Trump fires NSF's oversight board

JumpCrisscross

What are the equivalent institutions in China? Do they do open houses?

superkuh

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

matt3210

There’s only one reason to get rid of all the smart people, shenanigans are afoot.

yalogin

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.

jmyeet

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

metalman

Take That China! that will show them!

kenjackson

So is this a 2400% reduction in the number of NSF board members?

0xbadcafebee

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

k310

Putin is happy with his investment. Xi, we shall see.

SomaticPirate

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

rectang

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?

sega_sai

Presumably next he will nominate Kushner, Dr. Oz and a few donors... What a shame for a country.

fionic

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.

elijahwright

And so Vannevar Bush’s legacy slips away from us all…

pixelpoet

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.

dublinstats

National Science Board. Not the entire NSF.

jkestner

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.

readitalready

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?

andsoitis

> 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.

runnr_az

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