https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/2023-04/EndlessFrontier75t...
"A nation which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowl- edge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade, regardless of its mechanical skill."
I think FROs are certainly worth exploring, but if we're diverting vast amounts of funding to existing research infrastructure and talent to funding them, the opportunity costs are huge. This is not well appreciated, but universities are in fact very cheap places to do research compared to any modern alternative one might construct. I suspect FROs will end up being much more expensive just for structural reasons, and will end up re-discovering the university bundle slowly and piece by piece. Moreover, for many types of research they will have to effectively rebuild a range of infrastructure (facilities, equipment, etc.) that already exists at universities throughout the country.
None of this justifies blowing up the extensive basic research infrastructure we have today in pursuit of unproven experiments. Once they're proven, a conversation can be had about how to reconfigure existing assets and new government-funded approaches. But such discussions must include congress, the appropriators of the funds.
obvious grifting opportunity
Thinking about this as slashing science or making it more efficient or short sighted or innovative is all a distraction.
It’s just another opportunity to give money to the friends of those in government and take money from those you don’t. Say want you want about how it used to be, but this and the new rules around “political oversight” are just corruption and grift that are either wearing a mask of ideology or efficiency based on your political stance
Curious what the plan is when the academic pipeline for training researchers collapses entirely. AI all the things?
It’s so weird. Presumably the conservatives still want the US to be a superpower, which presumably includes high-tech capabilities like global power projection, missile defense, and persistent space operations. At the same time they seemingly want a Cultural Revolution-like decimation of intellectuals.
I don’t see how they believe they can attain both objectives at once.
You specifically have the much harder problem of explaining how you intend to maintain tech dominance with a Cultural Revolution and also without any foreigners or any of the many various groups of citizens you find personally undesirable.
Yes, you will get people who will 'qualify' for those visas, but the bar will and already is getting steadily lower.
Long-term, I suspect skilled immigration will trend down. But for positive reasons: as India and China develop, more people will make the choice to stay home rather than come to America. Same reason we see little emigration from Korea and Japan anymore. It’s a good change, just like it was a good change when our post-WWII edge was reduced after Europe rebuilt. But the attraction of American capital likely still will bring the superstars here.
I used to think that too, but it seems evident the current crop of conservatives is only interested in hurting people they don’t like and funneling money into the pockets of oligarchs. It’s pretty evident now that none of this is being done out of patriotism or a genuine desire to improve America.
> genuine desire to improve America
We think these are related, just like you do. The difference is that you assume that hurting billionaires will improve America while we assume that hurting NGOs and postmodernist academics will do so.
And that difference results from the fact that you think you can construct a new society without billionaires and industrialists that nonetheless offers the prosperity we have today, and more. By contrast, we think the way to get more prosperity is to do more of the things that made America prosperous in the past.
Like not wage foreign wars?
Oh, we're all well aware that you think hurting people is the only way to improve the country.
> The difference is that you assume that hurting billionaires will improve America while we assume that hurting NGOs and postmodernist academics will do so.
Don't you know that lying is a sin? You can't even define "postmodernist". No. I've heard this screeching noise you're making many times but it always boils down to the same truth: you don't believe in hurting "postmodernist academics", you believe in hurting people who aren't straight, white, christians.
So, like...Thomas Massie and Rand Paul?
There were only four republicans in the House and four in the Senate to vote to limit war powers, and I don't think you could claim Murkowski or Collins are isolationists.
Or did you mean this subset was "very unhappy" in like a completely impotent and meaningless way, but they'll have been 100% against it six months or 2.5 or 4.5 years from now?
That’s how I understood it, yes. So unhappy that they’ll write him in for a third term.
Why would you presume that? Isn't enough that they get rich and powerful as compared to others around them?
On the flip-side, my academic colleagues are tearing out their hair trying to get some - any - funding to support their labs. I'm completely inundated with request from colleagues to provide an LOI or some other evidence that our company is interested in working with their lab on something. But that's even _less_ attractive for many private companies!
Apologies if this interpretation is off-base, but I don't think it's a good thing that there is a nascent cottage industry of "software dev firms" that are elbowing their way into these grants. That is another glaring warning sign that what the NSF is doing right now is grossly inconsistent with what it is _supposed_ to be doing.
For example, let's say you want to make a fundamentally different kind of microscope, or nano-fabrication lab. Something that requires many millions of $$ to setup, and further tens of millions to operate. That's too much for an SBIR grant, too expensive for industry to do on a lark. An FRO could setup the lab and run it for 5-7 years, accomplishing major research goals while proving out the concept. But it'll never get done on a spoon-fed sequence of small grants.
So you grant an organization $50M/yr to do this work, with broad freedoms to spend that money how they see fit, so long as progress is made towards the research goals. That's an FRO. Yes, technically that is a government grant with less regulatory oversight. But it's not libertarian philosophy that drives that outcome, so much as regulatory oversight is not setup to fund such efforts in the first place.
most people know who Stephen Miller is but the real monster is Russell Vought
Heritage Foundation's #1 enforcer, the destruction of science and academia is their top 10
if Vance, their prized successor, somehow gets the reins in 2029 country is absolutely cooked
* https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/video-donald-trump-russ-v...
president burns $2 million in federal funds almost every weekend golfing https://DidTrumpGolfToday.com
he took $100 million from park funds for his own birthday party
he just ransacked the nuclear missile maintenance program for almost a BILLION dollars to refurbish a half-billion dollar plane which he intends to keep somehow despite wildly illegal under emoluments clause
Iran War spent a BILLION dollars a day and has to be restocked
US funds and supplies Israel 2/3rd of their entire weapons supply (while they have universal healthcare)
again, not about savings, about destruction of science and medicine
This is misleading.
Israel’s annual budget is $270 Billion, of which $45 Billion is military. US aid is around $3.8 Billion a year.
Scientists are literal pros at identifying and collecting (if not organizing) high-quality data.
This really should be a period of supercharging basic science in recognition of that, not looting it.
What I find so hard to wrangle is that the Trump admin does almost everything in an illegal hamfisted way, whatever their doing gets stricken down by courts, and then a year later we’re just spending time and resources undoing the obviously illegal things they do.
This change even seems like a positive one I wish they should just pass a bill like a normal government.
This seems like a decent initiative started under Biden’s pro technology/ industrial policy umbrella. It was launched as part of the hugely successful CHIPS act.
Your critique is a false dichotomy. There is a large spectrum between “purely curiosity driven research” and “research that has near term venture outcomes” where applied research lives. Something like the Bell Lans semi conductor and related research would fit into this. Not immediately venture scale focused research, but could lead to it.
Just because Trump is repurposing it for illegal grift doesn’t mean it’s a bad group to put resources into in general.
The Trump administration has already installed political appointees in America’s federal R&D organizations including the NIH and NSF. They have final say on funding decisions. These appointees override grant peer review and regular agency channels. It’s all part of Russel Vought/Project 2025’s unitary executive theory.
These NSF initiatives could well be the next logical step to channel millions of research funds to politically connected companies and organizations. Something similar happened with the recent Reflecting Pool fiasco where the federal contracts were give to Trump donors.
There’s no reason not to believe this will also happen to America’s federal R&D. Grift aside, there’s no reason either not to believe the funds will be given to Trump administration pet projects of dubious scientific value.
And its heavily inspired by the nazi Carl schmitt that created the legal foundation for Hitlers rule.
I naturally expect this money to go to tech companies who have time and time again proven their ability to innovate and thrive in the bleeding edge: basically Oracle.
Poster children for tech with no realistic commercial prospects. Projects in these fields have been pipe dreams for decades. Where are any commercial products in the areas of fusion reactors? Quantum computers? Asteroid mining operations?
If private investors want to fund this stuff, fine. As long as they don't come seeking bailouts later.
Fusion is literally still in the pure science stage that OP was telling governments to stick too.
I'm pretty sure you have this totally backwards. People who study scientific development seem to think that the government is actually a really effective funder of research, and covers gaps that would never be addressed by private industry. See for example:
* https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/leading-research-universities-r...
* https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/07/government-fun...
* https://www.americanscientist.org/article/%E2%80%9Cwhy-are-w...
The government is actually really really good at funding the right things. The grant process has been extremely successful in directing funding efficiently towards cutting edge ideas. It does this by handing off the decision making to experts who review proposals rather than having political/profit driven kingmakers.
In contrast corporate/VC money mostly only funds the latest shiny bauble that may result in exit liquidity in a few years. The minority investments in things like fusion are still only applied work and are built on decades of unprofitable basic science.
In other words. Government funding has basically funded every science/tech breakthrough of the last 80 years.
Hmm I wonder how these were originally funded when it was less likely that they would work.
And by cutting funding now, I wonder what we're missing out on in the future.
Of course, that's all generalities, sometimes directly monetizable stuff does come out of basic research. But the NFS should focus on basic research, because nobody else will in the US, and if we want to have it here at all, have the practitioners, have the knowledge, and then also reap the economic rewards because we have those people here, we need to fund the basic science that politicians love to mock and criticize.
The sooner the public learns that the public coffers aren't theirs, and will never be theirs, the better.