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cayley_graph
You and people you know will lead worse and less fulfilling lives due to this. You, or someone you love, will likely die of causes that would have been preventable without this destruction of domestic science. Academic culture undoubtedly needed reform, but this evisceration bent on shortsighted retribution will help absolutely nobody.
rayiner
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cayley_graph
That is an enormous budget cut; it is exactly an evisceration. And the general trend is to cut both science and its application. Trials for life-saving treatments _by biotech companies attempting to commercialize them_ are being halted or cancelled due to the science cuts and general corruption.
Many people have many complaints; many should be ignored. There's lots of money (and indeed, huge market incentive) to commercialize potentially successful science, and as such it has been done consistently. Curiosity-driven science must feed it, and the idea that it does not unambiguously benefit society at large, with extreme and breathtaking return on investment, is a fantasy perpetuated by those susceptible to the idiotic culture war.
rayiner
I assume Science magazine isn’t citing “decades” of complaints from random cranks? What’s your response to those?
voxl
Why is government research doing what the industry should be. The point of government research is to enable people to work on things without requiring some economical impact.
The fact you just happily ignore the political situation and the fact this is CLEARLY anti intellectual bullshit says all that needs to be said about you.
rayiner
> Why is government research doing what the industry should be
The government does plenty of applied research in conjunction with industry. E.g. DARPA.
solid_fuel
Your entire ass is showing here, liar.
You claim that the cuts aren't actually harmful then turn around and clarify that it's good to hurt people: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48636815 that's how it is obvious to everyone here that you aren't even trying to engage in good faith.
The linked comment:
>> hurting people they don’t like
>> genuine desire to improve America
> We think these are related, just like you do. The difference is that you assume that hurting billionaires will improve America while we assume that hurting NGOs and postmodernist academics will do so.
> And that difference results from the fact that you think you can construct a new society without billionaires and industrialists that nonetheless offers the prosperity we have today, and more. By contrast, we think the way to get more prosperity is to do more of the things that made America prosperous in the past.
tacomonstrous
”For example, it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award. It also allows NSF to make additional awards without the need to review a new application.”
obvious grifting opportunity
avs733
I think this is the larger point that is easy to miss.
Thinking about this as slashing science or making it more efficient or short sighted or innovative is all a distraction.
It’s just another opportunity to give money to the friends of those in government and take money from those you don’t. Say want you want about how it used to be, but this and the new rules around “political oversight” are just corruption and grift that are either wearing a mask of ideology or efficiency based on your political stance
sharts
Why does a couple billion not seem like all that much these days?
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TimorousBestie
More or less a handout to the tech industry. This is just the STTR program with even less oversight and a questionable funding source.
Curious what the plan is when the academic pipeline for training researchers collapses entirely. AI all the things?
contemporary343
I think it's also a way to reduce funding to universities (which are politically disfavored), since other things like arbitrary reductions to indirect costs didn't work. It also defies both congressional will in the appropriations bill (which is directorate-specific) and of course the whole charter and mandate of NSF, from Vannevar Bush's original case for it.
TimorousBestie
Yeah, this is all well-attested.
It’s so weird. Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower, which presumably includes high-tech capabilities like global power projection, missile defense, and persistent space operations. At the same time they seemingly want a Cultural Revolution-like decimation of intellectuals.
I don’t see how they believe they can attain both objectives at once.
rayiner
The assumption is that the people in the universities who can build missiles can pretty easily be distinguished from those who can’t.
SoftTalker
There's at least a subset of them who do not. They want isolationism. Almost a juche sort of mentality. Stop propping up Europe/NATO. "No more foreign wars" was their rallying point. The Iran war really brought them to the surface, a lot of them were very unhappy with the Trump administration about that.
solid_fuel
> Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower,
I used to think that too, but it seems evident the current crop of conservatives is only interested in hurting people they don’t like and funneling money into the pockets of oligarchs. It’s pretty evident now that none of this is being done out of patriotism or a genuine desire to improve America.
exe34
> Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower
Why would you presume that? Isn't enough that they get rich and powerful as compared to others around them?
monknomo
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hilariously
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counters
But not even. At least in the domain I work in, there is virtually no interest of engaging with these NSF programs. Regardless of what's put in writing in the calls for applicants, there's still a significant prejudice that NSF - by being a part of the government - will be slow and ineffective at administering awards, and therefore it's a waste of time for any agile, fast-moving company.
On the flip-side, my academic colleagues are tearing out their hair trying to get some - any - funding to support their labs. I'm completely inundated with request from colleagues to provide an LOI or some other evidence that our company is interested in working with their lab on something. But that's even _less_ attractive for many private companies!
atonse
We have worked with many (NSF funded) research centers over the past decade. It (accidentally) became our speciality. If you know research centers that are looking for software dev firms that understand how to work with NSF funded grants and research centers, I’d love to connect.
wahnfrieden
It’s a political revenge move, there’s no strategy toward a better outcome such as AI (however questionable that would be) as that’s not the point of it
adastra22
That seems like typical establishment / reactionary push-back. NSF is spinning up Focused Research Organizations, which are very effective ways of getting basic research done that wouldn't otherwise be funded, and to do so in a way that allows for commercial spin-offs. That's not a handout.
TimorousBestie
The whole point of an FRO is to have less oversight than a traditional government grant or contract.
adastra22
That is the point, but not the purpose. Traditional funding mechanisms leave large gaps across whole research areas. A more traditional government grant is small and focused, and only makes sense within the context of an ongoing research effort, e.g. in a university. That's great and fine, except that there are whole categories of things that existing labs and agencies do not do, yet are still too close to basic science for an industrial research lab to pick up.
For example, let's say you want to make a fundamentally different kind of microscope, or nano-fabrication lab. Something that requires many millions of $$ to setup, and further tens of millions to operate. That's too much for an SBIR grant, too expensive for industry to do on a lark. An FRO could setup the lab and run it for 5-7 years, accomplishing major research goals while proving out the concept. But it'll never get done on a spoon-fed sequence of small grants.
So you grant an organization $50M/yr to do this work, with broad freedoms to spend that money how they see fit, so long as progress is made towards the research goals. That's an FRO. Yes, technically that is a government grant with less regulatory oversight. But it's not libertarian philosophy that drives that outcome, so much as regulatory oversight is not setup to fund such efforts in the first place.
ck2
again, it's all Russell Vought
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
if Vance, their prized successor, somehow gets the reins in 2029 country is absolutely cooked
* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
pstuart
They say they care about spending but ignore DOD financial shenanigans, which implies it's not about spending and only about what they like.
ck2
has nothing to do with money, it's about destroying science and medicine
president burns $2 million in federal funds almost every weekend golfing https://DidTrumpGolfToday.com
he took $100 million from park funds for his own birthday party
he just ransacked the nuclear missile maintenance program for almost a BILLION dollars to refurbish a half-billion dollar plane which he intends to keep somehow despite wildly illegal under emoluments clause
Iran War spent a BILLION dollars a day and has to be restocked
US funds and supplies Israel 2/3rd of their entire weapons supply (while they have universal healthcare)
again, not about savings, about destruction of science and medicine
throw36932
> US funds and supplies Israel 2/3rd of their entire weapons supply (while they have universal healthcare)
This is misleading.
Israel’s annual budget is $270 Billion, of which $45 Billion is military. US aid is around $3.8 Billion a year.
pstuart
Preach, brother. I'm saying that the GOP frames the cuts as "saving taxpayer money" vs the obvious "we hate science because it consistently proves that we're lying to you".
pphysch
The next generation of life-improving technologies will likely come out of AI/robotics trained on high-quality data that hasn't been collected yet. Medical, ecological, resource and waste management, agriculture, home automation, etc.
Scientists are literal pros at identifying and collecting (if not organizing) high-quality data.
This really should be a period of supercharging basic science in recognition of that, not looting it.
ianm218
> By levying such a large tax on its other programs, the agency appears to be defying a congressional directive in the final FY 2026 appropriations bill that “No [NSF] directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level.” That language was meant to address fears by the research community and some legislators that NSF, if its overall budget remained flat, might decide to grow TIP at the expense of its other directorates—a concern that now appears prescient.
What I find so hard to wrangle is that the Trump admin does almost everything in an illegal hamfisted way, whatever their doing gets stricken down by courts, and then a year later we’re just spending time and resources undoing the obviously illegal things they do.
This change even seems like a positive one I wish they should just pass a bill like a normal government.
anigbrowl
Yes. imho it's impeachable because the repeated defiance of Congress indicates an unwillingness to 'faithfully execute the laws'. I'm pretty sure you could measure the statistical probability of this being intentional rather than simply erroneous by looking at the distributions of affirmations or reversals in court decisions.
Ar-Curunir
This is not a positive change. Applied research that makes profits is for industry. Industry will never fund curiosity-driven research in any amount, so the government needs to do it. Redirecting government funding for a function already served by industry is stupid and just another vehicle for corruption.
ianm218
> Created in 2022, TIP’s mission is to address the decades-old complaint that the agency, traditionally focused on curiosity-driven research with no obvious commercial value, needs to do more to make sure scientific discoveries eventually benefit society—in new jobs and products, improved health care, or a rising standard of living.
This seems like a decent initiative started under Biden’s pro technology/ industrial policy umbrella. It was launched as part of the hugely successful CHIPS act.
Your critique is a false dichotomy. There is a large spectrum between “purely curiosity driven research” and “research that has near term venture outcomes” where applied research lives. Something like the Bell Lans semi conductor and related research would fit into this. Not immediately venture scale focused research, but could lead to it.
Just because Trump is repurposing it for illegal grift doesn’t mean it’s a bad group to put resources into in general.
secretsatan
It’s to repay the bribes
BenFranklin100
Rest assured, this will likely come with no small amount of grift.
The Trump administration has already installed political appointees in America’s federal R&D organizations including the NIH and NSF. They have final say on funding decisions. These appointees override grant peer review and regular agency channels. It’s all part of Russel Vought/Project 2025’s unitary executive theory.
These NSF initiatives could well be the next logical step to channel millions of research funds to politically connected companies and organizations. Something similar happened with the recent Reflecting Pool fiasco where the federal contracts were give to Trump donors.
There’s no reason not to believe this will also happen to America’s federal R&D. Grift aside, there’s no reason either not to believe the funds will be given to Trump administration pet projects of dubious scientific value.
Hikikomori
>It’s all part of Russel Vought/Project 2025’s unitary executive theory
And its heavily inspired by the nazi Carl schmitt that created the legal foundation for Hitlers rule.
tennfown
> Rest assured, this will likely come with no small amount of grift.
I naturally expect this money to go to tech companies who have time and time again proven their ability to innovate and thrive in the bleeding edge: basically Oracle.
srean
I hope everyone gets it that it is sarcasm, painful as it is.
jagged-chisel
Oracle innovate? This must be sarcasm.
wirtSalthouse
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If you haven't read it already, it's really worth digesting the arguments Vannevar Bush made regarding funding basic science in 1945 (Science: The Endless Frontier) which resulted in the NSF as we know it being founded:
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75t...
"A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowl- edge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill."
I think FROs are certainly worth exploring, but if we're diverting vast amounts of funding to existing research infrastructure and talent to funding them, the opportunity costs are huge. This is not well appreciated, but universities are in fact very cheap places to do research compared to any modern alternative one might construct. I suspect FROs will end up being much more expensive just for structural reasons, and will end up re-discovering the university bundle slowly and piece by piece. Moreover, for many types of research they will have to effectively rebuild a range of infrastructure (facilities, equipment, etc.) that already exists at universities throughout the country.
None of this justifies blowing up the extensive basic research infrastructure we have today in pursuit of unproven experiments. Once they're proven, a conversation can be had about how to reconfigure existing assets and new government-funded approaches. But such discussions must include congress, the appropriators of the funds.