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Trump fires NSF's oversight board

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Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#221

Post by ernesto905 »

From the administration's perspective, why was this a good idea? I'm scouring the web but I'm struggling to find a steel-man. My best guess is that this is to control where the research dollars go which I'll summarize below, but wondering if anyone has better ideas.

From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?

[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/all

[2]: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2026/04/nsf-lags-trump-proposes-...

Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#224

Post by qsera »

pixelpoet wrote: post #215
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In my opinion the people who are deliberately destroying science and education should be prosecuted for literal textbook treason, not merely mocked. These are the "fuck your feelings" people whose feelings you're worrying about.

> who are deliberately destroying science...

But this is subjective. What you call as "Science" might be pseudoscience for someone else. As an example, some decade back, following and trusting peer reviewed research was "scientific", but even back then I thought it was a stupid, unscientific thing to do. Today the problems with peer review process is pretty widely acknowledged. But back then I would have been considered unscientific to not fully trust peer reviewed research. People also used to say things like "Science is settled" and "Trust the experts", which is the most unscientific thing that one could possibly say.

So since there is a lot of unscientific things that is being called "science" these days, I think this is very subjective.

Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#227

Post by bhadass »

jwpapi wrote: post #207

I’m trying to understand what rationale could be behind this decision. America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community. All the hyperscaler could build up because the engineers felt good in America. This might not kill it, but it risks it. What could be the reason he’s doing it, how does he benefit from it, or thinks he benefits from it?

the honest answer is it's not really about science at all; its about removing independent oversight.

the "benefit" from his perspective is the same playbook trump admin has been running across every federal agency, he wants to replace independent experts with loyalists, remove checks on executive power, and redirect spending toward admin priorities.

the board members served six year terms specifically to insulate science funding from political cycles. that's a feature to everyone else and a bug to this administration.

Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#228

Post by bhadass »

matt3210 wrote: post #16

There’s only one reason to get rid of all the smart people, shenanigans are afoot.

its very transparent what they're doing

they're almost certainly going to replace all the board memebers with political loyalists. the board members served six year terms specifically so they'd span multiple administrations and stay independent.

firing them all at once lets you stack the entire board with people. it's not about making science better, it's about removing the people who'd say no.

Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#229

Post by throwworhtthrow »

Spooky23 wrote: post #90
joe_mamba wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you ask? Do you assume those fired NSF workers want to go work in China now? Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?

Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage. The dismantling of everything to maximize executive power in order to maximize grift and corruption will have effects for decades. This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.

> Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage.

Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.

(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)

Re: Trump fires NSF's oversight board

#230

Post by dullcrisp »

readitalready wrote: post #150

I'm OK with it. You're supposed to destroy countries that are committing genocide. And Trump is doing that for us without us even firing a shot. And I really do believe Trump wants to destroy the US, as his base are not aligned with the liberal democratic values that are led by racist genocidal maniacs anyways. There really is no moral defense of the US at this point, given the last few years of the genocide it is ac…

It’s just like Gandhi said, you gotta fight genocide with genocide. Or maybe that was RTLM.
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