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.
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'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'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.
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".
Biochemist friend moved across the country for a post-doc and three months into it is waiting to be let go. She is now looking at options outside the country, specifically China, given the incredible instability here.
1. Most science PhD students are international. So funding their education has questionable domestic political value.
2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.
3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
If it's intentional, then they are deliberately sabotaging the US's leadership in technological research for the sake of looking like they're doing something. Which is a terrible strategy.
If it's unintentional, then DOGE faile the critical thinking test. Doesn't say much for them or their leadership.
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.
If you've read the three-body problem series (or the tv show) [spoiler incoming]
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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.
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.
I don’t know what the distribution of advanced degrees is among NSF program managers, but I strongly reject the implication that career program managers are somehow a lower tier or less well suited for the job. I’ve personally served a few times as an NSF panel reviewer for a career PM that does not hold a PhD, and they are awesome. They have a background in the startup world and ask really insightful question and know how to build effective groups of experts and efficiently guide discussion to get actionable feedback from them in a really short timeframe. A lot of PhDs are not great with these skills, and I’ve learned a ton about evaluating the potential impact and risks of research proposals by interacting with this person.
Also, this attitude is kind of counter to the egalitarian notion a lot of HNers hold that you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.
> 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.
This view of the balance sheet is of course bananas.
The worst thing is that the fear of the US becoming Argentina may drive a series of actions that turns the US into Argentina. Well, I'm using them as the poster child here, but really a lot of the Latin American countries have similar economic problems which have been through socialist revolution/CIA-backed coup or vice versa and come off worse each time. It seems this has spread north.
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.
My previous startup, Wombat Security Technologies, was based on NSF funded research of just $1.2M. It led to over 200 jobs, and we helped protect millions of people around the world through our cybersecurity training.
I'm sure there are dozens of other startups that I don't know of also based on US Federal funding from NSF and NIH.
Strong science leads to a strong economy, and a strong economy is essential to national security.
We're also in an AI arms race with other countries around the world. Cutting science funding right now is a massive self-inflicted wound.
For everyone who is a US citizen, please write your Senators and House representatives pushing back against the chaos and the proposed science cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and the future of science in the US needs every bit of help it can get right now.
Trying to tie Google to one single grant doesn’t make sense, nor does associating the market cap of that company to that one grant make sense.
Google owes far more to TCP/IP research from DARPA than that particular library grant. But even then, the meta point is that you need lots of research pushing forward all edges of knowledge.
It is very rare that any single grant can result in a massive successful business at this point. Pushing computing forward needs constant research in all directions to push forward hardware, networks, security, power conservation/generation, algorithms, storage, etc, etc.
The grandparent article claims that Page and Brin were paid by NSF, working on DLI projects while researching PageRank and that the equipment for their prototype crawler was partly paid for by DLI.
If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.
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 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.
And the names of the sages are forgotten, but Alexander is still known as one of history's great leaders and founder of an empire. It seems the personality traits one would look for in a productive citizen or a nice neighbor are almost antithetical for making it into history books.
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:
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.
> 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.
Startups have nowhere to go but up. Large established companies have nowhere to go but down. Why do you think large organizations are so conservative? It's because getting new customers is much harder than losing existing customers. The US government has flaws, but it is phenomenal overall.
This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.
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.
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.
“Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C." - Governor Bobby Jindal, Feb 24 2009 in his party response to Obama first address to congress.
“Monitor my Beer” - Mount Redoubt in Alaska, March 22, 2009, erupted.
The Wikipedia page details some of the effects of the eruption (air travel, oil production, etc) and like any. such natural disaster multiple government agencies were involved in recovery.
I always end up thinking about this when republicans pick stupid examples of government waste. Best of luck to you.
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.
They don't need a viable strategy if they regain control of Congress, gum up the works and use some of the checks and balances they are allotted. They can also order investigations so we can understand wtf is happening beyond leaks from throwaway acounts.
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.
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.
People will do the reverse: because they voted Republican, they will come up with increasingly complicated justifications for why things they previously held to be important should be destroyed to own the libs.
Yep, the amount of contradiction one can hold probably has no bounds when not subjected to some kind of deprogramming. I occasionally look at conservative messaging boards and most members are just asking for what to think not really asking why something (really bad) happened.
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 did not vote GOP, at least not the president and most offices.
I fully expected this outcome, and support it.
Despite your accusations, I ask you to consider that it is you who needs to assess your sources of information as well as your political stances. I was previously an avid watcher of PBS NewsHour but stopped due to the constant, obvious propaganda in the 2016 election cycle. WETA and NPR should get defunded first. When you have people who watched Lehrer say that: oopsies. As a Wikipedian, the entire left of center information space has become trash, no better than Fox News. WETA may have cleaned up their act, but alas it's too late for that. This is not a win for the GOP, this is a failure of the left and its thought leaders who still continue drinking the Kool-Aid. Trying to break out of your propaganda system will be extremely difficult and dare I say dangerous, so don't take it lightly.
One of the few falsifiable statements you made is absolutely, completely, objectively false.
Again, consider that perhaps your epistemology is broken.
You are free to explore their audited financials, as well as their IRS 990 form, which indicates all revenue, expenses as well as top 10 salaried employees.
Regarding the source of the falsehood you believed to be true, there are only two potential explanations:
One, they intentionally deceived you, or two, they have no idea what they are talking about and should not be relied upon for truthful information.
That this particular false belief was so strong, and so core to your political stances, that you used it as the foundation for your argument as to why the current republican administration is acting in the best interests of the nation, I would hope that this would cause you to reconsider the rest of your stances as well as more carefully scrutinize your sources of information for veracity.
In short, please consider the possibility that your epistemology may be broken.
Which outcome are you supporting exactly? Please explain in what concrete ways these outcomes benefit either the average American, or America's standing in the world, or America's leadership in technological research.
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.
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.
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.
Private sector research basically does not exist anymore, especially basic science research. A lot of truly revolutionary stuff starts in academia and spins into tech and biotech startups.
The trade war US and China has had for years sure is going to feel different in a few years time when China is the source of increasing amount of innovation and forbids the export of that technology to US and its allies.
Readit News
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...
We may be looking at a lost decade.
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'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.
Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144940 - Feb 2025 (646 comments)
2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.
3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.
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.
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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
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...
Watching a historic empire destroy itself is beyond words. I will miss Pax Americana.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order
If it's unintentional, then DOGE faile the critical thinking test. Doesn't say much for them or their leadership.
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)
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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.
Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.
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Also, this attitude is kind of counter to the egalitarian notion a lot of HNers hold that you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.
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.
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...
The worst thing is that the fear of the US becoming Argentina may drive a series of actions that turns the US into Argentina. Well, I'm using them as the poster child here, but really a lot of the Latin American countries have similar economic problems which have been through socialist revolution/CIA-backed coup or vice versa and come off worse each time. It seems this has spread north.
Seems unnecessarily alarmist speculation to me. :shrug: I'd rather see how this plays out, since no one can possibly know at this point.
When was the last time real science came out of Russia?
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
DataBricks is a multibillion dollar company and was based on research at the AMPLab UC Berkeley, which was funded by an NSF Expeditions grant. https://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/news/amp-awarded-10m-nsf-expe...
Duolingo is a multibillion dollar company and was based on NSF funded research. https://www.nsf.gov/science-matters/nsf-gave-duolingo-its-wi...
My previous startup, Wombat Security Technologies, was based on NSF funded research of just $1.2M. It led to over 200 jobs, and we helped protect millions of people around the world through our cybersecurity training.
I'm sure there are dozens of other startups that I don't know of also based on US Federal funding from NSF and NIH.
Strong science leads to a strong economy, and a strong economy is essential to national security.
We're also in an AI arms race with other countries around the world. Cutting science funding right now is a massive self-inflicted wound.
For everyone who is a US citizen, please write your Senators and House representatives pushing back against the chaos and the proposed science cuts. It only takes a few minutes, and the future of science in the US needs every bit of help it can get right now.
Google owes far more to TCP/IP research from DARPA than that particular library grant. But even then, the meta point is that you need lots of research pushing forward all edges of knowledge.
It is very rare that any single grant can result in a massive successful business at this point. Pushing computing forward needs constant research in all directions to push forward hardware, networks, security, power conservation/generation, algorithms, storage, etc, etc.
If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.
This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.
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.
Dead Comment
Except it's gambling with an entire nation's fortune, instead of likes/votes/reactions.
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.
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.
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.
It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.
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?
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.
This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.
Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.
I always end up thinking about this when republicans pick stupid examples of government waste. Best of luck to you.
Start a gofundme for your IoT subscription maybe? :)
Dead Comment
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.
Among endless examples, here is a Trumper begging to be educated on why Trump said he is king: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1itkmen/expla...
I fully expected this outcome, and support it.
Despite your accusations, I ask you to consider that it is you who needs to assess your sources of information as well as your political stances. I was previously an avid watcher of PBS NewsHour but stopped due to the constant, obvious propaganda in the 2016 election cycle. WETA and NPR should get defunded first. When you have people who watched Lehrer say that: oopsies. As a Wikipedian, the entire left of center information space has become trash, no better than Fox News. WETA may have cleaned up their act, but alas it's too late for that. This is not a win for the GOP, this is a failure of the left and its thought leaders who still continue drinking the Kool-Aid. Trying to break out of your propaganda system will be extremely difficult and dare I say dangerous, so don't take it lightly.
One of the few falsifiable statements you made is absolutely, completely, objectively false.
Again, consider that perhaps your epistemology is broken.
You are free to explore their audited financials, as well as their IRS 990 form, which indicates all revenue, expenses as well as top 10 salaried employees.
https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
Regarding the source of the falsehood you believed to be true, there are only two potential explanations:
One, they intentionally deceived you, or two, they have no idea what they are talking about and should not be relied upon for truthful information.
That this particular false belief was so strong, and so core to your political stances, that you used it as the foundation for your argument as to why the current republican administration is acting in the best interests of the nation, I would hope that this would cause you to reconsider the rest of your stances as well as more carefully scrutinize your sources of information for veracity.
In short, please consider the possibility that your epistemology may be broken.
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.
[edit: Found a less condescending way to make my point.]
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Why would they do that when stock buybacks are more profitable for shareholders?
This is after all the same reasoning used to give tax breaks to get a factory to setup in town
[1] https://itif.org/publications/2021/11/08/mapping-internation...
[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-chinas-ban-rare-earths-pr...