large system is going to have a lot of inefficiencies, and something to dislike for everyone. But its overall function can still be important enough that taking a sledge hammer to the whole thing is still much more harmful than whatever motivated picking up the hammer.

If they don't start reviewing grants again soon I'll be able to say I was fired by Donald Trump.

Reviewing? They’ve paused payments and award letters.

Part Seven: Enter DOGE.

Part Eight: Hostile takeover by Musk & co.

Catch your breath before you start writing. There is no reason to read past "although I keep removing curse words", it totally undermines the credibility of the piece.

What i've learned in the last week is that if an unelected bureaucrat thinks it will hurt the Trump administration to follow their order through a manner of malicious compliance, then they will. But if they don't, then they'll ignore the order and pretend they're defending the constitution.

a serious audit of the endless money printing of the federal government is well overdue

You don't need some genius brain auditing to know that 99% of the money goes to social security, defense spending, medicare, medicaid, and interest on debt.

The stuff DOGE is playing with is such a tiny percentage it won't move the needle.

There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.

> If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea.

You can't convince people whose attention bandwidth is entirely consumed by the social media engagement algorithms controlled by the very people doing this.

I'm afraid this might be a fait accompli for democratic institutions. The chance to stop this was 10 years ago, by breaking up concentrated media ownership and regulating social media. We didn't, and it's too late.

Hard to say what people voted for. Any winning candidate's coalition is going to be not unified on lots of issues, but Trump's especially. Project 2025 and many of its specific policies pulled out separately all polled like total garbage, so Trump simply lied and said he'd never heard of it and wasn't doing it, and the media dutifully reported the denial. So what did the people who voted for him vote for?

His dizzying array of contradictory statements, lies, and flip-flops have always made him someone where people, his supporters in particular, see the Trump they want to see. Isolationist or imperialist, the man who would ban TikTok or its savior, pro/anti vaccine, really pick just about anything.

There was a popular sentiment in his first term that Trump seemed to believe whoever had talked to him last on any issue, but he manages to have that same effect on other people, too.

Going back to the concept of the will of the voters, Trump won Muslim-heavy Dearborn, MI on the back of people voting to protest Biden/Harris's approach to Gaza. He just announced side-by-side with Netanyahu that he wants to totally depopulate Gaza and have the US take it over and rebuild it as a resort, and throw in the West Bank too while you're at it. Is that what those people voted for?

First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives.

Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.

We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.

I got to hand it to Elon Musk, I was in the “nothing ever happens” camp and he completely, absolutely proved me wrong. The Great men theory of history posits that a lot of History happens due to the action of a few great men. Great has a baggage of positive connotation, I prefer calling it the “Important People of History” theory (to also be gender neutral). It posits that if Hitler didn’t exist, Germany wouldn’t go down the path it did, if Gandhi didn’t exist, India wouldn’t go down the path it did. It is an alternative to the more modern view, that tries to find sociological, economic and environmental reasons for Historic Change. I leaned towards the Great Men View but was not fully convinced by it. Looking at Elon Musk, leads me to believe that this theory is true.

If Elon did not exist/ tie himself to Trump, I don’t think Trump could have done even 10% of the dismantling of the Administrative State that Elon has done. Elon has a certain will to power, flagrantly breaks all norms but advertises it on Twitter for his Twitter supporters, an insane sense of urgency to move fast, an ability to attract talented 20 yr olds to join him for “low pay”, and “100 hr weeks” that gets stuff done. The Trump ecosystem was mostly professional grifter (and crypto scammers), polemicists who only talked the talk, and a small set of true believers who never had a private sector job in their life. If it was just them, I might have been right in the “Nothing Ever Happens” camp. Elon and his ecosystem has given them fangs. They still probably can direct Elon, to a limit, at some things like H1b immigration they will probably concede to Elon but in return they will actually remake the government in their image. Elon is turning out to be one of the “Important People in History”.

>I was in the “nothing ever happens” camp and he completely, absolutely proved me wrong.

Me too.

Vengeance is in order.

I believe that is what we are witnessing, yes.

The financial position of the US is precarious, at best. I seriously doubt there is any painless way to correct course, as Congress seems to have lost the ability to compromise. Looking into the future, the US will go the way of the former Soviet Union if it does not take corrective action.

Is the current situation the only way, the best way, or even a good way to address the country's economic position? That is a matter of perspective. As is always the case, people will take sides. The unreasonable people (on any side) will refuse to compromise and spew inflammatory rhetoric, most often in defense of their own self interests and at the expense of others' interests.

I believe that the most sensible approach is for all parties to adhere to a metered diligence, always being mindful that the country is a collective of disparate interests. The whole point of a democracy is that through all the ups and downs, things work themselves out eventually. Sometimes there are setbacks and other times there is progress.

Things may seem chaotic, but this too shall pass.

How do you reconcile these deeply basic facts with your point of view?

1. The US economy was the best in the world in 2024.

2. The NIH, USAID, and NSF budgets make up just a percentage point or two of US spending.

3. These programs consistently generate ROI >>1.

In light of these painfully obvious facts, isn't it clear that the priorities of this administration have nothing to do with government finances? And that even trying to frame the discussion that way is blatantly irresponsible?

Watching the tech community waltz into DC and pretend that they know how all the levers of government work is pathetic. Are there inefficiencies? Sure. Are there places to improve? Of course. But pretending that they can understand the intricacies of literally decades of institutional knowledge and deep connections across the globe in the course of a single weekend is asinine.

We need to do better. The US government isn't Twitter. Breaking things simply because you have the power is the opposite of leadership, it's nihilism.

Note this isn't representative of the tech industry in general.

When I worked for Google I visited NIH, sat on study groups, and helped advise program managers how to move more compute to the cloud. Like many other techies in SV I have a PhD in a quantitative science and understand how NIH works. My efforts were entirely designed to help update the establishment, not tear it down, and that's true for the wide swath of my coworkers I encountered.

The folks who are doing this are a subset of the tech community, who do not represent the larger community.

Stop playing along with this farce. Their goal is not to improve anything or reduce waste, it's to destroy the apparatus of governance entirely, privatize everything, and rule over a destitute, terrified populace as unto gilded age kings lording over fiefdoms.

What came after the gilded age, again?

It may be a bad assumption to think HN comments reflect the broader tech community's opinion on what is happening in the US government right now. That being said, there are far too many commenters that seem to be okay with what's happening, especially when it comes to DoE and Musk taking over the treasury.

There just seems to be an overall lack of respect for how government works, the broader machine and bureaucracy that is supposed to protect from unilateral decisions made by a single entity. Government is not, and should not, be run like a tech startup. Going fast and breaking things isn't a recipe for stability or reliability in both government and software. History has tried kings and dictators and, well, they never turn out great for the general population. Democracy is slow and sucks sometimes, but it also has a ton of perks that we seem all too quick to dismiss and throw away.

And (as a complete side note) it has all worked out very poorly for Twitter, as a revenue-generating platform.

No reason to think it will be better when applied to the federal government.

What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.

The strategy is: Shut down everything, and see who complains.

If the complaints seem well reasoned, then you adjust course.

You can certainly argue that it is crude, but it’s simpler than trying to deeply analyze and understand a very complicated system.

Carl Icahn has a story[0] about firing 12 floors of people that seems relevant

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WSatPoD2W-o

They don't care how it works and they're overt nihilists, oddly disguised as "rationalists". The intent is to break anything that contradicts them.

Technologists and engineers can be so damn arrogant. Learn some humility. You probably aren't that smart or valuable and people like you aren't the only people adding value to society.

Turncoat Zuck's Meta had posters on the wall in every building: a picture of a rocking horse with the caption: "Not all motion is progress."

The fourth estates' and the masses' blind faith in and compliance to self-righteous, egotistical billionaires, one of whom may be a Nazi, is what is both disappointing and frightening.

Small nit, but these folks 100% can not be described as the "tech community". They're owners of big tech monopolies, their VC backers, and our new oligarchs. Tech community, however, they are not.

Honestly, this is exactly how Silicon Valley operates. Uber broke the laws until they could fix the laws (in their favor). AirBnB did the exact same thing. Meta knew their platform was causing damage to children and teenagers, and they gave zero fucks.

Move fast and break things...

Isn't the elephant in the room here the massive overspending on the US military which Trump and Elon and Satya and Bezos and Altman don't seem to care about?

His voters would be very upset if a single dollar was cut from the military budget. It's the same crowd and mindset that was all in on the Iraq War. The second amendment is the only amendment and anything seen as weakening the country in terms of actual strength would result in windows being smashed again.

But cutting money from weak nerds? Destroying education? That's fine. Nobody needs it.

This is trending on HN at the same time of another related citation, which makes a lot of sense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973

The idea is to destroy every part of the American federal government so that techno fiefdoms can be ruled by oligarchs. It's pretty obvious. Not sure if we can stop it!

In this particular case, the goal is to privatize science entirely.

https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism

Some people here seem to be upset. I don't get it.

More than 40% of US adults are obese. The rates of chronic diseases are through the roof. There's obviously a systemic problem in these institutions who are tasked with the well-being of the country. We know of many fraud in social sciences (ever heard of priming research?), medical science (eg. alzheimer researchs) and nutritional science (eg. saturated fats). In fact I'd argue it has become systemically untrustworthy. Robert Kennedy Jr vowed for: (a) dedicating 20% of science funding to replication studies, (b) systemic publication of peer reviews alongside papers, (c) publication of null results. Which seems like a very good improvement over what we have now. The field is in dire need of a reform.

Am I missing something?

PS: I am not from the USA.

Do you believe that it is the responsibility of the NIH to decide what Americans eat?

RFK believes in things that are provably false and you seemingly believe things without evidence either. Our institutions cause obesity? Who keeps refusing protect the environment? Who refused to directly address the COVID crisis when it was starting and pedalled fake cures. Effective policy is hard to get right but the Trump admin are immeasurably worse than the alternatives.

Assuming all these things are true, RFKjr is not qualified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr.#Anti-vac...

Yes, let's blame scientists for obesity. Not the fact that most of our society has been built around fatty foods and cars to get everywhere.

Where are these scientists arguing for that?!

Hell, science has been wrong on a number of health issues. But diet and exercise has been a staple of good health science for as long as I can remember.

Your blaming the wrong institutions.

> "Elon Musk has said recently that his goal is to have no regulations at all"

Is there a source for this? I ask because this concern me.

It was on a Twitter space, it seems - picked up by a few outlets at the time but, I think, lost in the general insanity of the last 2 weeks

One source: https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-eliminate-regulation...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-regulations-default...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-eliminate-regulation...

It's not a fair paraphrase of what he said.

> "Regulations, basically, should be default gone," the head of the White House's Department of Government Efficiency said on the call, as spotted by HuffPost. "Not default there, default gone." "If it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in," he suggested.

It's to some extent advocating for the "first, do no harm" default of not treating doctors are supposed to have.

Musk's definition of "missed the mark" likely varies wildly from mine, though.

The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.

I think the former is most likely. The people are largely unhappy with how things have been and it's unlikely to get materially worse for the majority of people in the near term, so I don't think there will be a fire lit under enough of the population to rise up.

If it gets bad enough that most people are starving, rather then just struggling, we'll see action, but I doubt it'll get there anytime soon.

Roughly half the voting population wants a king. It's not just rolling over, this is welcomed with open arms.

I try to understand how the "other side" is thinking about this. Disagreements on policy aside, why would "freedom loving Americans" want a king that can rule unilaterally?

Not trying to start a flame war or pose a gotcha question, I'm genuinely curious. What am I missing?

By the time there is any actual mass recognition of what is happening, nevermind any attempt to intervene, it will be far too late.

There was a successful coup and the USA as such has fallen, now presumably on the route to failing.

The thing I find strange is that the other wealthy and powerful stand for the destruction of things that gave the US a huge competitive advantage. The average person isn't hit immediately by the destruction of science. But a far-sighted person with some power should by self-interest not want this.

And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.

Sure. I can’t tell you how much I love my tax dollars fluffing the pockets of god knows what while also having to deal with insane inflation due to no accountability in government. More than have the country welcomes the purge

I live in the US; born here, lived here all my life.

The former is 100% how it will go. The only question is: how bad will it get?

A poster down thread mentions a million dead immigrants. I personally think it will just be in the low 6 figures. Maybe high 5 figures.

There was just an election! The people literally just voted for this.

> The cynic in me thinks that the US is going to roll over and take this fascist shake down. The optimist in me thinks that the people will rise up with a resounding NO and do something about it. Right now I'm not sure which I believe.

At this point, almost certainly the former.

1. Most Trump supporters do not think that there is a problem.

2. “Regular people” — that is, the folks who don’t track news — won’t notice any problems in their day-to-day lives until after said shakedown has been completed.

The only way large swathes of people will demand action is if they are hit hard in the wallets in an immediate and clear way (e.g., rapid price increases to one or more critical goods or services) or if a critical process (e.g., social security checks) gets disrupted. I’m not sure the current types of changes will reach that level.

Time to leave HN for me. It's become a cesspool of this vitriol.

He's an old man. I don't know whether to hope he dies of old age soon or to hope he doesn't because that would mean JD Vance would become president.

This is classic anacyclosis in action so none of this is surprising to me. I've talked about this for years, hell even here on HN.

We're at the final stage of the cycle—ochlocracy. (Mob rule)

I don't think Trump will be king, to be blunt he's too old and not skilled enough.

I'm worried about the next guy or the one after that.

This will probably decide it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

If one party wants to do things democratically at all cost, and the other party wants to bring down democracy, then the latter will win.

Wouldn't rise up lead to a coup? Isn't this exactly what Trump is waiting / routing for?

Reposting because my previous comment was unjustly flagged: The US just facilitated a genocide in the previous administration. This is not just me saying this - this is the consensus ruling of the International Court of Justice at the UN.

What is happening is a good thing. rm corruption -rf

Are we burning Beatles records yet.

My how we’ve fallen. Trump could says he’s bigger than Jesus and sell a bible with the quote

This is such a politically charged article and full of political hate. Is this really worthy of HN. Are political editorials now ok for HN? In addition to his obvious political hatred of the current president, the author goes out of his purview to repeat third hand rumors and allegations of illegality at other agencies he has no experience with.

Just a few quotes from the article:

"...This is amply laid out in the Project 2025 documents, and let me say right here that I was volcanically pissed off at the way that topic was handled during ..the campaign.", and

.. That’s a gigantic can of worms that I don’t have the energy to open at the moment, but past that, there is a broader hatred of education and expertise of all kinds. I hate to bring that one up, because it makes me sound like a crank, but there really is a strain of Trumpism that is nothing more than a desire for revenge against snooty over-educated elites who try to tell people what they should do based on their so-called "research." So if by pummelling the NIH and NSF you can simultaneously punch some huge bureaucracies in the face, revenge yourself against your imagined pandemic enemies, and cause distress at a bunch of big universities where they mostly hate you anyway, well. . .what's not to like? ... I strongly urge everyone to make their voices heard with their Senators and Representatives about these issues: the Republican ones need to hear that not everyone agrees with this stuff, and the Democratic ones need to hear that their constituents are not in a handshaking bipartisan mood."

We wouldn't be here if government funding was not overrun by leftist politics. How many grants have been rewritten the past few years to put a facade of DEI or to grab funding from funds specifically targeted for DEI or other leftist goals?

anything that gives pharma shill derek lowe a bad day is a good thing

How will high-intelligence AI change things in the next 5 years of science?

maybe everything will turn into a startup

whenever any team comes up with anything worthwhile then they get the money

nevermind the fact they need the money to do anything at all, oops

I support scientific research of course but to play devils advocate, how can the USA afford this? They run a deficit and have an enormous debt. I dont understand how this can continously be ignored. Of course nobody wants cuts but how can it go on? Same with the foreign aid, isnt that something a country running a surplus should be worried about?

Go read the article. All of this is a few drops in the bucket. There are some absolutely enormous line items that, by themselves, put us well into deficit territory.

On top of that, these things make the US money. We have, by far, the strongest pharmaceutical and medical technology industry anywhere. Those companies pay taxes.

(Those companies also screw us and the government over in myriad ways, and that should be addressed, but cutting off the research system that supports the entire industry in like throwing out the baby without even draining the bathwater.)

How can they afford not to? Subtract public research funding from the economy. Go ahead - see what's left.

I'll shortcut it real quick - we're all dead from lung cancer and leaded gasoline, so there's no one to do the calculation.

Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.

How can we afford it? because scientific discovery turbocharges our economy. Why do we have such a huge biotech industry? Why was the internet mostly built in the US? Why are we the only country that has placed somebody on the moon, and have huge launch capacities?

Because we invested in those technologies and they paid off handsomely. What you are seeing is the result of "profit externalization"- laws like Bayh Dole allow universities to profit from the research they carry out under contract with the government.

Everything we did, we did because the alternatives were worse.

The US could pay its debt tomorrow, in full. We'd like to avoid that shock, if possible, but there's nothing uncreditworthy about running a fiscal deficit.

USG revenue/spending should be reasoned about in terms of the resources it directs, and the resulting effects on US and world GDP. Everything else is just accounting.

A drop compared to military spending, thing that no one of that people cares about

"There has been a government-wide purge going on of references to any sorts of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) criteria, and indeed, various elected and unelected officials have for some time now been using "DEI" as a scapegoat term and apparently a shorter way of casting suspicion on anything that is not being run by some white guy. As a white guy myself, I find this phenomenally offensive, and I can't even imagine how I'd be feeling about it as a direct target of this garbage"

This is the kind of comment that caused all the public backlash against DEI. Completely out of touch. If you talk this way, don't expect the public to believe your claims about defunding.

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