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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

So the NSF has to manage $9B in grants but with fewer people to do so. That $9B will probably be less well spent now. So we're risking mis-spending $9B in order to save less than $20MM in salaries. That would be a really stupid move if the motive really was to improve efficiency.

Except obviously the motive is to not efficiency. It's about ensuring loyalty and even deliberately breaking the government to justify later actions.

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I'd guess that it will be less than $9B pretty soon.

bring back https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism or some equivalent pseudo science. noahs ark shipbuilding sciences or similar .

So, should they hire 10% more NSF employees to be even more efficient?

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?

Over the years NSF, like any organization, has attempted to staff completely to their needs and faced pushback from those that control the funding. Of course that doesn't result in perfect results, but it is somewhat connected to needed staffing levels. A mandate that was written to apply to every agency in the government is totally disconnected from appropriate staffing.

Yes, changing the plan from one arrived at by people familiar with the problem sure sounds like something that would need either talking to those people or engaging with the problem for months or years.

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