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PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

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Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#191

Post by rck »

dragonwriter wrote: post #123
rck wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific: > NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott. A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so…

I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.

I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.

Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#192

Post by convolvatron »

qcnguy wrote: post #169
takluyver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.

That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it. They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.

I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#193

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

iseletsk wrote: post #142
japhyr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men. There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has b…

PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential trea…

> Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.

Maybe I'm just exceptionally talented but as a white man I've never lost an opportunity because of DEI.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#194

Post by burkaman »

XCabbage wrote: post #190
burkaman wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...

Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!

It was not temporary. The victims spent substantial amounts of money suing and still lost: https://www.eenews.net/articles/appeals-court-says-epa-can-r.... Technically litigation is ongoing but there is no reason to believe they will succeed.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#195

Post by silexia »

dang wrote: post #310

[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness] (this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush) (please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley…

DEI programs are fundamentally racist. You don't fix racism with more racism.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#196

Post by acdha »

qcnguy wrote: post #169
takluyver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.

That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it. They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.

The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.

I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#197

Post by burnerRhodov2 »

takluyver wrote: post #144
burnerRhodov2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grants are at the bottom.

The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?

rip... You are right. Sorry. I exported it into excel and just looked at the column... interesting they have the same UEI?

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#198

Post by xeonmc »

numbsafari wrote: post #39
aspir wrote: post #29

This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk. Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.

The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive. US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented au…

I wonder, how likely do you think there would be a retaliatory threat of revoking PSF’s nonprofit status for a perceived snub in rejecting the offer?

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#199

Post by dragonwriter »

rck wrote: post #191
dragonwriter wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.

I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk. Interestingly, they may get more in do…

> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.

And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.

Re: PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program

#200

Post by acdha »

politician wrote: post #77
wrs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.

> I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law. The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.

Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
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