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Comment by JuniperMesos | Hacker News Reader

The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ, which I don't think is true. Academia is a badly broken system, and many people with formal credentials like PhDs have wasted huge amounts of time and effort on producing what is ultimately low-quality scientific work. This is a pretty uncontroversial statement among people I know in academia - or who were in academia but left - and this should absolutely affect the degree to which federal government agencies are willing to hire people who have formal credentials like a STEM PhD.

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It sounds like you're saying that this is a step in the direction of "fixing" academia. I don't see any evidence of that, all i see is fewer scientists receiving decreasing funding in a state where weve already been slashing basic research investment for generations. Also, there is no evidence that the ones that are leaving are the least productive. Intuitively it's likely the opposite: the ones who have the most potential will find work elsewhere and will be the first to leave.

EDIT: I would also like to say that i have never seen evidence that we can measure the performance of 10k PhDs in a single dimension at all. So a claim that this could be good for scientific research and development seems unprovable at best.

It also flies in the face of China's currently accelerating pace of research and breakthroughs by producing insane numbers of STEM majors and PhDs

China is famous for low-quality research and bad papers, which is exactly what you'd expect from a system that grants an expanded number of formal credentials to people who aren't actually doing good scientific research.

China was famous for low-quality products as well.

While there have been substantial improvements, it still deserves its fame.

Be that as it may, China also has persistent threat actors outfoxing American cybersecurity in the form of Salt Typhoon. The cards are on the table, and the US is already undoubtedly losing several fronts of asymmetrical warfare.

I have a friend who, to explain it simply, worked medium high up in the CIA for 8-12 years during Bush and Obama. The only time he gets serious about talking about his time there is on this topic. Chinas cyber security is, according to him, light years ahead of the US to the point where its embarrassing.

If I understand Salt Typhoon correctly it's a masterpiece. The descriptions I've seen indicate that they penetrated lawful intercept. Lawful intercept operates outside network operators network management systems because it was designed not to trust the network operators. I am skeptical of claims that Salt Typhoon has been eliminated from US networks. Any such implicitly claim to detect lawful intercept traffic and ensure it isn't nefarious, which traffic that system is designed to hide.

Yes.

I think well meaning people in the west are looking for a silver lining and in the process overcomplicating a rather simple issue: the US government is cutting spending everywhere while its electorate demands even deeper cuts. The money has dried up and people are leaving.

(One of my best friends was a nuclear medicine phd who left his cancer research lab after covid to work at a VoiP company, so i too have anecdotes)

Sigh.

The US is in a weird spot. The electorate does not generally want education and research cut.

Republicans here have convinced their base that education and the educated are bad, which has fed their desire to cut academic funding and research at all levels.

That is to say, the federal government doesn't have a popular mandate to do any of this. They simply hold all levers of power through a slim majority of the voting populace.

And lets not forget that its only 22% of the total amount of people who live here. A large minority of potential voters are disenfranchised and do not vote. The government isnt just without a mandate it is extremely unpopular.

Which breakthroughs, specifically? There are no Chinese institutions pumping out nobel prizes. Zero.

10 years ago were no Chinese companies pumping out world-class cars either. But here we are.

I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to.

Geely owns Volvo and IIRC a significant portion of Volvos are Chinese made now.

There's a number of companies or brands that are now Chinese owned. China knows that home grown brands (like Geely) don't work on an international stage, so they buy well known brands like Volvo.

It's a bit of a silent behind the scenes takeover but I'd say that China is now seriously making competitive cars. If you can follow the brands and notice.

Lol, the fully homegrown BYD is destroying Tesla everywhere outside the US where it’s basically banned and you’re taking about Geely and Volvo and behind the scenes. It’s all out there on the stage.

I don't really give a shit about Tesla though. Or BYD for that matter.

By my eye, Volvo / Geely cars are the most impressive.

I don’t really give a shit about your opinion though.

It’s just objective fact that BYD along with Tesla are world class cars and therefore they should be the main discussion point here.

> It’s just objective fact that BYD along with Tesla are world class cars

World class propaganda maybe. Cars definitely not.

I'll give China the Volvo brand. I can see the quality difference at any car show. I remember seeing some other nice looking Chinese cars but BYD (and Tesla for that matter) are objectively awful.

They’re still world class cars as they sell well everywhere in the world. The quality compared to some other smaller brands are not really important criteria in that context.

Geely is Volvo's parent company but Volvo still designs and manufactures its cars. Geely gets to benefit from Volvo technology for its own Chinese brands.

Just like Tata owns Jaguar and Land Rover but it doesn't mean India is "pumping out world-class cars".

I left China in 2017 so my info is a little dated but unless there was a _giant_ leap in quality I wouldn't trust a Chinese car any more than I trust other Chinese products (products made to spec in China is a different matter altogether). And when I was there anyone in China who could afford a foreign brand wasn't buying Chinese brands either.

It's not that Chinese are incapable of making great products, but cutting corners and crappy customer service is deeply embedded into their business culture. Things are changing but there's still a long way to go.

You can't buy $100 worth of merchandise for 1 penny. It's the manufacturer's principal's bid and proposed criteria that are key.

There are still a lot of third world populations in the world that need low quality, low price shit. Including parts of the U.S. population.

> It's the manufacturer's principal's bid and proposed criteria that are key.

Agreed. And Chinese brands are, on the whole, more concerned with cost than quality. Things are made to look shiny on the outside with a great "spec list", but are crap on the inside.

https://www.nature.com/nature-index/news/nature-index-resear...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Oh, that's old. In 2024 Chinese institutions only made up 7 of the top 10 most productive research centers but in 2025 they are account for 8/10: https://www.natureasia.com/en/info/press-releases/detail/911...

That's a volume based index, not impact, thus reinforcing my point.

Idk man, i dont keep a list of China's breakthroughs handy. You can find the same results on google that I can.

And I wasn't aware that breakthroughs needed to be nobel laureate worthy at a minimum to still be considered breakthroughs.

I'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the ~10k people who got PhDs under the current system are people doing actually-valuable work for the federal government and ultimately the American people.

Knowing current administration anti-science approach to things like climate and health, I wouldn't be all at surprised if many of those who left academia were ones producing quality work that just didn't align with Trump admin's ideology.

the unscientific stuff was actually past administrations which told us cheetos is more healthy than eggs and meat lol

Turns out, if we feed data in and query it in the right way, we can come to charts that allow bad conclusions just like any other.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/16/lucky-charms-healthie...

If anyone is curious, as I was, where this misinformation came from: it appears to be a criticism of the Food Compass rating system from Tufts University. The connection to "past administrations" seems to be added by the person I'm replying to. They've also swapped Cheerios with Cheetos.

>On social media, I have seen graphics showing certain breakfast cereals scoring higher than eggs, cheese, or meat. Did Tufts create these graphics?

>No. Food Compass works very well, on average, across thousands of food and beverage products. But, when this number and diversity of products are scored, there are always some exceptions. These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass. We are working on an updated version now – see our versions page for more information.

https://sites.tufts.edu/foodcompass/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-021-00381-y.epdf

I suspect you're right, but what we are and are not surprised by is self-referential rather than evidentiary.

But are we supposed to be content with not being given enough information to make a meaningful differentiation between people with PhDs in human resources and $IDENTITY-studies vs PhDs in organic chemistry and climatology?

When there's hostility towards discernment, it makes me feel like the two political strains are working together to use a one-two punch of credentialism and anti-intellectualism to erode empirical investigation into reality.

> 'm not claiming that this is a step in the direction of fixing academia; I'm claiming that, because academia is currently broken, we shouldn't assume that the

Why?

If you go that far then

- senate

- scotus

- violence

- SV

- tech bros

- lies about AI

What is not broken.

The idea of academia is it is an investment. Look at internet, DoE, Genome, vaccines - a lot from academia. Companies barely do that.

Indeed. You're far more likely to get sensible policy opinions from a STEM PhD who knows what science is than from sleazy opportunist politicians, investors, and PR people.

You might even say that the opportunists dislike STEM because it gets in the way of their opportunism.

Would you have said the same for folks doing NLP circa 2015?

these folks were already associated with FAANG. Most of deep learning progress comes from industry funding, not academia

And where did those people get their Masters degrees and PhDs from?

People start being inventive when tight on resources, so a bit of evolutionary pressure is not a bad thing.

You are assuming there is meaningful work for them in the federal government. There might be more productive work for them in industry. Their contribution to the workforce could put pressure on inflated salaries, if that is the case.

If their credentials exceed their defacto responsibilities in the government, they might be blocking someone else from being promoted or otherwise "growing" or whatever.

The tail of the distribution justifies the entire distribution. I agree that a large percentage of PhD research is inconsequential, but a small percentage is massively consequential. It’s ok to whiff on a thousand STEM PhDs if you pick up one Andrej Karpathy (for example).

People have really messed up views about hiring in general. I wish more people understood what you are saying here.

The US doesn’t have enough money to fund the entire distribution

And as a tax payer I prefer discretionary spending for high performers.

> for high performers.

Like $40k bonuses for ICE agents. Incidentally, $40k is about the stipend for a typical PhD student. I'll take a smart student doing nothing but eating food and digesting theorems over the absolute chaos that is being funded by our tax dollars.

Maybe this is true for academic institutions granting the PhDs (although even this I am skeptical of, training a PhD costs a lot in terms of time, money, and human effort). But that doesn't mean it implies that the federal government needs to employ a thousand STEM PhDs just to get someone like Karpathy - indeed, Andrej Karpathy does not work for the federal government! He made his name working in the private sector!

The number of people capable of identifying potentially consequential research is smaller than the number of people performing consequential research. And they’re all busy with their own projects.

Maybe, let's see if AI overall is a net positive or net negative to the US overall. If AI turns out to be a net negative (which seems likely) maybe we don't want this type of AI research being funded by taxpayers.

Picking only the tail ends of the distribution also tells me you don't understand how the bulk of progress is made.

It isn't always Eureka moments but also a slow grinding away at assumptions to confirmations.

Can we agree academia is the worst system, except for all the others?

In the last century, the US led so many tech fields because of both academic and corporate research and the people to do it. Let's fix that system if needed and keep it well stocked.

The alternative is ignorance, leading to unskilled industries and an easily misled electorate.

Wouldn't an easily misled electorate benefit the political party that lies the most?

That is kind of my point. That party has been attacking the education system in all forms for decades (imo) for exactly that reason. They have razed everything from school lunches to loan programs. This affects everyone.

We have definitive proof of that viz a vis, trump and his idiot magats.

10k PhDs lost isn't a step in the direction of fixing anything, though. There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

> There is little to no evidence that the people leaving aren't the top performers, let alone the bottom.

According to the article, the majority of the losses were voluntary (people quitting or accepting buyout offers) and not people who were directly laid-off.

While this isn't direct evidence of where these people sit on the spectrum from top to bottom performers, my anecdotal life experience suggests that when losses like this are voluntary its far more likely they are top performers who have plenty of options elsewhere (either in the private sector, or in other governments).

Also (and also anecdotally) this brain-drain doesn't just apply to direct government workers. I know of several people who worked in (and in some cases headed up) prestigious university research labs in the US who have left in the last year after massive funding cuts. Most of them were immigrants who went back to universities in their country of origin, some after having been here for decades.

At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious. I don’t know what things are actually like on the ground. But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.

Of course I don’t want to visit the US. There’s no way I’d want to move there right now.

I know of multiple US run conferences which are taking place in Europe this year. Too many attendees wouldn’t come if they were hosted in the US.

> At least amongst my circles, that seems so obvious

Blindingly obvious.

The long-term (very likely permanent in many cases) damage being done to America by the Trump administration through brain-drain, weakening of our own economy, and causing the entire rest of the world to (rightfully) distrust us as a reliable ally and/or trading partner is incalculable.

And it is all pure unforced error driven by a malignant narcissist bent on retribution who is also seemingly being used by a few different actors with their own individual axes to grind as he slips into dementia.

> But from here in Australia, the subtext of all the ICE news is that foreigners are no longer welcome in the US. And that America is becoming an authoritarian, fascist state.

This is also how it feels in the US. (And it isn't only foreigners -- the message is also that "the wrong kind" of American citizens are also no longer welcome in the US)

There's reason to suspect that the one's leaving are more likely to be top performers. First, top performers are the most likely to be able to find another job easily so they would take the voluntary buyout or just leave when things get crazy. Also, some of the DOGE cuts targeted probationary employees which include those that have recently been promoted or recently hired, both are classes of employee that the department explicitly wanted to keep.

Academia critics usually think it was pretty great until the last 3-5 decades.

Why wouldn't stem PhDs follow some bell curve of quality? I'm sure many PhDs that are leaving don't contribute but some of them do. I personally don't see a reason for it to be skewed for only PhDs which don't contribute to leave.

These things are not in conflict. It's possible that PhD quality has a regular distribution, and that most of them aren't contributing much.

I agree with this. I guess you already believe they follow a bell curve.Then from your former comment you also believe it's worth it to lose many PhDs that don't contribute to also lose the few that do.

I guess the conflict is my value judgement that it's good to keep PhDs that don't contribute if it allows US to keep the ones that do contribute. I believe so for 2 reasons.

- Distinguishing between contributors and non contributors at scale is difficult.

- the value of research can be large from a few contributors.

Saying "oh these are just the bad STEM PhDs" seems like a ridiculous exercise in sour graping.

The problem with this framing is that it treats a mass exodus as if it were selective pruning. Losing 10,000+ STEM PhDs in weeks isn’t a quality filter. We’re hemorrhaging institutional capacity. We lose researchers who understand decade-long datasets, technical experts who can evaluate contractor claims, and people who can actually critique scientific literature when making policy decisions.

Where’s the evidence these specific 10k were the low performers? The more likely scenario is that better performers left because they have options, while weaker performers stayed. If the issue is quality, you’d want systematic performance review, not mass departure driven by factors unrelated to competence.

> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ,

No, you're making a completely illogical jump there, that is absolutely not assumed in any way.

The assumption, if there is one, is that the position that the work PhD was doing in the government served the public good, more than they were being paid.

US Government science positions are not academia, so your second sentence does not even apply to this! Unless your assumption is that if the person was trained with science that did little then their training can not be applied to anything that is worthwhile, which is an obviously false assumption.

Arguments with these sorts of gaping logical holes are the only defenses I ever see of cutting these positions. I have searched hard, but never found a defense that bothered to even base itself in relevant facts, and connect through with a logically sound argument.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it sure is damning when in a democracy there's not even a fig leaf of an intellectually sound argument backing a drastic and massive change in policy.

Most PhDs don't move the needle because the point of a PhD is to learn how to do research, not to produce ground-breakingly original work that reinvents the entire scientific order.

That's orthogonal to domain expertise and general ability.

If you can survive a PhD there's an adequate chance you know more about your subject than an undergrad and are more capable of focused independent work.

That's what employers are buying. Which is why STEM PhDs still get more attention from the private sector than generic mass-produced undergrads.

People have tabulated the value of the academic pipeline, from grant to paper to patent to stock valuation. It is overall very valuable, even if you grant the very real issues with our hyper-competitive grant system.

This intellectual capital is valuable, despite whatever the latest populist memes about professors claim.

Academia may be broken, but a lot of bright students still pursue PhDs and it's better to have them in your pool of candidates rather than not.

You may be right in the general sentiment that not everyone with a PhD is a desirable candidate, but even if half of them were, that would be 5,000 fewer and that isn’t insignificant, especially in STEM fields.

You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?

Lots of scientists work in industry. Look at AI, rocketry, semiconductors, drug design, robotics, anything related to manufacturing. Academics are in the minority in these fields. You could eliminate all such jobs and there'd be plenty of science being done.

That's applied science. You don't have companies doing basic research because it isn't immediately profitable. You have to do both, basic research to learn things, and applied science to utilize it and make it commercially valuable.

Businesses have a long history of funding research with long time horizons. Look at quantum computing.

Whether that's basic or applied, well who really cares? The distinction is an academic invention because there's no definition of what basic research means and how it's different to applied. Was the transformer algorithm basic research? It's certainly become a fundamental general algorithm, but read the paper and it was designed to help Google Translate.

10k PhDs would mean 10k dissertations. I thought the popular narrative is that finding new knowledge has become too hard or much harder than in the past, so how are these grad students finding stuff that is new? Are these dissertations extremely incremental or just repackaging/regurgitating stuff?

I have yet to hear a criticism of academia where it sounds like we're better disproportionately losing people with PhDs than without them, particularly since most of those people got their PhDs quite a while ago.

PhDs seem to be quite employable by private industry, where competency is still valued.

>Academia is a badly broken system,

Why do you feel like you can state this like its fact?

Just to save you energy, state that you are conservative first before writing fan fiction fantasy like that, because it will save people a lot of time assuming that you are speaking some sort of facts.

No, the implicit assumption is that losing these 10k PhDs is worse than not losing them.

I fail to see how any of that is relevant to what the article is about, which is people who were already employed by the government leaving.

hmm, I was thinking >The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption

that in a large enough set of something there should be considered to be a normal distribution of high quality, medium quality and lower quality members in the set, unless one can show the distribution is biased in some way.

> The implicit assumption that this is a bad thing is grounded in the assumption that anyone who is a STEM PhD is automatically someone the US government should want to employ

No, not really? That would be true if we were talking about hiring anyone with a STEM PhD. Or 1 random person.

In this case we have people leaving, and it's a group. So it's more like: The assumption that 10k PhD's, that we saw fit to hire in the first place, as a collective, are worth the cost.

Seems likely that they are: The cost is low, let's say $2 billion per year? For reference, Trumps Big Bill includes $300 billion in new defense spending and "over a ten-year period is estimated to add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt and to cut approximately $4.46 trillion in tax revenue".

Also, let's say there were too many, and you should get rid of 10 000 of them. I doubt the guy who keeps rambling for 1 and a half hour [1] and keeps getting "Greenland" and "Iceland" mixed up, is going to do a good job with it.

1: Seriously, I dare you to try to watch it, I tried. At least hes "draining the swamp" /s https://www.youtube.com/live/qo2-q4AFh_g?si=Hwu3MSXouOfEfJCa...

You're kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Sure, some PhDs are in underwater basket weaving and barely warranting the title. However, most PhDs are extremely valuable. They are pushing the boundaries of our knowledge to improve society.

Some part of the hatred for the current academic system stems from legitimate concerns about how it operates. However, I think this hate is mostly driven by rampant anti-intellectualism. Fueled in part by pseudo scientific scammers trying to sell you supplements on TikTok and religious demagogues.

foxyv says "most PhDs are extremely valuable"

Can you defend this statement?

Sure! If you look at the device you are using to make this comment, you will find that almost all of the technology used to create it has been invented by persons with PhDs. Lasers, internet, electron guns, integrated circuits, transistors, lithography, etc...

That’s a straw man argument. Losing 10 people becomes a question of their individual qualifications, losing 10,000 people and this is no longer about individuals.

Some of the people who left where underperforming but a significant percentage where extremely underpaid while providing extreme value to average Americans.

The number seems arbitrary. Maybe we should be subsidizing until we have 100,000 more.

I'm always skeptical when something is presumed to be a universal good in a way that's unfalsifiable. What metrics would you expect to see if we had too many STEM PhDs? What metrics can we expect to improve if we had more of them?

I think your comment is more a refutation of the top level than the person you're responding to. I think people are right to assume there is already a serious throughput issue with scientific research, especially so-called "basic" research in the US and seeing a mass exodus from the government is troubling because public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs.

What the person you're replying to was likely trying to say is that once you get into this size of layoffs its no longer about the individuals and their performances and a claim that all 10k of them are on one side of a theoretical "bell curve" (which btw i havent seen evidence can actually be measured) is big and needs evidence.

> public funding is what, historically, generates the big breakthroughs

Without an opinion on the rest of this, public funding in the US doesn't produce big breakthroughs from scientists employed by the government, but rather by funding university research.

It appears that, after the administration canceling a significant proportion of grants in 2025, that science funding has largely been maintained or increased from pre-2025 levels for 2026, although how the 2026 funding gets spent, and whether it is all spent, is an open question.

You’re confusing two different questions. ‘Should we have more STEM PhDs in government?’ is a reasonable policy debate. ‘Is losing 10,000 STEM PhDs in weeks a problem?’ has a clearer answer… yes, because institutional knowledge doesn’t rebuild quickly. Also, there’s no evidence this was performance-based attrition. Lastly, recruitment becomes harder after mass departures signal instability.

The burden isn’t on critics to prove some theoretical optimal number. The burden is on defenders of this exodus to show it improved government technical capacity rather than hurt it.

I disagree--we're all paying for it, so it should be justified regardless.

And I don't need an optimal number. But the common refrain is essentially that more is always better, and fewer means we're losing our standing in the world. Always.

Maybe keeping a lot of them but shedding some percentage is actually more optimal. But I'm open to being wrong. That's why I'm asking for metrics.

The US government operates with such a huge debt that we aren’t paying for these things. Instead we are paying for the long term effects of such spending.

Cutting 10k scientists could therefore result in increased taxes without anyone ever seeing any savings. Or it could result in net gain from 1$ all the way up to what their cost * interest in the debt.

Therefore there’s no obvious side who takes the default win here. Instead you need actual well supported arguments.

If this was intentional workforce reduction, then the agencies affected should show improved efficiency or output with fewer people. We should see faster regulatory reviews, better grant decisions, stronger technical evaluations, just with leaner teams.

Instead, what we’re likely to see is degraded capacity, slower timelines, and reduced technical oversight. If that happens, will you acknowledge this was a mistake? Or will any negative outcome just get blamed on the remaining employees?

No, I accept the outcomes you are claiming are likely. I'm talking about the net results for the rest of us.

There are now 10k STEM PhDs who are (presumably, mostly) not being paid by the federal government, and are now employed in the private sector and contributing more to the federal budget than taking from it. Or retired, as noted in the article.

On the downside, some grants are maybe taking longer to be disbursed? Not ideal, but again: there's some reason we didn't previously have 100k more STEM PhDs. And we could make the same argument: if we had, we'd have faster regulatory reviews, better grant decisions, and stronger technical evaluations.

There's basically no way to argue for any number other than "more." That suggests an unfalsifiable argument.

> and are now employed in the private sector and contributing more to the federal budget than taking from it

Are they? Really?

Per the article, retirements were a big chunk. I guess the rest could be homeless and on social welfare systems for the rest of their lives, but I think it's more likely they have or will find employment elsewhere.

Maybe I don't understand your point.

One metric you could use is how often publications are mentioned by patents, and how often those patents lead to economic value. By this metric, it is valuable.

The number of PhDs we have is currently too many given the amount of money we have for project grants. But there is no evidence that the money we allocate to research is too large. If anything, you could argue the opposite.

I would be delighted if the private market funded basic research - the seed ideas that lead to patents.

It’s a separate question not arbitrary. How many PHD’s the government should employ is debatable, but saying we should have fewer such people says nothing about who was let go.

It’s always tempting to say ‘This was a good decision therefore all the consequences are good’ but in the real world good and bad decisions will have both positive and negative consequences. Understanding individual consequences is therefore largely separated from the overall question of should we do X. However in politics nobody wants to admit any issues with what they did so they try and smokescreen secondary effects as universally beneficial/harmful.

What's the correct level of STEM PhD employment in the government? Maybe those levels were way too high. But on a different note, we can't tell from the article what normal fluctuations look like. It only shows 2024 as the baseline, but ideally we'd look at a larger window than that as well as look at the percentage rather than nominal figures.

I think you're saying "how do we know this isn't the normal amount of Phd people who leave every year/administration

While we don't have PhD numbers the Trump administration fired a large amount of people so no matter some portion of those had Phds therefore it must be higher than the previous administration

From the article:

"Science’s analysis found that reductions in force, or RIFs, accounted for relatively few departures in 2025. Only at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where 16% of the 519 STEM Ph.D.s who left last year got pink RIF slips, did the percentage exceed 6%, and some agencies reported no STEM Ph.D. RIFs in 2025."

One would also have to consider the calibre of the individuals hired to replace them, or not, and whether functions such as the National Science Foundation add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen to increase its spending on...

> Add more or less value to the government than functions the government has chosen

Talking about average government spending isn’t a reasonable argument because you can only spend money once. If these people cost ~1B/year you aren’t paying for 100+B in spending by cutting them. Instead you get to add exactly 1B in government spending and thus the yardstick is the least efficient billion you’re paying out vs keeping these people.

Not that we actually balance the budget making the idea of short term saving meaningless. Instead it’s about long term consequences.

Agreed. Point of raising that was even if you don't think NASA scientists are productive in the long term, it isn't obvious that priorities government expenditure has been redirected to like Mar-a-Lago bills, ballrooms or recruiting people unqualified to be law enforcement to shoot protesters are higher ROI

Usually, when a system is broken, the correct course of action is to fix it. Not destroy it utterly.

Do you believe that 100% of the people who left were useless?

Do you think that's what is going on here?

In my experience legitimately talented people are staying, and the guy whose impressive education credentials seem to train him mostly how to write very wordy excuses for his shortage of actual work product is going back home. Maybe you have a different experience, but my experience is something that seems to be echoed among a lot of people in my social circle.

My experience is that people with talent are both driven and valued. Someone who might disagree with the current administration politically but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving, nor losing their job. But many pieces of gristle are getting trimmed off the American government.

what you are saying is idiotic. people who are in demand can find work anywhere, they are the kind of people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable. people who stay are more likely to be those who can't find job elsewhere.

I think people who will leave as soon as they feel their work environment has become even remotely uncomfortable are likely sitting in a comfortable sinecure, and it isn't the role of the taxpayer to provide sinecures for people with doctoral degrees.

Government workers are meant to serve the government, and the government of the United States is By the People. The People voted for the administration and if someone can't work for the company because you dislike the guy running it, well, it sounds infantile to me. Someone so fragile as to not tolerate political disagreement and reasonable scrutiny and auditing should not be receiving a salary from public funds.

Yes, I'm sure it's "infantile" for people at the NIH to resign because they believe their work is being censored for conflict with the administration's preferred pseudoscience.

Could you sound any more like a Lysenko propagandist in the USSR if you tried?

Your guy has armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law. It's a bit past "tolerating political disagreement", man.

Well, that went south quickly!

Glad to hear a British viewpoint now and then, but of course any problems stateside will be handled and voted on by Americans rather than Brits. Unless possibly you have dual citizenship (Brit & USA) perhaps?

FWIW Britain has plenty of history of what you term

"armed goons with "absolute immunity" literally executing people in the streets, after threatening to invade neighbours and allies, appointing shockingly-unqualified loyalists at the very top of national institutions, and generally gutting the rule of law."

You Brits almost have a monopoly on tyranny of various forms, having gone through most of them in bloody civil wars yourself. Hardly a model to follow, n'est-ce pa?

> but of course any problems stateside will be handled and voted on by Americans rather than Brits

Sure. That doesn't mean that an external viewpoint is any less valid. It's like saying "of course any problems in Teheran will be handled by Iranians" or "any problems in Venezuela will be handled by Venezuelans", when someone points out the issues in those regimes. You also assume you will get another meaningful vote, something that does not seem so assured when the supposed head of internal law enforcement starts asking for lists of voters.

The world is watching you, and it sees something really sinister happening. I would suggest to be humble and take stock - when innocent lives are lost to political fevers, you are in a very dark place, and whoever led you there should be suspected.

For the record, although I do live in England, I'm actually Italian; my great-grandfather lived under fascism, and I grew up in places deeply scarred by those times - as well as from the Cold War. That doesn't mean I'm innocent, just that I know a thing or two about what a regime looks like.

toyg says "Sure. That doesn't mean that an external viewpoint is any less valid."

Sure, but it is unwelcome and likely invalid.

toyg says "The world is watching you, and it sees something really sinister happening...innocent lives....you are in a very dark place..."

Woooo! I'm scared now!8-0

1. The world is always watching us! Y'all should take a break sometime. The world is big and there are lots of other things to see. Too much watching Minneapolis, right now one of the iceholes of the world, indicates poor judgement regarding one's use of time (indeed most anytime, unless you live there, which is another problem).

2. I count one possibly innocent life lost so far. That's very good given the circumstances. Renee Nicole Good drove an SUV toward an LEO officer on an icy road, possible attempted manslaughter. Alex Pretti OTOH was probably only foolish and I do believe it likely ICE will be charged with crimes associated with his death.

> Y'all should take a break sometime

We would gladly do if only you renounced your world-ending weapons, in the same way as we would be more than happy to stop bothering with Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, France, and Iran. Until then, unfortunately, we are kinda forced to pay attention, in the not-so-remote chance that some insane "representative" pulls that trigger. It also does not help that your shenanigans have a penchant for overflowing, invading countries closer to us than to you and maintaining military bases all over the world; stop doing that, and we'll happily leave you alone.

> I count one possibly innocent life lost so far.

One, two, or two hundred, it's still too many - and accounting for them like you do is simply callous.

I note you've not actually countered any point, just went "you're rubber, I am glue, nah-nah-nah". Which is sadly indicative of online discourse these days, even here.

This position is idiotic, more detrimental to the United States than the government over employing people, and frankly un-American according to how we understood what serves America best pre-Trump.

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

I'm a phd who used to be in civil service.

What you write here is certainly the goal, and I had a lot of colleagues who agreed with you. I thought it was bogus then, and I think it's bogus now.

Also people quit jobs all the time because of the boss. Usually it's the direct one, but not always, and as above, so below.

> reasonable scrutiny and auditing

It's been well over a decade since I left, and I'm sure it's gotten worse for those who stayed, but: lol. lmao.

How can your limited experience make any claims about the government workforce as a whole.

It requires a decent amount of time to understand if someone is talented and that talent is being used to better their job.

>but is doing exactly what they want to do with their life in a role that generates measurable utility for the taxpayer is not packing up and leaving

How would you know? Some people have very strong convictions and as another comment stated if a person is talented it increases the chances they could find another job similar to their desired work

This doesn't match my experience at all.

Mid last year I helped run a workshop on AI explicitly for laid off federal science workers. The people involved were clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, passionate about their research areas, and harboring an immense amount of institutional knowledge. They showed great curiosity and adaptability in the workshop. It was obvious that they were a set of very bad fires.

Ahh yes, clearly any government would greatly benefit by having way fewer highly educated conscientious people working for them /s

We should round up and reeducate people with glasses. /s

Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B

Peter Gregory reincarnated.

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