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NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

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

#151

Post by Workaccount2 »

Onawa wrote: post #139
Workaccount2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement a…

As I said,

>Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers

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

#153

Post by bpodgursky »

alabastervlog wrote: post #138
bpodgursky wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Social Security doesn't come out of the general budget.

Who cares? It contributes to the deficit, which is what matters for fiscal policy.

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

#154

Post by UncleMeat »

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.

The thought leaders within the Trump administration simply hate academia. They've said it out loud over and over. Folks like Yarvin or Rufo would like the university system in the US to be reduced to smoldering ash and replaced with ideologically focused universities that exist to teach particular religious, social, and economic values.

The issue is not that they don't like the NSF in general or that science funding is breaking the bank. The issue is that people they hate rely on the NSF.

This is a pretty old belief system amongst conservatives. God and Man at Yale was published seventy years ago and argued that universities should actively teach that Christ is divine and that free market capitalism is the best thing ever at all times and in all venues.

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

#155

Post by inverted_flag »

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.

Science sometimes says things that disagree with MAGA ideology and so it must be destroyed.

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

#156

Post by ausbah »

bilbo0s wrote: post #149
cmontella wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the entire DARPA "challenge" series has been about jumpstarting the US robotics industry. People who were involved in those went on to found driverless car companies, which then went on to create a market for driverless cars, and now America is a leader in the industry. And it needed to happened because the state of American robotics was sad in 2004; the very first challenge was a disaster when all the cars ran…

[flagged]

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

#157

Post by insane_dreamer »

The fastest way for the US to lose its competitive edge and status as global leader is to reduce funding for scientific research and academic institutions. They are the Crown Jewels and the primary attraction for talent from around the world.

The damage for the next four years is done. The question is, even if there's a major shift back to sanity with the next prez elections, it'll take years to build up trust and the mechanisms, find and hire talented people willing to do the work, or even find enough talent because of all the grad students and post-docs that are _not_ employed by research labs in the next four years.

It'll take at least a decade to recover, and that may be optimistic. If others fill the gap (China will try but their credibility is low, which is the US's only saving grace), this could be a permanent degradation of the US's research capabilities.

Insane.

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

#158

Post by space-savvy »

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…

I read the papers posted by the White House to support their claim of transgendered mice . https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...

I’m not a molecular biologist, but some seemed just good solid research on women’s health, like asthma prevalence, that just happened to study a mixture of transgender individuals and mice models since both are useful for understanding androgen sensitivity. Another included research on disruptors in lutenizing hormone. It still seemed a pretty dumb thing to attack.

Not to mention transgendered people are people too, and allowed to have some medical research related to their existence.

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

#159

Post by alabastervlog »

tessierashpool wrote: post #126
busterarm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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The truth is mixed.

What the White House got wrong was characterizing the studies they canceled as being on "transgender" mice, while the mice (at least, in many cases, IDK if all of them) were not in any way "transitioned", so there's no reasonable way to describe that as being a study on "transgender mice". However, many of those studies were definitely about the effects of e.g. hormone therapy used to support human transitions.

Some language used by the White House suggests that they may indeed have thought the mice were transgender because the mice were in fact transgenic, but those studies also were related to transgender healthcare, so, it's probably not accurate to say that the confusion is why those were cancelled. It's probably because they did in fact have to do with transgender healthcare.

It is also the case that studies involving hormones that had dick-all to do with transgender healthcare were cancelled because, I guess, too many keywords matched whatever inept search the fascists did. E.g.:

https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#descriptio...

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

#160

Post by damnitbuilds »

DangitBobby wrote: post #132
damnitbuilds wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that of all the American-born citizens who could have stood against Trump, Harris was the best choice? Just no.

Who would have been your pick?

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