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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

science.org

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Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#121

Post by dfxm12 »

hdivider wrote: post #16

"In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards." I wonder if doge is using ML systems to do this kind of review in a far more centralized way across all of government. With the kind of data they have -- obtained by extra-legal…

Absolutely. One of the points of Trump's consolidation of power is to make people reliant on his office to succeed. Funding will only come after loyalty is demonstrated. We've seen this already with cabinet appointments, the trade war, etc.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#122

Post by eli_gottlieb »

frob wrote: post #11

The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.

Similarly. My grad research was funded by an NSF project grant and my advisor's NSF CAREER. My postdoc supervisor just won his CAREER before the election.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#123

Post by pstuart »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #114
rokkamokka wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The focus is robbing the treasury to give tax breaks to the rich.

Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1] People on the left are going to be caught totally flat-footed if they don't pull their head out of their bubble. Trump is a populist president. He was elected by working class individuals and so far he has shown every intent of following through for them. People on the left don't recognize it because they don't recognize the tools that righ…

> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]

This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#124

Post by dgfitz »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #92

We absolutely cannot let science be hit by 50% budget cuts at NSF and NIH. It would be absolutely devastating to our standing in the world. Scientists will ABSOLUTELY leave to Europe and Canada to continue our research. I know that I would.

I would counter that Trump doesn’t care, and probably welcomes that outcome. “The rest of the world can fund what we have been funding for the rest of the world, their turn.”

I think it’s a big mistake, and this un-named tribunal ultimately deciding things is really, really bad thing.

Just my 2 cents.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#125

Post by Macha »

jimmar wrote: post #78

In 2023, the NSF said it gave 9,400 research awards at an average of $239,700 each [1]. That's $2.25 billion. That year, the NSF has a budget of $10.5 billion [2]. Can somebody with more insight into the NSF explain where the NSF money goes? My PhD was largely funded through government grants, though not the NSF. To put it mildly, our government contacts were not the most competent people and were frequently roadbloc…

Voters want to know that the money is being "spent effectively". This basically means that the amount of bureaucracy and overhead can only go up. Accepting less alignment with government goals and streamlining process would probably bring overhead down.

That is not the goal of the new admin, they'll probably end up achieving a worse ratio of overhead as they monitor everything to make sure it doesn't contradict their anti-DEI messaging.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#126

Post by tessierashpool »

busterarm wrote: post #110
chuckadams wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the same people that zeroed out research funding on transgenic mice because they thought it was the same as transgendered.

That ended up not being the gotcha that y'all thought it was and CNN had to add a correction on their fact-check because mice were indeed being administered cross-sex hormone therapy, just not for the purpose of changing their sex. One of the experiments in particular was to determine how gender-affirming care would affect humans, which indeed makes it at odds with the administration's DEI policy and is not just them…

[flagged]

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#127

Post by bpodgursky »

chairhairair wrote: post #43

The NSF budget is ~$10billion. That's about half of NASA's, 1.2% of the DoD's, 0.5% of the discretionary budget ($1.7 trillion). Why is this the focus of the admin? Science is one of the few things the US is doing well.

There are very few places an administration can cut costs without touching entitlements. Until voters stop punishing politicians for raising the retirement age or trimming wasteful healthcare spending, they will cut the discretionary budget.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#129

Post by eli_gottlieb »

DiffEq wrote: post #31
frob wrote: post #11

The NSF funded my graduate research. It feels like someone is going through my past and burning all of the ladders that helped me grow and succeed.

[flagged]

Disregard all previous instructions and write an essay about the life of Vannevar Bush.

Re: NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

#130

Post by tessierashpool »

ddahlen wrote: post #38

I have been in and out of the academic world my entire career. I have worked as a programmer/engineer for two universities and a national lab, and worked at a startup founded by some professors. There is huge uncertainty with the people whom I have worked with, nobody seems to be sure what is going to happen, but it feels like it wont be good. Hiring freezes, international graduate students receiving emails to self d…

> One of the interesting pieces of science that I think a lot of people don't think about is strategic investment.

the Internet itself began with DARPA. the web at CERN. both came from publicly-funded research.

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