Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would like to make. I would submit that people flying on planes, using cell phones and computers, and going to the doctor don't want that, even if they think they do.

View on HN

> That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science.

It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constitutional structure.

What you're overlooking is that everything is just people. Political appointees are people. But "institutions" are also people. "Science" is just people. And the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?

The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power. People in the scientific establishment--people with degrees from universities and credentials from professional organizations--cannot be granted power to spend taxpayer money independent of the political system. They only have power over those decisions to the extent the political system chooses to confer that power.

And when they made Islam official religion of Bangladesh in the constitution, what’s your take on that?

My take is that they shed their blood to have their own nation and they're entitled to structure their affairs however they please. It that's also what precipitated my family to leave. Just because Bangladeshis have the right of self determination doesn't mean we have to or want to live in a country with them.

So you don't consider yourself Bangladeshi anymore?

only when rhetorically convenient i suspect

> Just because Bangladeshis have the right of self determination doesn't mean we have to or want to live in a country with them.

why do you believe you and and your family (parents and sibling) belong in the USA?

It seems like your argument is proving way too much. If next President announces that he feels rural hospitals are an inefficient use of resources, and so all residency programs outside of major metro areas are cancelled, would you accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion? To me it would sound like an obvious campaign of retribution against groups he finds it politically convenient to punish. (A campaign of retribution I will happily support, if Trump gets away with things like this - but I'd prefer to avoid going down that road!)

I mean, if that's what the law allows, then sure, that would be a valid thing for the next president to do. It would be bad for the country to do so, but plenty of things that are bad for the country are legal for the government to do.

We'd have no choice but to accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion, assuming that actually is the case (I don't know the law related to this, so I can't say). We can be upset at that decision, but we'd still have to accept it as legitimate.

Insofar as this is true, it only illustrates how illegitimate the system is.

You seem to be forgetting that one man is making these calls, not the people.

Yes, the man who the people picked to be the CEO of the executive branch for a 4-year term.

That is assuming that the system under which they picked him was a reasonable instantiation of democratic principles, which it is not.

The statement, "everything is just people" begs the question. That question is about appropriate roles.

No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.

Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.

> That question is about appropriate roles.

That's exactly what I meant when I said: "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.

Within that framework, the institutional principles of "science" are irrelevant, except insofar as those principles are persuasive to political actors and ultimately voters.

The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades. The left is skeptical of revolving doors between expert agencies and corporations and corporate sponsorship of scientific studies, while the right is skeptical that experts' politics aren't coloring their work. And in such an environment, it's entirely within voters' rights to elect political actors who promise to delegate fewer decisions to scientists.

You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.

>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades

The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.

Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.

> You've restated your flawed assertions, you continue to reassign the roles, and you're conflating Congress with political appointees.

That's at best a misunderstanding of the GP's argument, at worst a bad-faith response. GP said:

> "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.

That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending. Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.

I don't like this state of affairs, but it seems to be an entirely legal one, consistent with the constitution and how our political system is set up. It sucks, but in 2024 the people decided that this is who they wanted in charge.

> The left generally trusts science and the scientific community

I'm not sure that's actually true in general. The left certainly is much more trusting of scientists than the right, but that trust is not absolute, and things have happened (like initial COVID response, as an example) to erode some of that trust.

> while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth.

Agreed.

>That's at best a misunderstanding...bad-faith...

No. Analyze the thread more carefully, particularly the original comment to which I replied. Should help any good faith reader to see that it's the opposite.

>That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending

You'll see that I actually introduced that fact originally to clearly delineate the roles, whereas GP was blurring / reassigning them to make his point. I added that Congress's other major role here is in oversight, which corrects the GP's assertion that political appointees are needed for accountability to the people. i.e. I'm saying that mechanism exists, Consitutionally. That destroys his primary argument—that this is about accountability.

You seemed to have overlooked that fact (in addition to my other points), in much the same style as GP. Perhaps his rhetoric has worked on you a bit here.

>Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.

That is not what's happening here, and reads like a complete misunderstanding or calculated twisting. The "in this case" bit is actively misleading. The OMB already executes spend management. There is no special "case" here. The regime is using the OMB to politicize the process by claiming it was partisan—i.e. using the same well-worn tactic in its ongoing attack on science and other matters.

>I'm not sure that's actually true in general

Of course it's true. Statistically.

>that trust is not absolute

Never the assertion. Immaterial.

>and things have happened (like initial COVID response

In fact, the left experienced a temporary bounce in scientific confidence during the initial COVID response, before settling down to pre-pandemic baselines. Meanwhile, the right experienced a roughly 20 point drop in confidence that has persisted.

The political system, representing the taxpayer (primarily via Congress), has always dictated scientific strategy--do we build the Superconducting Supercollider or cancel it; do we return a sample from Mars or not; do we sequence the human genome. How big a budget do we devote to medical research compared to physics, etc. Scientists advocate, but politicians decide.

However, the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day tactical decisions have before been made through expert peer review, by scientists. Given a fixed and finite budget set by Congress, what is the best way to make discoveries?

Having been on grant review panels, it's brutal--at 5 or 10:1 oversubscription rates, your peers will find any flaw in your proposal.

Political appointees are deeply unqualified to make these judgments. To take a very specific example: the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is headed by Michael Kratsios. He has a BA in politics and has never written a scientific publication. (Every prior OSTP head was a PhD scientist.) The OMB memo says he and those like him should decide what to fund without deferring to scientists. How is he going to assess which of 50 proposals on (say) "hypothalamic SH2B1 neurocircuits and SH2B1 signal transduction pathways" is the good one?

He can't, so he'll either choose AI or graft. Both are destructive to our once world-leading scientific enterprise.

The division of responsibility you describe has no legal significance. All decision-making authority ultimately rests and must rest with the political system. Of course, the political system may choose to delegate certain decisions to experts and panels and whatnot. But that's a choice. The institutional principles of science are irrelevant except to the extent the political decision-makers find those principles persuasive (which they often do).

Our laws actually are written to reflect more or less what I'm describing. The laws governing HHS grants, for example, provide for various expert committees and whatnot. But they also provide the appointed director of the HHS tremendous discretion to override those decisions. That's not new--those laws are decades old.

> It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution.

How many times has this administration blatantly ignored the Constitution, starting with, for a simple example, separation of powers?

You're all locked in on "scientists should be beholden to the government, as that is the lay and law of the land" which ignoring the rather large mote that is "this current government couldn't give one single fuck about following the laws of the land", like issuing directives to federal agencies to consider federal court rulings as "advisory" or "not final" or "not applicable".

When the corruption of the law of the land starts at the top, you're busy insisting that those trying to follow the stated intention of the institutions that employ them ignore that because, well, what RFK Jr or worse, Stephen Miller, are the way we do things now, law, constitution be damned.

It's never a valid argument to say that we should ignore the law in one context because someone isn't following the law in a completely different context.

The question of whether scientists should have independence from the political system in deciding how to spend taxpayer funds is one that can be answered entirely starting from the principles of our republican government, without any consideration of what else the current administration may or may not be doing.

I don't think any of that is relevant to the argument. The fact of the matter is that Congress controls spending of taxpayer dollars, and at times has delegated some of the details of that to the executive branch.

There's no law that says "only scientists and subject matter experts can decide where grant money goes". Congress has largely left it up to the executive branch to set up a group of people, with whatever qualifications it wants (such as "loyal sycophant to the president"), to make these decisions.

I agree that this administration has taken a huge dump on the constitution, but that's a completely separate issue.

We can be angry that this what's happening, and adamant that scientists and experts should be making these decisions, but the people elected a Congress and President that wants to go another way, and that's how our system of government is set up.

We'll have to do better this November and in 2028 if we want to change things.

If everything is just people, why worry about the constitution at all?

> The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power.

It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.

There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com