National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce
npr.org
npr.org
There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.
This is not the nature of union employment, it is a structural weakness in the way employment has been negotiated. Musk is exploiting that weakness.
Actors, writers, and directors are in unions in Hollywood, and the seniority plays no part in who gets which part or which crew is hired for a production.
Seniority has often been used in factories because it was easy metric where you had 'interchangeable' people doing the labour: the people were treated almost like machines/widgets themselves. But the advantage of seniority in that context was that it helped stability: you stayed at the same company so it reduced retraining / rehiring costs to the company, and in exchange for your loyalty to the company, the company was loyal to folks that didn't jump around constantly looking for greener pastures.
But there is nothing inherit in being unionized that mandates the use of seniority as a metric.
Probationary status for federal public sector workers has nothing to do with unions in the federal public sector.
Federal public sector unions do not even have a legal right to bargain over this topic.
For more on civil service protections and the category of "probationary employee" see:
https://www.mspb.gov/appeals/infosheets/Probationary_Employe...
It's generally accepted that a professional civil service is superior to a spoils system. That it's better to have a civil service that promotes people based on merit and retains experience from administration to administration, than a system where most key people are political appointees serving the current administration.
A professional civil service sometimes comes into conflict with the political component of the executive branch. Because of that, civil servants need stronger employment protections than ordinary employees. For example, the administration should not be able to fire a career civil servant for politically motivated reasons and replace them with a loyalist.
But hiring obviously goes wrong from time to time. A probationary period with a lower bar for firing is a compromise that makes hiring mistakes less costly if they are detected early.
Further, "probationary" and "junior" are not the same thing. People who have recently been promoted or changed roles are in this category, even if they've been working for the federal government for decades and decades.
Agree that the term "junior" here has some nuance to it, though.
Employees can join a union at any time federal public sector, including during a probationary period.
"Therefore it is a side-effect of unionization that these junior-est of employees are the easiest pickings."
Your premise is false, but even if it weren't, this wouldn't follow.
working somewhere that has no new people, is not fun when all the old people with knowledge all retire at once.
The loss of institutional knowledge right now is devastating.
That fact is VERY apparent because there's been more than a couple of times where OMB has scrambled to rehire recently fired employees.
This is a haphazard mess that will cripple the government and likely the US economy for a decade or more.
For all of the talk about "fraud" this is exactly that. All of these thousands of people are being told that they're being let go for "performance reasons" in clearly template emails which is just false. I've been reading stories people are posting about receiving these severance emails in shock because they'd just been praised for their performance, or showing them to their bosses who are also shocked because the bosses weren't informed at all and had no issues with the employee.
There are going to be endless lawsuits about this. The expense and waste of time is going to be enormous. But it achieves their real goal of crippling these agencies and reducing oversight for businesses.
Such courage. I've had to fire a number of people over the years unfortunately and I've always had the courage to do it myself.
>> terminated by the end of the day, without severance
As long as its done with humanity.... oh, no? Oh well.
… or trying to arrange to save positions at the last minute.
I’ve seen the other side of this before.
If he’s a shit leader, he’s just hiding.
If he’s a good leader, then he is firing off e-mails and banging down doors explaining how letting go of this position or that position (or department or whatever) will create irreparable harm.
And with this administration, he probably has the added task of trying to figure out which aspects of irreparable harm the administration wants and which ones they don’t want — an extreme exercise in doublethink.
Once you’re dealing with government leaders at this level, I would default to a charitable view until proven otherwise. They aren’t perfect for sure, but they trend towards being pretty damn good at their jobs.
Like education, there is a pendulum effect over time.. but the movement is such that "correcting" for one extreme happens over the enaction of another extreme.. etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethuraman_Panchanathan
But he was suggested by both Obama and Trump. Is it this?
"Panchanathan highlighted how universities like ASU ought to work hand-in-hand with businesses to create curriculum that fosters the entrepreneurial traits employers look for today, in order to produce a future of innovation ecosystems."
Or does he facilitate flooding the US with cheaper H1B scientists from India?
I no longer understand why people rise to the top (this is not limited to the US, Europe is the same).
These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate.
This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for.
May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.
The hero worship is one aspect of a much larger problem, I think, which is that technology culture is almost entirely defined by trends in the startup and VC spaces. It's been that way for at least a decade and a half, by my reckoning.
There is very little genuine technology subculture anymore that is willing to critique dominant trends, raise up our own heroes, and create alternatives.
I'm really hoping that demystifying "disruption" will create a moment of reckoning for technologists.
[edited to say "decade and a half"]
Doing it by end of day without severance seems unnecessarily cruel. And the director is a coward if he didn't attend the meeting.
The Cruelty Is the Point:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-...
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...
From what I've seen (I know multiple people at places directly affected by this), the justification is "poor performance", which is clearly nonsense as theres been no time for that kind of evaluation and the actual criteria is obvious (probationary or not).
The effects on unemployment here will be absolutely unprecedented, given how many very smart, otherwise successful people are being punted. It has also killed morale at any and all government agencies and companies that work with them (pretty clearly the point, imo). Everyone knows making the entire workforce depressed and fearful helps productivity!
In case it seems like these people at all know what they're doing: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-firings-us-nuclear-weapons...
But I genuinely cannot decide if it's likely that Trump's re-election and/or current behavior are the result of Chinese / Russian operations.
I guess the question is somewhat academic, given the scale of damage that Trump, Musk, et al are inflicting on national security.
Musk is on the bandwagon now, are there really that many organizations or individual decision makers who have the resources to make him more fabulously rich than he already is?
And are these in the same camp and are they aligned in any way?
If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would surely be condemning Trump as a flat-out communist, and not just a commie sympathizer as a softer reaction to his first term.
Plus, is there a counter-party who can make Trump a better offer if he were to refrain from applying his legendary bankruptcy-prone financial misdeeds to the country as a whole? After all this would realistically be his last chance for sure this time.
Remember when Trump goes bankrupt, he says how great he did because other people lost more :(
Russia.
Putin promised Elon he would be able to pursue the North American Technate without Russian interference. Elon bought Trump and promised that Trump would stay out of prison. If one gets caught now they both go down.
well, he's so rich that getting richer doesn't matter. But running the whole country is priceless
He wants more power. Money is old and boring to him already.
Before we had an FM radio I used to listen to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura when I was little. Listening to something at an early age and thinking "I don't agree" was a good experience. To this day I don't like reading, watching, or listening to stuff that I "agree" with.
Lasik surgery, PCR, CRISPR, MRIs are supposed to have come out of NSF projects, and these all became someone's line of business. Why are the heads of biotech or pharma or medical device companies not publicly stating that destabilizing the apparatus for early research risks shrinking these fields?
This doesn't affect the NSF grants. They fired 10% of middle managers distributing the grants. The actual scientific work is not done by employees of NSF but by employees of universities etc.
Finally, it's a stretch to argue that even if NSF grants go away, the progress of science stops.
Universities have other sources of funds and I don't see why businesses need government subsidies. They are not giving free lasik surgeries or MRI scans, they can fund their products and services from profits not taxpayer (i.e. you and me) money.
I don’t totally disagree with your point about scientific progress continuing with a diminished NSF, but NSF does place a lot of emphasis on early stage fundamental high risk / high reward research, which industry has been trending away from in favor of quicker and clearer returns.
Having an evidence-based discussion about how the US should allocate resources for scientific discovery is great - but it should be a clear discussion within the norms of our democratic institutions instead of a unilateral move by a few that stand to personally gain at the expense of the broader interest of the the American people
LASIK wasn't solely from NSF funding.
https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/invention-impact-story-l...
With PCR, their own claim, which other sources seem to agree with, is that research on extremophile bacteria supported by NSF in the 1960s found the bacteria from which a heat-tolerant DNA polymerase enzyme was isolated.
I think this is actually a pretty good example of research which initially might have seemed purely exploratory that facilitates valuable applications which couldn't have been seen at the outset.
In summary: NSF funding is great. It played an important role in a key component of PCR. But it's still a stretch for them to tout their involvement with PCR per-se.
The only difference is that when the Romans did it, they had a purpose in mind. What we are seeing now is the act of a Batman villain, not a general or an industrialist or a president.
The news says what is happening, not what you, in your district and state, care about.
Everyone in executive branch, as the saying goes, serves at the pleasure of the President of United States.
That's what constitution says.
President ordered reduction of number of government employees, as is his right and authority.
Hence NSF and other government departments are following the President orders and firing people, starting with those easiest to fire i.e. probatory workers. I'm sure that's just the beginning and they will follow with firing people for not showing up to work, having second jobs, lack of performance etc.
Congress is the other branch of government and has no power or authority here.
Contacting representatives and senators would be a waste of time.
The judiciary is the other other branch of government and absolutely has power and authority here if laws or contractual agreements (e.g., requirements to fire for cause) are being violated.
The President isn't an absolute monarch, even within the Executive Branch.
>Contacting representatives and senators would be a waste of time.
Aside from formal legal power, Congressional Reps and Senators can apply pressure to the President to change his policies, which they will do if enough of their constituents express their anger at these actions.
The unitary executive is not clearly visible in our constitution.
Except obviously the motive is to not efficiency. It's about ensuring loyalty and even deliberately breaking the government to justify later actions.
Or is it your position that NSF has optimal number of employees for managing $9B of grants and adding one more or subtracting one would make NSF less efficient?
If you could provide chain of reasoning that led you to opine that the current number of NSF employees is the optimal one?
Elon already proved that taking a chainsaw to a large org has practically no effect on the outcome. He fired over 80% of Twitter and even I thought it would go down for days at a time at some point, but I was wrong. He's taking this experience and acting at scale on the Federal government.
I don't know if he's right or he's wrong, but I'm willing to try it out and live with the consequences.
Twitter seems like a dysfunctional company at this point, and I'm not sure it's a good model for how to fix government.
Commendable, in a way.
But you're willing to try it out and let everyone else live with the consequences. That's somewhat less commendable.
Or maybe they really are crazy. But that would be a conclusion of last resort.
Note well: That's my guess. I have no definite knowledge.
However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.
Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
As far as I know majority of research on fusion / future of nuclear is financed by NOT government.
Spending $50 million on housing immigrants or $2 million on DEI programs that result in wasting employees times with "training" about white privilege will not create fusion.
If fusion is commercially viable, it doesn't require taxpayer (i.e. mine and yours) money to be developed.
Not to mention that universities are grifting on science grants and using half the money for "overhead", not for actual research.
It's also an open secret that grants don't necessarily go to the best scientists but to best grant proposal writers and those are not the same people.
This is the reason that NSF exists - many exciting and potentially promising future technologies are not commercially viable. We invest in NSF to fund the foundational research to get to a place where ideas are commercially viable enough for industry to fully develop and implement them.
Also, there is also (internal) overhead in industrial research organizations, and there are similar problems of optimal resource allocation in any organization. That’s not to say we shouldn’t strive to do better, but I think it’s selective logic to apply these critiques only to the public sector.
You have to start somewhere and they're starting with the low hanging fruit. They've already gotten permission to go though the defense budget as well.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-trumps-agenda-cal...
For the record, I personally am completely against the tax cuts.
These cuts to the workforce are performative at best, or designed to destroy the federal government at worst. Given it's Musk and Trump, I think it's the later. And they are doing this under the guise of budget concerns, which is clearly bullshit when they still have a $4.5T tax cut on the table.
So it's not whataboutism, it's was a quick way of highlighting how your post was incorrect.
The NSF generates much more value than it costs.
So no they don’t care about costs. Its about sucking all the government money for themselves :)
And the NSF headquarters is a complete joke...I use to do tempo runs down Eisenhower Ave when it was all brutalist government buildings and condo's. They ripped down the brutualist buildings and rebuilt them into commercial office space which has sat vacant for years. But then in comes the NSF and they constructed this abomination of a building that has rooftop gardens and dominates the skyline. Massive sky scrapper...And they did this when a significant portion of their employee's worked from home (I know one). Sorry if I'm not crying about layoffs with the NSF, especially after years of tech layoffs due to Section 174 (approved of by some of these same progressive NSF government employees).
> new contracts for military cyber trucks were signed just last week.
To repeat: Biden admin signed those contracts and they were last updated in December. So not new, not last week, not a deal with Trump admin.
> Space X was contracted to “fix” FAA
No. DOGE, which is a government department of ~100 people, will work to fix FAA, not SpaceX. And you don't have to use scary quotes: by their own admission traffic control system is tech from 70.
Finally, why don't you tell us which SpaceX government contract should be given to another company and how much more will that other company charge (assuming they are even capable of executing the task).
No tax dollars should go to Nazis. We have grandparents dead on the beach of Normandy.
State Department cut the Tesla deal that Biden signed.
Mass firing your best workers is not a great way to build a more efficient government.
It's almost as if it's just a boogeyman they trot out when they're the opposition party, and not the thing they're actually concerned about.
- Social Security: 21%
- Medicare: 15%
- Defense: 14%
- Interest: 13%
The administration has at points said social security and medicare won't be touched, no one's been talking seriously about defense spending cuts, and we understand there to be giant risks with screwing around with paying interest. So almost 2/3 of our 6.8T budget is off limits. The 10B for the whole NSF is like < 0.15%.
I'd love us to have a serious conversation about addressing the debt, but that can't start with asking for tax cuts and protecting existing entitlement benefits under their exact current terms.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Yeah… maybe:
> "We're even looking at Treasuries," Trump said. "There could be a problem - you've been reading about that, with Treasuries and that could be an interesting problem."
> He added: "It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of that stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent, therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought."
> It was not clear whether Trump was referring to debt service or other government payments made by the Treasury Department.
* https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/trump-says-us-might-have-...
That's also in the 2024 Republican party platform: "FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE". (Shouting copied from the source).
There are however a couple reasons to doubt the sincerity of that.
First the Republican Study Committee, which around 80% of House Republicans belong to, keeps proposing that the retirement age be raised.
Second, if nothing is done to either cut benefits or raise revenue or both the Social Security trust fund runs out of money around 2035. Around 20% of benefits are paid out of the trust fund. If that is allowed to happen then the only way to not cut benefits would be for Congress and the President to make that up out of the general budget.
The only thing Republicans have said along the lines of increasing SS revenue is that their policies will lead to so much economic growth that tax revenue, including the payroll taxes for SS, will go way up and that will be enough to avert the trust fund's insolvency.
Meanwhile, many of their proposed tax cuts will shorten the time to insolvency. The proposal to eliminate taxes on tips and to eliminate taxes on SS for retirees with high non-SS income will move the insolvency up by up to a couple years or so.
Anyway, I'm sure that if the trust fund is allowed to become insolvent those who let that happen will say that since they did not actively cut benefits they did not violate the party platform.
The Democrats also have repeatedly introduced bills to address the trust fund, which concentrate on raising its revenue. The main method in these bills is to raise the cap on income subject to the payroll tax. Right now you pay 6.2% on the first $176100 (in 2025) of your pay. The Democrat proposals are to include some income above that cap in payroll tax. I believe there have been proposals to get rid of that cap, to raise the cap, or to put a cap on that cap (e.g., payroll tax on first $176100, then no payroll tax from there to $400k, then payroll tax again on income above $400k).
A poll of a proposal that would do the cap on the cap thing (with the numbers given above), gradually raise the payroll tax from 6.2% to 7.2%, make the annual COL adjustment more accurately reflect inflation, and a few other things which would result in there being a small surplus got overwhelming support from voters [1] (here's the PDF with the detailed results) [2].
Overall support is 82%. This doesn't vary much by education level or income level or age. By party affiliation support is 88% for Democrats, 82% for independents, and 74% for Republicans.
Note: the above results are for a proposed package that includes several things. The poll also looked at the individual things in isolation and at variants of them.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/social-security/survey-raising-taxes/
[2] https://www.nasi.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/NASI_SocialS...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/02/19/...
~1% federal workforce growth since 2000: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-...
Federal employment numbers since 1940: https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... (peaks are temporary census hires)
spending over time as a % of GDP: https://www.cato.org/blog/century-federal-spending-1925-2025
Inflation adjusted federal spending (~4% growth): https://usafacts.org/articles/how-has-the-federal-budget-cha...
US real GDP over time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/
The attrition rate of the federal government is 6-7% per year. This is about 150,000 new hires a year if you maintain the same size government. You can even see it from the DOGE website showing hundreds of thousands
So yes, the vast majority are new employees. The idea that the government hasn't grown doesn't mean that new employees haven't been hire.
I'm shocked at the number of people that are defending government hiring when government jobs have been the butt of jokes for decades. Government headcount needs to be cut drastically. It doesn't have to be demeaning the way it's currently being done, but the 8 month offer was pretty generous in my opinion.
Or maybe you are wildly off base about how many humans it takes to corral the federal government of the US? Maybe you are more filled with propaganda of government jobs?
Maybe the people like you making government jobs the butt of jokes have been part of the problem? Maybe we should respect civil service and have high expectations of it but also understand how important it is.
Being mildly in debt is no reason or excuse to destroy democracy.
$36T is mildly in debt? 50% of our tax revenue will be used to pay our interest on the debt in the next 5 years. It sounds like you have no understanding about how much debt we are in, especially considering that most of our debt has been bought by the Federal Reserve, which is essentially printing money.
Nothing about this destroys democracy. Managing our debt and spending allows us to enjoy more democracy not less.