The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
I was also in science during Clinton, and what I’m saying was true then. The increase in funding went hand in hand with a massive increase in people seeking funding. So maybe there was some golden era of happy times when nobody had to chase grants, but it hasn’t been in my lifetime.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
Yes, I understand your claim that things are tighter now; I've repeatedly acknowledged that fact, and in any case, I have no personal basis to dispute the argument. But again, that's not related to the point I'm making.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
I'm just talking about my experience as a former researcher.
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
>4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
Staff being underpaid in academia is nothing new. Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money for funding academics? Instead of a new $100m "student center" and high-rise dorm buildings.
An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
I don't know how to comment on this considering you don't seem to know that the majority of research staff salaries in highly successful labs is paid entirely through grant money.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
The ratio has just been going up and up and up, and to suggest it pays for "equipment, supplies and data resources" is a bad joke considering the people doing the work end up saddled with yet more administrative bloat in the form of hostile, complicated processes in accessing the funds to buy the very equipment and supplies that enables the research.
That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations.
Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two.
For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive.
For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible, because it relies on an uncanny ability to predict which projects will succeed and fail ahead of time.
What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
I don't believe that the feeling is that it can be done "cheap", but rather the inevitable draw towards privatizing previously government functions. This drives towards a more immediate profit motive, which inevitably pushes research towards a more applied focus.
Who's doing the research? Who's benefiting?
VC backed companies are often slotted in as the for profit version of academic R&D without the "encumbrances" of non-profitable blue-sky pure research.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
> I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.
You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
The mods here are worse than complicit. Dang in the past has allowed threats of violence while warning/deleting/banning petty name calling in the responses. It’s frankly disgusting.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
Which tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.
Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
One reason foreign enrollment is declining is concern about (mainly) Chinese espionage. That’s entirely reasonable, given the vast amount of stolen engineering and research…
That is the mind hack. People will always assume that the administration has the United States best interest in mind. If people can drop that assumption, they might make a beginning with understanding the firehose of seemingly erratic policy.
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict."
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Not everyone is a tribalist.i don't have to agree with everything Trump does. Do you not know that? Or does the world feel safer when you split people into simple categories?
Academia in particular loves to push one-track thought and cancel culture. Hard to believe it used to be a place for diverse thought and DIScourse. Now if you disagree with the groupthink you are a racist. It's a very 2001 George Bush "you are either with us or against us" culture that absolutely deserves to have its funding cut.
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.
It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
Can you please name/educate us on some of those game theories and how they apply? (Please don't just point me to prisoners dilemma on wikipedia unless it lays out how it applies to research funding)
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it
Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies
Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company
Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)
Capital didn’t seek quantum mechanics which led to semi conductors which led to computers. Capital didn’t seek weather prediction which led to chaos theory which led to modern control systems for basically everything. And it certainly didn’t seek neural networks for the first half dozen decades they existed. So it seems like capital may have a poor nose for long term reach investment.
What capital seems to be doing right now is funding products that will create an AI replacement of my grandmother so I can continue to talk to her after she dies. Not exactly a good look.
"There will be so much money to go around for philanthropy" is also rich given that the world's richest man is going online to actively tell people not to give to the poor.
I ask again: How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
Capital seeks the best opportunities, like deliberately lying about asbestos in baby powder, producing fraudulent research and continuing to profit off poisoning individuals.
Capital doesn't seek the best opportunity, it can only seek the best monetary opportunity and that can involve fraud or products that are bad for society.
Without market-independent research you often wouldn't even realize that is what's going on.
Who got punished for the J&J asbestos issue? Who got punished for cigarettes and their deceptive advertising? And how badly did the Sacklers get slapped for causing the opioid epidemic?
If you're making the argument that they should be punished proportionally to their effects then all of these cases should result in the individuals being jailed for life at bare minimum and their assets forfeited. Yet this hasn't happened. Why?
I can't answer why, but I would suggest it has very little to do with the government spending on research, or in the way it allocates it annually vs 4 year blocks.
I have noted in the past that I do enjoy how intense the FTC and other consumer protection style agencies get when Democrats run the whitehouse, ideally companies would behave because if they dont the institution that has a monopoly on violence will club em really good, so to speak. IMO Citizens united and the way we fund the political game has broken the incentives to being a company on good merit rather than on legalized corruption.
Yet you ignore that when the Republicans are in power (they are very well supported by capitalist interests) they try to slash all the regulations - because money only cares about money and wants more money. And the money LOVES corruption because it gets you more money.
Capitalism without regulation is gangsterism. With regulation it's barely-controlled gangsterism.
So many discoveries only find an application decades later. If you stop persuing knowledge purely for its own sake you will never again be able to compete with countries that are serious about science and you will never again live up to your past achievements.
From the perspective of somebody outside the US it really is a shocking tragedy what the Republicans have done to what used to be the greatest country in the world. I hope you can manage to right the ship soon because I fear it may already be too late.
Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.
Full charge towards third world country standards.
(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)
If it could be profitable, the private sector would fund it.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.
One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.
Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.
Or the ballooning wasteful paramilitary spending to wholesale trample our Constitution and attack US civil society. Destroying an apartment building on suspicion that it houses some illegal immigrants makes negative economic sense.
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.
And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
Ehh... I was just making a crass joke that MAGA might end up making America so poor that Americans would be willing to work for terrible factory jobs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That just seems like the straightforward maggot plan though, once you read past the marketing hopium? Assuming our new Chinese owners will be willing to let us have factories, of course.
I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.
The state/local gov tend to be responsible for public education funding. in the US federal gov only does <10% of the funding.
US public education spending is also top 5 in the world so I don't think a lack of money is why "Johnny can't read or do math", something else is going on
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
The free rider problem is a natural consequence of all-encompassing progressions that benefit multiple parties at the least expense of themselves and each other.
Even the logic behind a pareto optimum necessitates the presence of the free rider problem, to prove the point.
The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.
It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
> who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly
Realistically though, this has nothing to do with geopolitics. This wouldn't be happening if the research community were driving around in trucks with MAGA flags and sleeping with Dear Leader body pillows.
This regime is entirely transactional and it's a howler to pretend otherwise. The academic research community could be dealing literal tons of hard drugs and they'd get a pass as long as they were card carrying party members.
I think you're asking a good question and it's not unreasonable at all.
The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.
The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.
Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.
Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.
That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.
Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?
Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:
- Internet
- GPS
- Semiconductor
- MRI/CT scans
- Vaccines
- Jet engine, aviation
- Lithium Ion batteries
- Touchscreens
- AI
- Fracking
- Mass agriculture
- Space exploration
You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.
To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.
I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.
At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.
Increasing money supply vs taxation is kinda just misdirection. It's politically disadvantageous to increase the tax % versus just siphoning purchasing power out of cash holders pockets silently and through the back door of increasing money supply.
Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".
> Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.
The money would be spent regardless of what is collected through taxes. It's not as though taxpayer money goes into a gigantic bag in the treasury, and then those same dollars get pulled out to fund public spending until the bag is empty.
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.
That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
In the end, charity, philanthropy and patronage can't achieve much more than help us feel good about massive inequalities. Not that it is completely useless, but if we want to have actual institutions carrying serious research we need public funding.
Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.
I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
> By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
Yes, they could, by paying their taxes.
But we’ve all seen that they really don’t want to share any of their wealth for any purpose, other than propping up a geriatric orange clown that campaigned on lowering their taxes.
PS: I said their taxes, not yours. Yours are going up, they’re just called tariffs, but that’s a tax: tariffs are your money getting collected by the government.
My question was from the context of non-research staff looking to provide financial and institutional support to research staff - looks like your resource is useful for researchers but not for me. thanks in any case.
Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.
There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.
DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
>unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
China's middle class is already larger than the entire US population, and growing fast. It won't be rich in the sense that say Switzerland or Norway are rich. But it seems safe to say they won't be barely scraping by.
IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
>the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.
They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.
sure, they could, hypothetically, close the borders and begin a campaign of forced insemination, but those babies would have no fathers to provide for them, and the state - any state - really resents footing the bill for child rearing, going as far as forcing victims of infidelity, fraud, or rape to pay child support. the state - any state - wants to give you as little as possible and to take as much as possible from you, for the delta between giving and receiving is its lifeblood.
the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
Children are not important. China has more than enough population to outdo the US in science. But also, the majority of US high end science is done by immigrants, not by people born in the US. Science is international, and the US has destroyed its trust and goodwill with the international community.
What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.
My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
The status quo is not in focus, let alone I would defend it. Your concerns about the status quo are really valid imho, how they should be dealt with would be an interesting other subject, but they are not a concern for the conservative movement, nor are there any signs one could expect even unintended good consequences. As such, as well-intending you might be, it only adds to confusion.
The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
I think the broadcast license is restricted to EUR area. Proton vpn is free though. I recommend to take the hassle, it is a great historical documentary in three parts.
We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.
A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.
Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).
Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment in science was slashed?
How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?
If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?
The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.
For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.
As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.
It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.
Thank you for the detailed insight. You've touched on an aspect that outsiders (like me) cannot truly grasp but can only guess about: motivation. And it's definitely true, motivation in the private sector is somewhat harder (you've explained it best), or at least motivation compared to the majority of the private companies; but, like you've mentioned, it doesn't seem like it's a problem with the system itself but with the kind of environments that grow in companies. Corporate culture is, more often than not, very toxic, especially when big money is involved (and/or big ideas; the subject of research could be even more important than money in science).
Or maybe it is a problem with the structure that fosters an environment. What comes to my mind is the exceptional case of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit. Sure, it "ended badly" because of the known drama, but my guess is that besides the money that was poured into it, it thrived because researchers had kind of an "emotional safety net," meaning that they wouldn't be pressured for results as much. Probably the reason some startups perform much better too.
I think career continuity matters, and you don't necessarily get that in the private sector for sure. This discontinuity then leads to practical work discontinuity, which means less work done (which is amplified by the non-decentralized nature of working in private compared to shared science in public, as you've explained).
My bottom line is that the private field could do better, and frankly it's kind of their loss. What I'm curious about is whether a "semi-private" approach is better: a non-profit or some kind of foundation. I guess in practice they're still private, but whether the money part can be "solved" through crowdfunding/some modern methods and whether they're viable long-term remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: a culture appreciative of science will definitely open more doors into novel methods of funding and organizing (maybe in the future these methods could rival the "traditional ways" of public science).
Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.
> The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding
Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.
As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...
"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.
When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.
Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.
The "unitary executive theory" is neither new nor novel. It was discussed and described from the beginning by the framers of the Constitution. It was further reinforced by SCOTUS in Myers (1926).
Which makes sense when you considering the ENTIRE Executive Branch reports to the President (aka chief executive) and leverages that authority for anything they do. They cannot exist counter-to or independent-of that individual.
The "decision-making independence" concept is newer and came about just around WW2, likely due to FDR's control of the system, threats to pack the courts, and more.
Any "independent" agency, activity, etc should be inherently suspicious as it doesn't have checks & balances defined and OFTEN defines its own authority.. inviting abuse and trouble.
You're conflating two very different things. You're correct that civil service reforms sought to ensure employees would be hired based on merit. But that does not mean they were granted "decision-making independence." The point was to have highly qualified people executing the agenda of the elected President--not to allow them to exercise discretion independent of political forces.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:
> The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.
> That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.
> This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.
So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.
The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.
Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.
This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).
There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.
> Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.
The purpose of civil service reform was to end patronage, not to insulate the civil service from political supervision. The idea was to have well-credentialed employees, instead of political donors, carrying out the policies of the elected President. It was not to have employees exercising power independently of the policies of the President.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was enacted in 1883. Four decades later, former President Taft wrote Myers v. United States, which still reflected the conventional view that the President was actually in charge of the executive branch.
> What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?
Because after 100 years of growth there was very little room left to keep hiring people, due to pressure on cap of taxes, that's part of why Trump had to resort trying to go back to firing.
Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.
Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
> Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point
Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.
Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
> So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group.
Can you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way? If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
There was massive sabotage of the first Trump administration. We're talking about administration lawyers not reporting case developments to political employees in order to keep the political appointees in the dark.
Which activities specifically were sabotaged? Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.
My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
> You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible and merely making your assertion true doesn't rule out the latter being true.
Again, this isn’t a hypothetical. The administration has recently been deploying political appointees to prosecute cases the career employees thought were too weak, and they’ve had little success at even securing indictments. The reason Trump and his supporters insist on dragging the discussion to hypotheticals is that all of the concrete things they feel have been “sabotaged” are either impossible or illegal.
You presented it as a non-concrete, without an example. I don't believe this makes you a Trump "supporter" as you put it. The example you gave preceding it was of a Muslim ban working.
I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.
I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.
> Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.
Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.
> You mention case developments,
I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.
> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.
Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.
The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.
>an you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way?
DOGE vs USAID
>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.
DOGE were not "civil servants" in the slightest. And USAID tried to sabotage DOGE?? Your entire worldview is backwards. (Looking through your past posts and yiikes yeah)
Yes, it’s true that Trump specifically has instructed civil servants to sabotage each other. You know why this is a dishonest answer, so I don’t see the point of continuing this conversation. The day will come when your heroes face the consequences of pointlessly killing all the children USAID helped, and you beg for everyone to forget you ever supported it; I look forward to rubbing the salt in your wounds, but until then I have no interest in what you have to say.
In the before times the close eyes were by directors and funding committees at the institutes like NIH and NSF. Now those roles are played by political appointees and funds controlled at the whim of the office of the President and their fundamentally anti-science agenda.
> That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.
> grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.
For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).
Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.
Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.
The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate. To the extent that the electorate trusts experts to set those priorities, it will vote for politicians that delegate a large amount of discretion to those experts. If the experts lose the confidence of the electorate, then a properly designed system will retract that discretion.
For the most part, the system that exists today actually reflects that design. The statute and associated regulations for the most part invest authority in "the Director." The Director can rely on committees of experts, etc., but it's more by convention.
> The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate.
Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.
> Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS.
We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose. “Decide how to use this big block of money to advance health” falls pretty comfortably within the scope of “executing the law” rather than “making the law.”
> That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority.
The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
> it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in
It’s not symmetric, because government employees and government-funded NGOs aren’t power centers for the right, especially the new right. Is President AOC going to lay off all the staff at PBS making programming promoting conservative values? Or cut all the federal grants to Heritage and Fed Soc?
I’d be thrilled if AOC openly ran on extreme promises like Trump did (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform) and then, if she won, started knocking them out. For one thing, I don’t think she could win by promising to open the borders, increase free trade, bring back racial preferences in small business loans, or put more power back in the hands of federal employees angling for jobs at companies they regulate. And if she runs and wins on something like breaking up big banks or raising taxes, then that’s fine.
More generally, I think a lot of our political dysfunction comes from the fact that, regardless of who wins the election, the government is run by the PMCs. No matter who you vote for, what you’ll actually get is managerial neoliberalism with a side of identity politics and mass immigration. Instead, Democrats should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win. Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
> We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose
Yeah, this is the hack that's being run right now. Indeed, the United States runs on norms to a large degree, and a small group of people have decided that if something isn't spelled out explicitly, that gives them untold unilateral power in the gray areas to do whatever they want because again, they've achieved a >50% margin in a single election, so therefore that makes them king for 4 years.
The norm that has worked out well for everyone for decades has been that we trust experts to run their own systems, because we understand that political interference from the government is suboptimal and leads to cronyism. Now, for some reason it's the conservatives who have a problem with this arrangement, and want to involve themselves to the point they are filtering by keywords what's allowed to be researched, big government at it's best.
So now, a system that took decades to build, which was the envy of the world in terms of research output, and which has been beneficial to US GDP and national security, is decimated in a few years time because a small group of people didn't like what they saw.
In this new Unitary Executive world, long-term research projects can only happen as long as Democrats have political control, because every time a Republican president comes into office they will shut down all research projects they don't like. I don't think it will work out well but we will see.
> The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
But Congress cannot reliably affect a tyranny -- they're too fractious, they are reelected as a whole every 2 years, and their priorities are too local. Moreover, the minority actually has power in Congress, even if it's just power to block progress. This is why they are supposed to be invested with more power than the President.
> Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
They did and they have (Project 2025) which is why we got torture prisons, rampant bribery and corruption, and a complete power / money grab from the Oval Office on down. I actually love that this is happening because we finally get to see the Conservative political project come to fruition. Finally we can stop pretending it was about "maintaining US institutions" and "preserving the soul of the nation". They are finally saying "we will go to war for the oil" instead of pretending it was about defending freedom and liberty. It's a nice change of pace.
But anyway, I don't agree this is something that should happen. What you're proposing will just going to lead to political instability as subsequent administrations flip back and forth. In feedback control systems we call that a "divergence" and it usually precedes total system collapse.
The people I know who work in life sciences R&D (basically anything bio) have had their funding absolutely annihilated. PhDs with 20 years of experience working second jobs as substitute high school teachers, lab workers taking up tech support positions paying a fraction of what was already terrible pay.
What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
Our lab is scrambling, spending all our time writing grants, not conducting science. It is so frustrating and wasteful.
This is why I became a teaching professor. My employment and promotion are not conditioned on how much money I bring in and what I publish. But I still get to spend 4 months of the year doing research that's important to me. I don't publish as often but when I do, it's substantive work.
I've seen too many promising academic careers torched at 6-years because they had unfundable ideas. With this new administration, we see how "fundability" and "good important research" are often at odds and can change as quickly as the political winds.
When I was in gradschool it was over drones and the politics was within the FAA and their shifting definitions of what an "unmanned aerial vehicle" technically was. Recently you wouldn't get funding if you didn't have the word "equity" in your proposal. Now you don't get funding if you do have the word "equity" in your proposal. New boss, same as old boss.
Heaven forbid you were researching suddenly now <VORBOTEN> topic, your entire career is torched. I just didn't want to tie my career to that kind of capriciousness.
This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
I was also in science during Clinton, and what I’m saying was true then. The increase in funding went hand in hand with a massive increase in people seeking funding. So maybe there was some golden era of happy times when nobody had to chase grants, but it hasn’t been in my lifetime.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
Yes, I understand your claim that things are tighter now; I've repeatedly acknowledged that fact, and in any case, I have no personal basis to dispute the argument. But again, that's not related to the point I'm making.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.
Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.
I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.
Undoubtedly the complaints are constant, but that is not evidence that the amount of work wasted on unsuccessful grant proposals is constant.
Nope. My PhD lab never laid off any research scientists in almost 30 years, until 47 and DOGE came along.
I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.
Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.
Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.
Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.
The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.
Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
If a private lab needs a chemist or biologist for say, quality assurance, one of the most common jobs in the field, then privates prefer fresh graduates:
- they cost much less
- even if the PhD would be fine with the pay, he/she will still be skipped over a fresh graduate because the person is over qualified and will jump to something more related to his/her field as soon as possible.
Thus these people's CV are genuinely worse for anything unrelated to their skill set.
I haven't been on the job market as a new PhD in (my god) nearly 20 years now, but at the time I was looking for work, having a PhD on my resume was the only reason I was able to snag interviews at Apple/Google/McKinsey/Bain/Twitter/etc. I never did anything related to my actual degree, but it certainly opened doors for me.
Times have changed, also, it might be related to the field.
Natural sciences such as biology or chemistry are different from physics or maths or engineering fields.
You picked an example to support your conclusion in mentioning QA jobs which typically don't require a PhD. There still very much are other jobs that do require a PhD so I don't see what the point is there.
More fundamentally this mentality of looking at education only through the lens of financial return is just so disappointing. Of course your country is self-sabotaging its science system if it's full of people who think that way.
I can pretty safely say that me and most people around me, when we got our PhDs, what job we'd later get really wasn't the primary concern.
We wanted to work on interesting problems at the frontier of what's known (and maybe also get a job doing that later).
I'm just talking about my experience as a former researcher.
If you spend 10 years of your life working on dye sensitized solar cells and perovskite, the number of positions for those roles in your area/country might be limited or non existent and at the same time you may no longer find any funding at your current position.
Thus you need to look for jobs outside your sphere of conpetence and for those your PhD may not be that useful, if not even a malus.
I have a friend who has a PhD in applied mathematics, has spent the last 5 years of his life on deep and machine learning problems, and he's applied to several positions as an ML researcher and his CV is not considered often due to the lack of professional, non academic experience.
And we talking the very booming ML sector for someone who understands the ins and outs of the math and architecture behind the models (area: UK and northern Europe).
> Actually a PhD is a con, not a bonus if you want normal jobs.
Depends on the market, which is true for any field. In places where there's a lot of technical work to be done, employers can hire PhD's and will do so if there's a local supply.
Even if you’re looking outside your field, the prestige of a PHD is offset by the fact that they assume (accurately) you’d rather be elsewhere.
>4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
It's very optimistic to think that this madness is going to end in four years.
The idiocracy is a global trend
Staff being underpaid in academia is nothing new. Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money for funding academics? Instead of a new $100m "student center" and high-rise dorm buildings.
An average NIH R01 grant is $600,000 dollars per year for ~5 years. Forgoing a $100m student center would net you 33 projects. For reference, Stanford had 1000 ongoing projects for FY 2025
If universities fund it themselves they might forego some of the usual 30% administrative grift and we get some 40 projects out of it!
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
I don't know how to comment on this considering you don't seem to know that the majority of research staff salaries in highly successful labs is paid entirely through grant money.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
The ratio has just been going up and up and up, and to suggest it pays for "equipment, supplies and data resources" is a bad joke considering the people doing the work end up saddled with yet more administrative bloat in the form of hostile, complicated processes in accessing the funds to buy the very equipment and supplies that enables the research.
> The ratio has just been going up and up and up
That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations.
Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two.
For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive.
For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible, because it relies on an uncanny ability to predict which projects will succeed and fail ahead of time.
What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
I don't believe that the feeling is that it can be done "cheap", but rather the inevitable draw towards privatizing previously government functions. This drives towards a more immediate profit motive, which inevitably pushes research towards a more applied focus.
Who's doing the research? Who's benefiting?
VC backed companies are often slotted in as the for profit version of academic R&D without the "encumbrances" of non-profitable blue-sky pure research.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
Note that it depends on the grant if indirects are included in the award amount or on top; NIH is the latter.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
> I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
That does help, and is part of the reason I myself engage with these folks from time to time, but it requires discipline to recognize when you're throwing good effort after bad.
You want to give your voice the greatest chance of being seen. Strategically responding to upvoted bad faith in a highly visible thread is a good idea. Keeping an argument alive 5-6 levels deep in a subthread that was already flagged is less so.
It would be so nice if the mods kept people out who hold views that threaten your worldview. Keep that money flowing into your useless academic toy.
The mods here are worse than complicit. Dang in the past has allowed threats of violence while warning/deleting/banning petty name calling in the responses. It’s frankly disgusting.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
Legitimate question: why don't you think universities already do this? It's not exactly a novel idea.
It can be proved by deduction based on the rate of increase in tuition
Which tuition are you referring to? Nameplate tuition is like the sticker price on a new car; few to no people pay it. Net tuition is the number that actually matters, and it's been largely flat the last 8 years.
I don't know the figures for large universities, but at the small liberal arts college I graduated from and the one I've worked at for the last 15 years, the average figure for "full pay" students—which, as the name suggests, is the students who pay, or whose families pay, the full sticker price, either directly or through loans—has generally been between 46% and 53%.
Now, if you have figures showing that what you claim is true on the whole across all of US higher education, please, by all means, post the links. I'm genuinely interested to know just how different it is with the larger universities.
So you're saying academics use the same opaque market practices as, e.g. health insurance? Yeah all the more reasons to cut funding. If they have nothing to hide they have nothing to fear with transparency.
You seem to have no interest in transparance or understanding, but answer everything with "cut the universities" no matter what.
If differential pricing based on ability to pay is a reason to destroy something, then we had better destroy 90% of B2B. But it's not a reason, you're just parroting the same desired end result no matter what is actually said about universities.
What's not transparent?
We know this information because the colleges give it out. They are transparent.
There's not much the colleges can do if somebody is commenting without researching.
I didn't ask you to prove it. I asked why it wasn't already happening.
This is not how research grants work.
> Maybe colleges should use some of that tuition money
That's going away too with the ban on immigration. A large amount of high margin tuition is from overseas students.
Overseas students are not immigrants. They are on student visas (and most likely from very wealthy families... at least most of the ones I knew at Purdue were).
It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students as they graduate and create a system to promote student visa to green card to naturalization, but only a very few do.
Mostly, foreign students are price gouged by our universities to prop up a failing business model and make it more difficult for citizens to afford higher education.
Sure, it's in the United States' interest to retain the best foreign students (and in many students' interest to study in a country which will permit them to live and work there after their study). That doesn't mean the current administration is necessarily inclined to act this way
International student enrolment is down 17% this year, because the administration chose to take a broadly similar approach to student visas as they did to immigration, with a "pause" on interviews and lots of revocations, plus of course the concern their lawful student visa status isn't a guarantee they won't get taken off to processing centres by ICE thugs with quotas to hit. Other bright ideas the administration proposed with include a four year student visa limit to rule out the possibility of completing a PhD in a normal time frame. That's gonna hurt universities using the foreign students to prop their business up, and citizens who'll have to pick up their tab instead if they want their courses to continue...
One reason foreign enrollment is declining is concern about (mainly) Chinese espionage. That’s entirely reasonable, given the vast amount of stolen engineering and research…
The US is a resource to be stripped, the interest in mind is self-interest. "Make us great again!" Back to the gilded age, whatever it takes.
> Overseas students are not immigrants.
> It is in the United States best interest to retain the best students
Yeah? Tell that to the US government.
As it stands, foreign student enrollment has dropped precipitously year-on-year. The international students are scared, and with good reason.
If ICE happens to roll up to campus, do you really think they'll be checking each student's visa status? Not on your life. They'll just round up everyone who doesn't look white enough, and if they're very, very lucky, they might just get sent back home in a speedy manner. If they're not, they'll get put in camps for indeterminate amounts of time, denied any access to the legal system, and treated worse than animals.
No, the Trump administration needs to not cut funding for science that disagrees with their worldview.
They need to cut funding until academia stops gamifying the research process. Aka cheating. It's bizarre to hear the stories that come out of this twisted world and then seeing them expect to keep getting paid the same.
Do you genuinely believe that every single research lab is cheating and should thus be punished across the board?
Whenever I have dug into views like these, this is not a rational view based on first principles, it's about carrying out culture war based on a very odd phrase I heard first here on Hacker News: "elite conflict."
Destruction of scientific research is viewed as a positive win for the culture war. The particulars, what's actually happening with science, is completely secondary to discrediting the institution as a whole.
It's bizarre to hear the words that come out of this administration's mouth on... Almost any topic, and then see an actual person actually arguing that anything those people say or do needs to be defended.
Have you considered holding it to the same standard you want to hold your enemies to?
Not everyone is a tribalist.i don't have to agree with everything Trump does. Do you not know that? Or does the world feel safer when you split people into simple categories?
Academia in particular loves to push one-track thought and cancel culture. Hard to believe it used to be a place for diverse thought and DIScourse. Now if you disagree with the groupthink you are a racist. It's a very 2001 George Bush "you are either with us or against us" culture that absolutely deserves to have its funding cut.
Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America. It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor. It helps business. Its something the government can and should do that is hard for private business to do. It helps human knowledge. I'm motivated to reverse this trend.
Unfortunately, "Griefing people we don't like" is the central defining principle behind everything the current administration does. It's the promise that got them elected. And they really don't like scientists and medical professionals. This is not going to be reversed until we get griefing out of politics.
> Funding for basic science and medicen should be a bi-partisan winning issue. It is good for America.
“Good” is never an objective question, its always one dependent on values, and values are often not bipartisan.
Everyone believes everyone should share their values, but if they did, there wouldn't be different ideological factions in the first place.
I don't even think this one is a bipartisan issue. This just seems to just be coming from the White House.
The article said
> The Senate and House rejected the White House’s proposed budget cuts
Since WH can't control the budget they are changing how it's doled out by giving larger payments to a smaller group.
> there wouldn’t be different ideological factions in the first place.
Maybe I’m just very jaded, but I don’t think this is true.
Our values are significantly more aligned than we generally believe, however as long as there is power to be gained by creating the illusion of a difference of values, there will be factions dedicated to ensuring that illusion is maintained.
> It is good for the world. It helps eventually lift the poor.
Not bipartisan. One specific party is literally against already existing medical progress, because it helps weak people they thing should die.
> It helps business.
Not bipartisan unless it benefits super rich millionaires businesses. The moment it benefits their competition, it ceases to be bipartisan.
It is not a bipartisan winning issue.
Wife worked in a construction firm in South Texas. Firm owners were a half-hispanic family. It was a decent sized firm, millions of dollars turnover and recipients of millions more in PPP loans, special state contracts, and tax breaks due to being half Hispanic and "woman-owned". They also firmly supported T and believed in qanon stuff. They believed something to the effect of, scientists have sold their souls to Satan in exchange for technological progress.
It was not really shocking. What was shocking is that how similar vibes prevail within silicon valley, as it became clear days after him winning the election.
The republican party is explicitly anti-science. One of the ripple effects of the anti-science agenda is an anti-education mentality among republican civilians. An educated populace is the enemy of the U.S. right wing.
As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project. Especially in private institutions which have billions under management and are ran like hedge funds, and not increasing their intake. Time to fix the deficit and kill off our debt.
If the rebuttal is "yeah but advancements improve the economy" -- The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis, they can take the risk and they can see if it is profitable in the market (ie beneficial)
If the rebuttal is "How will America stay competitive?" We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways. [1]
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950
Edit: Also the 4 years at a time thing is probably a better choice too, because it makes them less twitchy politically. You get your 4 years, regardless of who's team is in office. This should be a win regardless of your affiliation.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
You've inherited a nation built atop research which, at the time it was done, had no immediate pathway for economic viability. The groundbreaking research out of Bell Labs and DARPA provide many examples, among many more from other institutions, to support this claim which changed the entire world in addition to our nation for the better.
To think that this research would have been the product of economic incentivization is folly.
We, as a nation, have been spoiled by these gifts of our past and, like so many spoiled trust fund children, are flushing our inheritance down the toilet.
>no immediate pathway for economic viability
Investing in research towards creating digital computers and a global messaging system are pathways towards economic viability.
I suggest you look more into the research conducted at both Bell Labs and, separately, the research funded by DARPA.
What you listed is but a tiny fraction.
>"What you listed is but a tiny fraction."
I mean, likewise for you:
>"Bell Labs and, separately, the research funded by DARPA."
It's a fine sentiment but there are a dozen different game theory principles that contribute these investments never getting made when left in the hands of the private sector. If you're upset about not reaping any of the benefits of your tax dollars, just buy the S&P 500. Of course you don't want the government investing in bad ideas but that doesn't seem to be your sticking point.
FWIW I don't think the status quo is ideal, the government should be getting more credit for and more value out of research that results in profit for private companies so it can invest in and lessen the tax burden of future research.
Can you please name/educate us on some of those game theories and how they apply? (Please don't just point me to prisoners dilemma on wikipedia unless it lays out how it applies to research funding)
Free rider problems/tragedy of the anticommons - research that isn't directly patent-able would result in a dearth of private investment because there isn't a comparative advantage in researching it
Tragedy of the Commons - Research into monitoring, maintaining, regulating, and improving resources shared by private companies
Positive externalities - Some research will not pencil out without including return on investment that cannot be captured by a company
Negative externalities - Companies won't invest in research to reduce injury to other parties (could fix with regulation also but depending on specifics this may be very difficult to enforce)
awesome, thank you. You've given me some holiday reading at the very least :)
How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
The biotech industry is already tricky, with long lag times and a low probability of success. More risk just increases the discount rate and lowers the present value, making it an even less appealing investment.
Capital will seek the best opportunities, let's keep the incentive structure sane. Which means first tackling the biggest problems, with the highest probability of success, for the most people. As the opportunity space is explored or saturated, we'll move on to lower EROI opportunities. By getting the highest EROI initially we'l be richer still for chasing down philanthropic spaces (for the opportunities which do not make economic sense, but make moral, humanitarian sense)
Capital didn’t seek quantum mechanics which led to semi conductors which led to computers. Capital didn’t seek weather prediction which led to chaos theory which led to modern control systems for basically everything. And it certainly didn’t seek neural networks for the first half dozen decades they existed. So it seems like capital may have a poor nose for long term reach investment.
What capital seems to be doing right now is funding products that will create an AI replacement of my grandmother so I can continue to talk to her after she dies. Not exactly a good look.
"There will be so much money to go around for philanthropy" is also rich given that the world's richest man is going online to actively tell people not to give to the poor.
I ask again: How are we going to produce all of the basic research that is non-excludable & non-rival? What incentive do companies have to produce results like this?
Capital seeks the best opportunities, like deliberately lying about asbestos in baby powder, producing fraudulent research and continuing to profit off poisoning individuals.
This is unfair: biotech/pharma companies do valuable work, particularly in translational medicine.
Don't forget tobacco companies lying about cancer and oil and gas companies hiding climate change research.
Sure, but that is an issue of ethics and regulation. Fraud is illegal and should be punished proportionally to it's effects.
Capital doesn't seek the best opportunity, it can only seek the best monetary opportunity and that can involve fraud or products that are bad for society.
Without market-independent research you often wouldn't even realize that is what's going on.
> Fraud is illegal and should be punished proportionally to it's effects.
That's adorable.
Who got punished for the J&J asbestos issue? Who got punished for cigarettes and their deceptive advertising? And how badly did the Sacklers get slapped for causing the opioid epidemic?
If you're making the argument that they should be punished proportionally to their effects then all of these cases should result in the individuals being jailed for life at bare minimum and their assets forfeited. Yet this hasn't happened. Why?
I can't answer why, but I would suggest it has very little to do with the government spending on research, or in the way it allocates it annually vs 4 year blocks.
I have noted in the past that I do enjoy how intense the FTC and other consumer protection style agencies get when Democrats run the whitehouse, ideally companies would behave because if they dont the institution that has a monopoly on violence will club em really good, so to speak. IMO Citizens united and the way we fund the political game has broken the incentives to being a company on good merit rather than on legalized corruption.
Yet you ignore that when the Republicans are in power (they are very well supported by capitalist interests) they try to slash all the regulations - because money only cares about money and wants more money. And the money LOVES corruption because it gets you more money.
Capitalism without regulation is gangsterism. With regulation it's barely-controlled gangsterism.
So many discoveries only find an application decades later. If you stop persuing knowledge purely for its own sake you will never again be able to compete with countries that are serious about science and you will never again live up to your past achievements.
From the perspective of somebody outside the US it really is a shocking tragedy what the Republicans have done to what used to be the greatest country in the world. I hope you can manage to right the ship soon because I fear it may already be too late.
This logic is funny.
Because majority of the tax payers who might agree with the non-funding of "everyone's project" have another problem. They are also afraid of the unknown "They" and big industries - like Big Pharma. Private institutions research can be easily dismissed as biased. But given that like you they believe even public research is politically motivated - might as well not do any research at all.
Full charge towards third world country standards.
(PS: While I see you asking for proofs from others, you haven't provided any of your own. Do you have proof to show how this is going to fix the deficit and kill the debt?)
So only opportunities with a path to economic profitability should be researched?
That is a very narrow view of advancing society
Research anything and everything on your own dime. if it's taxpayer's money, then yes, it has to have at least a probability of profitability.
If it could be profitable, the private sector would fund it.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
And if there is a probability of profitability then there is a market to sell that opportunity for capital.
But in a high interest rate environment some ideas just arent worth exploring.
generating private profits are the best use of public money?
I think there are a couple of misconceptions stated.
One, endowments, this is thoroughly covered by others in past threads about funding on this site and in any number of articles elsewhere. University endowments are directed to specific purposes and largely do not cover basic science, nor can they be redirected to do at will. This is not a discretionary research fund.
Two, the private sector funds projects on time horizons that are far too short for fundamental discoveries to reach a technology readiness level that supports commercial R&D efforts, and in many cases, is unwilling to fund the commercial development too. You're frequently looking at a decade plus for fundamental R&D, with massive upfront costs and no clear commercialization path. Even if you have something that is ready for commercial development, it's still an uphill battle to get across the valley of death with patient capital.
> The private sector can fund projects which are opportunities with an economic basis
The private sector can only fund easy low hanging fruit productization projects (Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, …) once the hard public fundamental research and infrastructure (Internet, Rocket Science, Physics, etc…) that has no short term economic value investment is done.
As a taxpayer you should go after wasteful military spending, not scientific research.
Or the ballooning wasteful paramilitary spending to wholesale trample our Constitution and attack US civil society. Destroying an apartment building on suspicion that it houses some illegal immigrants makes negative economic sense.
> As a taxpayer I'm tired of funding everyone's project.
Some Americans took a hard look at the state of America as the world's leader in science, technology, and industry, with a ton of cutting-edge research attracting the smartest from all over the world, and decided "This sucks, can we go back to the simpler times where everyone had a factory job and they all looked and spoke like me?"
...And they might just get their wish, from how it looks.
No, they absolutely will not.
Those factory jobs are, to a first approximation, gone for good. Either they are being done by humans in other countries that not only have a cost of living less than 1/5 of ours, but also have massive supply and logistics chains built up to support them, or they have been automated. Sure, there will be a few much-ballyhooed factories built and staffed, but compared to the period after WWII, which is what most of them are thinking of, it's going to be less than a drop in the bucket.
And, for the vast majority of people, that's an unalloyed good. Factory jobs are hard on the body. Office work may have less of a nationalist mythos built up around it, but it's genuinely better for most people.
Ehh... I was just making a crass joke that MAGA might end up making America so poor that Americans would be willing to work for terrible factory jobs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you replaced "factory" with "covert drug lab" in your joke, would it get the point across?
Or will someone explain that those jobs, too, are a thing of the past...
That just seems like the straightforward maggot plan though, once you read past the marketing hopium? Assuming our new Chinese owners will be willing to let us have factories, of course.
>As a taxpayer
So like everyone else in the world that pays taxes?
The response (usually) is “OK but whatabout the $X billion we spent on the military?”
Which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it doesn’t answer why or whether we should be spending so much money on everything else
I actually agree here too. America (and Americans) spend waaaay too much, and especially on niche things that profit very specific subgroups. We need to get back to the basics. Johnny can't read[1], or do math. That should be funded long before we worry about today's PhDs, those kids are the pipeline of future PhDs.
/r
[1]-https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2024/11/15/kids-cant-...
The state/local gov tend to be responsible for public education funding. in the US federal gov only does <10% of the funding.
US public education spending is also top 5 in the world so I don't think a lack of money is why "Johnny can't read or do math", something else is going on
> We cant seem to keep trade secrets anyways.
Zero sum thinking.
It is possible that we can improve the entire world and ourselves, but for many the reasoning is "It's not enough that I should win: others must also lose."
That is not zero sum thinking. It is a classic free rider problem.
The free rider problem is a natural consequence of all-encompassing progressions that benefit multiple parties at the least expense of themselves and each other.
Even the logic behind a pareto optimum necessitates the presence of the free rider problem, to prove the point.
The problem is the competitive landscape by which other nations which are Anti- us, are taking but not giving. And are happy to see us go down the drain to their own profit.
It's less about zero sum and more about the existence of enemies in the world who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly. (to speak like dilbert)
> who are even willing to lose smally if we lose bigly
Realistically though, this has nothing to do with geopolitics. This wouldn't be happening if the research community were driving around in trucks with MAGA flags and sleeping with Dear Leader body pillows.
This regime is entirely transactional and it's a howler to pretend otherwise. The academic research community could be dealing literal tons of hard drugs and they'd get a pass as long as they were card carrying party members.
fix the deficit and kill off the debt? he added $2tn by giving tax cuts to corporations...
I agree. Just because I agree with 1 thing "He" did doesnt mean I agree with everything.
So it's clear that cutting those grants was never about fixing the deficit/debt.
You don't understand how science works... you wouldn't have nuclear reactors or GPS etc if it wasn't for government run projects
I think you're asking a good question and it's not unreasonable at all.
The way I see it, the private sector is in a place to even potentially be able to fund research because of prior publicly funded research.
The capital expenditure needed to fund research in a way that leads to breakthroughs is massive. Private sector doesn't always have the cash needed. Definitely this was true for a long time, and is true for many countries still.
Then generally the private sector is pretty risk adverse, the majority of private sector funds are retirement and savings. People don't want to risk that, so it tends to invest in short term or more known ventures, which is rarely research.
Some private funding is research moonshots, but the pool of private money interested in that is a lot smaller.
That means, at least historically, private funding simply isn't incentivized to properly fund research, and may not always have the means to do so.
Now should the public still fund it? What kind of ROI does society gets?
Again, at least historically, the ROI has been massive. Let's just look at a short list:
- Internet - GPS - Semiconductor - MRI/CT scans - Vaccines - Jet engine, aviation - Lithium Ion batteries - Touchscreens - AI - Fracking - Mass agriculture - Space exploration
You could also question investment in art and humanities. Private sector simply isn't interested. Do we want to learn about our history, preserve our arts, these don't have financial ROI, but depending on your opinion on the matter they could be societal ROI because you might want to live in a society with a rich culture and record of its heritage and a good understanding of its evolutionary roots and what not.
To be honest, it's hard to find a single private sector breakthrough that wasn't off the back of the public sector either through direct funding, prior discovery or indirect subsidy.
I feel the issue is that after the public funding achieves breakthrough, the private sector quickly capitalizes on the profits. At the same time, the private sector is really good at commercializing and finding efficiency and market fit. The ROI happens indirectly, society modernizes through access to new things, the private sector creates jobs, taxes are paid on private transactions and income generated from the discovery, etc.
At the end of the day, it's all opportunity cost. What else do we do with the money. You said paying down the dept, what's the societal ROI of that? Why not lay down the dept with some of the other tax money? Etc. It's a complex question.
1) Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
2) How do you feel about the money going to ICE?
Increasing money supply vs taxation is kinda just misdirection. It's politically disadvantageous to increase the tax % versus just siphoning purchasing power out of cash holders pockets silently and through the back door of increasing money supply.
Not sure why it matters what I feel about ICE, besides an attempt to categorize me or my affiliations. However, in general I believe the US has a large amount of very silly self inflicted wounds, a terrible immigration policy has lead to a situation where people only/primarily get in illegally, and then those people have to make compromising choices based on their legality. Attempting to reset the playing field is noble, but fixing the path to legality would have been nobler. A big chunk of it is a waste of money in an attempt to chase the holy grail in America... "Jobs".
> Tax dollars don't fund the government. The government funds the government. That's what "Fiat currency" means.
There was $4.9 trillion in revenue and $6.8 trillion in outlays in 2024 [1]. 95% of that revenue was from taxes. In spite of the high deficit, it remains a true statement that the federal government is funded by taxes as they account for the majority of funding.
[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185
The money would be spent regardless of what is collected through taxes. It's not as though taxpayer money goes into a gigantic bag in the treasury, and then those same dollars get pulled out to fund public spending until the bag is empty.
How should one orient themselves and their career if they wanted to work to increase funding to scientific development? Outside the obvious "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself"
Editing to clarify: this is not a hypothetical. This is something that I've been trying to do previously and am interested in doing a better job at in the future.
work to restore public trust in science and technology. look at the ways that trust has been lost.
There has been a decades-long push by a consortium of the wealthiest companies in the world to undermine faith in science by pushing money directly to media companies. I'm not sure how you work to undo that, but that seems like the best place to start.
That is increasingly becoming next to impossible in the current environment of 'influencers' trying to capture attention by amplifing every possible conspiracy theory.
The thing about science is that you need to be aware of, and accept the scientific method. There is no absolute truth, and future data can contradict established theory.
Unfortunately, this is often used to attack science by claiming that 'scientists change their mind all the time', and hence <insert unwanted result here> should not be relied upon since scientists cannot 'prove' or guarantee that they know the absolute truth. Never mind that the alternate position offered often doesn't have a shred of evidence. As long as it's delivered with absolute confidence, a vast majority of people will accept it.
We really need to do a much better job of teaching the essence of the scientific method in schools.
Trust was "lost" through naked demagoguery.
I’ve been working on splitting an idea out from government-funded academia into an industry-supported non-profit. Universities kind of like that, and industries (at least in my scientific domain) are fairly receptive to consortium-type arrangements.
Of course, industry is pretty gun-shy right now too, due to the general economic conditions and AI sucking all the investment out of everything else. So it’s not going according to plan.
Why is "make a boatload of money doing something obscenely profitable and distribute the money yourself" off the table?
Companies and wealthy individuals can and do fund research, maybe not as much as in the past but why not encourage it?
It's certainly on the table, I'm only pre-empting it as a clever answer since it's one I'm already aware of.
In the end, charity, philanthropy and patronage can't achieve much more than help us feel good about massive inequalities. Not that it is completely useless, but if we want to have actual institutions carrying serious research we need public funding.
Companies and wealthy individuals don't fund the same research as the government.
The government funds research that other scientists think is important. That's long term, often not flashy, meat and potatoes kind of stuff.
Companies tend to have very short time horizons. And wealthy individuals want splashy things. None of these are an option if the federal government is going away.
Become a politician or a lobbyist? Possibly work in a charity that funds research, as a fundraiser for them?
I am trying to figure out how to run for office, e.g. state legislature. (NC) But it is complicated, and you have to register way in advance. Not sure how to get the word out and/or money, although the paperwork and getting on the ballot, isn't heinous. Also not sure how to make this work if there's already a dem incumbent in your district.
I want to run on this topic, and election/democratic reform so we can cut to the nib of it, but it's rough when I'm in a blue/gerrymandered district in a red state. Would want to challenge an actual red incumbent.
You have to focus on the primary elections and even then it will be tough. The party will have its favorites, who are people who have devoted years of work or a lot of money or both. If your message resonates with your constituents however, if you have time to get out and talk to people, and you are reasonably charismatic and don't come off like a complete noob or wacko, you can win a primary election and then you're on the general ballot.
Remember that pretty much only political junkies vote in the primaries. You need to identify those groups and target them hard. Don't worry about the general public, they are not paying attention.
There are also plenty of behind-the-scenes roles where you can help elect people and influence them. Start showing up at your local Dem meetings and talking to people and see what clicks.
Run for election on this platform.
The challenge is to convince Republican voters that science has utility.
I briefly looked into this myself ( earlier in my life ) and decided that the "make a boatload and distribute it yourself" method really wouldn't help that much in scientific funding overall . Even if you made 10 million a year, and donated 99% of that, that would only help a handful of labs, which is something. Most science funding is orders of magnitude larger than that, and is on a scale that only nation-states can actually support. IMHO that translates to, if you want to have the biggest impact on science funding (including increasing the amount of funding), the best way would be to work in policy either at the NIH/NSF/etc. itself, as a congressional staffer specializing in science policy, an advocacy nonprofit (such as for a particular rare disease or a bigger, more popular one), or finally as a fundraiser/staff member at an independent science funding organization like the Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or more specialized institutes like the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
I don't work in the science-fundraising space, but my gut tells me that now would be a good time to do the last option: with the Trump admin interested in trying to reduce the NIH's budget by 40%, researchers are increasingly looking to non-federal sources of money to continue doing their (expensive) research, like the private science-granting organizations mentioned above. At the same time, there's probably a lot of philanthropists who recognize how terribly shortsighted decreasing the NIH's budget is, and who are willing to contribute more to private science funders in an effort to fill the gap.
There are large numbers, and then there are even larger numbers.
Academic research is roughly $100 billion a year in the US. A foundation with $2 trillion could support that indefinitely with the required 5% minimum distributions. By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
I don't know worldwide numbers, but 4x the US is usually a good rule of thumb. You would probably need the 100–150 richest people to support all academic research worldwide.
> By today's numbers, the seven richest Americans could fund that.
Yes, they could, by paying their taxes.
But we’ve all seen that they really don’t want to share any of their wealth for any purpose, other than propping up a geriatric orange clown that campaigned on lowering their taxes.
PS: I said their taxes, not yours. Yours are going up, they’re just called tariffs, but that’s a tax: tariffs are your money getting collected by the government.
Move to Europe.
Elaborate?
https://commission.europa.eu/topics/research-and-innovation/...
My question was from the context of non-research staff looking to provide financial and institutional support to research staff - looks like your resource is useful for researchers but not for me. thanks in any case.
Combating funding drains in other areas that aren't productive, are secretive or are potentially even fraudulent so that more money is available for the things that matter.
Essentially what DOGE has been trying to do.
There is certainly a case to be made for efficiently managing resources but DOGE's chainsaw methodology was a disaster. It had no comprehension whatsoever of what it was cutting, as we saw with frequent firing of vital divisions and then having to hire them back, its keyword approach to grant cancelling which resulted in trans-panic resulting in genetic research that included the word "transgenic". Worst of all were its broad workplace policies of offering deferred retirement and firing probationary employees. These disproportionately effected the most talented employees who could find employment in the private sector.
No, they really haven't.
That DOGE was so ineffective in the most DOGE-friendly political climate possible (Trump admin, republican control) kinda torpedoed the hypothesis that there's so much wasteful spending in the US government.
Musk went in thinking that $2T waste would be trivial to find yet fell so short of it that DOGE was disbanded within a year.
DOGE never had any strong legal mandate or financing by congress, it was rushed in and a small team operated on the edges of what OBM/federal heads were allowed to do... which wasn't much, so they did a lot of flashy mostly meaningless stuff.
It was an idea that was never earnestly pursued and highly constrained by not being a formal agency with real power (see: reforming DoD or untouchable golden eggs), and all the transparency that comes with being a real agency with an explicit mandate... So it burned public trust pretty quickly.
reducing wasteful government spending is an admirable goal but DOGE seems in mine and many others estimation to have focused less on reducing wasteful spending (overpaying for simple services, unnecessary doublings of effort, overly complex procedures etc) and was instead used to cut programs this administration has ideological disagreements with. Cutting programs it finds disagreeable is certainly this admin's right, but strange and dishonest to cloak it with talk of "efficiency" which is badly needed.
optimizing processes =/= removing goals
DOGE’s only consistent priority was ensuring that African children starve to death or die of preventable diseases. They didn’t do anything at all about, say, Kristi Noem buying two private jets, because they weren’t allowed to care about wasteful spending that benefits Trump and his goons.
I expect China will pick up the slack.
For basic research, which tends to be non-excludable/non-rival, this isn't even a bad thing! I hope India and other fast-growing nations join them!
Specially when their research is more hard science focused and spend very little on the soft sciences that tend to get way more funding in the US.
Seems like they already do:
"Research and development (R&D) funding of China reached 3.6 trillion yuan ($496 billion) in 2024, with an 8.3% increase year-on-year, the South China Morning Post reported on Friday.
Investments in basic research increased by 10.5% from 2023 to 249.7 billion yuan ($34.46 billion) in 2024, or 6.91% of the total R&D spending."
Private companies in China also do a lot of basic research, here is a quote from the Huawei founder:
---
Q: How do you view basic research?
A: When our country possesses certain economic strength, we should emphasize theory, especially basic research. Basic research doesn't just take 5-10 years—it generally takes 10, 20 years or longer. Without basic research, you plant no roots. And without roots, even trees with lush leaves fall at the first wind. Buying foreign products is expensive because their prices include their investment in basic research. So whether China engages in basic research or not, we still have to pay—the question is whether we choose to pay our own people to do this basic research.
We spend roughly 180RMB billion a year on R&D; about 60 billion goes to basic research with no KPIs, while around 120 billion is product‑oriented and is assessed.
---
Great. Can I start blaming China for not solving all the worlds problems yet?
Not yet. This is the transitional period where the US is blamed and laughed at and then finally abandoned for China.
Don't you worry. If they do, we will just call them copycats. /s
Certainly but US policy changes every 4 years and China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed. I think it will with China somewhat similar how it was back in the day with the udssr where economists were predicting its economy would outgrow the economy of the USA by 1994 and then 1991 or so it died. Could imagine something similar might be awaiting china
Despite China's fertility rate plummeting to 1.09, the country has a demographic cushion that will carry it through mid-century without serious economic consequences. China's "Alpha" generation (currently ages 6-16) is a large demographic echo of its massive Baby Boom, and will stabilize the workforce through the 2020s and keep the dependency ratio favorable until at least 2030. China's dependency ratio won't surpass America's until the mid-2040s. Two straightforward policy levers -- raising the retirement age from 50-60 to 65 and dramatically increasing college enrollment (already jumped from 26.5% to 60.2% since 2010) -- will offset all effects of gradual aging over the next 25 years. Real demographic strain won't materialize until post-2050 when the large Millennial generation retires without a comparable replacement cohort. The idea that demographics will erode China's competitive position in the next two decades is overblown.
If you want to talk demographics, there are a lot of places that are way worse off than China. Obviously there are the usual suspects, S.Korea and Japan, but also Germany, Italy, and Spain. (Europe's largest economies, France aside... and I'm not so sure about France!) All of them have demographic situations that are far worse than China's, unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
>unless you genuinely subscribe to the notion that they can somehow be fixed via mass immigration from third-world countries.
There are a lot of people who do subscribe to that, mainly people who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Heck, the entire Biden administration believed that.
China no longer has a one-child policy and is now actively focusing policies and incentives on increasing childbirth. Although it’s not going to yield immediate results, the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
> the PRC operates on long time horizons and will probably succeed long-term in raising birth rates.
That would make them the first country to do so, I think. Others have tried and nothing has worked. But China will likely become rich before it gets old, so it may not matter.
Did you mean to say "But China will likely become old before it gets rich"?
Their population is declining already and they have a very long way to go before being considered "rich", so I haven't seen many projections for what you said. If you meant it, I'd be curious to know why.
China's middle class is already larger than the entire US population, and growing fast. It won't be rich in the sense that say Switzerland or Norway are rich. But it seems safe to say they won't be barely scraping by.
IMO, India likely won't make this transition. It's population is still growing but it's birth rate is sinking fast (like most everywhere else).
And China's lower class is nearly double the size of the US population, making a median of $150 per month.
India's demographics don't look as bad as China's, so I'm not sure why you're less optimistic about them.
lol, no. it will not even maintain its current extinction-tier TFR of 1.02, let alone maintain its current population.
like every other civilized people, the Chinese have largely realized that the game is rigged and the only winning move is not to play. the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do. even the current TFR of 1.0-1.5 in the civilized world is largely inertial, and it will continue to fall. South Korean 0.7 will seem mind-bogglingly high a hundred years from now,
and 1CP was such a predictably disastrous idea that I seriously doubt the forward-thinking you seem to believe the CCP to posses.
>the only way to "fix" the birth rate is to reject humanity (education, urbanization, technology) and retvrn to monke (subsistence farming, arranged marriages, illiteracy, superstition), which no civilized country will ever do.
They won't do it willingly. That just means it will happen without their input.
sure, they could, hypothetically, close the borders and begin a campaign of forced insemination, but those babies would have no fathers to provide for them, and the state - any state - really resents footing the bill for child rearing, going as far as forcing victims of infidelity, fraud, or rape to pay child support. the state - any state - wants to give you as little as possible and to take as much as possible from you, for the delta between giving and receiving is its lifeblood.
the ideal family has two full-time working parents, paying a mortgage and car loans, consuming as many high-margin domestic products as possible, rearing as many children (future laborers and consumers) as possible, with little to no assistance from the state. and you simply can't have that by force. if you could, you might as well drop the pretense and openly treat your population as slaves.
The USSR didn't have the advantage of getting all the manufacturing supply chains in its soil funded by customers of the products it produced.
If there's one thing China learnt from the USSR was on how to be part of the globalisation push, and get as an advantageous of a position as they possibly could, in that the CCP has been very successful.
We will see if the shift to more authoritarianism from Xi will unwind that but China's future, with all its issues, is starting to look brighter than whatever the USA has become. Perhaps limiting the influence of the finance industry has a much better long-term prospect, it's very much one of the major flaws of the American system leading from the 1980s.
>China has a gigantic one child policy issue which just can't be changed
...the one that was changed a decade ago?
Unless you can retroactively birth children or import a shit ton of people (not practical in China, for all sorts of political and cultural reasons), the effects of a gigantic missing part of that age demographic can't be replaced. He's right, there's no way to fix that, other than wait long enough that those birth years would already be dead anyway.
Children are not important. China has more than enough population to outdo the US in science. But also, the majority of US high end science is done by immigrants, not by people born in the US. Science is international, and the US has destroyed its trust and goodwill with the international community.
He was commenting on the use of the present tense word "has".
Yes present tense. The policy has been reversed, but the issue can't be except in the very long run, except possibly through immigration.
He didn't say the policy can't be changed. It was. The issue, not so easily.
China has a population growth problem. They had a one child policy problem.
???
Gotta stop those people who don't look like us, right?
What’s sad is how tiny an investment this is relative to their parts of the Federal budget. It will have almost no impact on the Federal deficit (which will be higher than ever this year)
It’s entirely performative
https://archive.md/F42n9
Not if you’re a vaccine skeptic and personal friends with the CDC director https://www.statnews.com/2025/12/18/cdc-grant-controversial-...
...and just like that, the reproducibility crisis is forgotten.
Seriously, it's amazing how fast we can go from "man, scientific research sure is a mess, wtf are all these people doing anyway?" to "How dare you mess with the status quo?!"
It's worth remembering that American academic science has for years been training far more grad students than they could ever hope to eventually give tenure to, or even place in tenure track jobs (only to be denied at the last step). Instead, PhD graduates spend years working in the precariat of "soft-funding". The result is a desperate publish-or-perish culture that leads to all the ills we see so often on the HN front page: unreproducible results, p-hacking, etc.
This entire toxic environment is created and sustained by universities that demand that their faculty have independently funded research programs, that put a third or more of their grant funds into the university general fund via indirect fees.
This is the status quo that is being disrupted. It is pretty reasonable to assume that the majority of young researchers whose careers are getting derailed were not going to make tenure or publish anything anyway, and they have in fact been done a favor.
The counterargument to this is that we should deliberately fund many researchers who we know will never actually produce anything useful because that's how we find the few actual geniuses who will produce useful things. There is something to this argument, but we should be clear up front to the students about their true prospects.
Academia is tough, and things are bad enough to complain about it.
However, you have (understandably) fallen in a trap of rationalization. This is not an earnest effort to improve. As it stands now, the damage of the conservative rage is measured in decades needed for repair. As in: the intended effect.
I have linked it a few times, but I am happy to do it once more, because I can surely understand the genuine confusion people have about these things:
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/103517-001-A/capitalism-in-ame...
If the problem is, as I posit that it is, that universities cynically exploit cheap labor in the form of grad students and postdocs in order to keep indirect funds flowing into the universities' accounts', then many earnest efforts to improve would necessarily involve putting a lot of researchers out of work, and that improvement would be a good thing.
My issue is with the uncritical defense of the status quo in both the article and most of the comments. Though I suppose I can understand the impulse for scientists to say that the field's problems are internal, to be dealt with internally, and that the government needs to just give the money they ask for and not make any effort to see or change how the sausage is made.
The status quo is not in focus, let alone I would defend it. Your concerns about the status quo are really valid imho, how they should be dealt with would be an interesting other subject, but they are not a concern for the conservative movement, nor are there any signs one could expect even unintended good consequences. As such, as well-intending you might be, it only adds to confusion.
The bad consequences are, from a historical perspective, the least of a surprise.
"This programme is not available in your country." (i.e. USA) Oh the irony. You'll have to make the argument yourself, I guess.
I think the broadcast license is restricted to EUR area. Proton vpn is free though. I recommend to take the hassle, it is a great historical documentary in three parts.
Usually, when something is broken the correct course of action is to fix it, not demolish it utterly.
We WARMLY welcome all researchers here in Europe! Please come, we love science (and arts) and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
You might welcome them all, but you don't have jobs for most of them.
Still better than the US where they have no jobs AND they are persecuted...
Trust me, every scientist in America has been clawing for every eurpoean research grant opportunity there is. Competition is stiff
> and want to build an inclusive, open-minded society together!
Which will be guaranteed by strict monitoring of your private chats!
Well, we're still fighting against this. Still better than the US situation though
Not caring about global positive externalities of science is the flip side of not caring about the global negative externalities of pollution. So at least the Trump administration is being consistent.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/02/upshot/trump-...
A critical analysis of this article is that they got a staffing cut, and since they were afraid they wouldn't spend their yearly budget in time the Office of the director simply paid themselves 138% of their prior budget despite having fewer employees to avoid losing the money.
One also wonders if the reduced funding correlates with more politically focused labs. Certainly the goal of the administration was to avoid giving money to DEI/politically adjacent research, and while I've definitely seen professors take computer science money and throw it towards social science research, I'm not sure what amount of the 8% decrease in funding that might be.
One positive note is universities have been known to abuse students (particularly international/visa students) by making them work in the lab for 5, 6, or 7 years. By restructuring grants to be 4-5 years, and giving the four years of funding up front, professors will be more incentivized to get students out in four years so they can enter industry.
More wood behind less arrows.
This is good.
Most research is universal basic income for PhDs with no really benefit. Even worse, most research can’t be reproduced anymore.
We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those. After being associated with academia and research, the whining and crying of random PhDs are all in their own self interest but not in OUR collective self interest. Most research doesn’t deserve funding.
>We need to identify the highest quality research projects and fund those.
Congratulations, you have described the system that's been in place for decades.
Everything is about "AI", "crypto" and substance grifting. There is no place for real science or useful economic activities like building houses.
Here is the latest fake poll that the Crypto/AI/Substance czar posted and that was retweeted by Musk, who claimed to be an "AI" skeptic not so long ago:
https://xcancel.com/DavidSacks/status/2003141873049952684#m
Getting favors for billionaires is all that these people are concerned about.
It's like three body problem but fintech chuds are the sophons
Well, the purpose of the whole thing is to harden humanity against downfalls, distribute it all away from the people (who might become religous fanatics and analphabets) and away from the governments these people produce (insane clerics and tyrannical military dictators). The idea is to get infrastructure and software that can keep humanity going regardless. If you get research done beneath a bhurka under the taliban after a regional nuclear exchange then we reached the mile-stone of "civilizational" root hardening this whole affair aims towards.
Hey al-Biruni and Ulugh Beg did it, why not?
If you need links for the "substance" part. Investments of Sacks:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/cannabis-logistics-startup...
https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/13/telemedicine-adderall-vyva...
Trump relaxes cannabis classification:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/trump-cannab...
Please convince me how gov. funding is better than the private sector. Before people jump to the "late capitalism and everything will be profit-incentivized" bandwagon, I fail to see how things like finding a new good medicine/the next propulsion system/new most efficient energy solution/etc. cannot be linked into the more theoretical fields, which I'm assuming are some of, if not most of the positions/areas of science affected by this.
Everything can be "sold", especially in today's age with the new methods of discoverability. But I would argue scientists don't need to "sell" something in the capitalist sense. They need to link the hope of a new discovery to inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. Sure, some things might "fail" to continue by failing to adjust to the markets, or some scientific discoveries might be used for bad things (ethically), but this is (1) both inevitable and (2) the responsibility of the scientists & the people buying the end product/service. If I'm not mistaken, most bad/evil/etc. discoveries were made by scientists working FOR the government/king/etc. throughout history. If anything, democratizing science through the capitalist markets seems like a more beneficial way to develop self-sustaining science. The key thing is transparency, which can be less present in the private sector, especially when corruption is involved(assuming transparency is demanded by the gov.).
Let me counter with this: Can you point out one country in the post world war era that had minimal government investment in science but had very productive scientific output? Or can you point out one country where scientific productivity increased after public sector investment in science was slashed?
> Everything can be "sold"
How do you sell having lost $50M on research which ultimately went nowhere?
If you can't, then how do you guarantee that your research will always bear fruit?
The bottom line is: You have to be willing to fund MASSIVELY-expensive losses in addition to wins in order to make real progress. Scientists aren't magicians.
For every success there are countless failures which you don't hear about.
That's not how science works. Fundamental science works on much longer timescales (10/20/50/100 years), that are not accessible to companies
This is anecdotal but as a current PhD student who was doing research at a large tech company for a few years prior to this, the incentives as an individual are very different across the two programs. In tech even in a research role there was little to no incentive to dive deeper into potential high-risk, high-reward research because your career trajectory was determined by maximizing certain metrics for promotion cases. The general vibe among my coworkers was spend your day on the guaranteed progress projects and then go home. This was actively incentivized by leadership who asked for frequent progress updates especially as AI began to takeoff.
As a grad student so far though I've found the incentives to be very locally driven and the kind of research you can do is almost wholly determined by yourself and your advisor. This can be good or bad but if you find an advisor who is in a stable spot (tenured or nearly-tenured) and not a jerk they'll generally give you leeway to pursue what you believe to be high-impact work even if it doesn't align with the general consensus on what to do next, especially if you have proven credentials and a clear image of a research plan in mind. Additionally progress is largely driven by the individual so there's a larger personal motivation to really delve into a problem and be consumed by it. For me personally, I have access to significantly fewer resources than before but have gained the freedom and time to not be attached to the paper-mill or some measurable metric and am spending months of my time trying to get at a deeper problem than I ever would have been able to in industry. While this may be different than the usual narrative about academia, I think it's more true than people say since there are such huge variations in how academia works as a result of school, advisor, and the individual researchers themselves. The disgruntled tend to be those who complain the most while those happy with the field are busy doing other things. I'd compare my experience in academia thus far to the startup of the research world whereas the industry jobs (at least in tech) consume far more resources and are pressed to provide steady, measurable impact. Maybe it's upsetting that we do waste some resources on stupid research which does exist, but the odds of getting a researcher like Einstein dedicating 10 years to discovering relativity in an industry job are vanishingly small. I'll probably be unsuccessful but there are 100's of people in my field doing related but different approaches and this kind of swarm approach is more likely to give a fundamental discovery on a population level than the large alignment of goals found in private research who would do a great job building on any basic science discovered in academia. I don't think it's wasted resources if 99 researchers fail in different ways and 1 succeeds since traversing the tree is inherently valuable even if most of the leaf nodes are failure. That's far more likely to happen in academia imo than industry.
It's not that private sector funding is inherently worse, but in reality it is different and as such will lead to different results due to how people and our economic system at large work. While I'm sure there are exceptions where individuals at private research labs are highly-motivated and feel the push to go the extra mile and try to find some deeper truth than is necessary for their personal well-being, in my experience many doing research at these companies are apathetic as a direct result of the environment in which it's being conducted. It's hard to feel motivated to make a large step in basic science when you think it'll just be consumed by the large institution you exist within who's stock price you have no real effect on rather than being open-sourced for peoples' benefit. We should have diversity in how we fund science.
Thank you for the detailed insight. You've touched on an aspect that outsiders (like me) cannot truly grasp but can only guess about: motivation. And it's definitely true, motivation in the private sector is somewhat harder (you've explained it best), or at least motivation compared to the majority of the private companies; but, like you've mentioned, it doesn't seem like it's a problem with the system itself but with the kind of environments that grow in companies. Corporate culture is, more often than not, very toxic, especially when big money is involved (and/or big ideas; the subject of research could be even more important than money in science).
Or maybe it is a problem with the structure that fosters an environment. What comes to my mind is the exceptional case of OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit. Sure, it "ended badly" because of the known drama, but my guess is that besides the money that was poured into it, it thrived because researchers had kind of an "emotional safety net," meaning that they wouldn't be pressured for results as much. Probably the reason some startups perform much better too.
I think career continuity matters, and you don't necessarily get that in the private sector for sure. This discontinuity then leads to practical work discontinuity, which means less work done (which is amplified by the non-decentralized nature of working in private compared to shared science in public, as you've explained).
My bottom line is that the private field could do better, and frankly it's kind of their loss. What I'm curious about is whether a "semi-private" approach is better: a non-profit or some kind of foundation. I guess in practice they're still private, but whether the money part can be "solved" through crowdfunding/some modern methods and whether they're viable long-term remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: a culture appreciative of science will definitely open more doors into novel methods of funding and organizing (maybe in the future these methods could rival the "traditional ways" of public science).
Cause goverments funds basic research and private sector does not. Also, results of private sector research are secret, patented and generally dont create competitive markets.
The amount of basic research funded by the private sector has been growing for decades. It is now a large percentage of the total in the US.
Government investment didn’t decline, private investment massively grew. Same thing happened in applied research decades earlier.
> The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding
Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.
For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2
As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...
It tightened its hold by shrinking its portfolio as the article describes.
"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.
When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.
Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.
The "unitary executive theory" is neither new nor novel. It was discussed and described from the beginning by the framers of the Constitution. It was further reinforced by SCOTUS in Myers (1926).
Which makes sense when you considering the ENTIRE Executive Branch reports to the President (aka chief executive) and leverages that authority for anything they do. They cannot exist counter-to or independent-of that individual.
The "decision-making independence" concept is newer and came about just around WW2, likely due to FDR's control of the system, threats to pack the courts, and more.
Any "independent" agency, activity, etc should be inherently suspicious as it doesn't have checks & balances defined and OFTEN defines its own authority.. inviting abuse and trouble.
This isn't new. My father told me 50 years ago, "never work for the government, because your job exists at the whims of whoever gets elected."
You're conflating two very different things. You're correct that civil service reforms sought to ensure employees would be hired based on merit. But that does not mean they were granted "decision-making independence." The point was to have highly qualified people executing the agenda of the elected President--not to allow them to exercise discretion independent of political forces.
In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:
> The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.
> That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.
> This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.
So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.
The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.
Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.
This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).
There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.
> Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.
The purpose of civil service reform was to end patronage, not to insulate the civil service from political supervision. The idea was to have well-credentialed employees, instead of political donors, carrying out the policies of the elected President. It was not to have employees exercising power independently of the policies of the President.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was enacted in 1883. Four decades later, former President Taft wrote Myers v. United States, which still reflected the conventional view that the President was actually in charge of the executive branch.
> What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.
If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...
Because after 100 years of growth there was very little room left to keep hiring people, due to pressure on cap of taxes, that's part of why Trump had to resort trying to go back to firing.
Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.
Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.
> Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point
Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.
Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).
> So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group.
Can you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way? If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
There was massive sabotage of the first Trump administration. We're talking about administration lawyers not reporting case developments to political employees in order to keep the political appointees in the dark.
Which activities specifically were sabotaged? Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.
My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
> You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible and merely making your assertion true doesn't rule out the latter being true.
Again, this isn’t a hypothetical. The administration has recently been deploying political appointees to prosecute cases the career employees thought were too weak, and they’ve had little success at even securing indictments. The reason Trump and his supporters insist on dragging the discussion to hypotheticals is that all of the concrete things they feel have been “sabotaged” are either impossible or illegal.
You presented it as a non-concrete, without an example. I don't believe this makes you a Trump "supporter" as you put it. The example you gave preceding it was of a Muslim ban working.
I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.
I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.
> Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.
Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.
> You mention case developments,
I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.
> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.
The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.
Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.
The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.
>an you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way?
DOGE vs USAID
>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?
I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.
DOGE were not "civil servants" in the slightest. And USAID tried to sabotage DOGE?? Your entire worldview is backwards. (Looking through your past posts and yiikes yeah)
Yes, it’s true that Trump specifically has instructed civil servants to sabotage each other. You know why this is a dishonest answer, so I don’t see the point of continuing this conversation. The day will come when your heroes face the consequences of pointlessly killing all the children USAID helped, and you beg for everyone to forget you ever supported it; I look forward to rubbing the salt in your wounds, but until then I have no interest in what you have to say.
In the before times the close eyes were by directors and funding committees at the institutes like NIH and NSF. Now those roles are played by political appointees and funds controlled at the whim of the office of the President and their fundamentally anti-science agenda.
> That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.
> grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.
For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).
Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.
Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.
The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate. To the extent that the electorate trusts experts to set those priorities, it will vote for politicians that delegate a large amount of discretion to those experts. If the experts lose the confidence of the electorate, then a properly designed system will retract that discretion.
For the most part, the system that exists today actually reflects that design. The statute and associated regulations for the most part invest authority in "the Director." The Director can rely on committees of experts, etc., but it's more by convention.
> The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate.
Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.
> Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS.
We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose. “Decide how to use this big block of money to advance health” falls pretty comfortably within the scope of “executing the law” rather than “making the law.”
> That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority.
The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
> it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in
It’s not symmetric, because government employees and government-funded NGOs aren’t power centers for the right, especially the new right. Is President AOC going to lay off all the staff at PBS making programming promoting conservative values? Or cut all the federal grants to Heritage and Fed Soc?
I’d be thrilled if AOC openly ran on extreme promises like Trump did (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform) and then, if she won, started knocking them out. For one thing, I don’t think she could win by promising to open the borders, increase free trade, bring back racial preferences in small business loans, or put more power back in the hands of federal employees angling for jobs at companies they regulate. And if she runs and wins on something like breaking up big banks or raising taxes, then that’s fine.
More generally, I think a lot of our political dysfunction comes from the fact that, regardless of who wins the election, the government is run by the PMCs. No matter who you vote for, what you’ll actually get is managerial neoliberalism with a side of identity politics and mass immigration. Instead, Democrats should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win. Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
> We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose
Yeah, this is the hack that's being run right now. Indeed, the United States runs on norms to a large degree, and a small group of people have decided that if something isn't spelled out explicitly, that gives them untold unilateral power in the gray areas to do whatever they want because again, they've achieved a >50% margin in a single election, so therefore that makes them king for 4 years.
The norm that has worked out well for everyone for decades has been that we trust experts to run their own systems, because we understand that political interference from the government is suboptimal and leads to cronyism. Now, for some reason it's the conservatives who have a problem with this arrangement, and want to involve themselves to the point they are filtering by keywords what's allowed to be researched, big government at it's best.
So now, a system that took decades to build, which was the envy of the world in terms of research output, and which has been beneficial to US GDP and national security, is decimated in a few years time because a small group of people didn't like what they saw.
In this new Unitary Executive world, long-term research projects can only happen as long as Democrats have political control, because every time a Republican president comes into office they will shut down all research projects they don't like. I don't think it will work out well but we will see.
> The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.
But Congress cannot reliably affect a tyranny -- they're too fractious, they are reelected as a whole every 2 years, and their priorities are too local. Moreover, the minority actually has power in Congress, even if it's just power to block progress. This is why they are supposed to be invested with more power than the President.
> Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
They did and they have (Project 2025) which is why we got torture prisons, rampant bribery and corruption, and a complete power / money grab from the Oval Office on down. I actually love that this is happening because we finally get to see the Conservative political project come to fruition. Finally we can stop pretending it was about "maintaining US institutions" and "preserving the soul of the nation". They are finally saying "we will go to war for the oil" instead of pretending it was about defending freedom and liberty. It's a nice change of pace.
But anyway, I don't agree this is something that should happen. What you're proposing will just going to lead to political instability as subsequent administrations flip back and forth. In feedback control systems we call that a "divergence" and it usually precedes total system collapse.