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What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

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Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#821

Post by philwelch »

tyingq wrote: post #729
leereeves wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Routinely reaching past the defined limits of the executive branch could be described as a coup. Depending on the event/circumstances, it's congress being overthrown, or the constitution, etc. Assuming a definition of coup like "violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group" there's a reasonable case to be made.

The bureaucracy isn't actually a branch of government recognized by the Constitution. Nominally it's within the executive branch, which the president is in charge of.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#822

Post by philwelch »

benzible wrote: post #773
Gareth321 wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can call a democratically elected president doing what he promised to do a coup.

We don't have a monarchy (yet). The Constitution does not say "anything in here is void at the whim of the President". An electoral win does not allow him to unleash a gang of thugs through all of the agencies, to shut down Congressionally mandated agencies, to violate civil service protections, etc. Presidents swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Not to mention, he ran on the opposite of what he's doing. He cla…

Which branch of government are those agencies a part of?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#823

Post by AlexandrB »

chasing wrote: post #299
Gabriel54 wrote: post #141

Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…

Unethical race-based preferences is what those policies have been trying to fix. Not sure you’re aware of this, but academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

> academia used to be basically off-limits to anyone not white and male.

How long ago was that? In Canada 60% of college grads are women[1]. In the US the story is similar and the gap is widening[2]. Part of the reason that some left wing ideas seem so out of touch is because they are. People are still parroting social problems from the 1960s as justification for policy in 2024.

[1] https://heqco.ca/pub/understanding-the-gender-gap-in-postsec...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/08/07/wome...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#824

Post by Manabu-eo »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #761
jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

Most of that $5 billion in the LA times article was not received by Musk's companies at the time, and I'm not sure if they ever received the full amount as it was contingent on reaching several milestones in the span of 20 years.

A big part of those $5 billion was not having to pay sales taxes on possible future Gigafactory production, for example, but that gigafactory never reached the initally planned size AFAIK.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#825

Post by xhkkffbf »

jmward01 wrote: post #490

This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…

A coup? This was a general election and the person who won the election is allowed to choose his staff to run the executive branch. Pretty much everyone in the executive branch except the president and maybe the vice president is unelected. Was it a coup when the current people at the NSF got their jobs?

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#826

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

krapp wrote: post #610
curt15 wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framers designed a system of government to be allergic to kings, having just fought off a king a couple years earlier.

The system appears to have developed a tolerance. Americans' blind faith that their peculiar system of government makes tyranny impossible will only lead them to deny reality even when it hits them in the face with a truncheon.

>> Americans' blind faith that their peculiar system of government makes tyranny impossible will only lead them to deny reality even when it hits them in the face with a truncheon.

Even those who crafted the American system knew that it was not perfect. Benjamin Franklin said:

"I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others."

"In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government."

Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-se...

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#827

Post by searine »

batushka5 wrote: post #757
searine wrote: post #41

Do you hear that sucking sound? It's biggest brain drain you've ever seen. It already been happening, I know several great scientists who've already left, this BS just kicked it into high gear.

This sounds like Hollywood celebs leaving to Canada - no one did. So where will so called top scientists go? Real scientists will continue their work after weeding out. But the DEI, climate, gender studies and other bottom feeders will need to pack for Europe. Or learn a trade.

>So where will so called top scientists go?

Back to their home countries. I can think of about a half dozen world leading scientists I work with every day who would pack up their labs if funding dried up. They already did it once to move to the US because that is where the most funding was for these diseases. If you make the US inhospitable to these talented people, they will not think twice about finding a country that doesn't consider them "bottom feeders".

Also. Believe it or not, there are other fields than DEI/Climate/Gender studies, and when you remove the incentive to work in the US, the leaders in these other fields will leave.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#828

Post by nmz »

scarab92 wrote: post #775
insane_dreamer wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

[flagged]

Yeah, like he stated that he wasn't going to do anything that was in project 2025. So that was a lie.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#829

Post by oramit »

rayiner wrote: post #783
Spooky23 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JFK wrote a book called “Profiles in Courage” - no courageous people are around. The “coup” happened a long time ago. The US has demonstrated that there’s no rule of law at the federal level for some time now. Once the Chief Justice leaned back and tolerated the open sale of the court, that was basically it. We don’t have the same system of governance anymore… we’re like Italy 1936 or Argentina in 1948 now. We’ll inv…

I’m pretty sure the coup happened in the 1930s when the government created the modern system of unaccountable executive agencies and a Supreme Court, under duress, approved it.

Why this amorphous "the government" wording? The people elected Congress and Presidents, who did this over decades with popular support. Executive agencies are not unaccountable. They have specific charters and there is a huge volume of rules they have to follow. eg:(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act). Congress writes their budgets every year and the heads of those agencies are reviewed at congressional and presidential levels.

Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF

#830

Post by yoyonamite »

scarab92 wrote: post #775
insane_dreamer wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other big elephant in the room is that the self-appointed wanna-be ruler, Musk, owns companies which have received very large amounts of both government (taxpayer) grants and contracts. Back in 2015, the LA Times reported Musk's companies had received nearly $5 billion in grants. That's taxpayer money. Plus there's the SpaceX contracts--not saying those are unwarranted, certainly SpaceX deserves the contracts mor…

[flagged]

This sounds like a potential conflict of interest:

PROJECT ANNOUNCEMENT: Inspection of USAID's Oversight of Starlink Terminals Provided to the Government of Ukraine May 14, 2024

https://oig.usaid.gov/node/6814

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