If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.
People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.
I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.
I can't take it myself so I'm just going to roll over and not stand for any principle or fight for any cause because that's just too much for me to handle.
And besides you're just one person so what difference is it going to make anyways.
Same thing why people don't vote. It's not like their one vote will make a difference.
Multiply that times 10 million people and you get what we have.
Consider yourself lucky.
And, to be honest, there is almost literally nothing more important than ones own personal mental health. Almost everything someone is able to achieve is built upon a foundation of their mental health. If the foundation is shaky, so will be the building.
Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.
Can you give me some examples of how you would fight?
Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?
That's helpful for the conversation!
Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears?
(It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)
I actually have no idea how this would disrupt anything.
Most link parsers, browsers, and sites will happily redirect you to available encrypted sites these days.
And even when they don't this is extremely dangerous advice to give for people who aren't technical.
Give a wrong time. Stop a traffic line!
I've mentioned it too often and sound like a stuck record, but Jaroslav Hasek's Svejk has it perfected [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk 11;rgb:0000/0000/0000
Comply in a maximally obstructive way.
Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.
Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.
There's tons of "how-to" guides on how to maliciously comply with work demands without getting fired.
I guess you could slow down the firing process for a bit? That would be a minor obstruction for a short period of time. Then what?
Anyways, "how-to" guides on malicious compliance probably don't tackle situations where an external team, acting on behalf of the president, come into your workplace with unparalleled authority to do whatever they please.
These only apply to countries where the judicial system doesn't bend to whoever's in power.
Subversion is the goal of them. To be successful requires time and not getting found out. It requires plausible deniability.
Doesn't apply, everybody knows what's going on already.
> Comply in a maximally obstructive way.
Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.
> Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.
Doesn't apply, you can't half-fire the specified people, or give just a little bit of money to the people you've been instructed not to fund. You can comply, or not, and it's not going to be any kind of secret which way you chose.
If you want to go out in a blaze of glory and leave the building a day later than you otherwise would, with less dignity, go for it.
> Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.
It's just not that kind of role.
> Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.
"Obstructive" in this scenario results in the organization keeping functioning effectively. Obstructive of something destructive allows it to keep existing.
Right, but with whose money?
"Fighting" isn't about magic moves that keep everything safe. It's about choosing when and how to accept the risks. Expecting a fight with no threat to your position is cowardice disguised as pragmatism.
I'm asking for concrete examples of what "subversive, incremental ways to undermine it" would be.
You basically just reworded the vague suggestion of "fight back". What are some specific examples of what the NSF director could have done that are subversive, incremental ways to undermine the orders which ultimately came from the president?
You simply do as you're told. Orders are never completely without ambiguity, and the person giving the order has less direct experience with the subject than the person receiving the order. There's wiggle room.
Concrete example: The order is "Do X". The person charged with executing it actually understands that the consequences will be that Y and Z (which the person giving the order cares about) will actually be on fire if you do X.
In a functioning relationship, you speak up and say "Happy to do X, but here's what'll happen, maybe we should consider a different way to achieve your goals". If you're going the subversive route, you say "Sure thing. I'll get right on X. I'll overdeliver on it". Then you do X, and nudge it towards maximally bad impact on Y/Z.
Followed by "Oh, who could've foreseen! Y and Z are in ruins! What would you like me to do, boss?"
I'm also not sure how to just... not fire people. Sure, you can delay it a week or two. Okay. Then what? Get fired for non-compliance? That seems about as effective of a tactic as quitting is.
*fact vs embellished fact vs straight fiction is always questionable on Reddit.
Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone.
People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children.
If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.
- How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside.
- Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.
A) disagree and commit
B) disagree and wait to be fired
C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions
I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role:
SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.That, of course, probably doesn't apply in this situation since Trump rarely changes his mind. But it does apply in other situations.
That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.
"We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."
Given that the management is choosing who is let go, I believe many are threatening to let crucial people and programs end if funding is cut.
It's extremely effective.
NSF is an "independent agency" [1] so if the job you were appointed to an confirmed by congress (senate) is at odds with the presidents desires I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a problem for the president not you.
Similar to all those inspector generals who just gave up when they were illegally fired. Literally your job is to prevent the president from corruption, how are you going to do that now?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
The judiciary. E.g Bowsher v. Synar
That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.
There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign.
In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either
1) start another company to directly compete
2) quit, join another company to compete or
3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place.
3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level.
Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later.
Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions.
Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.
I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places.
I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?
They believe in him.
They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'.
It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something
There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again.
I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.
Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.
The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.
That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.
Based on your first graph though, how much longer before federal whistle blower laws get DOGE'd?
That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).
Have you actually done this? It's harder than it sounds.
Sometimes there is not a direct path to 'good'. Sometimes the path to things getting better goes through a rough patch.
It is very dissatisfying that a lot of people are doing very stupid things very publicly right now.
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Politics is an information game, and you can't play an information game without changing the game; all information games are metagames.
The way the game is being played right now is drastically changing the game.
I won't claim that the game will be better after this (especially in the short term), but it certainly will be different.
Those people are being fired as fast as possible.
That's because what's happening is not just changes in policies within these agencies, but essentially a loyalty test / purge.
You can either be loyal and do what the new boss wants without disagreement, you can resign in protest, or you can be fired.
If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life.
Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.
That has stopped being the case recently, for whatever reason.
2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.
If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan).
The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.
And in this context it's reins not reigns.
First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.
Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?
The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.
Very few academics become principle investigators. Most every academic who's not a PI is working on something for that PI.
> inherently trainee positions
Do we live on the same planet? I understand that the point of being an academic is to always be learning, but there's no place on earth I know of that thinks of someone with a PhD as a trainee.
> the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Implying that one gets a choice is bold. My understanding is that there's a job for about 1 in 10 postdocs in academia these days.
Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.
There will be entire genres of books written about how America just said “eh” to being gutted by a bunch of rich psychopaths.
This is next level of "I'll deliver anyway, I know what you wanted" while fucking it up spectacularly. If only all of our pensions wouldn't be now siphoned to those few with advanced government access I would be laughing a bit more.
Switzerland, Cayman Islands, etc now report to the IRS.
The checks and balances have all been exhausted. There are no bullets left in the gun.
Rather than, you know, actually coming up with an alternative good enough for people to want to vote for.
The concrete example of this is Harvard and some of the big law firms (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale). That is what resistance looks like now.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is an example of an entity that should have resisted, but folded instead.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the C-suite at big US corporations do not quite realize this about their position. They think that it's not their job; either that they keep their head down and the lawyers and politicians will take care of it, or something far worse, that the system has already fallen so may as well try to make concessions and go along to get along.
It's true, that they risk the erosion of their status and the assumption of their power by the state over the medium to long term. But it is also true that in the short term they can beat their competitors by a carefully targetted bribe. There are significant upsides to getting behind the administration, and you can't ignore that.
This kind of corruption is literally how feudal oligarchies form.
Basically don't study how Elon's websites are destroying the fabric of society or how Trump's policies will destroy the environment.
Pretending social media holds no influence on society was an argument you could have made when it was just kids getting into fights or shooting each other over Internet beef fifteen years ago.
Now it's an essential target in governments all over the world when it comes to spreading propaganda/disinformation. It has a direct link to effecting change in voters and entire governments innumerable times now.
The NSF doesn't even cost that much money to run. They're doing this counterproductively and, as far as I can tell, for no good reason at all.
Trump is doing a lot of illegal things. Like, A LOT of illegal things, but if you read the article they specifically said that Trump officials said they were only going to ask for Congress for 55% of the current budget in the next years budget cycle so they are actually doing this one correctly.
Guessing or mind reading passes as journalism and that's frustrating.
What do we know? Budget cut and resignation.
jmclnx•4h ago
jfengel•4h ago
danudey•3h ago
ttoinou•3h ago
stouset•3h ago
Every time I go down this line, it’s all vague boogeymen or claims of events that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
StefanBatory•3h ago
ttoinou•2h ago
jfengel•36m ago
My comment was bitter sarcasm lamenting how much is lost and how little gained, not an argument. And you could call that out. But just flopping the words around doesn't turn it into an argument.
CoastalCoder•4h ago
Making advanced, superior weapons systems requires a workforce with strong science, engineering, and manufacturing skills.
I struggle to understand how the current administration's policies help.
dullcrisp•4h ago
stouset•3h ago
staunton•3h ago
vjvjvjvjghv•3h ago
danudey•4h ago
We'll create jobs! But good-paying jobs, for well-educated people! The kind that we won't be making anymore once we gut the department of education and saddle everyone with crushing student loan debt that we've just announced we're going to be chasing after again! Because the government isn't willing to let people get away without paying their debts! Unless it's a big bank, or a billionaire. Or the US government itself, for that matter! But the US government is in massive debt, and we can't let student loan payments go unpaid! But we can give a $4.5 trillion tax cut to billionaires who don't need it, that's important.
The administration is in this weird limbo of "doesn't know what they're doing" and "is desperately trying to accomplish goals that will clearly and irreparably tank the entire country".
hengheng•3h ago