Why I'm resigning from the National Science Foundation
time.com
time.com
The Trump admins cuts are not likely to be reversed until at minimum 2029 if Democrats are able to take the White House. But the entire scientific pipeline has been disrupted. Science has always had "passion profession" tax, but at this point I would strongly recommend anyone pursuing life sciences or government research to either consider another field, or realize that you will most likely end up in industry.
Things are quite bleak right now...
It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
Well, they don't do that. The myth that universities are liberal monocultures is propagated by the right as an excuse to attack them.
Let's turn your argument around: most police departments employee conservative voters. Would you be comfortable with the government requiring "viewpoint diversity" among police offices? After all, why should liberal politicians fund non-liberal institutions?
The government should not discriminate based on political orientation. Government services, including government-funded universities, should serve all Americans.
> It's one thing to want public funding, but it's quite another to want that funding while expecting nakedly partisan purity testing like "DEI statements" for faculty.
Universities are, and should be, free to choose their own values and hiring practice.
Said as a liberal.
Litmus test: Say something incendiary in a liberal direction at a university and observe reaction (i.e. "there is no such thing as biological gender"). Say something incendiary in a conservative direction and observe reaction (i.e. "life begins at conception and abortion is murder").
There absolutely was a double-standard.
That said, even if liberals created consequences for conservative speech, they by and large allowed it. (While picketing and, in later years, shouting it down)
In contrast to the current group of populist-conservatives who are anti-free speech and want to erase liberal ideas from existence.
The fact that there are a large number of liberals at universities does not make it a monoculture. There is no conspiracy to keep non-liberals out. Your anecdote shows nothing.
Too few liberals in academia were willing to say "I disagree with what you say, but support your right to say it" when it was inconvenient.
Which isn't in any way to justify the excessive clusterfuck of a reprise by populist conservatives these days. Two wrongs do not make a right, and what's being done today is much worse than the liberal bent of early 21st century US universities.
>Job applicants should not be required as a condition of employment to profess their loyalty to partisan statements or beliefs. Yet universities that solicit statements of commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion from job applicants do precisely that.
...
>We have discovered that 86 out of the 98 American universities we investigated required diversity statements for at least some job positions.
https://www.nas.org/reports/ideological-insistence/full-repo...
University professors are also required to accommodate students under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If the president finds that wheelchairs are a communist plot, does that make the ADA partisan?
And the command performances of DEI (the implementation) did get a little Kool Aid-y, even if diversity, equity, inclusion (the principles) are individually laudable.
But that's most things once they go through the HR washer.
See Title 6, Title 9 of course the Civil Rights Act
There are redresses for breaking the law -- the courts.
I think you don't know what that word means.
The comment I'm addressing claimed that DEI statements are partisan. They weren't, until an ideologue decides to make them so.
Performative, maybe. In many jobs, I have to prove that I can be legally hired: is that performative as well?
It's hard to parse how they were used any other way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250403173227/https://edib.harv...
https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedo...
https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedo...
Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan.
No, it's pretty easy. They were used to comply with the law.
> Both of the writers seem to believe that DEI statements, as implemented at Harvard, were mildly to wildly partisan.
Do you know what partisan means? It means favoring a particular political party. The attempt to cast perfectly normal rules against discrimination as a partisan project is one of the more evil ideas to come out of this administration, and that's saying something. Believe it or not, some people take actions because they have authentic beliefs. Not everything you don't like is performative, and not everything is calculated for it's political impact.
The current government, like you, sees everything through a partisan lens. They thinks that a lawyer who takes the case of a client who opposes the administration is necessarily partisan (and therefore worthy of punishment). More recently, the American Bar Association was singled out for alleged [1] partisanship for having the gall to support a plaintiff who thinks the government should pay its debts. Or how about the Associated Press [2] is a partisan organization now because of the name they choose to assign to the body of water south of the US.
The expansion of the world "partisan" to mean anyone who has any beliefs at all makes every person and every action a partisan. Which means that everyone is either with the administration or against it. That's exactly how they see the world, but that's not the world that I want to live in.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-temporarily-blocks-cance...
[2]https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/the-asso...
If you want to monologue, that's fine, but I thought we were having a conversation.
One of the greatest travesties of our modern times is that political conversation somehow robs people of the capacity to read and listen, because another person being wrong seemingly trumps any requirement for either.
This is a criticism that you should take to heart. I addressed your previous comment: you said that DEI is performative, and I explained how it wasn't; and you said that DEI is partisan, and I explained how it wasn't. Are you able to read and listen, or are these virtues that you love to extoll only when it suits you?
Or you could take the lazy way out.
FWIW I'm not even saying that it's necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. As far as I'm concerned, a lot of it is due to conservatives increasingly drifting away from major positions that can be sustained through facts and reason (although the same effect also exists on the other side of the aisle, I'd say it's less pronounced overall).
But that doesn't matter. OP's point is, if science falls squarely on one side of political spectrum, for any reason, the consequences shouldn't be surprising.
If you are going to take in millions in Pell grants, student loans, and research funding, you are going to be beholden to politics. There are many that decline the funding to retain their independence.
What does "beholden" mean? Does it mean the executive branch gets to install "viewpoint diversity" police and cancel whole departments, as they wanted to at Harvard? Do you think that level of government takeover benefits the university or the community?
If you believe, truly, in the market place of ideas, then the question is why you dont have wildly successful conservative universities springing up, to take advantage of the inefficiency this so called purity testing is taking up.
If professors are going to leave the country whole sale, thats a pretty clear sign of preferences which can’t be faked.
——
A point I raise on the DEI angle. We are at a stage where, with better ways to allocate resources, humanity could become (or be on its way to) a post scarcity species. This used to be the dream.
The question is how we spend our time. Part of that journey is the existence of role models from communities where there is a low diversity of examples of careers to take one through life.
DEI doesn’t mean that this is anti-majority. I’ve heard this particular assault in more than one country now. Fundamentally, the issue is never DEI.
The issue, stripping past the politics, is always resource distribution, AKA jobs.
In my experience, industry can be vastly better funded, but the industry labs are internal and perhaps very hard to find.
1. Astronomy.
2. Physics.
3. Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.
4. Biology aside from medicine.
5. Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.
6. Theoretical computer science.
7. Mathematics.
I'm not blaming you for not knowing this, but I am holding my head in my hands - how can people not know about astronomers? They've been a part of our culture and the prestige of civilization for thousands of years.
What benefits do you expect to see from the kinds astronomy that require this sort of funding? Sure, knowing things can be nice but this ignores opportunity costs, eg. would practical knowledge like fusion research be further along if talent weren't focused on impractical knowledge?
> Physics.
Not strictly true, see quantum computing for instance, lasers, semiconductors and so on. There are some types of physics that aren't viable in this sense, but why does that automatically translate into some need to support them? For instance, consider the decades spent on supersymmetry which ultimately produced bupkis. In a world in which we weren't so focused on ideas so divorced from empirical data, what other types of knowledge or engineering would we have done?
> Geophysics concerning the parts of the Earth deeper than the crust.
What benefits do you expect to see?
> Biology aside from medicine.
Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
> Chemistry aside from industrial chemistry.
Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
> Theoretical computer science.
Untrue, Google and Facebook have advance distributed computing considerably, for instance.
> Mathematics.
Unclear, there's a lot of math involved in predictions of all sorts, like weather forecasting, stock market prediction. If your argument here is that math will be more application-focused, this strikes me much like the physics objection where it's unclear that we'd really be worse off.
There seems to be this automatic assumption among some people that pure research with no direction or constraints is an unmitigated good and that we can't do better. I used to think so too, but I just don't see it anymore.
There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Results are often spun out into companies, but there is no institution that can fund experiments that require timelines of multiple decades (even things like fusion power is nearly completely government funds)
And those are the only two parts where I actually have some competence. So yeah.. I wouldn't buy
Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.
> There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded.
Yes, and? Is this an argument that they cannot be funded in other ways, or an argument that the parts of physics that cannot be funded in any other way ought to be publicly funded? There's just this blanket assumption that this is true but it simply doesn't follow.
For instance, the newest super collider project that some people are pushing for completely misses the opportunity cost of not funding other projects that could be far more impactful, like wakefield accelerators, which would reduce the size and cost of particle accelerators by orders of magnitude.
This is not true in many aspects. There are many problems with plasma and laser wakefield acceleration. First, the beam quality (emittance and stability) is orders of magnitude below collider requirements. They have demonstrated GeV-scale acceleration over centimeters, but scaling to multi-TeV and maintaining luminosity is not even close to solved. There are no concept for a full detector-ready experimental program exists using wakefield accelerators. But on the other hand, we have "FCC" being based on mature accelerator technologies, with well-understood cost scaling and detector integration that builds on decades on experience building accelerators. Actually it is much safer option than what you are saying.
But the important point is that you are making it binary choice, we can still investigate and work on wakefield accelerators while working on more mature projects. Remember than it takes decades of work and thousands of scientists to make any of these things work. And it is not the question of accelerator itself but what detector can use it and for what physics exactly. We can produce much more interesting physics colliding muons instead off protons but this is much more challenging task and will cost more efforts and will cost more.
Also I would say that Scientific value isn’t measured by compactness or cost alone. This is a VC mindset not a scientist pushing boundaries of knowledge.
> Right, defense can and has funded research for its own purposes, and sometimes those purposes can find wider commercial application (like the internet). That's all great, national defense is one of the government's primary purposes.
Well since we are here. I know it is a cliche by now and many people HN doesn't like to be reminded about that but guess that is the most beneficial CERN output ?
The question is not whether wakefield accelerators are "ready" for something on the scale of a supercollider, the question is what is the expected return per dollar spend? From what I can see, there's very, very little we can expect from the energy levels achieved by the next radio frequency supercollider. It's basically "explore the Higgs sector a little better", and that's it, and we're not expecting to find much there. $20B is a high price tag for producing basically nothing new.
I'm saying that if you took $18B of $20B for the supercollider they've been tossing about and invest it into wakefield research, it's very plausible that we could solve all of the problems you describe, and with the $2B left over we could build a wakefield accelerator of comparable energy, and that we'd be better off in that world.
> But the important point is that you are making it binary choice, we can still investigate and work on wakefield accelerators while working on more mature projects.
Investment dollars are finite, therefore it often is a binary choice. You could fund tens of thousands of smaller experiments in domains where we have actual uncertainty for the cost of this one piece of equipment that's good for only a few experiments.
> Also I would say that Scientific value isn’t measured by compactness or cost alone. This is a VC mindset not a scientist pushing boundaries of knowledge.
If you want to expand knowledge faster then you should consider adopting the VC mindset: reduce costs per novel datum gathered. You can run more experiments in more diverse fields and uncover more surprises. Sounds like something a scientist should value frankly.
> I know it is a cliche by now and many people HN doesn't like to be reminded about that but guess that is the most beneficial CERN output ?
Direct military projects arguably haven't been a focus of CERN for 30+ years. They might benefit indirectly, but ask yourself whether the military would have still achieved the outcomes they needed by funding that research directly rather than indirectly in a way that accidentally produced things they needed. The direct funding is what I'm suggesting is well justified, the indirect maybe not so much.
>[Chemistry]? Such as? What benefits do you expect to see?
Everything around us is made up of "molecules," assemblages of parts called atoms. Since it's not possible to manipulate the molecules directly in sufficient numbers (one pound of plastic is made of 2000000000000000000000 individual molecules), we have to assemble molecules en masse by subjecting them to processes that cause each step to happen to all of them at once. How does that work?
Let's say you have a molecule. Its structure will have exposed parts, and some bonds will be weaker than others. If you want to replace a part with another part (one step in the assembly of the final product), you might go about it by letting another molecule come along that has a greater affinity to bond with the location of the part you want to replace, and also has a tendency to be in turn itself replaced with the part you want to add. How can you know which molecule to use for this? You could run a computer simulation, apply a rule of thumb, or look it up in a book. In order to write the simulations, deduce the correct rules of thumb and write the books, scientists need to try a lot of combinations of molecules to see what parts swap with what other parts when they're mixed, and then think very hard about what's happening and why it is happening. This practice is known as, "chemistry."
Once a lot of the rules for a certain molecule are mapped out, engineers with an application in mind can go to the library and ask, "what sequence of steps will take me from available molecules to a molecule I can sell in a way that succeeds very often?" This is called, "industrial chemistry." If there was no library and no knowledge in it, industrial chemistry would be impossible. That is the relationship between science and engineering.
Even supposing the costs associated with basic research can't be recouped commercially using existing technology, that does not suggest that alternatives are not possible. For instance, in a world in which this library was not created, perhaps the set of talented industrial chemists in our timeline would have studied physics or computer science instead and advanced quantum chemistry simulations that capture some, most or even all of the utility of this empirical approach.
I can look at what you describe and acknowledge that it's useful without automatically accepting that it's a) not commercializable, and b) impossible to work around, which is what you were implying.
Nicely put, but I say ignorance because your post was a flurry of questions asking someone else to tell you information about multiple subjects rather than adding substantive information or viewpoint to the conversation.
> Not an argument that these advances would not have been made otherwise, such as by research directly in medical imaging, nor an argument that this was the cheapest way we could have made these advances.
You've asked a question that is impossible to answer, but the reality is that the benefit happened, and it's not the only one. It seems that the system has some merit, although yes, there's no way to prove that there wasn't a "better" straight-line-to-the-answer way to do it. How can you know the straight-line path ahead of time? You can't map the territory without going out there and looking. Basic research in multiple areas, allowing for cross-pollination has done a really good job at that over the years.
> Ditto for mathematics, which for centuries has progressed without direct public funding.
This one really doesn't make sense. Who paid Riemann? Who paid Newton? Universities are not a new thing, and funding them with state money has been there from the start. Even figures perhaps not as strongly associated with universities like John Herschel or Tycho Brahe got their money from the state one way or the other (aristocrats, or given money to advance the knowledge and/or image of the state).
This is exactly the problem: you're describing a for-profit mindset, and it's exactly why research in the private sector floundering.
If you pretense everything with "what value will this bring" then you've already lost. Research is about finding things out for the sake of it. You don't know if it brings value because you haven't researched it yet. That's what breaking new ground is all about.
No, it's not. If research never brought any value then we would almost never do it, aside from some weird hobbyists, and particularly not with public funds. Everything has a cost-benefit tradeoff, even publicly funded research, and pretending this isn't so is naive at best.
Research whose costs can be recouped on short time horizons arguably should not have public funding because the economic incentives are sufficient. Exactly where to draw this line is not clear, not only because research returns are unclear but also because publicly funded research diverts talented people from endeavours that would have provided direct economic benefits. This second order effect is not widely appreciated. How can you truly evaluate the opportunity cost of this counterfactual world? Seems virtually impossible in fact, so arguments that research X returns Y with no consideration that you can't evaluate the counterfactual should be viewed with extreme skepticism.
And this doesn't even get into the problem of scope creep. Academics charged with pure research develop the exact mindset you illustrate, where no matter how outlandish the idea, well maybe it will be good for something someday, so why not fund it just in case? This ends up producing a whole lot of nothing, as we've seen in particle physics over the past 30+ years.
"holding my head in my hands" to quote an earlier poster
the perniciousness of the "we need to economically justify the kind of scientific research we are doing" is that plenty of the research we've had that has been economically beneficial was NOT obvious when it was being conducted
by restricting research to programs that may have economic benefit, you restrict yourself to funding things that we pretty much already know, which is a bit more like R&D and less research
to give two examples
1) Gila monster venom - research in the 1990s on Gila Monster Venom formed the building blocks that would become GLP1 medications, which are likely to be some of the best performing medications of all time, as well as have the huge societal benefit of reducing the obesity load on the health system, when this research was being conducted its implications were not known and could have very well been on the chopping block if we were trying to "justify it to taxpayers"
2) CERN - the study of high energy particle physics at CERN is a classic case of "how useful is this knowledge?" It's pretty easy to look at this and wonder how it economically justifies itself. What difference does it make to the tax payer if we discover the Higgs Boson or not? Well, the entire digital economy is down stream of CERN. The internet was partially developed to facilitate the transfer of large quantities of data from colliders like CERN to be analyzed elsewhere in the world. For fuck suck, the world wide web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners Lee. If we didn't invest that money into CERN, or other research institutions, who knows what the web would look like today, and how large the digital economy would be.
Yes, these are just two examples of how research without clear ROI has had economic benefit and justified itself to tax payers. The crux of the issue is we don't know how valuable what we don't know is, and we don't know what branch of science will have the next society altering discovery, so a random walk through scientific research for the sake of knowing things is valuable, because there are undoubtedly things we don't know that will benefit us greatly.
So my argument is in a way like yours, the science does have to justify itself to taxpayers. But the evidence is that the process of science, and knowledge seeking at a high level have justified the funding of science, going study by study to figure out what will have ROI and what won't is a great way to ensure that we discover less and less, leaving more and more stones unturned.
Microsoft Research has a ton of people working on theoretical CS.
Biology - there is a ton of research in agriculture too - e.g. Monsanto and GMO seeds.
I don’t think there are current private organizations doing research similar to what Bell Labs did as the current corporate-governance systems wouldn’t allow for it.
Currently, industry research is more for profit-maximization at the expense of greater human prosperity/economic growth: such as you mention Monsanto making patented seeds, increasing profits by disallowing farmers to regrow crops more cheaply which otherwise could’ve been passed onto consumers/wider society.
It can never be released.
Light pollution. Lots of people now live in places where the stars are hard to spot.
And now we also all have infinite distraction cuboids, many who can still see them if they look, won't look.
And if you don't know what's out there — or mistakenly categorise all of space as scifi — then why would you be curious about it? Why even ask who might research it?
And pharma companies do a lot of research but it's almost entirely applied, taking the basic processes discovered by NIH funded research and figuring out how to turn them into feasible drugs. You need both halves there to sustain our current progress.
why do we need to subsidize "half" of these pharma companies' research? if they can't get it for free then they'll have to find a way to do it themselves at a profit
I also don't buy the notion that industry is better for science, maybe if you want to research ways to damage humans and the environment sure but most people don't want these things.
However, deep scientific cultural do roots exist here and won’t be stamped out by some fearmongering. The entire western world is under populist pressure right now, not just here. So even if you imagine someone moving out and studying in a different country, it’s not a guarantee they will find stability there either.
Will the rest of the world absorb the scientists in the US? Probably not, that is honestly their mistake and missed opportunity, but all the same probably not. Fine, so you're right? Scientists just stick it out? No.
The best scientists will definitely leave. Those are the very ones we always wanted to attract. They could have always left, but didn't because the US was the best place for them. Now they leave. Everyone else will try and leave or leave for industry. Even if you only lose 20% of your scientist to other countries and sectors where they are no longer doing productive scientific work, that is a massive blow to progress.
Worst case scenario is China wakes up from its xenophobia and uses this opportunity to replay the US science strategy. Suddenly 20-50% of US scientists can leave for China.
So, cutting off real funding is now considered "fearmongering"?
Sure, scientists wont move and decades of research goes down the drain and/or will never exist. Science progress will slow down but lets be contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.
the problem is not students moving and studying elsewhere, it's PIs accepting a position to run a lab at an institution in another country that will fund their research; and many will definitely accept that given the prospects in the US for the next ?? years.
Why should my tax dollar subsidize for the dominance of US in science? How has US dominance in science helped the average American taxpayer in last decade other than funneling billions to arms or pharma industry or funding academians being out of touch with the rest of the country?
If I remember correctly Moderna is USA company and without their research on vaccines who knows how many millions more people would have died of COVID.
Did your precious tax dollars help Moderna directly or indirectly... Most probably. Are you happy to be alive? Most probably...
I am not against government spending for dominance but I am just simply asking a question when the deficit spending is high and soon the line item for interest expense is greater than the defense budget, is dominance still more of a concern than say, I don't know, Govt unable to pay its debt or inflating away the currency?
brandolini's law in full effect
Of course, in modern monetary theory GDP growth is one of the major factors keeping sovereign debt manageable [1], and NSF funding of about $9B [2] is about 0.2% of the national budget, and that money that is invested in basic research is generally found to significantly contribute to that economic growth [3], there are few ways I can think of to make the debt situation worse than to cut basic research.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-to-GDP_ratio
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
[3] https://www.sfn.org/-/media/SfN/Documents/NEW-SfN/Advocacy/2...
whether you care to admit or not, you've benefitted immensely from US investment in science, the entire digital & technological economy is downstream of basic scientific research
(the irony of a hacker news user and American taxpayer wondering how they've benefitted from tax dollars spent on science is not lost on me)
This is a fair question.
For one thing, the US dominance in science has allowed us to dominate many profitable products and new industries that were derived from that science. I'm not sure I believe the commonly-given estimate that every $1 spent on basic research yields $8-20 in economic return, but I do believe that the return has been positive.
If other countries become the preferred target for the best and the brightest scientists then the US is unlikely to continue to dominate new research-dependent industries as we did for the last ~4 generations.
I don't necessarily think this is bad for the world -- concentrating too much wealth, talent, and power in one country has had corrosive effects. But this decline may ultimately be bad for the average US resident, even if their taxes go down.
> other than funneling billions to arms industry?
As someone who has worked on several military research projects, for better or worse my sense so far is that US military research budgets will be the only ones to come out of this administration largely unscathed.
you think it's bleak that one's research now has to be profitable rather than being subsidized by people paying taxes?
J&J kept their asbestos baby powder out of the public eye for 50 years. 3M knew about forever chemicals in their adhesives for decades. Bayer knew their drug had been infected with HIV and they sold it anyway.
That's not to say all private research is untrustworthy. But, we should be skeptical.
Because it's the only way to get a job in industry.
I find it repugnant that theoretical scientists feel entitled to some of my income.
The algorithms behind modern finance, logistics, and computing stem from abstract mathematics.
Quantum mechanics laid the foundation for semiconductors, the internet, your smartphone etc.
Even GPS depends on Einstein’s general relativity, a theory once attacked for being too esoteric and detached from reality.
Do people not understand the concept of a long term investment, even if they can't grasp the importance of understanding for its own sake? What is it?
One thing all of the major advances which shaped the 20th century have in common is that they required huge upfront spending which even large companies couldn’t afford. Smart people will contribute to society in various ways but creating those opportunities allows that to happen more frequently and on a larger scale.
The US is very purposefully not a democracy.
> Using an inaccurate phrase like “central planning” calls your motives into question.
My motives are transparently not to have the money I earn taken from me to subsidize theoretical science research.
So supply and demand can get stuck at these local maxima. Central planning can think longer term. Maybe it doesn't pay off, but sometimes it does. And when it does, it can shake us free of that maximum.
This works, and is why Bell Labs and its peers existed. For reasons I don't fully understand, they stopped doing this, largely. Maybe because it's difficult to quantify those long-term gains.
Finally, those scientists get to choose where they are employed. So if the private sector wants them to do this work, they can hire them.
The connection between new knowledge and profit is often indirect and cannot be clearly predicted beforehand. And, why must something be profitable in order to justify it? Are there no valid outcomes other than profit?
Because if it isn't profitable then it needs to be subsidized to continue. Given the replication crisis I don't think it's most people's priority to use part of their paycheck for this.
Why don't people prioritize increasing their income? Like, they could look at wealth inequality and consider that if they owned some of the wealth around them then they could instead generate income from it, which might obviate their desire for lower taxes because they're able to pay their bills with a surplus of savings. What's the purpose of destroying science funding when the problem is a lack of personal wealth?
Some of us believe that there are things that are good for society that are worth the money. Medicaid doesn't make a profit. I'm glad people don't die in abject poverty quite as often as they used to.
I honestly don't understand why people don't get this - Government is not supposed to be "profitable". The whole reason to collect taxes is for good of the society. It sounds like your view is that rural towns, which are already in crisis, should be left to rot away because it isn't "profitable". The callous and lack of empathy is seriously astounding.
There are infinitely many things that are marginally good for society and finitely many resources to accomplish them. Spending on irreplicable research has an opportunity cost that most taxpayers wouldn’t choose. Framing it as empathy to forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic.
How do you know that? Tax paying is a larger subset of people who voted in this election because migrants also pay taxes. The popular vote count was 49.8%. So, however you want to dice it "most taxpayers" aren't choosing here.
> forcibly take their income and subsidize lofty science is ironic
Forcibly take? That is a right-wing point you seem to be repeating without seeing the irony.
The whole point of electing a government is that it can allocate taxpayers money maybe to causes you don't agree with.
If government reallocating resources is "forcibly take" then "most taxpayers" - the 50.8% people who didn't vote for this government can also claim their taxes are being "forcibly taken" by this government as well? Or is it that right wing voices matter more than others?
As I said lack of empathy and callousness is a hallmark of this government and its supporters.
If I could legally hypothecate my entire tax payment to science funding, I would. Science research has a high overall economic multiplier and frankly I'm sick of how one political tendency in the US has chosen to clothe itself in ignorance for political gain. It's contemptible.
That is literally the opposite of how taxes work though. Other people decide how your money is spent. If your financial situation was that of the US govt [0] I also don't think you would act the way you say with your earnings.
I was a PhD student in machine learning during the first Trump administration, and even then things were on very shaky grounds. The Muslim ban alone hit really hard, and was a boon for research institutions outside the US. (Look at Canada's Google Brain branch, for instance.)
But, until recently, there was still the plausibility that the whole Trump thing was a flash in the pan. When Trump lost in 2020, there was a sigh of relief that science would continue in the US.
This is on top of plummeting educational attainment in the US and the as-of-yet uncertain ramifications of students widespread reliance on LLMs.
It is very difficult to imagine a path of returning to the good reputation we had in science.
How? Since the fall of the USSR, what major technology took a lab-to-living-room path where the “lab” bit wasn’t American?
Still, the statement that a large (but not all) portion of them were American inventions is probably defensible.
On the other hand, the American economy was one of the few major ones unravaged by WWII conflict.
- Basic oxygen steelmaking
- Float glass
- Orbital satellite
- High speed railway
- Public key cryptography
- Orbital space station
- DNA/RNA/sequencing
- Self-driving car
- Cellular phone service
- CD-ROM
- Direct satellite television
- Laptop
- (Also some other stuff after 1985...)
You can definitely have CD-ROMs and I think it's fair to give you DNA sequencing (though that's not really one single thing), but everything else is questionable or just not correct when I look up the history of those exact things on the same source you link to above — their own wikipedia pages.
As for "questionable":
- Cellular phone service: depends what you count as such, given people have been working on the predecessors to what's now called 1G since about the invention of the radio; but 1G itself would be Japan in 1979, so if that's your cut-off-point, then you could have it I guess.
- Laptop: only if you're counting the Portal R2E CCMC, because the first clamshell laptop was the Grid Compass. While the founder of the company and designer of the laptop were British, they were doing the work in the USA.
As for "just no":
- Basic oxygen steelmaking: 1856 for the first demonstration in the UK, 1940s for industrialisation in Austria
- Float glass: 1950s
- Orbital satellite: 1957
- High speed railway: depends what you mean by "high speed", but you could easily claim 1938 or several different points in the 1950s
- Public key cryptography: 1973 in secret in the UK, but they were classified for ages and only the US invention of the same a few years later made it commercially available, so the "lab" part in the lab-to-home path was definitely American.
- Orbital space station: 1971 (I'd count this as a paradigm shift even if there's no living rooms anywhere in sight here)
- Direct satellite television: why did you put this in your list? Not only is the first ever satellite TV broadcast the USA's Telstar in 1962, the first direct broadcast satellite was ATS-6 in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS-6
- Self-driving car: Even the SOTA in self driving cars is not "paradigm-shifting", so it's not really been invented yet at the level required to be on this list
The most convincing and interesting thing I’ve read about the US’s science standing is just a reminder that it wasn’t always considered a global science leader. A few people saw the opportunity created by Nazi ideological purges of scientists and built, among other things, Princeton’s IAS.
Considered most charitably, the current administration sees itself as trying to return to an era of imperialism for the good of the country. In this area I wonder how resilient and immobile the scientific community is to these stresses. If I were in charge of science in a wealthy country right now I would be working overtime to brain drain US researchers.
secondly, sitting in California, this repeated cool-kid refs to Nazis is just more knee-jerk polarization. Serious topics are at hand. Excess and overly-optimistic polarizing rhetoric with smug bank accounts are a root cause of this recent extreme swing in Federal powers. IMHO
That's the problem of the tiktokification of public discourse. Attention spans of the wide masses are really, really low, everything longer than a tiktok or youtube short just gets dismissed as "too long, didn't read". Trump, for all his faults, is a master of that - each of his speeches is not designed to be appealing to the audience, but to be cut into very short "soundbites" that just convey the core message.
The perception is that we have a gestapo in ICE arresting mayors and judges, an admin talking about suspending habeas corpus, going after scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like, and just gutting funding for research in general.
You can say, “oh this is hyperbole” and “these people are wrong to leave,” but all that really gonna matter is that they were terrified and left.
I have very bad news for you re: the last ~70 years of research on voter behavior in democracies.
The story of the field is, if I may paint it a bit poetically, researchers hiding under their desks and rocking back and forth going "it can't be that bad... it can't really work like that..." until they gin up the courage to look again, find it's even worse than they thought, and repeat the cycle.
Bread and circuses -- the prior administrations, regardless of political camp, have delivered neither the circus nor the bread. People want to try something else.
That's in my opinion totally orthogonal to the aims of those digging in Federally right now; those aims are fairly diverse in my opinion, if themed.
European universities would love to do so, the problem is that our model of funding is just as braindead as it is in the US (if not worse, like in Germany) and our politicians are too braindead or unwilling to fix the circumstances.
One country that will actually drain American researchers will be China.
Not really. Even if they'd shower American scientists in money, who will guarantee they won't be taken hostage in a political conflict? It has happened in the past [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...
Bit of A, bit of B, with B encompassing the Nazis and the British.
Did you see the "Oppenheimer" movie? Check the real physicists depicted working on the Manhattan project. A large number of them were European Jews who left before or during the war. Einstein, Teller, Szilard, Hornig.
Even some others left Europe because of this: Niels Bohr (Jewish Mother) and Enrico Fermi (Jewish Wife).
To be sure there was Wernher von Braun and co as well.
In fact, it would be quicker to list the Manhattan project physicists depicted in that movie who were not Jewish at all:
* Ernest Lawrence
* Luis Walter Alvarez
And as time has gone on that geography is less and less effective as a shield.
The combination of state, industry and WMF-type loans extended American power globally. It was a very very good time to be American. This is the core of the "Great Again" part of the slogan. Boomers remember this America and want the growth, wealth and dominance back.
> This feels revisionist to me.
Reexamining past narratives/theories based on new data or ways of viewing things is the core of science. It's particularly important in softer social sciences where so much of the effects can only be viewed in the long term.
> Boomers remember this America and want the growth, wealth and dominance back
My point is you can't go back to there, at least not without another massive war and this time the chances the US gets by unscathed is practically zero.
Not to mention shattering the alliances that put the US in that position isn't the way to get back there either. Even if we tried countries are going to be a lot more wary of trusting the US for critical things like military protection which was a major part of the deal for the US's position, we extend a military umbrella across your country and we get good access to your markets.
Trump et al fundamentally misunderstand why we were in the position we were and their actions push us further away rather than bringing us back to it.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1334182/wwii-pre-war-gdp...
Or even inside the US itself.
Our founders were aware of the perils of letting public opinion write public policy. We’ve spent a lot of the post-Cold War era dismantling that anti-populist infrastructure.
To the extent I see a guiding light out of this mess, it’s in reducing the electoral fetishism that has dominated post-90s democratic discourse. There is more to democracy (and more pointedly, republics) than popular will. To the extent there is a silver lining in MAGA, it’s that the numpties have given us the tools with which to accomplish this if we choose to.
The majority are well represented. They’re just idiots. This isn’t a criticism of Americans; it’s why direct democracy fails in a predictable, partisan way in any society. (If you really think about it, you’re probably something of an idiot a good amount of the time. And you, like me, probably hold stupid views with low conviction because it was never worth it to do the research.)
The thing to remember is that in the 1950s and 60s the US government was basically running a censorship regime and had manufactured an anti-Communist consensus. They had to do this because democratic politics back then meant political parties actually listening to their constituents. In other words, America had populist infrastructure, which the state had to carefully commandeer to maintain the illusion of a unified society willing to fight a Cold War against a country which, at least on paper, was promising a better America than America.
This broke in the 70s, when the Vietnam War pitted young Boomers against old[0]. A lot of the civic institutions that were powering democracy in that era got torn apart along age lines, and fell apart completely. Politics turned from something you made with your voice to something you purchased with your vote. This is how we got the Carter / Reagan neoliberal consensus of "free trade and open borders for me but not for thee". The state was free to dictate this new public policy to its citizens because the citizenry were too busy fighting to mount an effective opposition to it.
[0] Recall that "Baby Boomer" is actually two generations of people, both because the baby boom was so long and because America's access to birth control was on par with that of a third world country. There's a never-ending wellspring of parental abandonment in that generation.
I think it's worth remembering where that came from. Before the war, in the 20s and 30s, the American industrial establishment was quite happy to work with the Soviet Union, both in selling equipment and lending technical expertise to help the Soviet Union set up their own production (for instance, Ford helped them set up GAZ). The ideological incompatibility of the Soviet Union and western capitalism wasn't seen as so much of a problem, it was mutually profitable to be civil and do business with each other.
Genuine concern with the Soviet Union grew during the war when it became difficult to ignore the belligerent nature of the Soviet Union, towards their neighbors and their own people.
And immediately before that, they (Americans, British, French, Japanese (!)) had invaded Russia to provide support to tsarist and proto-fascist elements that were running around committing pogroms, killing anybody not immediately prostrating themselves to their "saviors", and trying to crush the revolution.
> The keenest Interventionists were equally appalled, regarding the offer of talks [with the Soviet government] as tantamount to diplomatic recognition. From Vladivostok, General Knox sent a 'really fuming' telegram - the proposal put 'brave men...fighting for civilisation' on a par with 'the blood-stained, Jew-led Bolsheviks' - and in Archangel, American consul DeWitt Poole threatened to resign. Happening to be in Paris, Chruchill burst in on Lloyd George while he was shaving, and thundered that if one were going to recognize the regime, 'one might as well legalise sodomy.' Churchill and Foch both also privately assured White contacts that even if they rejected talks, military aid would keep flowing. The Prinkipo proposal thus died at birth.
---
> It is true that the worst violence happened off-stage, in small towns away from the bases where British personnel spent most of their time. But this was not always so, and there was more than enough opportunity to find out what was happening from Jewish relief organisations, or from survivors who had fled to the cities. Typical of the way the British preferred to turn a blind eye was embedded journalist Hodgson, who tied himself in knots criticising the Volunteer Army's obsessive antisemitism ('a fierce and unreasoning hatred'), while simultaneously denying that it had committed any pogroms. He dismissed a Jewish committee's protest to British command at Constantinople as an 'effusion', and on a tour of newly captured towns claimed not to have found 'a sign or whisper of outrage'. On the contrary, he possessed 'the strongest evidence' that Denikin's orders against pogroms were being 'conscientiously observed', and 'every effort' being made, 'with great success, to prevent unnecessary bloodshed.' As for past pogroms, the were 'grossly exaggerated', and had mostly been 'fanned into existence by the nervous panicking of the Jews themselves.'
---
> For the civilian population,. perhaps harshest of the winter's brutalities was the burning of front-line villages. Both sides did it, but rattled, out-of-their-depth Allied troops - ready to see a collaborator in every uncommunicative local - especially so. In early January a false alarm panicked American units into completely destroying the Vaga village of Kitsa, and Scheu describes putting part of disputed Tulgas to the torch:
>> We throw a cordon of troops around the village to prevent interference, notify natives, and set fire to village at 9 p.m. It ignites rapidly, lighting up surrounding country. Have difficulty with natives; we gave them 3 hours notice to pack and vacate. 'Twas a sad sight.
> The next day the cottages were still smoking, 'a big black smudge upon the snow.'
from Reid - A Nasty Little War
Now some Jews were Communist sympathizers and some weren’t. But there were just so many who flooded in from staunchly Eastern-Bloc, Soviet-dominated areas that they were sure to gain powerful footholds in Western society.
McCarthy and the House couldn’t afford to be perceived as “anti-Semitic” so they chose to couch everything in patriotic anti-Commie terms. But in hindsight, look at how miniscule the influence has been here from Soviet Communism, compared to ideologies of Eastern-Bloc Jews [many who are quite secular and Americanized].
My perception (probably skewed by overly negative media) is that the US is leading a global trend (emphasis on leading). It feels like the world is too busy preparing for war or economic gloom than trying to poach scientists.
Of course the US comes up… but it seems that the rest of the world is just moving on without us (I am American). Our government is simply an unreliable partner. Some US PhD candidates here are looking for post-doc labs in the EU.
A speaker for Dow Chemical was talking about their Year 2050+ plan for net-zero CO2 and circular economy. I was surprised to learn (news was last month) that Dow cancelled their $9B net-zero ethylene processing facility in Canada because US tariffs will make it too expensive (to build it and long term it’s the source of ethylene). Imagine the jobs lost, contracts lost, US exports lost, and environmental damage.
This morning I had this conversation (before seeing OP): “If all the US university research funding disintegrates, how does that affect the primacy of US science education? How should somebody applying to college now think about this?” Perhaps focus on a teaching-focused college and then try to do the research abroad? Of course such choices are more easily available to the wealthy. US higher science education and industry will just naturally decline?
Random: Only one talk I’ve seen so far included a GitHub repo.
Separately, I have multiple friends who lost their US lab funding and/or jobs. I also have a friend who was being poached via Dutch Visa fast-track. I think the science brain drain is real.
Here's an article from a European perspective: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/usa-scientists-lo...
I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1].
Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years.
That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7...
[2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
> The initiative also includes a target for member states to allocate 3 percent of their GDP to R&D projects by 2030. [...] The plan, originally proposed by the French government, also proposes creating long-term “super grants” for outstanding researchers, to provide them with financial stability; these would last for seven years. The program also plans to double the amount of financial support available this year for those who decide to move to the European Union.
You can get a sense of everything they have available here: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/....
Maybe they should have done a TikTok or a YT short? Would that be the right length?
Hillary: "This great economy, based on the new globalization means that we will with the help of economists transform Pennsylvania's economic infrastructure away from dirty fuels."
Donald: "I'm going to save coal."
Kamala: "My macroeconomists say this is the best economy the US has ever seen, and they say my plan to help will put money back in American pockets"
Donald: "No taxes on tips."
Not only is that losing the engagement economy, but onlookers to the thread are far more likely to read and latch onto the smaller soundbites. Longer replies also give critics more gristle to latch onto - you may think a long post covers all its bases, but you're really just giving people more avenues of rebuttable.
Better to be succinct, and if important context is left out, respond to it as concerns are raised.
It's a common characteristics of states that start consolidating enough power to nationalize science funding. They often eventually use it to wield power.
I mean there's charitable interpretation, then there's being an emu and pretending that the transfer of massive wealth to Trump and his cronies through stock market manipulation (after removing checks on said manipulation, apparently) isn't just wide scale theft. $3.4B to only two of Trump's circle {Trump bragged in a recent video} direct from the pockets of regular investors through market manipulation - I could well imagine the total is trillions.
'I'm stealing from you for your own good'!
Hmm.
NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
Sabine highlights the problem with scientific funding in this video and it should be required watching before posting on this thread. Reform is needed. Some good will be tossed with a lot of bad. Its a cycle, a pendulum, and it will eventually tip to excess again sometime in the future. For now... fixing what is broken ought to be the priority.
While there are certainly problems within science, Sabine has the most nihilistic view of the field.
This doesn't render her immune to the lifecycle of physicists, of course: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556 and https://xkcd.com/793/
But that means I don't put too much credence to her summary of climate science or trans stuff: when it's the topic of inclusivity attempts, she's got the direct personal experience to play the "here's how well intentioned policies backfire" card; when it's the internal politics within science, honestly that reminds me a lot of software development's cycle of which language, framework, design pattern, and organisational orientation pattern (objects, composition, functional, etc.) is a code smell or the smell of coffee that one should wake up to, so it rings true even if I can't verify it.
"The field" in her case is "particle physics". And she's been making a very good case against the non-science being done in that field. Unfortunately, like physicists tend to do, for some reason, she's branched out into criticizing "not her field" as well, sometimes even non-science topics, to far worse effect. She's become an excellent example of audience capture, a loss to us all (and a loss to credibility she earned within particle physics).
> The NSF’s investments have shaped some of the most transformative technologies of our time—from GPS to the internet—and supported vital research in the social and behavioral sciences that helps the nation understand itself and evaluate its progress toward its democratic ideals. So in 2024, I was honored to be appointed to the National Science Board, which is charged under 42 U.S. Code § 1863 with establishing the policies of the Foundation and providing oversight of its mission. > But the meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE. That historical tension—between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control—may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board.
> Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.
> Our closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, Terrell showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles than in the discussion. According to Nature Terrell, listed as a "consultant" in the NSF directory, had accessed the NSF awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants. The message I received was that the National Science Board had a role to play in name only.
I can't sum up everything that's wrong with this moment better than that.
This is not some necessary pain that comes with shaking up the system. This is a hostile takeover of the federal government by embarrassingly ignorant goons who think they know everything, just because they can vibe code an almost functional app. This is what happens when you have VCs huffing their own farts in their Signal echo chamber: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t.... Congratulations, you buffoons, you have demonstrated there are scaling laws for footguns.
Superb, take a bow!
one thing I'm struck by is the willingness of people who greatly benefitted from the downstream effects of basic research (ex: the entire internet economy being downstream of DARPA, CERN, etc.) to tear down basic research, to .... unleash science?
take Peter Thiel for instance, across Youtube, blogs, and articles you can hear him railing against science and how it's stuck in the 70s...there almost seems to be this Silicon Valley disdain for science & scientific research and I'd love to understand why engineer/innovator characters are so antagonistic to researchers
Thiel on Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbk5Lccr_e0
(aside: there is a strong chance these characters are hyper interested in race science, eugenics, and gene modification and they are simply upset about ethics which they euphemistically refer to as "dogmatism")
Very much agree we need to make and shame these dufuses who think they'll be the God kings of federated techno states, like Thiel and his ersatz court philosopher Moldbug.
To your list of names I would also add Paris Marx
and Robert Evans has done a lot of great series on Elon et al as well
It's an concerted attempted authoritarian takeover through bureaucratic methods. When they exhaust this, you'll see them frustrated and declare states of emergencies. The founders wrote about this in the Federalist Papers, people like this have always existed.
What was your intention here?
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-- Sun Tzu, The Art of WarThanks for the clarification.
No, what we are seeing is a coup. The USA has exhausted in causing coups in other parts of the world. Now, we are in a coup caused by the USA government.
The executive branch is captured. The courts are captured. Most of Congress is captured. Those left over whinge about 'illegal' and basically send out more emails for more donations. And throw in a few stump speeches.
I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree. I mean sure, we are well outside the strict scope of Constitution, but that ship left generations ago.
It's just not officially a coup until they refuse to cede power. We know they are very capable of it (already tried it once). In the meantime they are sowing chaos and destroying institutions.
Firing the head of the CBFP, installing a non-approved Librarian of Congress, bypassing agency regulations such as IRS privacy laws, etc. That's all illegal. It's a coup by the President against the rest of the government.
The courts have been captured and politicized heavily. Clearance Thomas should be expelled for emoluments. Kavanaugh also for lying on the stand.
Congress has a bare majority for republicans. So getting impeachments for actual crimes by republicans is a non-starter.
POTUS and executive branch can run roughshod, and order all sorts of illegal actions. Congress won't impeach. And they can pardon anybody underneath them. Musk is a perfect example - no clearance, yet somehow 'legally' is destroying sections of government that was investigating him. And given a complete pass. Its also how ICE can kidnap and traffick people, all the while flaunting disobeidance from a federal judge.
This is a coup by the oligarchy against the people. And aside violent uprisings (of which I do not condone), there's not much at all we can do.
This isn't a real thing. They're not captured, people are just on them that you don't like and they're ruling against your values.
>Congress has a bare majority for republicans
So the majority is governing?
I wasn't calling out party political disputes. I was calling out taking massive bribes, violating the emoluments clause, and perjury.
Your politics are showing. I prefer rule of law, not of kakistocrat.
This is a very myopic view.
In the past 3 months, we've seen curtailing of civil liberties (bypassing due process), open bribery (memecoin pay-to-play, Qatari airplane), illegal interference with independent agencies (firing head of CFPB), executive overreach ("emergency" tariffs), violations of free speech (punishing law firms for their clients), etc. None of this is precedented at this scale.
What you are doing is exactly what aboutism, by claiming that minor transgressions in the past excuse blatant authoritarianism.
Pelosi insider trading is a minor transgression? She was the most powerful congressman for years. You think she didn't do anything to earn those stock tips?
Yes, those are problems. Congressional stock trading should be illegal, although it isn't at the moment. The Clinton Foundation was noticeably founded after Bill Clinton was president; lots of presidents get money for speeches, but typically after they hold elected office.
What you are missing is the scale and openness of the current corruption. Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, received a pearl necklace valued at $425 from Bangladeshi Prime Minister and was not allowed to keep it; now, Trump is getting a $400 million plane from the Qataris and apparently is allowed to keep it. Does that seem the same to you?
They're not ruling against "my values", they're actually illegally. The people who are supposed to stop them aren't, and are thus captured.
Look at Orbán, Erdogan, and similar new authoritarians, the coup is a slow grinding of every facet of democracy: grind the press, grind the judiciary, throw a new law into the mix made up by your cronies in the parliament/Congress, keep grinding at the foundations of democracy over decades and you get a shell of institutions that used to be the foundation of a democratic state being re-purposed to push the agenda of the dictator.
The veneer of institutions is the point, it's to make you have exactly this reaction:
> I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree.
Because you are expecting an overt coup, not a slow moving covert one.
They did actually try it, though, and all the prior involved got pardons from the president. Totally agree with you overall point, just wanted to point this out.
It's not an enjoyable read in either subject matter or style, but provides invaluable insights into the mechanics of authoritarian rule behind the iconic renditions of oppression in snappy uniforms.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780805087260/hitlersbenefici...
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/05/04/america-first-legal-fou...
"The suit was prompted by the refusal of the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office to respond to AFLF's FOIA requests for copies of communication with the offices of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, two legislators who have worked overtime to stir up ethical allegations against sitting Supreme Court justices. The Judicial Conference and Administrative Office rebuffed the requests on the grounds that each are exempt from FOIA."
"The basis for AFLF's suit is that the Judicial Conference and Administrative Office are not part of the judiciary, but are instead executive branch agencies subject to FOIA. According to AFLF, neither entity is a "court," and insofar as each has other responsibilities, including the promulgation of rules governing federal courts and responding to Congressional inquiries, each is an "agency" under FOIA."
I don't think I'll convince you otherwise, but those interested can read this counterpoint to the Reason link with more background and detail: https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-ally-steph...
I was raised in a very left wing family where pulling on the rope was required, it's in my blood.
Nelson was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science and society of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Is she even a highly qualified? She has a Ph.D., but in what?
Nelson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in anthropology
She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.
The obvious difference is stated in the post you are replying to: "Congress hasn't approved him."
> She earned a Ph.D. in American studies from New York University in 2003.
The NSF funds humanities/social science grants, so it needs experts in those areas. Note that she is deputy director for science and society. This funds work associated with history, sociology, etc.: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/sts-science-techno....
There are no scientific qualifications in her education.
If you want to disagree with her commentary, do so on its merits. Dismissing her arguments because of who is making them is ad hominem fallacy.
You're using a person's associations as an excuse to avoid engaging with their ideas.
They are both political appointees, you like one and don't like the other is just political bias.
No: one was appointed legally, the other was illegally installed in an unconstitutional power grab. That's all that matters.
Because so far every appointee by Trump has been, objectively, less qualified than the people they replace?
There's no bias in that, it's just looking at credentials. We have people in public health who have never worked in healthcare. We have people leading the DOD where their only battle thus far has been alcoholism. We have a surgeon general who can't even practice medicine. I mean... what pattern are we noticing here?
Are we just supposed to play stupid forever, in pursuit of some "fairness"? We're not blind, we're not deaf, we can understand what's going on.
The only possible response to this propaganda piece are nodding along religiously or revulsion and disgust at the sheer intellectual dishonesty of it.
This kind of superficial performative nonsense is a big part of why the replication crisis is as bad as it is. And few scientists are willing to speak of that. I’d love to hear from the scientists whose careers were damaged or destroyed by this person. But I doubt I ever will.
At a certain scale, you're almost guaranteed to get moderation via populism simply because the friction for using these tools in bad faith is far too low and there never seems to be enough of a punishment for misuse.
Shockingly, I've found Hacker News to be far worse about how it promotes echo chamber behavior than most subreddits, despite how much tougher it is to obtain access to these tools. On the other hand, it's far less of a problem on Tildes, and I suspect that's in large part due to there simply not being a explicit downvote button. However, the fact that "Noisy" and "Spam" tags haven't been abused might simply due to its smaller scale.
To be clear, I actually agree with the people downvoting you, despite not doing so myself. But if you find that distasteful, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Please provide some examples of how you think this person destroyed anyone's career.
"Well, they elected him so off to the gallows with you with a smile on your face, it's what the people want" is not an acceptable world.