171–180 of 311 posts
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Why can’t he discriminate on political affiliation?
Because our system would fall apart every 4 years when a different party started diverting money to their cronies. How corrupt do you want a nation to be?
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There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering. "Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law . Who cares "why people can't live withou…
This isn't law, its journalism, and frankly the article is well written and asks a good question -- why are these (extremely wealthy) universities finances so brittle?
Yes there is.
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Clear example here is USAID. Congress has directed, as recently as March 2025, that a specific amount of funds be spent on the statutory goals of the US Agency for International Development. (I have not checked, but I am sure federal law also goes into some detail about what tasks USAID needs to perform.) I do not imagine it is congruent with the law to simply fire all the staff and shut down USAID (or "merge" it int…
The situations are a little different. With NSF grants, the question is whether the President can redistribute funding away from applicants affiliated with specific institutions he doesn’t like (my first approximation: probably). With USAID, the question is whether the President has the authority to disband an entire Agency established and appropriated by Congress (22 U.S.C. 6563) (my first approximation: probably no…
With science funding grants, the administration likely has latitude to make some changes, but the specifics of that latitude are going to be embedded in a thicket of overlapping statutes of different vintages.
Without going through all the specific statutes, I relied on the suggestion that if they are okay breaking the law around USAID funding passed in March, they likely are not going to find religion and adhere to laws governing science funding. But I guess anything's possible.
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On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?" On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems e…
Yeah, my experience is the patent gets licenced to some private entity that then squeezes a profit of it. The public sure doesn’t “benefit”. I’d prefer to see such funding going to state universities, not private ones.
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America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that. The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only su…
This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse. So if it decides to spend $X on something specific , it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Directly or indirectly the people of the United States have power over all three branches. One can easily make strong arguments that the problem here is both that Congress as abdicated its powers to the executive (rather than delegated), and that the people have ignored that Congress should retain those powers while focusing on the presidency as the important election to the exclusion of all others.
This has been going on for decades or longer.
>So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Sure. Definitely means he can't spend it on something else. But how much wiggle room is in this? Does it say on which day, hour, and minute it must be spent? Sure, it's probably tied at least to the fiscal year (in which case it needs to be spent by September, one would suppose), but that's months away. Does allocating a budget imply that it needs to be spent at all? If some bureau or department fails to spend all of its budget, has the president somehow committed some treason-adjacent crime, or is that just thriftiness? Are these funds earmarked for specific universities? What if he just goes shopping for alternative recipients?
To say that he has no discretion at all is absurd, if that were the case then Congress would have mandated that these be automatic electronic bank transfers without any human intervention (or oversight). The nature of the job not only implies but practically demands some (if limited) discretion.
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This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat. Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
The overhead is what makes research possible. How do you do research without a lab, or a building?
I am not a fan of the orange man. But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student. All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and…
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research. Federally-funded academic science often looks like: 1. The university + government fund/run a project 2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!) 3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge 4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers gre…
I don't know precisely, but I would assume the universities take about 50% to 60% of the granted research funding as administrative overhead, and only what remains goes to the actual research.
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Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research. Federally-funded academic science often looks like: 1. The university + government fund/run a project 2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!) 3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge 4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers gre…
This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat. Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
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Universities have two roles: education and research. The funding is overwhelmingly for research and it's going to those that provide the best return on investment. Should cancer research funding go to your local community college? Educating the best and brightest is also of special value, but that is beside the point.
I disagree -- the funding isn't ROI based at all. Heck NIH doesn't even really audit how well the funds were spent, how could they? They don't even really assess if the research had impact, save for counting journal articles and impact factors, which are in themselves poor proxies for quality of work (and easily gamed).
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The overhead is what makes research possible. How do you do research without a lab, or a building?
You include expenses for lab and facilities in your grant budget rather than as "overhead" ?
Facilities are common to all of the university. It doesn't make sense to force this individual requirement on each grant when the University has hundreds of ways it is using a given building or lab equipment.