The entire National Science Foundation budget is less than what we spent in the first week of the war with Iran. The National Ins utes of Health,… accounts for a fraction of 1 percent of all federal spending
visa rules changed to make it well-nigh impossible for foreign students to get PhDs
huge own goal here, the USA has been the talent magnet of the world since WWII and we're basically throwing it away to satisfy racism and xenophobia
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czdmp87rpv1o
op-ed page of Science goes hard
https://www.science.org/content/blog...ding-continues
yesterday
instead of professional/scientific evaluation of grant proposals, it all (about $1T in appropriated money) goes to the OMB's political shop, where it all gets vetted for conformity with the boss's political priorities, or gets shopped out to AI/Tech cronies
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/michael-kratsios-researchKratsios’s report is supposed to be the successor to Bush’s, and even apes the format, but this isn’t really a do ent about science policy. It’s one about ending science research as we know it in favor of shoveling cash at big tech companies.While it might be temping to wave this away as an aspirational policy do ent, Trump has already begun to shift billions in research funds to AI projects and has taken a hatchet to science funding across the board. He’s teed up the shift Kratsios proposes here, and since neither Congress nor the Supreme Court seem inclined to stop him from doing whatever he wants with taxpayer money, it isn’t doomering or hyperbole to say we are staring down the barrel of a world where the only “science” the government intends to support is for-profit tech and defense advancements.
deep background
In a normal administration, you could probably skip over learning about a science policy do ent — but this is no normal administration, and this is no normal science policy do ent. Instead, it’s Trump’s attempt to end the actual golden age of science that was kicked off in 1945 with the publication of '“The Endless Frontier” by Vannevar Bush.
Bush, at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s request, laid out a vision of federal support for science that centered on funding universities to do basic research, saying that as long as those ins utions were “vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere.”
In passing, attempting to use appropriated funds for science as an executive kitty at OMB is breathtakingly brazen and anti-cons utional.
Turning OMB into a political slush fund with impounded (stolen) appropriations breaks the form of government, the principals should all be impeached and removed before being tried as criminals
Nuking science grants because the proposals contain keywords Republicans don't like is viewpoint discrimination pure and simple
In no way is it improper for researchers to express viewpoints disfavored by whoever the current president is
https://www.highereddive.com/news/in...unding/826203/Those court do ents offer insight into how the Trump administration undertook a swift campaign to revoke research funding for work related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and other subjects at odds with its political agenda.
Federal agencies relied heavily on keyword searches when terminating grants held by UC researchers, court do ents revealed. While the searched terms varied across agencies, they focused on initiatives facing significant conservative opposition, such as DEI and green energy.
The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case torule the revocations uncons utional.
The keyword lists used by four of the federal agencies named in the UC lawsuit — the National Ins utes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Humanities — elucidate the wide net cast by the Trump administration when targeting grants.
Of the four agencies, NSF used the most keywords by far. It told the court it pulled its search terms list directly from a 2024 report released by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, which alleged the Biden administration had politicized science at the agency. NSF also mentioned, but did not list, terms related to misinformation.
The report shared hundreds of terms it used to screen grants to determine whether they were related to DEI or promoted “neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” The list included “injustice,” “ally,” “prejudice,” “ins utional,” “discrimination,” “historically,” “minority,” and “traumatic.”
NIH worked off of a shorter but similar list, which included “workforce diversity” and “health equity.” The agency noted that it also used “various permutations” of each keyword.
if democracy does not operate across time and ins utions, we're liable to radical revolutions every four years
the last election isn't the only thing that counts in a democracy
Triple hit*INTERNATIONAL APPLICANTS TO US COLLEGES FELL 10% THIS YEAR
Foreign students subsidize domestic ones by paying full fare, the shortfall hits other parts of the university budget, and they/we lose out on the talent of the most qualified foreign applicants.
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