I'm with you on this. It's irrational to destroy an institution or project like USAID that leads to millions of unnecessary, preventable deaths and cannot be reconstituted. These aren't pieces of software nor lend themselves to movie plot/amateur/macho man quick-fixes. Organizations are best modeled as living organisms that require careful assessments and stakeholder buy-in for positive change.

>No, tearing it down does not automatically make it better.

Laughable coming from the "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" people.

>The current system is far better at resisting these things than the proposed alternative would be.

No it's not.

I'd tend to agree. And we should encourage other fellow non-super-rich people to join our cause rather than casting out those who disagree or we do our common enemies' work of becoming divided-and-conquered.

The above, I meant it as increase in degrees towards these objectives explicitly rather than presuming the existing system were perfect or neutral. IIRC, institutional affiliation lends a degree of credibility but grant writing effectiveness and form filling ability are prerequisites to increasing the probability of winning grant awards. I don't know how a large disbursement organization could improve on fairness in selection without requiring documentation and convincing proposals in a format convenient for efficient, fair review. Weakening this process would encourage an appearance of arbitrariness and favoritism, if not actually. I don't believe for a second that DOGE or similar non-expert "experts" can "improve" anything they touch when meaningful improvement requires domain expertise, careful assessment, and usually stakeholder buy-in. At a high level, it appears the current US regime is incrementally remolding and reverting its society, industry, academia, and institutions from more egalitarian-based to more feudal/prerogative-based.

>You may think your cynicism displays wisdom

It doesn't take much (any?) wisdom to correctly identify the system being torn down and the proposed replacement are two peas in an identitarian orthodoxy pod.

>but it actually just reveals your own passivity and subservience to those who would dominate and rob you of your future.

Cheering on the destruction of the perversion of science, specifically those who have been dominating and robbing science and all scientists of their future for over a decade is anything but "passive" and "subservient." Stop projecting about passivity and subservience, not everyone in science is as effeminate and ideologically captured as you.

I've noticed this sort of ideology taking over social media, probably because it selects for firing off vapid dunks over sincere engagement with the complexities of the world. I fear it's destroying our ability to think for ourselves, here to the benefit of the ruling class for whom science holds inconvenient truths.