At the moment it's simply weird discriminatory cutting of grants by internet trolls, but it's quite likely that all Federal research funding will vanish at the next budget. Leaving that to China to catch up.
The firehose of money won't go away, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it will be redirected right towards a spoils system, where the administration's friends and supporters will be reaping the rewards of victory.
Sadly unsurprising, given the witch-hunt nature of recent cuts – Emily Riehl's been a big source of mentorship and inspiration for women in mathematics, and she's been pretty vocal about it. The point is to make a show of stamping out "DEI" for a headline, and to hope that no one looks too closely at the details.
I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics. This subset may intersect with another subset that is happy to see the things described in these stories happen.
> I think it is true that a subset of HN readers don't want to see stories about politics.
There is a huge subset of HN readers who don't live in the USA, and thus don't really care about political drama in the USA as long as it is not relevant for their own life.
What I'm going to call the "anti woke mind virus" has captured a lot of people: they're happy to burn down anything because they're annoyed about "woke", often based on a single misrepresented incident.
What would you have us do? People voted for this. I’ve hated every minute of this, but they obviously have the authority here. Apart from legal challenges, this very much seems like a “we voted to make our country nontrivially worse off in the long run” scenario.
Trump's approval numbers do not suggest indifference, but more likely self censorship. I think most people were overwhelmingly opposed to all of this DEI stuff, but that can be disingenuously framed as saying somebody is opposed to e.g. diversity or inclusion, as opposed to them being opposed to what DEI amounts to - which is about pursuing equality of outcome, something that is in direct conflict with everything that the Social Rights Movement fought for and achieved.
I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period. Certainly not the federal government. In particular if they were just replacing the DEI funding with e.g. Jesus funding, I would be vehemently opposed to this all. But so long as they continue to just cut the funding without replacement, I'm instead vehemently supportive of it.
Self-censorship about their opinions on cutting grants that mention forbidden keywords, even if the grant outcomes have nothing to do with said keywords?
There’s an unbelievable opportunity for other countries to pick up world class U.S researchers.
The next four years all countries need to do is offer the research funding and citizenship and university positions and entirely new industries and centers of knowledge could be created.
I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US and kick starting a competetive European tech sector. Cloud computing, AI etc. Now would be a great time to take the initiative.
> I can only dream of the EU snatching top talent from the US
This top talent will not be satisfied with the common salaries in many EU countries. Also, it will be unsatisfied that Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries where English is an official language, and in none of them English is the only official language.
That would be truly exceptional, but: the US already is the only country that makes its citizens pay taxes when they're not resident at all. (Lots will make you pay taxes if you're partially resident)
They could quite easily take out anti-dual-taxation agreements and try to make US overseas nationals pay two sets of tax.
The existing regulations giving the US global jurisdiction over KYC/AML for Americans can also make it hard for Americans to get bank accounts overseas; that could easily be escalated.
It's not based on titles. Here [1] is the proposal. It included "Furthermore, by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US. It will train the next generation of scholars from minority serving universities and marginalized communities in the fields of cybersecurity, utilization of renewable resources, and machine learning to address the pressing problems of this age."
Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.
Interesting, thank you for the addendum! Do you believe it is likely that inclusions of things such as "by employing and mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM, this project will aim at bridging the gap in institutions across the US" result in a higher likeliness of funding? I also wonder if Hacker News would generally consider it to be ethical to use this to increase the likeliness of funding. In this case it does seem unrelated to DEI otherwise.
The way it’s being done is profoundly unserious, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is politicians interfering with what it’s acceptable to think and study.
> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )
So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.
> So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it.
Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.
Readit News
And it won't even be coy about it.
The utter indifference is very distressing.
There is a huge subset of HN readers who don't live in the USA, and thus don't really care about political drama in the USA as long as it is not relevant for their own life.
I think there's also the argument that the government should not be pushing social ideology, period. Certainly not the federal government. In particular if they were just replacing the DEI funding with e.g. Jesus funding, I would be vehemently opposed to this all. But so long as they continue to just cut the funding without replacement, I'm instead vehemently supportive of it.
And Category Theory is social ideology?
The next four years all countries need to do is offer the research funding and citizenship and university positions and entirely new industries and centers of knowledge could be created.
This top talent will not be satisfied with the common salaries in many EU countries. Also, it will be unsatisfied that Ireland and Malta are the only EU countries where English is an official language, and in none of them English is the only official language.
They could quite easily take out anti-dual-taxation agreements and try to make US overseas nationals pay two sets of tax.
The existing regulations giving the US global jurisdiction over KYC/AML for Americans can also make it hard for Americans to get bank accounts overseas; that could easily be escalated.
I downloaded the linked excel file and this is the description of the first project link I clicked on:
> "COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: CISE-MSI: DP: CPS: CYBER RESILIENT 5G ENABLED VIRTUAL POWER SYSTEM FOR GROWING POWER DEMAND"
I feel like they just go by keywords like covid, 5g, gender, women, climate change etc....
Previously DEI adherence weighed into which proposals were awarded funding. They no longer do. It's unclear exactly how this is working but suspect they're flagging grants where either the entire point was DEI, or where the project was unrelated to DEI but the DEI stuff pushed it into the acceptable range (and/or drove the grant amount higher than necessary for the underlying science), and cancelling them.
[1] - https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2219701&His...
> NSF actually required investigators to highlight outreach to diverse audiences in their grant applications. ( #catch22 )
So it used to be that you had stretch to include whatever little bits of DEI-connection you had in your grant applications (what's the DEI-equivalent of greenwashing?), and now the tables have turned and they're being punished for it. So much waste.
Lesson learned: as a founding agency, you should never create incentives to introduce politics into research proposals. Instead, you should incentivize to keep politics out of them as much as possible. Otherwise, as you can see here, drama starts to kindle as soon as the prevailing political "wind direction" changes.