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Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

>$10k to give people who otherwise didn't have a road into science, exactly what they need to get their foot in the door.

The current admin thinks those $10k grants are better spent by giving them to some billionaire via tax cuts. Impoverishing the many to enrich a few is a 3rd-world, banana-republic mindset, and unfortunately is not self-correcting.

The politically-connected will see the pile of money controlled by the treasury as easy money, unless there is some organization with enough independence and (arresting) power keeping a check on them.

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That $10K breeds a Democratic/progressive voter. The actions of the current admin are pretty logical if one considers the goal of increasing political power of the conservative populist mass (i don't say "voters" here as making voting meaningless is among the end-games here)

I'm waiting for an analog of my "favorite" AETA laws to be made into federal law (FETA - Federal Enterprise Terrorism Act) criminalizing any anti-government speech/protest into terrorist/extremist hell. Note about the First Amendment - AETA doesn't seem to be affected by it, and so FETA would be safe from it too. Would be pretty similar to the Russia's discreditation laws and those China' security laws being used against democratic opposition in Hong Kong for example.

For those who think this is exaggeration, remember that JD Vance wrote a heartfelt endorsement for the skull book, the one arguing that anyone who opposes MAGA is a secret communist revolutionary who needs to be crushed by any means necessary to avoid an imagined communist genocide that they allege we are all plotting. Absolutely wild shit.

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

It's not even midterm season yet, they are already testing the waters by conducting extrajudicial deportations of random Hispanics to labor camps in El Salvador, and the sitting US President is on record saying the El Salvador labor camps need to be expanded by 5x to accommodate the "home growns."

Dark times ahead.

The issues of speech, hate, deportations are the very visible ones. The less visible is for example changing the nature of US government.

The old government bureaucracy which was focused on protecting people - consumer protection, EPA, civil rights, etc. - is being dismantled, and new bureaucracy is being built in place to enforce myriad of new restrictions and dole out import/export/tariff quotas, exceptions, and other government favors (those being given out as favors is a key here). The old bureaucracy was progressive. The new is conservative and oppressive, and will be keeping tight chockhold on the main drivers of the progressivism - free trade and tech innovation. (don't take my word for it, just look at such bureaucracies in other countries)

The old bureaucracy stopped being progressive long ago. I believe the EPA protects the environment about as much as I believe DOGE is about creating efficiencies.

At this point these organizations are just tools for the administration in power to hand out favors and therefore maintain support. The worthwhile work they do is secondary.

Trump is simply getting rid of the ones that aided democrats and creating new ones that will allow him to aid his own supporters.

Also I don't see the connection between progressivism and free trade/tech innovation. If anything, the latter only aid the status quo rather than helping it to progress.

> believe the EPA protects the environment about as much as I believe DOGE is about creating efficiencies.

The EPA is (was?) an enormous set of programs encompassing a range of environmental concerns. Undoubtedly some are more effective than others. But to claim without evidence that it is ineffective is disingenuous. I was around in the 60’s and 70’s.

Interestingly, the EPA was established by Richard Nixon, in an age when his party was also about creating things rather than indiscriminately dismantling them.

> some billionaire via tax cuts

The current noisy news is taxes for the rich the same or higher, not "cuts".

Only for those too ignorant to actually understand what's being extremely loosely proposed. And he's totally non-committal about the whole vague thing.

Hiking income taxes on W2 salaries isn't going to touch those billionaires. They'll still get massive tax cuts.

And that's assuming he's actually saying these things in good faith.

"noisy news"

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