If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.

So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.

A) disagree and commit

B) disagree and wait to be fired

C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions

I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role:

  SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation  (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the  President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.

NSF is an "independent agency" [1] so if the job you were appointed to an confirmed by congress (senate) is at odds with the presidents desires I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a problem for the president not you.

Similar to all those inspector generals who just gave up when they were illegally fired. Literally your job is to prevent the president from corruption, how are you going to do that now?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...

Congress doesn't create agencies without a president's approval. (Give or take an occasional veto override.)

The judiciary. E.g Bowsher v. Synar

If you believe the NSF is independent then you are implicitly agreeing with those who claim there is a fourth 'deep state' branch of government that operates without accountability.

Separately: I cited the law that says the president can fire the head of the NSF. So I'm not sure why you'd conclude that any disagreement would be a problem for the president.

I think it's imminently reasonable to say that agencies shouldn't be independent of the executive, and that's the default if the legislation passed by Congress (and signed by the current executive!) doesn't specify otherwise. But Congress should, and I believe does, have the power to set things up otherwise.

(And it's pretty unclear to me how the NSF, which is ultimately a method for Congress to spend money, could relate to any Executive powers)

That, of course, probably doesn't apply in this situation since Trump rarely changes his mind. But it does apply in other situations.

As for GP's options, normally I would think B (standing your ground and throwing them a small bone while waiting to get fired) is the most rational option outside of sheer self-preservation. Since its a federal job if you don't know the law it may get little dicey if you go the C route.

My guess from out of leftfield: there is immense pressure and unseen threats being thrown about by admin goons similar to what they did in the attorney general's office in the Southern District of New York, namely: If you don't resign we will fire everyone underneath you. That's what would easily explain this behavior.

Given that the management is choosing who is let go, I believe many are threatening to let crucial people and programs end if funding is cut.

It's extremely effective.

That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.

"We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."

Can you give me some examples of how you would fight?

Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?

I.e. "It's time for bed" means "I'm going to continue to play, just in my bed."

"Go to sleep" means "Pretend to sleep for 5 minutes, then go back to playing." When confronted, say that you woke up after 5 minutes.

Comply in a maximally obstructive way.

Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.

Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.

There's tons of "how-to" guides on how to maliciously comply with work demands without getting fired.

Doesn't apply, everybody knows what's going on already.

> Comply in a maximally obstructive way.

Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.

> Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.

Doesn't apply, you can't half-fire the specified people, or give just a little bit of money to the people you've been instructed not to fund. You can comply, or not, and it's not going to be any kind of secret which way you chose.

If you want to go out in a blaze of glory and leave the building a day later than you otherwise would, with less dignity, go for it.

> Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.

It's just not that kind of role.

> Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.

"Obstructive" in this scenario results in the organization keeping functioning effectively. Obstructive of something destructive allows it to keep existing.

Right, but with whose money?

I guess you could slow down the firing process for a bit? That would be a minor obstruction for a short period of time. Then what?

Anyways, "how-to" guides on malicious compliance probably don't tackle situations where an external team, acting on behalf of the president, come into your workplace with unparalleled authority to do whatever they please.

People are now routinely absolving GOP Congress critters, when they are the actual decision makers.

Subversion is the goal of them. To be successful requires time and not getting found out. It requires plausible deniability.

"Fighting" isn't about magic moves that keep everything safe. It's about choosing when and how to accept the risks. Expecting a fight with no threat to your position is cowardice disguised as pragmatism.

I'm asking for concrete examples of what "subversive, incremental ways to undermine it" would be.

You basically just reworded the vague suggestion of "fight back". What are some specific examples of what the NSF director could have done that are subversive, incremental ways to undermine the orders which ultimately came from the president?

You simply do as you're told. Orders are never completely without ambiguity, and the person giving the order has less direct experience with the subject than the person receiving the order. There's wiggle room.

Concrete example: The order is "Do X". The person charged with executing it actually understands that the consequences will be that Y and Z (which the person giving the order cares about) will actually be on fire if you do X.

In a functioning relationship, you speak up and say "Happy to do X, but here's what'll happen, maybe we should consider a different way to achieve your goals". If you're going the subversive route, you say "Sure thing. I'll get right on X. I'll overdeliver on it". Then you do X, and nudge it towards maximally bad impact on Y/Z.

Followed by "Oh, who could've foreseen! Y and Z are in ruins! What would you like me to do, boss?"

*fact vs embellished fact vs straight fiction is always questionable on Reddit.

I'm also not sure how to just... not fire people. Sure, you can delay it a week or two. Okay. Then what? Get fired for non-compliance? That seems about as effective of a tactic as quitting is.

That's helpful for the conversation!

Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears?

(It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)

I actually have no idea how this would disrupt anything.

Most link parsers, browsers, and sites will happily redirect you to available encrypted sites these days.

And even when they don't this is extremely dangerous advice to give for people who aren't technical.

Give a wrong time. Stop a traffic line!

I've mentioned it too often and sound like a stuck record, but Jaroslav Hasek's Svejk has it perfected [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk 11;rgb:0000/0000/0000

Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.

If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life.

Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.

That has stopped being the case recently, for whatever reason.

2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.

From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring."

Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest

Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”"

Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups.

Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c...

==== From there:

I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.

====

RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.

You might be overestiamting how much 'clout and power' people in public life have. Few of them are known outside of their specialty field, so they really don't have much clout. And their power is quite limited; you may have noticed that multiple inspector generals (who are legally independent of the executive branch) were fired early in the administration. Several of them went to court and have obtained judgments that their firings were illegal, but the damage is already done.

Seeking shelter to heal is certainly one good option, but I also encourage everyone who struggles to seek out help. That's not a fight you have to fight alone. If out break your bone, you see a specialist for fractures. If your mental health is damaged, see a specialist for mental health.

Consider yourself lucky.

And, to be honest, there is almost literally nothing more important than ones own personal mental health. Almost everything someone is able to achieve is built upon a foundation of their mental health. If the foundation is shaky, so will be the building.

I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places.

I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.

What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?

Reading the tea leaves, this guy has less clout and power then he had assumed and fighting has a different meaning when people are threatened with getting disappeared to El Salvador.

Maybe he might also have something else lined up.

The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.

That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.

That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).

If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan).

The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.

Sometimes there is not a direct path to 'good'. Sometimes the path to things getting better goes through a rough patch.

It is very dissatisfying that a lot of people are doing very stupid things very publicly right now.

---

Politics is an information game, and you can't play an information game without changing the game; all information games are metagames.

The way the game is being played right now is drastically changing the game.

I won't claim that the game will be better after this (especially in the short term), but it certainly will be different.

There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign.

In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either

1) start another company to directly compete

2) quit, join another company to compete or

3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place.

3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level.

Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later.

Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions.

Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.

Have you actually done this? It's harder than it sounds.

Those people are being fired as fast as possible.

That's because what's happening is not just changes in policies within these agencies, but essentially a loyalty test / purge.

You can either be loyal and do what the new boss wants without disagreement, you can resign in protest, or you can be fired.

That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.

Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone.

People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children.

If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.

And in this context it's reins not reigns.

There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again.

I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.

- How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside.

- Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.

I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.

People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.

Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.

They believe in him.

They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'.

It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something

There will be entire genres of books written about how America just said “eh” to being gutted by a bunch of rich psychopaths.

This is next level of "I'll deliver anyway, I know what you wanted" while fucking it up spectacularly. If only all of our pensions wouldn't be now siphoned to those few with advanced government access I would be laughing a bit more.

The checks and balances have all been exhausted. There are no bullets left in the gun.

The concrete example of this is Harvard and some of the big law firms (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale). That is what resistance looks like now.

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is an example of an entity that should have resisted, but folded instead.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the C-suite at big US corporations do not quite realize this about their position. They think that it's not their job; either that they keep their head down and the lawyers and politicians will take care of it, or something far worse, that the system has already fallen so may as well try to make concessions and go along to get along.

It's true, that they risk the erosion of their status and the assumption of their power by the state over the medium to long term. But it is also true that in the short term they can beat their competitors by a carefully targetted bribe. There are significant upsides to getting behind the administration, and you can't ignore that.

This kind of corruption is literally how feudal oligarchies form.

Also from there: "Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”"

For a science-fiction version, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad. Will that change as things continue to play out?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics "Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others.""

Trump could easily have been defeated by a centrist Democrat who focused on kitchen table issues not fringe social ones, and was able to discuss and debate them coherently.

That and term 1 Trump really was basically what was left of the Republican establishment running things while Trump did his reality TV show presidency.

So people wrongly assumed the same people would be there to stop him from driving the country off a cliff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_(Tacitus)

Switzerland, Cayman Islands, etc now report to the IRS.

Basically don't study how Elon's websites are destroying the fabric of society or how Trump's policies will destroy the environment.

The NSF doesn't even cost that much money to run. They're doing this counterproductively and, as far as I can tell, for no good reason at all.

Pretending social media holds no influence on society was an argument you could have made when it was just kids getting into fights or shooting each other over Internet beef fifteen years ago.

Now it's an essential target in governments all over the world when it comes to spreading propaganda/disinformation. It has a direct link to effecting change in voters and entire governments innumerable times now.

First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.

Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?

The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.

Very few academics become principle investigators. Most every academic who's not a PI is working on something for that PI.

> inherently trainee positions

Do we live on the same planet? I understand that the point of being an academic is to always be learning, but there's no place on earth I know of that thinks of someone with a PhD as a trainee.

> the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.

Implying that one gets a choice is bold. My understanding is that there's a job for about 1 in 10 postdocs in academia these days.

Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.