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Discussion (185 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's hard to imaging a more wasteful and destructive set of actions over the past year, except just shutting it all down. Money was still spent, less than usual, but in a way that ensured it was squandered, and that seeds that were planted could not grow.
However, it was apparently reauthorized on April 14, as my NIH newsletter this week linked to this April 21 announcement that SBIRs and STTRs are back!
https://grants.nih.gov/news-events/nih-extramural-nexus-news...
If the pathology was entirely within his own privately-owned company that'd be one thing, but Americans are going to continue to get hurt because of it.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
they're almost certainly going to replace all the board memebers with political loyalists. the board members served six year terms specifically so they'd span multiple administrations and stay independent.
firing them all at once lets you stack the entire board with people. it's not about making science better, it's about removing the people who'd say no.
(Submitted title was "Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation", which was probably just an attempt to fit HN's 80 char limit that had collateral damage)
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
So it's similar to working for the UN or IAEA where most jobs are fixed term.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
Destroying institutions is one heck of a lot easier than building new ones.
It's a harsher punishment that they live to see the rebuild of what they turned to ash.
From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?
[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/all
[2]: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2026/04/nsf-lags-trump-proposes-...
What could be the reason he’s doing it, how does he benefit from it, or thinks he benefits from it?
the "benefit" from his perspective is the same playbook trump admin has been running across every federal agency, he wants to replace independent experts with loyalists, remove checks on executive power, and redirect spending toward admin priorities.
the board members served six year terms specifically to insulate science funding from political cycles. that's a feature to everyone else and a bug to this administration.
It A) gives business funding that would otherwise have to give up equity to VCS or sell to PE or whatever other forms of private, for-profit funding. And B) takes away money that could go to the military or ICE or other programs that could be used to concentrate Trumps power or aggrandizement.
> America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community.
Has Trump and his friend benefited from this program? No? Then this doesn't matter.
"A Senate bill was introduced in February 1947 to create the National Science Foundation (NSF) to replace the OSRD. This bill favored most of the features advocated by Bush, including the controversial administration by an autonomous scientific board. The bill passed the Senate and the House, but was pocket vetoed by Truman on August 6, on the grounds that the administrative officers were not properly responsible to either the president or Congress."
Also mentions the preceding organization OSRD (Office of Scientific Research & Development) and that they had tried to exempt it from conflict of interest regulations.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade... [3] https://www.project2025.observer/en
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
Surely, he has made things uniquely worse, and in ways that would not have happened without him.
You don't get the wildfire without all three, and anyone paying attention can observe the looming danger and the inevitability of ignition. Who lights the match matters. But is only a small part of the contributing circumstances.
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
In both cases, this looks like users using the site normally.
Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.
Mocking regional accents doesn't really help the conversation.
Xi, we shall see.
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
Well done, everybody, the system works.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
The presumes that "Trump Administration" and "United States of America" are the same thing. The reality is that a Venn diagram of them would be two circles that barely touch. Is it really an "own goal" if you gravely injure your victim while you rob them?
Until the Trump Administration is replaced, the "Trump Administration" _is_ The United States of America.
It's certainly not what an increasing amount of the population want to be true, but facts can be sticky like that.
It's not just American right wingers turning off the world. The world sees how unexceptionally gen pop reacts in the US as our local politics destabilize everyone
America is a normal country now. All the WW2 heroes are dead and soldiers since were imperialist aggressors. We don't dare worship Vietnam vets or middle east vets as those conflicts were not so valorous. That we have to point back so far to feel good about our history says a lot about how long America has been falling apart.
For decades Academics been saying the decline of America started in the 1950s and has accelerated only as countries we bombed to hell to stay ahead normalized. I tend to agree.
America has really not been that great this whole time. But like every other nation, Americans been propagandized by each other to believe their American made bullshit don't stink.
In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
What academics? Links please.
Then it's extremely important to prevent those sweatshop workers from immigrating to the US (legally or illegally), where they and their natural-born citizen descendants will vote against the interests of the average American.
Nor are the Europeans or East Asians.
> In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
What?
I like Trump.
I never followed US politics before Trump. I didn't think politicians and politics were interesting, until Trump came into the picture. I enjoy watching him speak. There is not a single thing that he said that felt dishonest to me. The fact that he talks with the press casually and frequently is itself a big indicator to me that he is honest. In my mind, I cannot fathom why a dishonest person would do that and risk any slip of tongue that could expose him.
I have found that if I listen to Trump and the administration directly, then it really feel honest and if done via some news channel, the feeling is different.
I don't think he is stupid either. As I said, if he were stupid, I would not have found his speeches enjoyable to listen.
This is same with the other members of the Administration including RFK, Marco Rubio, JD Vance etc.
People say that he lies all the time. That he said he would end the war in three days, but haven't yet done it. To me this is not a lie. This would be a lie if he says it and didn't even try. But as far as I understand, he tries it, and fails. When he says "I will end the war in three days", I think he genuinely believes it. So I think he is genuine. He is really his own master. He does not play safe by tightly following what ever his advisors or PR people (not sure if they even exist) say. This makes him appear incompetent when you compare with presidents who are just a mouthpiece that follow "advisors".
And if I am not mistaken, this is probably why he won. And I think he will win again, and the internet will be shocked again.
Is it really surprising that I can relate?
There really is no moral defense of the US at this point, given the last few years of the genocide it is actively committing under both parties.
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
Trump will have been an incredibly cheap victory for whichever new superpowers emerge.
I half expect the entire Trump family to move to Dubai in 2029.
Russia, maybe Israel. Not Dubai. Dubai will remain too closely tied to the next administration in the US without a major change in our energy supply. But yes I think it is highly likely that many of the criminals in this administration and the trump family will flee the country and take their pilfered millions with them once they are out of power.
> With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing [...] Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
Tom over at the Explosions&Fire channel (and Extractions&Ire channel) just published a video[1] about his academic career. In it he noted that in Australia where he's located, the defense companies were an exception to that general rule, and did indeed sponsor a fair bit of basic research, including his PhD. I assume in areas they figured had potential, but still.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CbdVkcr-Nw
I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.
Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.
You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.
Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... the first being GPS. There are way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
EDIT: other folks beat me to it
We are each responsible for learning ourselves, and we live in a time where that is easier than ever. I find it odd your default position is to assume it is not important.
I find in conversations like these, if I don't know something fundamental like the NSF's role in American science, it's pretty easy to do a short bit of research before commenting. It's not bad to ask questions, but I figure if the question has a basic factual answer in wikipedia, it's best to start there.
It's wild how efficient they are, sometimes.
Personal: Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
https://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pa...
But if I have a specific question regarding what some entity does, I can always look into it on my own time, rather than have a default stance on what they might do/not do.
We are all failing morally for not revolting at this level of corruption.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
I'm not even American and I've heard of it. The NSF's mission is to promote science and engineering in all 50 states.