If this administration had an actual plan for priorities in science, I suppose I could understand shuffling grant funding among them. But there is no plan other than to destroy.

While I no longer live in the U.S. and would never return, I grew up there & did benefit enormously from access to public academic institutions and to the Federal grants in science research that allowed them to thrive. Seeing this whole apparatus dismantled and sold-off for scrap is beyond sad. Finally the party that has striven for so long, since at least the late 1950s, to eliminate public education - and perhaps the whole academic enterprise is on the verge of achieving results beyond its wildest imagination. I hope that they are satisfied now; but doubt they are.

It’s just plain old antiintellectualism.

The strategy is to destroy an opponents centres of power. This is the result of the liberalisation of academia over the last 40 years.

The spread of opinions in a mathematics department on social issues should reflect the general populations. Yet the few foolish enough to express conservative views can expect to be terminated.

I hope the next generation of institution builders keep this lesson in mind: you need buy in from all tax payers when you're spending their money.

Edit: Responses in this thread give me little hope for American academia correcting course before it is destroyed. One can hope something better comes from its ashes.

What ‘conservative views’ are being terminated in mathematics departments?

Presumably it's the fault of mathematics departments for not admitting more dunces who could be taken in by the flag-draped anti-Americanism of talk radio, and then coddling them with kid gloves to avoid hurting their feelings.

The claims of the liberalisation of academia are part of a propaganda campaign from the people currently destroying academia - that narrative is totally disconnected from my experienced reality as someone who worked through an MA and a PhD. There's always been lefties in the Humanities, and there's been little change there over the last 50 years that I've seen. There used to be more Communists than there are now.

If people are allowed to make their own life choices, you are unlikely to get equal representation of various demographic groups.

For example, conservatives tend to prioritize wages and stability when making career choices. Liberals are more likely to choose jobs that are inherently interesting but don't pay that well relative to the risk. If you let people make their own choices, liberals are more likely to try to become professors. And once a profession becomes associated with a particular group, people outside the dominant group may be reluctant to enter it, as they may be afraid they wouldn't fit in.

If you find that problematic, you could try to fight it with regulation. For example, you could institute quotas. Maybe 40% of all software engineers in every company must be female and 40% of all nurses in every hospital must be male. That may even work if there are enough qualified candidates available. But if the pool of candidates is already skewed, quotas can be a recipe for disaster.

If regulation is a too blunt tool, you may get better results with programs that encourage underrepresented groups to enter a field. You could have support networks for conservative professors, female software engineers and male nurses. You could have outreach programs targeting kids in those groups. And you could prioritize them in education and recruitment.

If there were a plan, one would hope they would have shared it?

This is my frustration - there is clearly no plan, but smart people will assume that there must be one, because they bring their own biases of how they approach problems and project that onto trump.

Trump has always been a terrible executor even when getting the initial idea correct. See all his failed businesses. In this case, along with the tariffs, his frame of reference is 40+ years out of date. He thinks that people will do whatever they have to in order to work with US. That the best and brightest won’t leave. That other countries will bow down to his will. That’s not the world today, even if a lot of Teslers are made in the US.

No, there is no more to this. They fucking eliminated grants for studies on transgenic mice because they thought that was the same thing as transgender. That’s the level of thought and care put into this.

To answer your question -- they say "to save money".

The question is still open whether it actually saves the announced sums, or whether it saves anything at all.

The benefits of education on a country are decades long to fully see the positive outcomes. How do you expect differently by destroying said institutions? Your kids or likely kids kids will be feeling the decision of today as the beginning of the dark ages (at least in the US). Without innovative people able to achieve great progress, where does society, , hell humanity go? At the very least from a here and now position, it's a strong signal to continue pulling money out of the US and into countries that have better long term outlook.

“orange man bad” is a pretty good example of a thought-terminating cliche (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3...).

Talk to employees working at Federal agencies.

There hasn't been time for any kind of coherent review of the programs. A few programs receive enough outrage, and they're restored almost immediately.

So no, I don't think there is any kind of strategy beyond "cut any budget item that my constituents don't care about, especially if it makes liberals angry".

> The guidance said that in the event of a request that “violates or doesn’t follow proper procedures”, employees were to contact Dorothy Aronson, the NSF’s chief information officer. “Do not give any indication that the request will be denied,” the guidance statement noted. Two members of DOGE, Luke Farritor and Zachary Terrell, were quickly given complete access to NSF grant-management systems despite statements in the guidance to staffers that they should initially receive read-only access.

I feel like “don’t make them follow policy” and “we’re going to lie about the access they have” is pretty telling as to whether there’s more behind this

There no strategy. They put rfk Jr in charge of public health. Orange man is bad. Or more specifically he's a selfish corrupt liar who doesn't really care that much if he destroys the country. To the extent that he'd prefer to be a king or dictator he'd prefer economy and military to be strong while he's in control but even that falls to his whims and instincts which are authoritarian, racist and conspiratorial. He's too intellectually lazy to learn how things work. Of course some of his subordinates are far right true believers but even then flattering Trump corruption and incompetence rule the day more then ideology.

- "Another affected scientist is Eric Wustrow, a computer and network-security researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies censorship in authoritarian countries. Millions of users rely on Wustrow’s tools, which can evade firewalls, to access the Internet freely. His award of more than $450,000 was terminated last week."

Previously discussed on HN,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36531485 ("How the great firewall of China detects and blocks fully encrypted traffic [pdf] (gfw.report)" — 285 comments)

When the dust settles and this terrible moment has passed, may something better bloom and grow in the ashes of this mess.

Trump is actively trying to destroy America from the inside. There is no other explanation that really makes sense.

I'm more amused about the actions of the Congress, a higher authority than president. I mean the total silence from them.

Why don't people retract their Representatives for not representing them?

Red states are notoriously rank lowest in education, healthcare, and quality of life. So yes, if those are the policies they are unleashing on America then they are destroying America.

The simple answer is that they are corrupt and want to be authortarians with complete control and dumbing the population goes a long way to that goal. So is controlling the "truth"

He is destroying America whether that's his aim or he is just incompetent. Most people didn't vote for this. Many don't care and others are just blinded by partisan bias and cult membership

His poll numbers have dropped, so people are starting to shift. What’s fascinating is the how effective propaganda has been in the age of social media and Fox News. It used to sequestered to AM radio. For example, to see his supporters rail against universal healthcare as evil socialism and either getting Medicaid themselves or being ok being bankrupted by health costs is wild. Trump ran on lowering prices, but those same people who complained about inflation are now saying it’s MAGA to handle the pain.

They think this because they are gullible and their media and leaders have been long bought by big business, which is now subservient to China and other international capital - literally that same exact globalist dynamic they think they are somehow fighting. If they would bother listening to their fellow citizens they might have a chance at understanding any of the ways they've been thoroughly pwnt for the past few decades, but they prefer the comforting "facts" from their own fictional universe instead.

(and just to preempt the inevitable "both sides" whataboutism - no, my quarrel is currently with the party currently and rapidly destroying our country)

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43786304

I don't understand your sentiment. Nothing honorable in sticking around to be forced to do the wrong thing. A leader bowing out is at the same time the most powerful signal they can send to their superiors.

An innumerable amount of hurt has been borne by 'good' people that hung in there when they should have walked away.

It’s a nice sentiment, but the federal govt can make your life pretty miserable they get a hankering to do so.

The US will just send you to an off shore concentration camp if you try to get in the way.

They know the system, but the system is changing. I also wish they could stay and use their power to delay and obfuscate to protect their employees and their goals. This is a power of being a manager, at the least. I also suspect that since funding is cut, their removal might decrease expense.