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?

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-...

What could be the reason he’s doing it, how does he benefit from it, or thinks he benefits from it?

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

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.

Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.

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

Xi, we shall see.

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?

If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.