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Hope china can step up and fill the gap.
The notion of "governance by putatively neutral experts" was a progressive reform of the early-to-mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. Rolling the government back to 1880-1910--when the modern administrative state was just a twinkle in Woodrow Wilson's racist eye--would hardly be a bad thing. That was a time of tremendous progress in America economically and technologically.
> contrasts with a merit system, where offices are awarded or promoted based on a measure of merit, independent of political activity.
What is commendable about this? Why should anyone who isn’t close enough with political winners to get the spoils want this?
This is your comment basically:
People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), tuberculosis was a leading cause of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
The advancement of antibiotics did not happen until the mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. It would be a great idea to rollback science to that time when we didn't have all these life saving vaccines and antibiotics.
Not at all. My comment was that America’s good run began a century before the 20th century practice of administration through independent experts. Thus, such administration cannot be a necessary condition for America’s “good run” as OP suggested.
Similarly, Germany experienced great economic growth under the Third Reich.
To each his own, I guess, but personally I'll take a less corrupt and more equitable country over a wealthy and powerful one any day.
After the war, USSR incorporated totally or partially many countries and they transformed the remaining Eastern European countries into vassal states.
Especially during the first decade after WWII, USSR has stolen huge amounts of resources from those territories, in various forms, starting with what the Red Army had robbed during their so-called "Liberation" actions, then with huge so-called "War reparations" extracted from the countries that the Soviet Union itself had attacked, so they had been forced to attempt to defend themselves, but eventually they had to pay a lot for daring to do this, and then with various profits extracted from mixed companies established in the vassal states after the war and from various unbalanced contracts for economic exchanges with USSR.
The most affected was East Germany, from where entire factories have been moved to Russia, machine by machine and tool by tool, where they constituted the bases for new industries that were developed in USSR after the war. (While USA had no need to take entire factories to be able to reproduce the German technologies, they also took from West Germany many samples of industrial products, together with their manufacturing documentation, which were given to certain American companies, which then expanded after WWII in domains where previously Germany had exclusivity or domination. An example is the technology of magnetic recording, which became important after the war not only for audio and video recording, but also for the first electronic computers.)
While in some countries dictatorships have achieved economical progress mainly by internal means, under Stalin the greatest achievements were based on plundering most of their former neighbors, while the Soviet Union greatly expanded territorially, mostly at its west, but also at its east.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.
i also think the importance of grants is a bit academic, so not a day to day concern.
It seems very easy to just blame this on the voter like this.
The Trump 2.0 administration was already easily the most corrupt in American history well before these rules were proposed.
To their credit(?) they don't even try to hide it, they are just fully corrupt out in the open, because they know the cultists who support them will support anything they do.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
Marx’s idea of communism required a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Lenin took that notion and, under the pretence of needing absolute power to prevent a counter-revolution, turned it into the totalitarian regime of the USSR. Since then, communism and totalitarianism have gone hand in hand.
I can only say Bravo to Americans who think this constant fighting is somehow going to help the country.
The upcoming midterms are very plausibly the last free and fair elections we will ever have in this country. As deeply unpopular as this administration is right now, the Democrats will need an enormous amount of luck for the size of historic landslide it will require to take the house and senate, and even then they need to do so by enough that they can impeach and convict.
That is just about the only plausible path towards preserving democracy at this point. And I’m not really holding out hope.
I’d be happy to be told that I’m wrong. So please, tell me I’m wrong.
If you can’t tell, I am not hopeful.
I don't think Democrats will win the Senate this fall (though there's a chance they will, and I'd be happy to be wrong here). The House is reasonably likely. Either way, they won't have the supermajority needed to convict on impeachment.
Trump is doing a lot to try to destabilize elections and put his thumbs on the scale. His recent order telling USPS not to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone not on some list that the federal government is compiling is troubling. The SAVE Act is troubling, but fortunately still hasn't gained enough support to pass (though it's far from settled that it, or something like it, won't).
But I think a big strength in the US is that all elections, even for federal offices, are administered by the states. The federal government does have some constitutional say in how they're administered, but changes there generally require acts of Congress (which is hard, even with GOP control), and I expect any and all executive orders around election matters to be challenged in court, and hopefully largely thrown out. Red states will continue to do what they usually do to disenfranchise voters they don't like; nothing new there. Blue states will continue to be blue, and will do what they need to do to keep things as sane as possible. Purple states are a more difficult proposition, but there are few enough of them that it's easier for people to keep an eye on what's going on in them.
I think we'll know a lot more after we see what happens during the midterms (not by the outcomes, but in seeing what happens with the electoral process). I wouldn't expect the 2028 elections to be significantly different than what we see this fall. If the courts disagree with election-related changes the GOP have been trying to impose for this year, it's unlikely they'll be more amenable to them in two years.
I expect that the GOP (and MAGA folks in general) will reject the results of the 2028 presidential election if a Democrat wins. They'll dial up the "big steal" lies again, just as in 2020, and will push even harder with that narrative. Hopefully the law changes since then around vote certification will help avoid a repeat of all the crap we saw around that event. Will institutions stand up to that misinformation campaign? I'm not sure. I hope so, I think so, but I'm not sure. I'm cautiously leaning toward optimism.
What's Happening to Science in America
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48313687
Science should be guided by science, not ideology.
Congress being neutered is not an accident, hopefully it will be less fucked if the power balance shifts.
And as the OP is inherently political in what it's calling out, that is not the motivation -- it's the science. I get the fact that in the end, everything's political but partisanship itself is a cancer on the body politic. Just as we seem to be in late-stage capitalism, we are entering late-stage democracy. It pains me that we effectively arrive here by choice.
The system is fundamentally broken.
We are never going back to where we were. That is past us now. There is only forward.
Those are the only people who get to decide. Congress can’t turn over the expenditure of taxpayer funds to people who aren’t politically accountable.
If Congress doesn't stop the executive and the Supreme Court overrules any legal blockades then ... I guess they can and are doing so RN.
Or I can be a chickenshit, and praise Trump and have a career, however pathetic. I routinely ask them to approve my results before publishing, just in case. I apply for grants looking at vaccines and autism. Every Friday, I spend an hour talking about how Trump is America's chosen one.
The executive branch does not hold the power of the purse, and the fact that you can casually use that phrase in reference to the executive branch shows how far we’ve fallen as a country in a decade.
A very sad state of affairs.
At times they don't even cotify their subservience through the usual measures like legislation and committees, except where needed to slap down any roadblocks to the unitary executive.
Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
Voters can always choose to turn over those decisions to scientists they trust. For much of the 20th century, that’s what voters did. But if they don’t trust the priorities of the current scientific establishment, they can also choose to put that control back in the hands of political appointees. The institutional principles of science cannot override the prerogative of voters to decide how their money is spent.
I do not intend to live in a country where supposedly unelected organizations think they have independent jurisdiction to spend public money independently of the political system.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constitutional structure.
What you're overlooking is that everything is just people. Political appointees are people. But "institutions" are also people. "Science" is just people. And the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?
The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power. People in the scientific establishment--people with degrees from universities and credentials from professional organizations--cannot be granted power to spend taxpayer money independent of the political system. They only have power over those decisions to the extent the political system chooses to confer that power.
FTFY
But then your counter is likely some form of originalism as you've been instructed. The current administration and it's pet SCOTUS have no interest in the Constitution or they wouldn't be so hell bent on making POTUS king for life. A mad king at that.
Well no wonder we're so fucked. The constitution is a disaster.
My question is now: Which company is gonna buy the IRS now?
This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
The OMB writes the budget to enact federal policy. And critically, no federal regulation can exist with the OMB approving it. By making this appointment explicitly political, they have carte blanche to completely rewrite all federal regulations to be exclusively conservative ones. This would have been crazy to attempt before, but with Trump 2.0, this is the new norm.
One of the things they are doing right now (it's been approved and the rules are now active and legal, so it is now happening) is converting 50,000 civil servant jobs into political appointments. This means having a job in government no longer serves the whole nation, it's now an ideological function to serve a single political party. Literally weaponizes the federal government to punish opposing political views and enforce one view on everyone (there's no other point to political appointment). And if the party in charge ever changes, it now means everyone will be laid off and replaced. Every few years. So nothing will ever get done in government now, except for extreme short-term pushes for radical political agendas, because nobody will stay long enough to know how the government works to do anything else. Move fast and break things with the largest economy in the world, radical political agendas, and 380M people.
The OMB also can review and block all proposed legislation going to Congress, vet all official congressional testimony, and block any agency from publicly disagreeing with the President. Military generals, health officials, science experts, ecologists, intelligence directors... they can block all of them from giving any testimony to Congress. That's an actual power the OMB has.
They can also block money Congress has already allocated, meaning that your representatives in government are now completely useless, because whatever party is in the Executive can nerf anything your reps have passed. The Supreme Court could do something about it, but won't, because it's now a Conservative Supermajority. There is no reason for them to disagree because they already ideologically agree.
Finally, the OMB can issue a rule that every agency that wasn't officially under the Executive before, has to submit all its rules for Executive approval. Meaning the Executive would control all government agencies.
In any other context, in any other country, this would be called a single-party authoritarian coup. When they create rules that outlaw other political parties (that's what authoritarian governments do to retain single party control) - and assuming the democrats don't just give up - it will be the official start of civil war. Coming to you Fall 2028.
Not sure what you mean. Lots of people have been talking about it since he was appointed to the role. I've known about it and been pissed about it for quite a long time now.
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
~ https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/basic-science-curiosity-...
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.
That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.
Yes
> It incentivises high-impact research
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
> common sense says aren't worth the public funding
who is deciding what is "common sense"?
If you want to be independent of the government, don't take money from the government. If you are mad because you don't agree with how the government is making decisions, say so. But don't pretend it has anything to do with "government overreach"
Perhaps more political oversight will make research more accountabile to the population at large. In this era I suspect it's far more likely to benefit the few, those born into power and fame who are consolidating their power. Scientists with resources and accountable only to other scientists are uniquely dangerous to those unwilling to give up their power.
We may not like it (I certainly don't), but this is one of the times when Trump seems to actually be acting within his authority, and not pushing at or past those limits.