This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour.
The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at NSF with total disregard for what they were doing or why. Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.
Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.
https://www.wired.com/story/national-science-foundation-febr...
In addition to these scientists, I heard from my friends in academia that they will be taking fewer PhD students because they're unsure of the funding.
We may be looking at a lost decade.
We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.
As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.
I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.
> We may be looking at a lost decade.
We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.
Reduced health, reduced education, reduced funding for research, reduced international aid programs (which both garner goodwill whilst also creating a bulwark against those who profit from misery), reduced oversight / regulation of the power of capital, alienation of prior allies, reduced safety nets for the vulnerable, increased rhetoric against poorly defined 'foreign types', anti-intellectualism.
It's a helluva vacuum being created, and I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going to fill it.
I keep oscillating between are they just stupid or are they malicious and I'm starting to settle on the latter given the kinds of actions this administration is taking. Ironic that their voters thought they'd be mAkINg AMeRIcA gREaT aGAin when in fact they're going to cause us to lose our leadership role in many areas.
You forgot "wilfully letting go of democracy". US democracy is far away from dying, but who knows how much longer it can keep holding up.
It’s not far away from dying. I would argue that it’s already too late. The trump administration has shown that it can seize the power to control spending which is constitutionally an exclusive power if congress and courts can’t and won’t do anything about it. We are past a constitutional crisis, republicans had a theory of a unitary executive and prove they can stream roll other branches. Now trump and others are talking about a third term. They play it off as a joke but that’s how they have succeeded in moving the goal posts already.
Trump is continuing a trend that has been going on since at least Bush Jr. Presidents for a couple decades now have been moving more power into the executive branch.
Obama and Biden both talked about undoing this, but neither did. The Patriot Act still exists, three letter agencies still have authority to spy on American citizens, and immigration laws still defy what's written on the Statue of Liberty (I think most have forgotten how harsh Obama was on southern immigration).
Since Woodrow Wilson.
With a slight pause in the post-watergate era when Jimmy Carter was president.
The Dangerous History Podcast has a very interesting series in Wilson. The host was not a fan.
False equivalence.
Tell me more.
... which has been allowed and caused by the Republican congressional obstructionism going on since the 90's. Bush, Obama, and Biden could have reduced their own use of executive power, but they couldn't undo it - rather it was Congress that would have had to reign them in and shrink executive power. Just as the current Congress is ultimately allowing Trump's ongoing authoritarian power grabs, rather than passing laws and impeaching.
For another example, take the frequent neofascist argument that the federal agencies are "unaccountable" unless they are under the direct command of the President. No, the agencies were created by Congress, and have always been accountable to Congress. But Congress has not been doing its job, which is why they seem unaccountable.
> For another example, take the frequent neofascist argument that the federal agencies are "unaccountable" without being under the direct command of the President
It’s not “neofascist” lol, it’s just what the constitution says. The first sentence of article II: “ The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
It’s not Congress’s job to hold executive branch employees accountable any more than it’s Congress’s job to hold judicial law clerks in the courts accountable. It’s the President’s job, in whom the executive power is vested.
That’s also reflected in the appointments clause. Anyone with discretionary authority must be either appointed by the president, or report to someone who is: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf. The whole point is to make the executive branch highly responsive to Presidenfial elections.
Congress is supposed to hold both employees and departments accountable. Employees are held accountable via the advise and consent power so that the leadership of departments isn't beholden to the executive. Departments are held accountable by the budget process, don't do a good job, don't get appropriations. The executive power is merely administrative and logistical.
The executive power, as being laid out in the Constitution. Not all executive power. This is plainly clear by appointments requiring approval of the Senate. If the "executive branch" were meant to be a singular top-down command structure, then such approval (or ability to impeach) would not be required. This push for an authoritarian command structure is one pillar of what makes the term "fascist" appropriate.
I was not talking about the accountability of individual employees according to the law. The accountability I was talking about was the mandate for an agency. That was set by Congress when they created the agency, and can thus be clarified or changed by Congress at any time.
“The executive power” means “all the executive power,” in the same way “the judicial power” in Article III means “all the judicial power.” Or do you think the other branches can properly exercise some judicial power? Advice-and-consent isn’t an exercise of executive power, it’s a check on executive power, just like impeachment.
Sure, Congress can change or clarify the mandate of an agency, and the President must go along with that. But what we’re talking about with Trump is accountability for individual employees and the discretionary conduct of executive branch employees.
For example, Congress has appropriated $1.7 billion for USAID operations, “for purposes of the carrying out the 1961 foreign development act” (paraphrasing). I agree the executive must ultimately spend that money within the broad mandate of the appropriation. But do you spend that money on DEI in Serbia or pro-natalism in South Korea? Clearly the President should be able to decide that.
> No, the agencies were created by congress, and have always been accountable to Congress. But Congress hasn't been doing its job, which is why they seem unaccountable.
If Congress hasn't been doing its job, then they don't just seem unaccountable, they actually are.
The levers of accountability could have been pulled any time, so it stands to say that they were still accountable. Perhaps they weren't held accountable as much as you or I would have liked. But the authority was there.
But either way I don't really see what greater point you're trying to make.
Here are some new concrete developments that I doubt the founders of the democracy would say are fine:
- the Executive Branch now has presumptive - if not absolute - immunity against all criminal official acts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_%282024...
- universities must obey Trump's culture war agenda, otherwise they will be de-accredited and a fine equal to the value of the entire university endowment will be leveraged - https://www.mediaite.com/politics/trump-vows-to-seize-endowm...
- President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisers have long cited impoundment, a little-known legal theory [... that] essentially claims that any president has unilateral authority to ignore Congress’s funding bills and withhold or “impound” funds meant for programs, agencies, or departments deemed unsuitable by the White House. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3244202/...
> otherwise they will be de-accredited
Who decides the ultimate authority on accreditation anyway?
Why can't we just start a new trust network?
Impoundment, or rather the idea that it is an issue, is a weird concept in general. Congress legislates executive directives that should be acted upon and provides a budget. They don't say "spend every dollar we give" and they rarely define metrics for success to know if the executive branch is meeting their goals.
The fact that the Trump administration is able to so easily chest the game and roll back agencies is a side effect of congress writing thousands of pages of legislation without ever bothering to define precisely what is expected of the executive branch.
The US is a strong federative country. Individual states are almost literally _states_ (as in "country") and have a lot of power. They can impose their own carbon taxes, net neutrality rules, fund research, etc.
And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong.
> And more importantly, their local democracy is going strong.
I guess you never heard of gerrymandering.
To your parent comment's point, this varies a lot by state!
Enough to control the House.
And yet states aren't allowed to form alliances with other states according to Article 1 section 10. Sure, states might be able to fund research, but most states on their own aren't going to be able to afford to do this effectively - but if several states could band together to, say, keep funding climate science that might help keep us on track and keep scientists employed until better times come back. But they can't do that.
> And yet states aren't allowed to form alliances with other states
That's not quite correct. The judicial practice in the US is that the intestate compacts (agreements) require Congressional authorization only if they infringe on the sovereign Federal powers.
One good example for the 2nd Amendment lovers: states are free to make reciprocal agreements with other states for concealed carry permits. It doesn't require any authorization from the Congress.
Another example are the laws for taxation of multi-state corporations that the neighboring states can negotiate together.
States need a military to enforce their independence, but almost none have one of note. The National Guard is under the executive branch and state guards tend to be tiny (e.g. just 900 enlisted for CA).
Except that the states have no power because an unchecked executive branch can just claim that it had authority and the states have no recourse to resist.
The US has an incredibly weak form of government.
Don't get so depressed. The Executive branch in the US does not have a lot of power when it comes to influencing the states.
For example, Trump can't actually force states to change their school athlete programs. It doesn't have any power over individual states (or schools). All his DoE can do, is to threaten to withhold funding. And even that is being contested because the Congress has not authorized it.
However, if he does manage to withdraw the funding, that's just 6% of total spending on schools in CA ( https://lao.ca.gov/Education/EdBudget/Details/900 ) and 8% in NY. The states will just shrug and go on.
The discretionary part of the US Federal budget is not large, on the scale of the country.
Congress has authorized it: civil rights laws make schools ineligible when violated, and Trump is claiming various programs violate those.
States have "power", but not money. There are no state level science grants anywhere at the scale of the linked article.
CA spends around $11B on the University of California system. The NIH budget is $47B. I haven't done the math, but I would hazard that the total amount of money spent on science by the Federal and the individual state authorities would be comparable.
It's just that historically the Federal government was leading with the fundamental research, but if push comes to shove, states can start spinning up replacement programs.
1) The fact that the President embodies the executive branch is just what Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The same people who say that’s “just a theory” also think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. They’re not serious people.
2) Trump hasn’t seized the spending power. Congress was the one that delegated spending power to the executive branch by appropriating multi-billion line items and directing the executive branch to spend the money with only the vaguest instructions. Live by the delegation sword die by the delegation sword.
1) While Article II says....it also depends on a checks and balance system with the other two branches of government. We've already seen where the congressional branch is laying down for the executive, and we've also seen where the judicial branch has granted immunity essentially giving carte blanche to the executive. Without equal branches providing checks and balances, you've just ceded power the Constitution requires. Any of the lower courts trying to hold on to any semblance of checks and balance will eventually be reversed once it reaches SCOTUS.
The system has specific, well-defined checks and balances. For example, Congress can limit the executive’s control over spending by enacting specific appropriations bills with concrete line items. But it hasn’t done so for decades. It has done things like appropriate single $1.7 billion line items for USAID, leaving it to the executive’s discretion how to spend it with only the vaguest guidelines. Congress having done that, it’s not for say the courts to “check” that by insisting that the executive can’t exercise all the discretion Congress provided it.
And your point about immunity is misinformed. The Supreme Court held that the President has immunity for official acts. This is a no-brainer. You can’t sue Congressmen for their official acts either, or judges.
If the President didn’t have immunity, Georgia prosecutors would be able to indict and convict Joe Biden in some red county in connection with the murder of Laken Riley, on the theory that Biden recklessly or negligently opened the border leading to her death.
> And your point about immunity is misinformed. The Supreme Court held that the President has immunity for official acts.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. You'll never convince me that a phone call from a candidate trying to convince someone to "find" extra votes is an official act of office. Nor is assembling a league of fake electors because the official ones will not bend the knee
Neither point is accurate. The executive power doesn't include the ability to create a fake department (DOGE), with a fake head (Elon Musk), lie that he isnt running it in court, and then run roughshod over the regulations and laws congress passed around employment regulations.
You know what the constitution does require, advise and consent. Not a single thing elon musk is doing is legal and yet their are seizing the power to remake departments created and funded by congress. If you want to eliminate USAID or any other department have CONGRESS pass a law to make the change, anything else is a constitutional seizure of power.
The executive power doesn't include a concept such as impoundment, yet the trump administration seized $80mil of FEMA funds from the the city of new york bank account.
Bearing in mind that this administration won the election and a lot of what they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on, I'm not sure democracy is at risk.
One can pick around the details, but for example with regard to the firings, voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening.
This is essentially democracy in action. Yes, the voters may come to regret their vote, yes they likely didn't understand what they were voting for, but that's the flaw in democracy we're aware of.
Is this what everyone wants? Clearly not. But democracy is about majority rule, not consensus.
When an election is canceled then one can talk about democracy dying.
But right now, Americans are just getting what the majority voted for. They may not necessarily like it, but they voted for it. And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it.
Like if or not, the "democracy" part is working well.
This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy.
Democracy had a bad reputation in the ancient world, because unconstrained majority decisions often led to terrible outcomes. In the modern world, democracy usually means liberal democracy, which includes things like the rule of law and constitutional protections. As a rough approximation, a constitution exists to prevent the government from doing what the voters want.
A constitution in itself a worthless document, and the checks and balances have no power. The power comes from conventions. Conventions on how the constitution should be interpreted and how the people in power should act within the constitutional framework. If too many people ignore the conventions and interpret the laws and regulations literally to their advantage, democracy will die. It died in the Roman Republic, and it has died in many modern republics. Plenty of authoritarian states maintain nominally democratic institutions. And many of them became like that in a way that was at least nominally legal.
Ultimately the checks and balances are also elected. Directly in the case of congress, indirectly in the case of the judiciary. (Mitch McConnell obstructed merrick garland and was rewarded for it.)
Of course unrestrained majority decisions lead to terrible outcomes. This is well understood, and has been demonstrated over and over recently (think Brexit.)
Democracy is objectively a flawed system for this reason. It has never promised to deliver the best, or even good, government. It is what it is.
I agree, this is a literal interpretation of democracy. It is "the will of the people". I'm not sure that anything else could still be even called a democracy.
One thing Americans don't seem to realize is that the current constitution needs to be rewritten once we get out of this mess. One of the consequences of dictatorships is that they deform the constitution for their purposes. It seems that republicans have done enough to deform the system in an irreparable way.
How would you propose rewriting it that wouldn’t just mean “less democracy” and “more control by credentialed elites?”
This is Orwellian double-speak. You’re defining “democracy” to mean “not democracy.”
Nor does the “constitution” support your view. Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
What you’re calling “democracy” and the “constitution” is neither. It’s Wilsonianism, an idea invented by a eugenicist who hated the constitution as well as democracy: https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/woodrow-wilson-s-c...
I don't see how your reply is related to my comment.
I was not defining democracy. I was describing the common real-world usage of the term, which has a more specific meaning than simple majority rule. It is commonly used as a shorthand for "liberal democracy". Some Americans use "republic" for the same concept, but that's misleading in other ways. Partly because some countries that are commonly understood to be liberal democracies are constitutional monarchies. And partly because some actual republics (such as North Korea or the member states of the former USSR) do not match the concept particularly well.
I was also not talking about any specific constitution, but constitutions in general. They all come with implicit and explicit assumptions that must hold, or the system will not work as intended. If some entities are supposed to function as checks and balances to each other, they are expected to remain independent. If they choose to collude instead, nobody is capable of stopping them if they decide to twist the constitution beyond recognition or outright break it.
I said that a constitution on its own is worthless. That means a constitution cannot enforce itself. There must be some people who are capable and willing to enforce it. But if they are capable of enforcing the constitution, they are also capable of breaking it. Which means there must be other people capable and willing to act as checks and balances. And so on. The system may work as long as those people act within the expectations, complying with both the spirit and the letter of the constitution. But if they reject the expectations and start looking for loopholes to take advantage of, they may find some. If that becomes too common, the constitution becomes worthless, because the people who are supposed to enforce it no longer believe in it.
> This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy.
Attempting to run a democracy in a non-literal way seems like a recipe for disaster.
That seems to imply that citizens get to cast a vote and have their voice heard...unless those in charge decide the citizens don't know what is best for them.
As a country we picked Trump. For better or worse we made that bed and we now have to lie in it.
Folks on the left would do well to remember that the same unelected bureaucracy that declared “resistance” to Trump would destroy an AOC or Sanders presidency too. Ultimately, it’s a good thing if electing the President can effectuate drastic changes in the executive branch, because that’s the only real lever voters have for affecting the largest and these days most powerful branch of government.
In a modern nation, it’s not tenable to flush the federal government down the toilet every four years.
To the contrary, in a modern, diverse country, it’s not tenable for the same people to keep running the government in the same way regardless of who wins elections. That was okay when we had a more homogenous, slower-changing country with widely shared values. That’s untenable today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
Edit: you can use a democratic process to kill off democracy. In the end democracy is dead, and it doesn't really matter anymore why.
You're right, but that's a flaw of democracy itself. It is known since ancient Greece.
This:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/19/donald-trump-king-i...
doesn’t really sound like democracy.
Democracy is not about what he does. It's all about how he comes to power.
In 4 years the people will vote again.
Optimistic.
I mean, to the degree in which I expect there to be an election in 2 years, and 4 years, I suppose that counts as optimism.
I've not seen any indication that elections themselves are under threat. Given that elections would happen at state level anyway (and absent disbandment of congress) those elections would elect senators and representatives. Which in turn have the power to remove a president.
So yes, I see nothing to suggest that elections themselves are at risk.
> In 4 years the people will vote again.
There's legitimate concern that won't be a viable option, and the admin has hinted that will soon be the case.
That's just a prank. But it shows how little the president cares about democracy, or even monarchy.
> voters clearly approved of the concept of smaller, cheaper government. Which is basically what's happening.
Except that this is completely false. These haphazard cuts are a miniscule portion of the federal budget, even assuming they don't incur a whole bunch of second and third order costs. The exact same administration doing those is going to burn literal orders of magnitude more money on tax cuts for billionaires, border security theater, and other corrupt nonsense. Federal finances were in bad shape a year ago and are going to be absolutely horrid a few years from now.
Oh, I agree, finances are going to be poor. But these departments cost a lot more than salaries, so firing everyone does save real coin.
And it plays very well with an electorate who wants to see "big changes". That thr changes will hurt them is the point missed by most.
Killing federal departments also plays well with those encumbered by red tape. If there's no CFB there's no one getting in my way to treat customers badly.
USaid buys (bought) a lot of food from US farmers , so in effect that subsidy is going away (without the bad press). The money "going to Ukraine" was being spent at US munition suppliers, so really, it'll hurt those suppliers.
I mostly agree. Trump is behaving in a way that's consistent with his prior rhetoric.
Where I disagree is that there may have been an expectation that the systems outside of "The President" would have stood up for themselves more, offered more resistance and slowed him down more. The slow-moving of government is (was though to be) it's own protection to some extent.
I'm not sure what evidence suggests that Republicans in congress would grow a spine to resist this. Conversely the evidence since 2016 suggests they actively applaud it.
The voters have voted out any congress people who resisted, sending a clear message that they want this path.
This may not be the pretty side of democracy, but it is democracy.
My point above (which I see is being downvoted) is not thst I see this as "good" , but rather that I see it as democratic. Everything going on is literally because the people voted for it. The stacking of the Supreme Court, the obstructionist behavior in congress, the tolerance for (Trump) crimes- this has all been rewarded, not penalized by voters.
If democracy is the will of the people , then what you see seeing is the power of that will.
Except it’s not really democracy. You have gerrymandered districts. You elect a leader not by who gets the most votes, but who wins a system that was designed for the benefit of white slave owners.
And of course, who really believes the election results when you have Trump saying that Musk rigged some voting machines in his favor.
Face it, the US no longer creates its government from the collective will of its citizens. They’ve replaced politicians with corporate backers for the actual corporations themselves.
I buy the gerrymandering concept at the congressional level.
But Trump won the popular vote. He increased his numbers in 90% of counties. He grew across all demographics.
This was not a structural failure. It was very clearly a country-wide mandate.
He clearly won, but a narrow victory is not a mandate.
1984 Reagan's victory was a mandate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_United_States_president...
> they are doing is more-or-less what they campaigned on,
He campaigned on bringing prices down and exacting revenge. So far failing on the former and going strong on the latter.
This administration has made it clear that they think that the current President should have the power of a king, and the reign to match. We're in uncharted waters and there's rocks ahead.
Trump specifically ran saying he didn't agree with many of these plans.
His actions are consistent with cheaper federal government but not smaller federal government. Just a centralized executive government that does what he says.
The method is simple: say what you need to to get approval, do what you always wanted to do after you get it.
See also Kennedy walking back his anti-vaccine positions to get crucial votes out of Republican senators in committee and then promptly revealing he is still anti-vax.
So when he makes comments about at third term and claiming even more power... how consistent do you think that is with smaller federal government or continuing democracy?
Trump ran on saying whatever to whomever. his intentions though were obvious. He ran on cutting spending by 2 trillion. Where did people think this was going to come from? He ran on ending red tape. He ran on reducing regulation.
These days folk getting approved by the senate just have to show up. No one believes RFK when he says he's changed his mind on vax. I mean, these guys are lackeys, not stupid.
Democracy is about letting people who have no understanding, who pay minimal attention, who are easily led by media and populism, choose who should be in charge.
It is working as designed.
Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse.
If the population votes him a 3rd term, If they vote for congress who supports that- that is democracy. The people will get what they vote for.
We are literally seeing what "govt by the people" looks like. This is not democracy dying. It's democracy showing its flaws.
I'm not happy with the situation, but I agree with almost all of what you've said.
> Do we need a better system? I'd argue yes. But all the others are worse
I think there's a lot of room for improvement here. Eliminate the senate. Dramatically expand the house. Eliminate the electoral college. Sane district boundaries. Etc.
Perhaps the Democrats should consider letting their voters choose the candidate for once instead of anointing it. Nobody wanted Clinton except the DNC establishment, and then they lied about Biden until he was forced aside for Kamala at the behest of insiders.
Trump specifically disavowed Project 2025 when he ran and now is embracing it. He never said he was going to put an unelected billionaire in charge and disregard the Constitution.
> And the lack of reaction by Republicans in congress suggests that they feel the best way to be reelected is to go along with it.
They are worried about getting primaried and their primary opponent being financed by Musk.
He disavowed project 25, but it was written by all his inner circle, and he hired them into govt. So, if the voter believed him, well duh.
Musk was a big part of the inner circle before the election. His track record is well known.
In other words everything that is happening was predictable and predicted. Voters knew what they were voting for. Those who are surprised really weren't paying any attention.
Voters could not have known that Trump would make a concerted effort to do anything unconstitutional. This is nothing like he did his first term or any other Republican has ever done.
He is going after departments that are conservative darlings like the Defense department. I can’t remember any serious person saying we need to cut spending and fire people at the FAA.
If he had thought that voters wanted Project 2025, why would he disavow it during the campaign?
Wasn't Doge floated before the election, with Trump embracing the idea?
Regardless, Trump has made a living as a (slimy) business man. No one should have heard his campaign speeches and taken them at face value.
He didn't even have to be lying at the time, he could have simply changed his mind. The man seems to be driven only by two motivations: his family and making deals. The first one is often seen as admirable or honorable, the second means you'll do whatever it takes to negotiate a situation where you're better off by whatever metrics matter to you (usually money and status).
We're only one skipped election away from democratic death.
This is democracy! You can say it’s a bad idea or whatever. But Trump had Musk on stage promising to do this then we elected him. That’s democracy. Tyranny of the majority.
Also people like it: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/HHP... (pp. 29-32)
This is not "letting go", this is "deliberately giving away and dismantling".
Nobody is that incompetent to do this accidentally.
>We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.
many here see it way (me too, though i'm well aware that many times whenever i was critical of Musk, he happened to be right, and in this case - Musk is naturally not anti-science guy, so i'd guess there must be some other reason for him doing that which i'm just not able to see).
I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions. In particular what is the expected state near, mid, and longterm and how the current actions are supposed to result in it. It would be great to have it with some ballpark estimates.
Their actions are pretty clearly to consolidate power, replace everyone with loyalists, cut taxes on the rich, deport and depopulate the country and transfer assets to their associates. Once the economy is tanked they can go on a buying spree and pick up all sorts of private assets for bargain price.
> I wonder whether somebody from the opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions.
i am not on trump's side (i hate trump; i am neutral on musk except these past few weeks i think he's said -- but not yet really done -- things that are a bit beyond the pale, even for him) but i think this will be positive for American science.
as i posted in sibling comment:
> to steelman the issue: what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions.
two things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered (Reproducibility crisis, amyloid hypothesis scandals e.g.).
after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up.
i guess technically this isn't a logocal explanation since i dont think trump is doing this in good faith but i think the US might be better off in the end.
Musk is interested in money and power. Not science.
His interest in money has led him to beliefs that he gets the most money if he cuts as aggressively as possible and pushes others to do as much as they can for as little as they will take. "Efficiency" to protect him from things like taxes or regulation, at the expense of anyone else's desire to not be cut to the bone.
And he's getting power by making a trade - he gets Republican approval by cutting a Federal workforce that right-wingers have long complained about. In exchange they give him power. So even if those cuts don't make a material dent on the national budget or debt, he'll have taken advantage of that power to make a few specific actions to benefit him personally.
Look at the difference between how he talks about space and how NASA does, say. Mars? Not science, not research, but just a place to plant a colony beholden to him that he can tax (without using those words) as much as he wants.
Musk's motivations are simple; the rich have been promised tax breaks, which means deep spending cuts. So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires.
Same for "science". That's a long term investment with long term returns. Kill that now for immediate tax breaks. Let someone else worry about the fallout 10 years from now.
Then there's direct interest. The CFB regulates companies processing payments to protect consumers. X wants to process payments without that pesky oversight. CFB is gone.
Musk and Trump sell this to the masses as saving money. Which the masses assume means lower taxes for them. Whereas the billionaires understand it's to remove services from the masses to route more money to themselves. The masses are easily duped - this is literally democracy in action.
In 2016 they had tax breaks without spending cuts. And he's not actually saving all that much money. The employees are only a small part of the budget.
He's doing it because hate for government employees has been a talking point since Reagan. He's getting huge accolades for sticking it to the evildoers. It's popular and fun.
that is the question - for example SpaceX needs FAA permits. With the federal employees severely cut in that future that Musk/Trump builds how that will be solved - 1. no FAA permits required or 2. SpaceX gets same-day service (or even total blanket exception) while everybody else waits 3 years?
> So gutting the parks service means no parks open to the public, but balances a tax break to billionaires
That's the stupid thing in the end. Gut the parks service, here's your $500 tax break on your several hundred million+ income.
It's a lot more than $500. For the few. It's $0 for the masses. A 1% reduction in corporate tax means millions in their pockets.
Billionaires aren't the ones going to national parks. So they don't care if they're closed.
> opposing side can provide a reasonable logical explanation for the Musk/Trump actions
Maybe it is like with Mozilla. You send money to Firefox development, but it pays for Marxist get-away conference in Africa.
Once academia gets rid of bloat, there will be far more money for science and engineering!
Well I'm not from "the other side" as I don't align with either party, but I do live in a very red part of the country.
In the short term, as I understand it, the goal is to root out fraud and abuse. For decades many people from both sides of the aisle have believed the government wastes money, that is nothing new. The current moves somewhat rhyme with the early Clinton administration. Whether that is Trump's goal or not is largely speculative, but those I've talked to that support him see this as the goal.
The mid and long term goals vary wildly depending on who I talk to. Some still view it like old school republicans, small government and states' rights. Others want a government just as large and powerful as today but focused on different goals and moral views.
The question I've yet to hear raised or disavowed by the Trump supporters I know is whether this is leading to fascism. A supposed billionaire running the country with his billionaire friends in toe sure seems like industry take over of government.
Similarly though, I rarely heard the other side of the aisle acknowledging whether the other path was intentionally leading to Marxism - a similar number of parallels existed there as well and in either case the outcome is authoritarianism and massive federal powers.
The Democratic Party is about as far away as you can get from any sort of Marxist political ideology as you can. There’s not a single even minor US political movement that is even remotely related to Marxism.
That seems like a hard claim to stand behind when Harris's father was a Marxist economist. BLM was also a very popular movement among the Democratic party, and it was organized and run by Marxists.
How do you land on the party being as far from Marxism as a party can be?
What Marxist policies was Harris promoting?
Elon Musk's parents and grandparents were adovactes and beneficiaries of a violent, racist apartheid South Africa. His dad had children with his step-daughter.
Fred Trump was arrested for participating in a KKK rally and prosecuted for racist discriminatiory housing practices.
How do you land on Trump and Musk being far from violent ugly racism?
> The Democratic Party is about as far away as you can get from any sort of Marxist political ideology as you can.
The last comment or set the bar pretty high here. Many of Harris's policy ideas were more focused on the collective well-being than the individual, all of those are more Marxist than they could be.
I'm not sure why you're jumping to Musk or Trump comparisons here. I agree with you in some areas that they both may be dangerous, that just wasn't the topic here.
Trump I have no explanation for except corruption.
But Musk and DOGE, there is a simple explanation. Musk has learned that you take a chainsaw to sacred cows, then fix the 10% that were really bad mistakes, and that is the easiest way to cut through bureaucracy. So he's trying that, at scale.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like he'll notice most of his bad mistakes. Because it is at scale, and his attention doesn't go that far.
Yeah, this slash and burn approach is legitimately good in many circumstances. You cut through cruft, break down old unneeded processes, and things that are needed but were undocumented become quickly documented and maybe refurbished. Things that break are quickly noticed and reinstated.
It really doesn't work for huge complex systems where the breakages aren't felt fully for many years, and building the systems back up take decades, and things break so far down the line that it's impossible to even tell what needs to be fixed.
I have to hope that the intentions are actually good, because the appearances from the outside look a lot like the start of a dictatorship.
> We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.
It’s not hard to understand why people believe Trump Is a Russian asset
Lost decade for the US and the beginning of the Chinese century for others
Recent and related:
Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144940 - Feb 2025 (646 comments)
to steelman the issue:
what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions.
a few things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered.
after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up
Maybe China will start accepting international PhD students? I don’t see anyone else who could pick up the slack.
We're losing an entire generation at least. The pain that these cuts are going to cause won't be felt overnight. It will be felt over decades. "Things have been set into motion that cannot be undone".
Just like the Supreme Court :(
My fear as well. I’m not sure if even a magic wish to rearrange stuff back to the before January state of affairs is possible at this point.
Write to your representatives. I fear that if they don’t pull off something the only ethical and responsible thing is civil war. This shit is insane and will destroy everything I like about our government.
Also to quote every true patriot: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
I’m so angry and mad and wanting to help fix it. My near term approach is write expansively to all my city state and congressional reps.
We already have diarrhea inducing corruption happening in plain view. We have walking piñatas for an urgent need to do campaign finance reform.
I’m not sure if there’s any way to save some of the institutions and programs that make this country actually great without a straight up secession/civil war for the coastal states.
I’m very very scared. And angry.
On HN, "revolutionary" is an adjective, and it means making a lot of money. :)
Calling your elected representatives daily is more effective. The app 5 calls makes it easy.
Unfortunately, mine very proudly proclaim how much they agree with what's going on. And they're also very proud of gerrymandering the state so they don't need to listen to anyone.
5 * 0 is still 0. They aren't listening.
Unless you are in a swing district that isn’t gerrymandered to death, your representative could care less about what you think. Their first objective is not to get primaried.
The biggest check on the administration is the Senate which confirms executive nominees. The Senate is definitely not “representative” of anything when Wyoming gets two Senators just like California.
Alternatively, after the initial shock of ripping off the doge bandaid has subsided, we’ll have saved enough by not funding foreign operas and firing employees who don’t even check their work email to fund plenty of worthwhile research projects.
The goal of this exercise is not to fund worthwhile projects. This is not a cutting of the fat. It's a permanent end of funding so that the rich can get some tax breaks.
The "big beautiful bill" has to be budget neutral to pass. Meaning to get those tax breaks, funding has to be slashed.
This is all about money. Republican voters believe a cheaper govt means less taxes for them. They don't appreciate the benefits they're getting. Hence they cheer as they lose those benefits, and they'll cheer just as loud when the rich get tax cuts.
When in the last forty years have Republicans shown any real interest in funding any new worthwhile research projects at the federal level? Versus just cutting what already exists?
The money being saved ain't for you.
When legal and predictable processes are undermined no one can rely on the government being a good actor. A good reputation takes generations to establish and seconds to destroy. No one will trust the government now.
More likely we’ll let others fund the research and when the discoveries are made into technologies, help our oligarchs pirate the technology.
Sean Carroll has a very informative, and impressively apolitical post/podcast about the recent de-funding of science in the USA.
I have seen it appreciated across the political spectrum. It is worth a read or listen, and hopefully a share. This is the most sober-minded analysis of this turn of events that I have seen so far.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
It was already bad last time when the objective was to just enrich the fossil fuel industry - https://archive.is/DywH6. This time the purge is all-encompassing. If science and education is suppressed, it's easier to control the masses.
And the worst thing is that they may have misunderstood what "probationary employees" were. In federal speak, they are new employees, but the new regime may have thought they were "bad" employees, based on the idea of "probation" in the criminal justice sense.
We live in such a moronic time that I believe the reason that we are dropping the post-WWII Rules Based Order, is that it is also called the "Liberal" International Order. [0]
Watching a historic empire destroy itself is beyond words. I will miss Pax Americana.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order
It looks more like they're just trying to fire everyone. You know, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
there are two tiers of program managers. there are those that are pulled from academia, as you say, but theres a 3-5x? multiple of "junior' PMs that are say MS or BS scientists, rarely PhD (usually the case when the PhD is... subpar), these are career and eventually thet are promoted to senior management and decision making roles.
The loss of their jobs is all part of gods plan, apparently https://www.mediaite.com/politics/house-republican-tells-fir...
If you've read the three-body problem series (or the tv show) [spoiler incoming]
- - - -
the way to stop humanity from being able to fight back (against alien invasion) is not via weapons, but via disabling science. It's a long term strategy.
So the conspiracy theory that trump is a russian asset (or is influenced by them at the least), seems plausible, if you imagine that such removal of science and research funding is meant to disable american technological progress for decades to come. This would be a strategy that outlasts the tenure of the russian asset.
Those concepts are not science fiction, they were very often used in the past already. Just read about how the most famous dictators in history came to power, and what they did first.
Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.
Who is the dictator here? Obviously the states that run these schools will raise taxes to fund the state schools, no?
> Who is the dictator here?
I’d say the leader of the executive branch who is unconstitutionally restricting (without an act of Congress) money that Congress lawfully appropriated, thereby seizing most of the power of the purse.
The dictator is still in the oven, but it's nearly ready. Just needs a topping of constitutional crisis and a suspension of elections and it'll be done.
You don't need to suspend elections you just need to subvert them. For-show elections make good dictatorial theater.
Yeah, I was going to say that the most likely thing is "making the voting process more secure and reliable to make sure elections are fair" by setting up voting machines and counting processes run entirely by loyalists, but that's less punchy and didn't fit the metaphor.
The constitutional crisis was Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio's contempt of court.
If the president can pardon contempt, then the president has the power to exempt a person from the obligation to show up in court, admit guilt, or experience consequences for their crime.
That was the moment of structural executive supremacy and an actual constitutional crisis -- when the law contradicts itself calling the laws themselves into question.
> This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist.
It is a decapitation strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_(military_strateg...
Ukraine is more or less a proxy war between America and Russia, which is also between John Locke's Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, which said simply is whether rules are made in respect to reason (law) or in respect to power (order). It's also a fight over who are the final enforcers of law. Are citizens the last line of enforcers of the law or is "law" always enforced by the strong against the weak?
America has the world's largest military and a world ending nuclear arsenal, so direct conflict is unconscionable. That means what's left is high leverage asymmetric warfare. Russia corrupted America's elites (and German elites to a significant degree, too), either through money, compromising material, or the promise of power. Some of those elites are people like Peter Thiel, who are absolute power houses of the American surveillance capitalist state. Private intelligence companies were leveraged to divide the American public and then conquer it.
America is experiencing a decapitation strike. By compromising our leadership, our economy and technological flywheel is being destroyed, our ideology is being corrupted, and trust in us has been decimated. Our closest allies now see us as someone who must be weakened and defended against. We abandoned Ukraine. There is no argument that Trump's America is good faith in any way.
It's a decapitation strike.
The point is to damage us and our future, and we're letting it happen. Our military that took an oath to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic have failed their obligation. Now America at large is rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. Americans are obeying in advance.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK)
> Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.
Seems unnecessarily alarmist speculation to me. :shrug: I'd rather see how this plays out, since no one can possibly know at this point.
We have seen it happen over and over again.
When was the last time real science came out of Russia?
I wouldn't put down Russia's achievements.
They did manage to effectively disable their greatest geopolitical enemy and cause us to destroy ourselves.
All the weaponry in every other country on earth couldn't harm America more than what they did with social media, some highly skilled "recruitment," and smart leveraging of monetary resources.
They got us to vote against Ukraine at the UN without a gun. Even the worlds best weapons aren't that effective.
> Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.
Personally I'm not sold on their tactics so far, but there is another way to view this than thrashing out.
Non-probationary federal employees are protected and not easily fired. If one honestly believes the government is bloated and so far into debt that the budget needs to be balanced at all costs, cutting anyone and anything you can may make sense.
Normally you wouldn't throw good food overboard, but if the ship is sinking you may have no choice other than to throw out anything that isn't bolted down.
Where exactly is the proof that the ship of government funded science in the USA was sinking?
If you don't mean just US funded science, then what evidence is there that the USA was sinking in general? When I look at the graph of debt increase, it was actually decreasing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366899/percent-change-n...
I meant US budget in general. If they believed the ship that is the US federal government balance sheet is sinking, they would jettison whatever they could.
It isn't about funding science in my scenario, its about funding the government.
Government employee payroll makes up a tiny fraction of the budget. It's actually a horrible place to start.
> It's actually a horrible place to start.
That depends on what the options are. The executive branch likely does have authority to fire probationary employees. They likely don't have authority to immediately fire non coronation dry employees or to end programs and departments created congress.
This may be the best lever they think they legally have today. If that is the case, and that's an if, they are trying to stick within the letter of the law despite how it is often being reported.
The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: https://www.nsf.gov/news/origins-google
That grant in the area of library science led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today's market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it's entire history.
This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said "Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!" But it was.
Basic research is like VC funding, it's a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn't change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC's and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.
This really feels more and more every day like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping
Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.”
This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.
To repeat popular quotes, there's a lot of walking up to fences gaily and then tearing them down, and a lot of "Government doesn't work, vote for us and we'll prove it"
Not much to say. If anyone is truly on the fence, please remember this and vote against it in 2026. Vote early, vote often. Vote local. I promise that killing trans people and defunding science is not going to make gas cheaper or anything.
It's like an internet argument spilled out into the real world, with all the posturing and bravado to increase perceived expertise.
Except it's gambling with an entire nation's fortune, instead of likes/votes/reactions.
It's literally what happened. Twitter is more real than "real politics" now
4chan regime.
Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains. For example, lots of stories in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9629714. Now certainly the Trump administration could have been more careful, but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
> the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.
It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/hiv-usaid-freeze-...
The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.
The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.
Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.
Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.
In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.
To be rather abrasive in my response: I believe your view is a waste of air. In case I'm correct how about we cut you off from air for a week and if there's a problem we'll restore it then.
That is how a large portion of the internet works, e.g. in most subreddits certain viewpoints will be instantly banned without any discussion. HN is kind of strange in that respect.
I figured it was a rather apt example of how the turn it off and wait until someone complains doesn't work if the damage done in the wait until it's restored time isn't repairable. The abrasive personal example is because he's ignoring that this view has many people's lives at risk when we talk about programs like usaid.
I wouldn't do this if there were lives at stake. e.g. turning off circuits in a hospital to see which ones are really necessary.
It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.
All of the important programs have temporary restraining orders. That's actually the standard the judge applies, "is there a possibility of irreparable harm?" (e.g. lives lost). It's not perfect but no system is.
Hundreds of people now have HIV which could have been prevented from USAID. This number is increasing.
These people also can't afford AIDS medications.
This is just one of many examples.
Your standard given here already isn't being held to in the most basic, obvious ways.
USAID saved thousands and thousands of lives every year. And that is a massive understatement of the suffering and misery USAID prevented.
It’s gone. People are dying because it’s gone.
> but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.
Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?
> Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains.
These government programs aren't stray servers in a closet.
Even if you believe that these programs should be stopped, it's entirely wasteful to abruptly end them and let their work in progress just crash out and burn.
But it's still a very bad idea to operate this way. There is no rapid feedback loop. The negative effects can be subtle and take years to ripple through the economy and science world.
Have you been paying attention to Republicans over the last 40 years? They don't care if it's useful or important. They don't want government programs to exist.
Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.
There's certainly an argument that anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. That argument would conclude that the government should indeed not exist, and consequently have no programs. The reality is more complicated, something like the microkernel vs. monolithic kernel debate, but it is hard to say that the current distribution between private and public sectors is optimal.
It reminds me of the Gordian knot myth. All these sages had tried and failed to untie it. Alexander the Great, a true jock, sliced it in half with his sword.
Trump and Musk style themselves after Alexander. They see the complexities of geopolitics, security, culture and economics, and they have contempt for that complexity. They give simple, brutal solutions for hard problems: War in Europe? Force Ukraine to surrender! Slow to change government policy? Fire Federal workers and consolidate power! Too many illegal immigrants? Send them to Guantamo! And it feels active, it feels efficient, it's cathartic, and so their base cheers them on as they take swings at the load-bearing walls of our country. The fulminant narcissism, impulsive mania and willful ignorance are adaptive, to them.
Sad to say but this will be the norm for the next 4 years, don’t expect any federal organization to come out intact. I’ve basically ruled out working as a federal employee as there’s no assurances about anything.
Federal scientist here. The situation is dire, and this is only the beginning. We've lost all employees with < 1 year of service, which has halted the new projects they were hired to work on. Leaders of 100 employee offices were booted since they had less than 1 year of federal service--back to another interim director. Those of us left are hamstrung since all travel has been canceled, and our credit cards will have $1 limits starting tomorrow. Who cares if you had a recurring charge on it that was maintaining the cell service on an instrument monitoring a volcano. We waste time in hastily scheduled team meetings trying to figure out how respond to DOGE's latest demands, only to learn as more info comes down from above that, no, we're no longer required to address their ultimatum messages. Make no mistake—their objective is to dismantle and destroy government functionality.
More than 4 years. At least the way it seems right now. The democrats have no viable strategy or someone with a cult of personality that can unite all the factional groups.
That's really the key idea behind this, IMO. Make it more scary to work for the feds or nonprofits since a Republican president can boot you every 4/8 years.
That area will then be handled by Huawai, which developed the 5G spec. The US no longer has much of a telecommunications technology industry.[1]
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2021/11/08/mapping-internation...
Don't worry about it Elon hired 19 year old criminals to run the agency's description through grok and it turned out that isn't important.
Interesting approach to competing with China on wireless technology. I would have thought the US having a competitive edge over China in terms of research and development would be important to Republicans.
The federal govt can’t be the majority of technological innovation. If we’re lucky this vacuum will be filled by an even larger private sector innovation hub like Xerox park and bell labs.
Oh my god dude, who do you think is the major subsidizer of private industry research?
I didn’t say I was in favor of axing all govt positions and grants, dude.
Indeed you did.
Various institutions that, among other things, receive federal grant money, make up an enormous amount of technological innovation. The federal government deciding it doesn’t want to pay out money that it has already contracted to pay is not going to help these institutions succeed at their innovation mission.
I, personally, believe that much of the current financial structure of the universities is broken, and the structure of the “indirect costs” causes strongly misaligned incentives, but arbitrarily and massively lowering the rates on zero notice is not the solution. I’ll note that no one involve in DOGE seems to have an actual proposal to improve the situation — they just seem to want to shut everything off.
US innovation is looking at how it can extract as much profit as it can in the next quarter.
Just like in healthcare, right? Where we are lucky the private industry has created...oh wait, most expensive healthcare system in the world, doesn't cover a third of the population, doesn't even crack the top ten in outcomes.
The regulators ain’t regulating. That’s their main job, not innovation.
It will be largely filled by Chinese universities and Chinese companies working together. Non-Chinese researchers will probably have to go to Europe.
Why do you think the vacuum won't be filled by other countries willing to fund their scientists?
This is after all the same reasoning used to give tax breaks to get a factory to setup in town
They say on the internet, a direct result of DARPA funding.
Not sure how you have such optimism. It will take a lot more than luck to rebuild what's being destroyed and we don't have what it takes.
[edit: Found a less condescending way to make my point.]
Every single American cellular operator was part of this program.
You do realize PARC and Bell Labs are long gone, right?
But the memories will live on in our hearts.
What a horrible outcome! NIST is, for most of its services, a self-funded agency and they define the acceptable standards for new tech. This makes no sense.
Edit: Too much time on screen today. My apologies for muddying the waters!
Who said anything about NIST?
This is inline with “take down anything that shows expertise and competence” approach by this administration. Following the pattern of extremely biased and subservient to the president appointees, I am not sure what it looks like for this specific organization, may be they are fired and that’s it
There are obviously strong emotions on both sides regarding the actions of the first few weeks of the Trump administration. Whether you believe the goals are worthy or not, one must acknowledge that the manner in which all of this is being done is deeply disturbing.
Trump will be gone in a few years, one way or the other. However, the foundations that are being poured for legitimizing a strongman, authoritarian role for the executive and almost eliminating the role of the other two branches is deeply dangerous.
If you believe the goals are worthy enough that the ends justify the means, think of the worst president ever(in your opinion) and consider whether you'd want them to have the same power? Because politicians never let power go willingly. They will certainly point to Trump's precedent as a means of legitimizing their actions.
My fervent hope is that our institutions are strong enough to weather this assault and that enough people make it clear to the administration that there are lines they are not willing to cross. Whether that happens remains to be seen.
What is this supposed to be? It's a link to a bunch of posts on some kind of social media platform that all say "uspol science funding". Am I missing something?
There is a “show more” button
""" I have been informed that everyone at NSF who was overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation (PAWR)[1] project is gone. This program has been providing testbed environments to help drive forward wireless networking, including mobile/cellular networks at locations in Harlem NY, Salt Lake City Utah, Ames Iowa, and Cary North Carolina. One of the explicit goals of the program is to keep the US competitive when it comes to both wireless technology development and training the workforce needed for leading-edge wireless networks.
I do hope that the program will continue with new leadership - some PAWR contracts are still active, and some platforms, including ours[2] have funding outside of PAWR. But the loss of institutional knowledge will seriously hurt these programs, and is definitely not "efficient"
[1] https://advancedwireless.org/ [2] https://www.powderwireless.net/
"""
What a strange UI/UX.
This is because a bunch of us use the Fediverse (Mastodon, etc.) as a general purpose social media network and really don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is, but want to read the other things folks have to say. So a bit of etiquette has built up over the years to stash those things under a CW (think of it like a subject line) so you can read it when and if you have the spoons to do so, and can happily ignore it and wait for something else from that person, say, cat pictures, without having to unfollow them.
In a more elegant world, Mastodon/Fediverse would have the concept of topics, and I'd be able to follow `@mh+cats@example.com` without following @mh+uspol@example.com`, but we're not in that elegant world. Mastodon (nor Pleroma, nor Pixelfed, nor any of the other Fediverse software) doesn't offer anything like that, short of multiple accounts, which comes with other big problems.
Ok, that's actually very cool. And I deeply share this sentiment:
> don't care to have the entire timeline be doom and gloom about how bad the world currently is
..
> In a more elegant world [..] the concept of topics, and I'd be able to follow [..]
One can dream. I used to regard the idea of filter bubbles as a negative thing, but I'd be perfectly content with being able to craft my own right about now.
Yeah. As with many things, having a bubble is not wrong _if_ you are aware of it and _if_ you control it and you chose it.
As Technology Connections recently said, it's worrying that people have had hostile bubbles built around them and not noticed.
Have the spoons to do so...?
> One of the explicit goals of the program is to keep the US competitive
Competition doesn't matter to a xenophobe. That's what the tariffs are for. You admit that you can't compete, so you make it too expensive for people to buy the foreign things, forcing them to buy your (inferior/expensive) things, with the upside-down belief that that will make your economy strong. When actually the now-captive market is an incentive to make things worse and more expensive. You'd think the people who "beat communism with choice and competition" would get that.
Modest proposal: hacker news is not the most left leaning of web forums, However, there seems to be a fairly consistent and relatively unanimous view that the actions of the current republican administration are deeply problematic.
If you happen to be one of those people who thought that voting for the Republicans was in your best interest, yet you are shocked and horrified by what the Republicans are currently doing, I strongly suggest you reevaluate your political epistemology, and interrogate both your sources of information as well as your political stances.
Unlike you, others fully expected this as the outcome Of a Republican Administration and Congress.
I really doubt they're the same people. I think when left-leaning people see a story like this one, they are far more inclined to participate in the discussion. And vice versa.
I know these cuts make almost no difference to the massive federal spending, but they are putting a spotlight on our nation's dire financial situation.
Most young people have no hope of owning a home or having kids and our federal government is "borrowing" money to pay for all of these things. Last year it added 1830 billion dollars to the national debt while paying 1126 billion in interest. Take a look at the dollar price of gold chart if you haven't recently. This is obviously not sustainable, maybe even in the short term.
To continue steal from our children's futures to pay for decades of accumulated corruption, appropriated by Congress, is a crime. Can anyone see a reasonable path forward where we don't make drastic changes?
The NSF funding last year was $9B. Cutting it will stop the US from continuing to have a growing economy in ten years. That’s stealing trillions from our children.
Look at the republican budget. They’re adding $85B a year for better border security; half of which is to deploy the US military inside the US. The other half goes to the national guard and customs and border patrol. So, for every dollar they cut from the NSF, they’re spending $10 to deploy troops against American civilians.
For every one of those dollars, they’re handing $10 out in tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.
This is being paid for by cutting medicare, which we will all rely on, assuming we somehow manage to live through the inevitable pandemics, natural disasters, economic collapse and wars this jackass is going to start.
> decades of accumulated corruption, appropriated by Congress
Is just something assumed by Republicans with no basis in reality. The amount of "facts" that conservative friends post on Facebook that can be trivially debunked that have still been circulating for years is insane.
any thing that leads to or could lead to decentralization will be exterminated smh zuck
Many are surprised by this, but if you think of it as Trump's getting paid to set the US back so others can catch up, then it makes a lot of sense.
Wonder who informed the author? And how did the DOGE thing go exactly?
Why shouldn't the three monopoly cellular players in the US do this work themselves? Is there some reason the NSF is doing industry research for them? Are we /honestly/ afraid of "falling behind" in cellular technology if the government doesn't do basic research?
How is it saving money if the cost is just shifted elsewhere? Why does it matter where the work is done except for empty ideological signaling?
The cost would be borne by the consumers of Telcos / wireless services rather than by all taxpayers.
The Telcos would allocate funding / resources based on their financial position and their needs.
I dunno, tbh maybe the government can do a better job at right-sizing the service and running it efficiently than the private sector could? Maybe! But it feels like most arguments along these lines would also apply to the Telcos themselves, i.e, if government can do a better job why not nationalise the Telcos?
What US centered industry has continued to innovate new technologies in their fields that have benefits other than increasing shareholder value at all costs?
I, for one, prefer the rotary dial.
Ah yes the Verizon protocols were such a good contribution to standards.
Everyone whose funding is cut/questioned says it's wrong and/or inefficient.
They can't all be right and the US is running a $1.5T+ deficit and the national debt per citizen is $666k.
The vast majority of federal spending goes to the military (including Veterans Affairs), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and debt interest. Everything else doesn't matter much. This is especially true given that Republicans will probably increase the deficit; any money saved will go to tax cuts for the rich, and then some.
For example:
> The Senate on Friday forged ahead with plans to give the military an additional $150 billion in spending even as the Pentagon seeks to make sweeping changes and reductions in its budget. Senators voted 52-48 in favor of a budget resolution that will unlock $340 billion in spending for U.S.-Mexico border security, energy independence, Coast Guard modernization and military investments while mandating cuts elsewhere.
https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2025-02-21/senate-milita...
Worrying about small amounts of M while increasing other parts with B makes me wonder how it could be perceived that there's any actual interest in a "balanced budget." The only president to balance the budget was Clinton, and it was an economically terrible idea.
Government budgets are not like a company's budget or a family's budget, and pretending that it is, when we control the reserve currency of the world, is just plain silly and weak.
The cuts are not about making a dent in spending or waste. As you say, if that was the goal, they'd be going after the billion dollar departments. It's becoming obvious that the purpose of all this chaos is to grief federal employees, kill their morale, and make them miserable/frightened. We shouldn't try to read too much into the actions of this administration. It's not some advanced 4D chess. It's just about cruelty to perceived opponents.
Note that Clinton balanced the budget while also funding stuff like the NSF. His term ended with the dot com boom, which was clearly a long term win for the US economy.
Step 1: Fire people to "save" single digit billions
Step 2: Give 100's of billions in tax cuts to the richest
4 Trillion in tax cuts, actually.
The way tax cuts are reported, it sums up over the lifetime effect of the cut, usually ten years.
So this is hundreds of billions per year, and 4 trillion in total effect on the debt.
I doubt Trump is trying to balance the budget. He’s not a traditional economic conservative, definitely wasn’t in his first term. I think they are just trying to find waste and redirect it to other things.
Such as their idea to give $5k cheques to every American with the savings which would cost $1 trillion (+ $1T to pay off debt). https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-doge-c...
Why don't you care about nuclear safety, dmix? Is that the waste you're talking about?
Posting multiple replies under my comments, then replying again in other threads is some weird attention seeking behaviour...
But yes I do think it is very wasteful, as the article says it can cause serious inflation issues to dump $1T into the economy like that. Not at all economically conservative nor a useful behaviour of an agency claiming to want to save money, similar to the federal firings I critiqued as non-productive in the other thread you followed me from.
I’m not seeking attention, I’m seeking your accountability for the bullshit you post online. Why are you mischaracterizing the DOGE efforts and dodge questions about the many mistakes made so far in the name of government efficiency? Why lie through omission of important context that shows this is all in the name of expanding oligarchic power? Why make such shitty assumptions about my position when I challenged your assertion that nothing more than a token effort has been made to curb my government’s (note: not your government’s) waste? You need to do better.
And people obscure this fact by talking about spending controlled by XYZ instead of total federal spending.
Who cares that it's an act of congress that funds a given project instead of a regular budget? Your money is still being spent.
Here is an infographic from 10 years ago that shows where the money is actually going: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/death-and-...
In short: if you're not auditing the DOD you're not trying to fix anything.
“I need to lose weight, so I cut off my fingertips. Why is everyone saying that’s bad?”
If you want to cut the federal deficit, we need to restore tax rates to the level they were at around the turn of the century - rich people were fine back then, nobody gave up because their yacht only had a small helicopter – and reduce spending on the big areas which are the only ones where it’s mathematically possible for cuts to make a significant difference.
For example, NSF’s budget is 1/15 of the Republicans’ proposed INCREASE in DoD funding. Even if we destroy U.S. science funding entirely and cede the global leadership role to China, we will end up behind of where we were last year even before the tax cuts add orders of magnitude more debt. That’s even before you factor in how much money the economy has lost from all of the work the government supports and how many businesses rely on government research and funding.
Similarly, if you wanted to save a lot more money, you’d be working to make U.S. healthcare as efficient as government programs. Instead, Republicans blocked Medicaid from negotiating drug prices and shut down attempts to limit drug profit margins, which means there are individual drugs where the annual extra profit compared to pricing in Canada is greater than the entire NSF budget.
I think many people who argue this, including myself, are saying that there are good cuts and harmful cuts, this likely falling into the latter.
The common two reference point for "good" ways to reduce the deficit is 1) spend less on defense. 2) change taxes (either raise on corporations, wealthy or close loopholes).
2 being basically impossible to move. 1 seems easier, but I know nothing of this space. Others include stronger healthcare reform, etc etc.
The real question is, what negatively changed when the debt went from 600k to 666k? What about 500k to 600k? What will negatively change if it goes from 666k to 700k?
I hear a lot about the debt going up. Not once have I ever heard what the consequences of this debt are to the regular tax payer. None of these cuts are going to give normal people significant tax cuts, and cutting all these programs certainly doesn't seem like it'll positively impact people's lives. Research investment more than pays people back not just in terms of money, but quality of life. Same goes for general maintenance.
Generally sovereign debt is not a problem until creditors become worries that the debt will not be paid back. The exact threshold is subject to the regular market fear/greed manias and is not an exact figure. Once this happens the country issuing credit will have trouble lending at favorable rates and will be forced to choose between printing money (could lead to massive inflation) and making large cuts. Here is recent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis and here is an older more infamous one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R....
The sudden nature of these consequences without many real world impacts beforehand also happens at an individual level. It might be tempting to take on credit card debt at the moment and there might not be any real world consequences to running up the balance but if painful measures are not taken to address the situation before a moment of crisis (i.e. inability to service the debt), you are in for a world of pain.
National debt is not like credit card dept...at all. There is nobody coming to get your car if you don't pay up.
My god...this is such a common misunderstanding, they should use a different word already...
Well, if the government starts defaulting on payments, then bond rates go to infinity while the domestic currency goes to zero.
The US is currently defaulting on all sorts of debts, and the deficit has nothing to do with it. I wonder why its credit rating hasn’t been slashed yet.
>Not once have I ever heard what the consequences of this debt are to the regular tax payer.
Inflation, and systemic fragility.
The second part is esoteric but extremely important. In financial systems, you often find that risk clusters in gray areas where models are incomplete or where the cost doesn't show up as a line item on a report. For example, increasing the bank leverage ratios to tamp down long term yields (some talk of this possibly happening that I've seen in the trading space), swaps the cost of higher interest rates for banking fragility. Risk cannot be erased, just transformed.
When it comes to debt, the Federal Reserve balance sheet spiked from 4 trillion to 8 trillion during 2020, which was in and of itself a result of earlier systemic fragility (bond leverage/basis trade collapse, which is essentially the link between the directly FED controlled ecosystem and the even more massive modern global dollar system). That balance sheet expansion seemingly had no "cost", due to interest rates being zero, but when looked at with a wider lens, the Fed essentially had massive amounts of convex interest rate risk on its books. When inflation did wake up (in large part due to the sharp fiscal infusion), their response function is to raise rates, but that functions as an immediate devaluation of their book which in part functions as a large wealth transfer to the private sector (which includes many things like mortgage holders, to the embedded inflation in long term options which the trading account I was managing got for essentially free). The net result was inflation that ran away, a borderline housing bubble where a generation is priced out, and of course a massive spike in inequality. With higher rates, Reverse Repo was also paying hundreds of billions in interest, directly fighting the inflation reducing effort.
The previous regime looked good on paper - yields were low, inflation was low, etc, but essentially what was happening was an overheating system that didn't fully factor in the costs of QE. Naturally, the costs are eventually realized. But it's insidious when these effects are, as I said, things like increasing wealth inequality that won't show up on a balance sheet report on WSJ. Risk clusters in gray areas.
So the situation now is that the treasury has shifted most of the issuance to the short end, Which means that there is a concentration of risk that starts to accelerate if inflation starts to tick up again. Because all of the T-bills get rolled every six months to two years. Before too long the debt is going to have to be termed back out to the long end, but at that point you're going to see some serious issues absorbing all of the issuance. That line raises the risk of a liquidity crisis and a breakdown of the repo market, which is a financial crisis. Alternatively, the debt can be once again stuffed in the central bank balance sheet, but it's unlikely that that regime is going to come back in full force because the costs of doing so are now extremely apparent and humans have recency bias. If the options become too constrained, the net result would be a Bank of Japan style situation, where a major currency devaluation is the only realistic scenario.
So as for the costs, it's not something that's ever going to be immediately seen, unless something's going wrong. You will probably see a mix of all of the above. Bank regulations loosened so they can take on more risk. Central Bank reversing balance sheet runoff. Some slow grinding currency devaluation. And a slew of creative financial repression (lower long term bond yield) initiatives.
Zooming way back out, it's just not an ideal or efficient way to run the system, to have these slow rolling crisis waves reverberating through time. Billions dollar pet startups levered against the QE regime was not efficient allocation of resources. Negative cost leverage for private equity is not ideal for an egalitarian society. Etc. Of course there are the more obvious examples, like sharp inflation shock risk, and budget constraints as interest payments rise, but my point is that the costs are there. All around you. You just don't see them.
The fragility point is a good one, but it's also misleading if you only look at one side of the equation. The other side is assets sloshing about the system -- like a large tanker without internal divisions, if there are a lot of assets sloshing about and the tanker gets into bad weather, the internal movement of assets can increasingly destabilize the whole thing.
That's one aspect of retirement systems that has always concerned me. Sure, it's neat to give people the control over retirement that comes with investing in an open market. But contrast this to public retirement systems where you pay in and the money is used to pay out retirement (of other people) immediately. Ultimately, both systems have to be sustained by a real economy that can provide the goods and services that folks require during retirement. But one of them puts a large amount of assets into the hands of unelected money managers, which is surely a potential source of instability.
The consequences are inflation. However, as long as there isn't inflation, it's just fine. And there are other sources of inflation, like energy crises, outside of spending based inflation.
Actually it goes the other way. Inflation erodes public debt [1][2]. It is, however, not necessarily good[3].
But at the end of the day, the causes of inflation are not cause and effect. You can print money to save an economy without causing inflation as we did during the 2008 financial crisis[4] or you can print money and cause hyperinflation as in the case of Argentina[5] or Zimbabwe. It’s more about how you do it instead of what you do.
[1] https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/how-inflation-erode...
[2] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/using-inflation-erode-us-publ...
[3] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/aug/inflation...
[4] https://econofact.org/rising-inflation
[5] https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-money-printing-destroyed-ar...
QE isn't money printing, it's a duration swap.
Financial conditions tightened after 2008, despite QE. The money supply in the broader sense (global liquidity) tightened significantly because of banking regulations limiting balance sheet size, and because of collateral requirements massively tightening up. No more sending CMBS into repo to originate systemic leverage - it's treasuries or nothing. Repo within the US is about 5 trillion today, and probably about 20 trillion globally (with USD assets at the core of the chain), so the 2008 style collateral crisis was massively deflationary despite the various liquidity injections.
There is also a cost for the QE activity - the central bank takes on interest rate risk, essentially putting on a giant prop trade on short-term interest rates (and the results of such an unwind were seen post 2020, especially in areas like the housing price surge and the banking collapse).
QE is not money printing though. It's a misconception. In some ways it can tighten. It takes high quality collateral out of the system and exchanges it for bank reserves which are extremely limited. As the QE "money printing" got obscene, banks had massive amounts of excess reserves and further reserve accumulation from QE was not an injection of liquidity at all. It really had almost no effect. If you remember, trillions of dollars of reserves were parked back at the Fed in Reverse Repo, and when inflation forced interest rates up, the inflationary loop was accelerated by the interest on reserves - the risk never goes away, it transforms and slashes around. In the '10s though, there was arguably collateral scarcity from QE, and indeed it is undeniable that a giant bond bubble was built up with 0% (negative in Europe) long term debt. Meanwhile leverage was zero cost or even negative real cost, which showed up in massive asset inflation (bank reserves from QE mostly don't propagate to the real economy. Even bank lending post 2008 has little to do with reserves.)
Like you say inflation erodes public debt and so the consequences of taking on a lot of public debt is that the government is also tempted to increase inflation.
If you print money you will increase the rate of inflation. The question is how much and when. During crisis, often lending is impacted which can lead to a decrease in the supply of available capital. Printing money in this circumstance can head off deflation and thus like you point out you have printed money without causing inflation to increase above the historical baseline rate like we did in the 2008 crisis. Crucially, you cannot rely on this strategy to reliably make up for a budget shortfall as we have seen time and time again (see bullets for two examples). The parent comment is correct that often a perpetual budget shortfall leading to an expansion of public debt can and often does lead to an inflation crisis but you are right that there is a bit more nuance.
To make an analogy: if you eat much more than the average person you will become overweight. You might object that this is factually incorrect and a silly thing to say because there are some exceptions such as if you only eat fresh vegetables, are training for a marathon, have a medical condition etc but in broad strokes this is true. However in the general case, eating too much leads to weight gain (even if it is arguably not the root cause which may be that we have engineered our food supply for financial incentives rather than compatibility with our evolutionary history :D).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement#Roman_Empire * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money_of_the_Qing_dynast...
Inflation causes interest rates to go up. Which increases our interest payments. Which blows a hole in our budget.
Another source of inflation is maintaining zero interest rates during an economic boom, like Trump did in his first term.
It takes a few years to kick in, which is why we saw it under biden.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, since this is a very reasonable question to ask, especially since the related deficit spending doesn't just disappear. It goes somewhere, and you can't reduce one without reducing the other.
> Everyone whose funding is cut/questioned says it's wrong
Everyone who made billions off the internet is too busy smelling their own farts to recognize that none of this waves hand in the general direction of basically all modern technology would exist without the sustained government funding that built ARPAnet and NSFNET.
I think you miss a critical fact:
They absolutely understand that. They also see money/power as a finite resource and absolutely do not want any new competition to emerge via anything that could be created or funded by anything they do not control.
It's shortsighted because they are asking China to take over.
You're certainly right in some cases, though I do think its a mix of truths.
Some of them do realize the actual situation and are ladder pulling, but mixed in with that there's also a pervasive offshoot of hyper narcissistic survivorship bias that in my experience a lot of modern tech entrepreneurs suffer from where they really are actually shockingly blind to the build-up of everything that they then built on.
Like the Internet existing for them is taken as just a given like the earth and the seas being here, but "taxi cabs you hail through the internet"... that's the real invention!
Also, who cares about the per citizen deficit when some of the wealthiest and largest companies pay no taxes?
So raise taxes. The deficit isn’t a problem of spending it’s a problem of repeated tax cuts.
So the conservatives counter with "nu-uh! we just need to cut all government funding and eliminate all government services. then we'll save soooo much money, that we can buy more bombs." Annnnnnnd that's how we get to cutting the funding for cutting edge research.
This is the real reason. Does the program produce money or help people? Or is it a black hole for funding to be dumped into?
People are so used to excessive waste they can’t even tell it apart from something that adds value.