- This should feel personal to a lot of us. I have hopes of applying to the Small Business Innovation Research fund (https://seedfund.nsf.gov), a program that gives small companies a good chunk of money without taking equity, in order to encourage development of technologies deemed of national importance. I’d be curious if anyone here has tried applying in the last 18 months.
by matt3210
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- There’s only one reason to get rid of all the smart people, shenanigans are afoot.
by kenjackson
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- So is this a 2400% reduction in the number of NSF board members?
by JumpCrisscross
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- What are the equivalent institutions in China? Do they do open houses?
by dublinstats
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- National Science Board. Not the entire NSF.
by jesseendahl
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- There are so many bots/trolls on HN now, it's crazy.
by rssoconnor
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- Time for scientists to return to the Invisible College: a guild of science that keeps their research to themselves for the benefit of their own membership.
by elijahwright
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- And so Vannevar Bush’s legacy slips away from us all…
- Trying to find a silver lining and think positively...
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
by ernesto905
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- 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-...
- 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?
by 0xbadcafebee
1 subcomments
- An expected part of Project 2025[1]. The end goal is to install Trump allies as heads of every agency that matters to their agenda, and to shut down all agencies that don't. This way by end of 2028 there is nobody left in government who can speak out against what they're going to do next.
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade... [3] https://www.project2025.observer/en
by Henchman21
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- Lots of comments here where people simply refuse to understand the mission:
Trump's goal is to destroy the United States of America at the behest of his foreign handlers.
You can deny it all you want, but it is the only thing that matches up with all his actions.
by rambojohnson
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- every headline coming out of america is so god damn nauseating. empire on rapid collapse.
by pixelpoet
1 subcomments
- I suppose that's a very effective way to stem the tide of pesky educated libruls. Not so smart now, are you?
Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.
- It's just own-goal after owl-goal with this administration.
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
Well done, everybody, the system works.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
- So is he going to replacer them with antivaxxers, flat earthers or lyssenkists?
by SomaticPirate
3 subcomments
- Every American here has allowed the quickest decline of a superpower in history. The damage to our country is irreparable and going to result in a worse life for generations to come
- Don't worry - I'm sure the people he hires will be super super competent, like the rest of the folks he's hired to run departments and whatnot
- Putin is happy with his investment.
Xi, we shall see.
- Take That China!
that will show them!
- Since science.org has made all their content inaccessible behind cloudflare here is a mirror of the article text, http://pastie.org/p/3coKAFruPfdJjw5s2H9tbX/raw
by gverrilla
1 subcomments
- MAGA are hurting the USA a thousand times more than "terrorists" ever did. Next to Trump, Bin Laden is like a schoolboy.
- Meanwhile all the ceos of Apple, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, nvidia and palantir went to kiss his feet one more time. That obviously did not happen now but you would have believed it.
- Trump is a disruptor. I am interested to see how this plays out and whether he replaces anyone. One thing I've learned since COVID is, unfortunately, to be more skeptical of medical authorities. We were lied to in so many ways and all the while forced to "trust the science" and so called experts. But they were caught either wrong or lying way too many times. So I am not going to assume outright all the people he fired are perfectly honest or unbiased scientists, and I hope Trump has a plan going forward. TDS is a thing, and anything he does is met with resistance. He could cure cancer and people would still be mad at him somehow.
by napierzaza
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- Presumably next he will nominate Kushner, Dr. Oz and a few donors...
What a shame for a country.
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by throwaway457854
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by readitalready
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- 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 actively committing under both parties.
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
by andsoitis
1 subcomments
- > U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). Many science advocates see it as the latest step by his administration to erode—some would say destroy—the independence of the 76-year-old research agency.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
- There’s a lot of political commentary in these threads about how dumb the admin is this and that, sarcasm, etc. but is anyone able to share why this is such a truly beneficial org to our country? I’m just out of the loop on this and I’m genuinely asking, I have never really heard of them. But by the reactions in the comments they’re like the most blessed org of our country and accelerate innovation and advancement of the USA. It’s just a foundation? Please just let me know, I’m not trying to be weird and I’d appreciate being civil about it.