Trump's new executive order threatens US scientific freedom | Hacker News Reader

Trump's new executive order threatens US scientific freedom

dw.com

24 pointsLAsteNERD11 comments

The executive order, titled "Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking", grants political appointees sweeping authority over all federal grant funding.

If implemented, political appointees — not scientists — would take control over decisions about research grants. It would, among other changes, allow political appointees to overrule advice from scientists on award decisions, and let them terminate ongoing grants based on political criteria.

Well this is no different than the school the scientist is working under to award decisions one way or another. This is the exact same thing, it's just that the schools are left wing and the current government is right wing.

I guess like this you can justify basically everything.

So right wing commissars are good and left wing bad? Do I understand you correctly? We don't have infinite resources, we have to pick and chose what we spend on don't we?

I guess commissars you can indirectly vote in are better than commissars you can't vote in, lol.

Meet the right commissars same as the left commissars, voted in or not doesn't really matter.

This is classic black-and-white thinking: If what is being done now is for the right, then whatever there was before must have been for the left. It's simplistic and inaccurate thinking.

And given that everybody in Trump's orbit has shown themselves to be dumber than a box of rocks, we can expect this to not go well.

> we can expect this to not go well.

That's the entire reason of doing it.

Par for the course. The administration's hostility to freedom generally is solidly established. It would be surprising if they had a different attitude toward science.

Lysenkoism... Since the world is 6K years old and we have the Bible, what's left to fund? We have all the answers and what we don't know can't be known. Cue St. Augustine.

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