[polairscience]

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour.

The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at NSF with total disregard for what they were doing or why. Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.

Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.

https://www.wired.com/story/national-science-foundation-febr...

[abirch]

In addition to these scientists, I heard from my friends in academia that they will be taking fewer PhD students because they're unsure of the funding.

We may be looking at a lost decade.

[polairscience]

We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

[BLKNSLVR]

> We may be looking at a lost decade.

We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.

Reduced health, reduced education, reduced funding for research, reduced international aid programs (which both garner goodwill whilst also creating a bulwark against those who profit from misery), reduced oversight / regulation of the power of capital, alienation of prior allies, reduced safety nets for the vulnerable, increased rhetoric against poorly defined 'foreign types', anti-intellectualism.

It's a helluva vacuum being created, and I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going to fill it.

[ajmurmann]

Lost decade for the US and the beginning of the Chinese century for others

[bongodongobob]

We're losing an entire generation at least. The pain that these cuts are going to cause won't be felt overnight. It will be felt over decades. "Things have been set into motion that cannot be undone".

[dang]

Recent and related:

Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144940 - Feb 2025 (646 comments)

[jmcgough]

Biochemist friend moved across the country for a post-doc and three months into it is waiting to be let go. She is now looking at options outside the country, specifically China, given the incredible instability here.

[grandempire]

1. Most science PhD students are international. So funding their education has questionable domestic political value.

2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.

3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.

[seanmcdirmid]

Maybe China will start accepting international PhD students? I don’t see anyone else who could pick up the slack.

[carterschonwald]

My fear as well. I’m not sure if even a magic wish to rearrange stuff back to the before January state of affairs is possible at this point.

Write to your representatives. I fear that if they don’t pull off something the only ethical and responsible thing is civil war. This shit is insane and will destroy everything I like about our government.

Also to quote every true patriot: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

I’m so angry and mad and wanting to help fix it. My near term approach is write expansively to all my city state and congressional reps.

We already have diarrhea inducing corruption happening in plain view. We have walking piñatas for an urgent need to do campaign finance reform.

I’m not sure if there’s any way to save some of the institutions and programs that make this country actually great without a straight up secession/civil war for the coastal states.

I’m very very scared. And angry.

[throwawaymaths]

to steelman the issue:

what if there was overinvestment in science? as in we chased money after talent that didnt exist, or was mismatched to the difficulty of the available and fundable open questions.

a few things: you'd expect a lot of fraud and misallocated science to have been recently uncovered.

after the cuts, you would expect the quantity of science to go down, but the quality to go up

[consumer451]

Sean Carroll has a very informative, and impressively apolitical post/podcast about the recent de-funding of science in the USA.

I have seen it appreciated across the political spectrum. It is worth a read or listen, and hopefully a share. This is the most sober-minded analysis of this turn of events that I have seen so far.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...

[intermerda]

It was already bad last time when the objective was to just enrich the fossil fuel industry - https://archive.is/DywH6. This time the purge is all-encompassing. If science and education is suppressed, it's easier to control the masses.

[jhbadger]

And the worst thing is that they may have misunderstood what "probationary employees" were. In federal speak, they are new employees, but the new regime may have thought they were "bad" employees, based on the idea of "probation" in the criminal justice sense.

[MengerSponge]

It looks more like they're just trying to fire everyone. You know, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

[consumer451]

We live in such a moronic time that I believe the reason that we are dropping the post-WWII Rules Based Order, is that it is also called the "Liberal" International Order. [0]

Watching a historic empire destroy itself is beyond words. I will miss Pax Americana.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order

[insane_dreamer]

If it's intentional, then they are deliberately sabotaging the US's leadership in technological research for the sake of looking like they're doing something. Which is a terrible strategy.

If it's unintentional, then DOGE faile the critical thinking test. Doesn't say much for them or their leadership.

[whalesalad]

The loss of their jobs is all part of gods plan, apparently https://www.mediaite.com/politics/house-republican-tells-fir...

[insane_dreamer]

true, except the GOP didn't bother to look up which gods the plan belongs to (turns out its the plan of the Chinese gods)

[hayst4ck]

> This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren't a scientist.

It is a decapitation strike. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation_(military_strateg...

Ukraine is more or less a proxy war between America and Russia, which is also between John Locke's Social Contract and Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, which said simply is whether rules are made in respect to reason (law) or in respect to power (order). It's also a fight over who are the final enforcers of law. Are citizens the last line of enforcers of the law or is "law" always enforced by the strong against the weak?

America has the world's largest military and a world ending nuclear arsenal, so direct conflict is unconscionable. That means what's left is high leverage asymmetric warfare. Russia corrupted America's elites (and German elites to a significant degree, too), either through money, compromising material, or the promise of power. Some of those elites are people like Peter Thiel, who are absolute power houses of the American surveillance capitalist state. Private intelligence companies were leveraged to divide the American public and then conquer it.

America is experiencing a decapitation strike. By compromising our leadership, our economy and technological flywheel is being destroyed, our ideology is being corrupted, and trust in us has been decimated. Our closest allies now see us as someone who must be weakened and defended against. We abandoned Ukraine. There is no argument that Trump's America is good faith in any way.

It's a decapitation strike.

The point is to damage us and our future, and we're letting it happen. Our military that took an oath to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic have failed their obligation. Now America at large is rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears. Americans are obeying in advance.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/decapitation-strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK)

[chii]

If you've read the three-body problem series (or the tv show) [spoiler incoming]

- - - -

the way to stop humanity from being able to fight back (against alien invasion) is not via weapons, but via disabling science. It's a long term strategy.

So the conspiracy theory that trump is a russian asset (or is influenced by them at the least), seems plausible, if you imagine that such removal of science and research funding is meant to disable american technological progress for decades to come. This would be a strategy that outlasts the tenure of the russian asset.

[andix]

Those concepts are not science fiction, they were very often used in the past already. Just read about how the most famous dictators in history came to power, and what they did first.

Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.

[throwawaymaths]

there are two tiers of program managers. there are those that are pulled from academia, as you say, but theres a 3-5x? multiple of "junior' PMs that are say MS or BS scientists, rarely PhD (usually the case when the PhD is... subpar), these are career and eventually thet are promoted to senior management and decision making roles.

[rsfern]

I don’t know what the distribution of advanced degrees is among NSF program managers, but I strongly reject the implication that career program managers are somehow a lower tier or less well suited for the job. I’ve personally served a few times as an NSF panel reviewer for a career PM that does not hold a PhD, and they are awesome. They have a background in the startup world and ask really insightful question and know how to build effective groups of experts and efficiently guide discussion to get actionable feedback from them in a really short timeframe. A lot of PhDs are not great with these skills, and I’ve learned a ton about evaluating the potential impact and risks of research proposals by interacting with this person.

Also, this attitude is kind of counter to the egalitarian notion a lot of HNers hold that you don’t need a formal CS degree to be a great software dev.

[_heimdall]

> Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.

Personally I'm not sold on their tactics so far, but there is another way to view this than thrashing out.

Non-probationary federal employees are protected and not easily fired. If one honestly believes the government is bloated and so far into debt that the budget needs to be balanced at all costs, cutting anyone and anything you can may make sense.

Normally you wouldn't throw good food overboard, but if the ship is sinking you may have no choice other than to throw out anything that isn't bolted down.

[consumer451]

Where exactly is the proof that the ship of government funded science in the USA was sinking?

If you don't mean just US funded science, then what evidence is there that the USA was sinking in general? When I look at the graph of debt increase, it was actually decreasing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366899/percent-change-n...

[russdill]

Government employee payroll makes up a tiny fraction of the budget. It's actually a horrible place to start.

[pjc50]

This view of the balance sheet is of course bananas.

The worst thing is that the fear of the US becoming Argentina may drive a series of actions that turns the US into Argentina. Well, I'm using them as the poster child here, but really a lot of the Latin American countries have similar economic problems which have been through socialist revolution/CIA-backed coup or vice versa and come off worse each time. It seems this has spread north.

[alabastervlog]

Probationary employees also require a layoff process if you want to do layoffs. They didn’t do it.

[stronglikedan]

> Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.

Seems unnecessarily alarmist speculation to me. :shrug: I'd rather see how this plays out, since no one can possibly know at this point.

[freen]

We have seen it happen over and over again.

When was the last time real science came out of Russia?