Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2
As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...
When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.
Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.
This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).
There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.
Can you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way? If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
DOGE vs USAID
>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.
My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible and merely making your assertion true doesn't rule out the latter being true.
I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.
I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.
Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.
> You mention case developments,
I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.
> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.
Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.
The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.
If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...
Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.
Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.
Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
The purpose of civil service reform was to end patronage, not to insulate the civil service from political supervision. The idea was to have well-credentialed employees, instead of political donors, carrying out the policies of the elected President. It was not to have employees exercising power independently of the policies of the President.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was enacted in 1883. Four decades later, former President Taft wrote Myers v. United States, which still reflected the conventional view that the President was actually in charge of the executive branch.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:
> The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.
> That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.
> This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.
So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.
The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.
Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.
Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.
For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).
Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.
Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.
For the most part, the system that exists today actually reflects that design. The statute and associated regulations for the most part invest authority in "the Director." The Director can rely on committees of experts, etc., but it's more by convention.
Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.
We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose. “Decide how to use this big block of money to advance health” falls pretty comfortably within the scope of “executing the law” rather than “making the law.”
> That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority.
The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
> it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in
It’s not symmetric, because government employees and government-funded NGOs aren’t power centers for the right, especially the new right. Is President AOC going to lay off all the staff at PBS making programming promoting conservative values? Or cut all the federal grants to Heritage and Fed Soc?
I’d be thrilled if AOC openly ran on extreme promises like Trump did (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform) and then, if she won, started knocking them out. For one thing, I don’t think she could win by promising to open the borders, increase free trade, bring back racial preferences in small business loans, or put more power back in the hands of federal employees angling for jobs at companies they regulate. And if she runs and wins on something like breaking up big banks or raising taxes, then that’s fine.
More generally, I think a lot of our political dysfunction comes from the fact that, regardless of who wins the election, the government is run by the PMCs. No matter who you vote for, what you’ll actually get is managerial neoliberalism with a side of identity politics and mass immigration. Instead, Democrats should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win. Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
Yeah, this is the hack that's being run right now. Indeed, the United States runs on norms to a large degree, and a small group of people have decided that if something isn't spelled out explicitly, that gives them untold unilateral power in the gray areas to do whatever they want because again, they've achieved a >50% margin in a single election, so therefore that makes them king for 4 years.
The norm that has worked out well for everyone for decades has been that we trust experts to run their own systems, because we understand that political interference from the government is suboptimal and leads to cronyism. Now, for some reason it's the conservatives who have a problem with this arrangement, and want to involve themselves to the point they are filtering by keywords what's allowed to be researched, big government at it's best.
So now, a system that took decades to build, which was the envy of the world in terms of research output, and which has been beneficial to US GDP and national security, is decimated in a few years time because a small group of people didn't like what they saw.
In this new Unitary Executive world, long-term research projects can only happen as long as Democrats have political control, because every time a Republican president comes into office they will shut down all research projects they don't like. I don't think it will work out well but we will see.
> The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
But Congress cannot reliably affect a tyranny -- they're too fractious, they are reelected as a whole every 2 years, and their priorities are too local. Moreover, the minority actually has power in Congress, even if it's just power to block progress. This is why they are supposed to be invested with more power than the President.
> Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
They did and they have (Project 2025) which is why we got torture prisons, rampant bribery and corruption, and a complete power / money grab from the Oval Office on down. I actually love that this is happening because we finally get to see the Conservative political project come to fruition. Finally we can stop pretending it was about "maintaining US institutions" and "preserving the soul of the nation". They are finally saying "we will go to war for the oil" instead of pretending it was about defending freedom and liberty. It's a nice change of pace.
But anyway, I don't agree this is something that should happen. What you're proposing will just going to lead to political instability as subsequent administrations flip back and forth. In feedback control systems we call that a "divergence" and it usually precedes total system collapse.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).
India's demographics don't look as bad as China's, so I'm not sure why you're less optimistic about them.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.
the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.
...the one that was changed a decade ago?
He didn't say the policy can't be changed. It was. The issue, not so easily.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
---
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.
optimizing processes =/= removing goals
Only if those programs aren’t legislatively established or mandated.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
Yes, they could, by paying their taxes.
But we’ve all seen that they really don’t want to share any of their wealth for any purpose, other than propping up a geriatric orange clown that campaigned on lowering their taxes.
PS: I said their taxes, not yours. Yours are going up, they’re just called tariffs, but that’s a tax: tariffs are your money getting collected by the government.
The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
edit: best study I could casually find is Anderson and Slade (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-015-9376-9) from 2016 that estimates grant writing at about 10% effort.
I mean, yes...but everyone on this thread admits that it's still true (in fact, worse today), so I'm not sure what point you're making with this. Y'all are arguing that it's worse now, which is not a claim I am disputing [1]. The entire point of citing my "old" experience is that, in fact, we were all doing the same stuff back in the stone ages. I also haven't forgotten or misremembered due to my advancing age [2].
> The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
OK. I never said my experience was universal. I was in the biological sciences, not engineering. To be clear, I'm not claiming experience in economics or english literature, either.
Again, I don't dispute that things might be worse today, but the situation is absolutely not new, and any grad student in the sciences [3] who expects otherwise has been seriously misled. That is my point.
[1] To be clear, I'm not saying it is or isn't worse today. I am making no claim with regard to the severity of the fundraising market. The market can be a bajillion times worse than when I came up, and my point is still valid -- back then, professors spent nearly all of their time chasing money! Today, professors spend nearly all of their time chasing money!
[2] This is a joke. I'm not old, and my experiences not as ancient as you're alluding. I understand that every generation clings to the belief that their struggles are unique in time, but it's probably a bad idea to take that notion seriously.
[3] Yes, I made the general claim "in the sciences". Because insults about age aside, and even though the specifics will vary from year to year and topic to topic, it's very important to realize that if you become a professor in the sciences, this is what you will be doing. You will not be in the lab making gadgets or potions or whatever -- you will be filling out grants, making slide decks, reviewing papers, and giving talks. If you cannot handle this life, quit now. It will not get better.
There are certainly ways to go work in a lab and do "fun stuff" forever, but a) you often don't need a graduate degree for these, and b) you shouldn't be deluded about which path you're on.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
> It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m
Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...
https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...
Trump relaxes cannabis classification:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...
Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!
“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.
Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.
The article said
> The Senate and House rejected the White House’s proposed budget cuts
Since WH can't control the budget they are changing how it's doled out by giving larger payments to a smaller group.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.
> It helps business.
Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.
Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.
It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else
/r
[1]-https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-...
US public education spending is also top 5 in the world so I don't think a lack of money is why "Johnny can't read or do math", something else is going on
That is a very narrow view of advancing society
But in a high interest rate environment some ideas just arent worth exploring.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
If you're making the argument that they should be punished proportionally to their effects then all of these cases should result in the individuals being jailed for life at bare minimum and their assets forfeited. Yet this hasn't happened. Why?
I have noted in the past that I do enjoy how intense the FTC and other consumer protection style agencies get when Democrats run the whitehouse, ideally companies would behave because if they dont the institution that has a monopoly on violence will club em really good, so to speak. IMO Citizens united and the way we fund the political game has broken the incentives to being a company on good merit rather than on legalized corruption.
Capitalism without regulation is gangsterism. With regulation it's barely-controlled gangsterism.
Without market-independent research you often wouldn't even realize that is what's going on.
That's adorable.
"There will be so much money to go around for philanthropy" is also rich given that the world's richest man is going online to actively tell people not to give to the poor.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies
Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company
Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
Zero sum thinking.
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
Realistically though, this has nothing to do with geopolitics. This wouldn't be happening if the research community were driving around in trucks with MAGA flags and sleeping with Dear Leader body pillows.
This regime is entirely transactional and it's a howler to pretend otherwise. The academic research community could be dealing literal tons of hard drugs and they'd get a pass as long as they were card carrying party members.
Even the logic behind a pareto optimum necessitates the presence of the free rider problem, to prove the point.
2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?
Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".
There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.
So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
Investing in research towards creating digital computers and a global messaging system are pathways towards economic viability.
What you listed is but a tiny fraction.
I mean, likewise for you:
>"Bell Labs and, separately, the research funded by DARPA."
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.
And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
Or will someone explain that those jobs, too, are a thing of the past...
The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.
One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.
Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.
The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.
Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.
Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.
That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.
Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?
Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:
- Internet - GPS - Semiconductor - MRI/CT scans - Vaccines - Jet engine, aviation - Lithium Ion batteries - Touchscreens - AI - Fracking - Mass agriculture - Space exploration
You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.
To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.
I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.
At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.
From the perspective of somebody outside the US it really is a shocking tragedy what the Republicans have done to what used to be the greatest country in the world. I hope you can manage to right the ship soon because I fear it may already be too late.
Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.
Full charge towards third world country standards.
(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)
Here's a reference if you need one - "“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90487-annual-income-twenty-...
You choosing to debate the last point and not address the issue I pointed about “let private enterprise fund research” tells me enough.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).
Government investment didn’t decline, private investment massively grew. Same thing happened in applied research decades earlier.
How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?
If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?
The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.
For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.
It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.
Or maybe it is a problem with the structure that fosters an environment. What comes to my mind is the exceptional case of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit. Sure, it "ended badly" because of the known drama, but my guess is that besides the money that was poured into it, it thrived because researchers had kind of an "emotional safety net," meaning that they wouldn't be pressured for results as much. Probably the reason some startups perform much better too.
I think career continuity matters, and you don't necessarily get that in the private sector for sure. This discontinuity then leads to practical work discontinuity, which means less work done (which is amplified by the non-decentralized nature of working in private compared to shared science in public, as you've explained).
My bottom line is that the private field could do better, and frankly it's kind of their loss. What I'm curious about is whether a "semi-private" approach is better: a non-profit or some kind of foundation. I guess in practice they're still private, but whether the money part can be "solved" through crowdfunding/some modern methods and whether they're viable long-term remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: a culture appreciative of science will definitely open more doors into novel methods of funding and organizing (maybe in the future these methods could rival the "traditional ways" of public science).
This is good.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.
It’s entirely performative
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
karakoram•1mo ago