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Comment by JCTheDenthog | Hacker News Reader

It does make me livid, just as much as the waste of taxpayer money on pointless (and sometimes outright racist) research here makes me livid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48335722

Believe it or not, it's possible to hate both Kash Patel/Kristi Noem and the unelected bureaucrats burning tax money on awful research.

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Sure that’s fine. They funded research that you think is wasteful and you would like to have tools to provide that feedback. The issue with this OMB change is that it is not that. The OMB change is a change that allows the administration to cancel any grant for any reason without answering to citizens about it.

BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?

The president is elected, the bureaucrats that were making the decisions before were not, that's the difference.

>BTW your “believe it or not” is quite condescending. Do you talk to people in real life like that?

Yes, especially when they're the sort of people who support taking my tax money to fund idiotic and outright racist "research".

> the bureaucrats that were making the decisions before were not

Russ Vought was not elected either.

Correct, bur he is directly accountable to and acting under the direction of elected officials, most other bureaucrats in the civil service are not.

That’s even worse, the incentives are completely misaligned for a political appointee vs unelected civil service workers who are just carrying out their jobs.

Again, the status quo is that funding recommendations are made by expert peer review by PhD scientists. Political appointees literally do not have the knowledge to make the calls this policy directs them to.

So you want every decision in government to be made by a politician instead of an expert? We should start with the military right? Get those bureaucrats generals out of the battlefield and put some elected officials in charge of our battle plans so our plans aren’t wasting tax dollars!

If that sounds absurd… you’re right! It is!

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