Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

We'll be very lucky if it's a lost decade. One of the many factors that made the US a technical powerhouse were the long threads across disciplines where people could do focused research. you had to reapply for grants but generally could be sure that important programs would stay in place. This breaks all of that. It seems poised to break research as we know it.

As one of the many researchers that will likely lose their career to this, I will be forced to choose between stopping work that benefits both the public and industry or moving abroad to one of the many nations that do appreciate such effort. We are about to not only lose our future efforts but also hemorrhage current talent.

I'm surely not the only person who's inbox\phone exploded with messages after the news broke with collaborators abroad offering to help me start a lab at their institute. Europe will gladly do take backsies on their WWII brain drain.

> We may be looking at a lost decade.

We're looking at the US wilfully letting go of the possibiility of remaining the most powerful nation in the world.

Reduced health, reduced education, reduced funding for research, reduced international aid programs (which both garner goodwill whilst also creating a bulwark against those who profit from misery), reduced oversight / regulation of the power of capital, alienation of prior allies, reduced safety nets for the vulnerable, increased rhetoric against poorly defined 'foreign types', anti-intellectualism.

It's a helluva vacuum being created, and I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going to fill it.

Lost decade for the US and the beginning of the Chinese century for others

We're losing an entire generation at least. The pain that these cuts are going to cause won't be felt overnight. It will be felt over decades. "Things have been set into motion that cannot be undone".

Recent and related:

Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43144940 - Feb 2025 (646 comments)

Biochemist friend moved across the country for a post-doc and three months into it is waiting to be let go. She is now looking at options outside the country, specifically China, given the incredible instability here.

1. Most science PhD students are international. So funding their education has questionable domestic political value.

2. Those people don’t just disappear. If there aren’t PhD programs they will do something else.

3. It’s hard to argue we are at some optimal level of PhD students and that if we cut back the system won’t work. Most academics agree we have too many.

Maybe China will start accepting international PhD students? I don’t see anyone else who could pick up the slack.

It looks more like they're just trying to fire everyone. You know, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

We live in such a moronic time that I believe the reason that we are dropping the post-WWII Rules Based Order, is that it is also called the "Liberal" International Order. [0]

Watching a historic empire destroy itself is beyond words. I will miss Pax Americana.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_international_order

If it's intentional, then they are deliberately sabotaging the US's leadership in technological research for the sake of looking like they're doing something. Which is a terrible strategy.

If it's unintentional, then DOGE faile the critical thinking test. Doesn't say much for them or their leadership.

true, except the GOP didn't bother to look up which gods the plan belongs to (turns out its the plan of the Chinese gods)

Those concepts are not science fiction, they were very often used in the past already. Just read about how the most famous dictators in history came to power, and what they did first.

Discrediting scientist is a standard step for most dictators. They only keep the bare minimum they need for the military and surveillance.

The grandparent article claims that Page and Brin were paid by NSF, working on DLI projects while researching PageRank and that the equipment for their prototype crawler was partly paid for by DLI.

If that's true, I'd say they're very fortunate that the Digital Library Initiative existed and that they could put their research into the public domain to reuse it for free at Google. In another context, I'd call the DLI an angel investor and they'd have wanted a slice of that Google pie.

Vote in 2026 (and hope your vote gets counted correctly).

[flagged]

It's literally what happened. Twitter is more real than "real politics" now

4chan regime.

And the names of the sages are forgotten, but Alexander is still known as one of history's great leaders and founder of an empire. It seems the personality traits one would look for in a productive citizen or a nice neighbor are almost antithetical for making it into history books.

> the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

That’s seriously begging the question of whether a website started to rate the attractiveness of Zuckerberg’s classmates has the same consequences for society if it fails as the government. When you work on something which actually matters, there are virtues other than speed. What the Republicans are doing is like clearing your lawn by setting it on fire, saying they didn’t have time to do anything slower.

It’s estimated that just the USAID cuts alone are on the order of hundreds of children being born HIV positive every day, not to mention the impact of food aid disappearing during a famine, or shutting down the last option for afghan women to get educated:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/opinion/hiv-usaid-freeze-...

The science funding has a lower death toll, of course, but it profoundly disrupts careers and pushes people out of the country. Someone educated in the United States who returns to their home country ends up competing with us and probably won’t come back. The grad student getting cut now will probably end up leaving science entirely (people need to make rent and student loan payments) so we’ll be missing out on their lifetime achievements and also the later-career guidance they would have given the next generation.

The federal government as a whole becomes less efficient because fewer top people will be willing to work for lower pay without job security and every contractor will be pricing in future disruption.

Thats fine for a sofrware startup because it fundamentally doesn't matter. Who cares if your silly website fails after you experiment, no one gets seriously hurt.

Shutting off the government means that things can be irreparably damaged. Losing a generation of scientists because of random cullings at the NSF will have effects for decades.

In the worst case, "moving fast and breaking things" with the government will kill people. For example, many patients were kicked off clinical trials during the NIH funding freeze. Abroad, the end of PEPFAR could kill untold numbers of people.

To be rather abrasive in my response: I believe your view is a waste of air. In case I'm correct how about we cut you off from air for a week and if there's a problem we'll restore it then.

I wouldn't do this if there were lives at stake. e.g. turning off circuits in a hospital to see which ones are really necessary.

It's a very strong claim to say no lives depend on any federal funding.

> but they only have 4 years so the Facebook motto of "move fast and break things" applies.

Except with the federal government “things” in many instances refers to people’s lives. What’s the acceptable body count to you, as we approach haphazardly and unconstitutionally reducing the deficit?

> Sometimes the only way to know something is important is to shut it off and see if anyone complains.

These government programs aren't stray servers in a closet.

Even if you believe that these programs should be stopped, it's entirely wasteful to abruptly end them and let their work in progress just crash out and burn.

But it's still a very bad idea to operate this way. There is no rapid feedback loop. The negative effects can be subtle and take years to ripple through the economy and science world.

Startups have nowhere to go but up. Large established companies have nowhere to go but down. Why do you think large organizations are so conservative? It's because getting new customers is much harder than losing existing customers. The US government has flaws, but it is phenomenal overall.

This is like taking over Apple and tearing apart its culture and management. Only bad will come out of it.

Have you been paying attention to Republicans over the last 40 years? They don't care if it's useful or important. They don't want government programs to exist.

Trump isn't changing that. Don't kid yourself.

  “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C." - Governor Bobby Jindal, Feb 24 2009 in his party response to Obama first address to congress.  


  “Monitor my Beer” - Mount Redoubt in Alaska, March 22, 2009, erupted.  

I always end up thinking about this when republicans pick stupid examples of government waste. Best of luck to you.

Hang in there. Thank you for monitoring the volcanoes, anyway.

Start a gofundme for your IoT subscription maybe? :)

[flagged]

They don't need a viable strategy if they regain control of Congress, gum up the works and use some of the checks and balances they are allotted. They can also order investigations so we can understand wtf is happening beyond leaks from throwaway acounts.

Yep, the amount of contradiction one can hold probably has no bounds when not subjected to some kind of deprogramming. I occasionally look at conservative messaging boards and most members are just asking for what to think not really asking why something (really bad) happened.

Among endless examples, here is a Trumper begging to be educated on why Trump said he is king: https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1itkmen/expla...

NPR doesn’t receive government funding.

One of the few falsifiable statements you made is absolutely, completely, objectively false.

Again, consider that perhaps your epistemology is broken.

You are free to explore their audited financials, as well as their IRS 990 form, which indicates all revenue, expenses as well as top 10 salaried employees.

https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

Regarding the source of the falsehood you believed to be true, there are only two potential explanations:

One, they intentionally deceived you, or two, they have no idea what they are talking about and should not be relied upon for truthful information.

That this particular false belief was so strong, and so core to your political stances, that you used it as the foundation for your argument as to why the current republican administration is acting in the best interests of the nation, I would hope that this would cause you to reconsider the rest of your stances as well as more carefully scrutinize your sources of information for veracity.

In short, please consider the possibility that your epistemology may be broken.

Which outcome are you supporting exactly? Please explain in what concrete ways these outcomes benefit either the average American, or America's standing in the world, or America's leadership in technological research.

Various institutions that, among other things, receive federal grant money, make up an enormous amount of technological innovation. The federal government deciding it doesn’t want to pay out money that it has already contracted to pay is not going to help these institutions succeed at their innovation mission.

I, personally, believe that much of the current financial structure of the universities is broken, and the structure of the “indirect costs” causes strongly misaligned incentives, but arbitrarily and massively lowering the rates on zero notice is not the solution. I’ll note that no one involve in DOGE seems to have an actual proposal to improve the situation — they just seem to want to shut everything off.

Oh my god dude, who do you think is the major subsidizer of private industry research?

US innovation is looking at how it can extract as much profit as it can in the next quarter.

They say on the internet, a direct result of DARPA funding.

Just like in healthcare, right? Where we are lucky the private industry has created...oh wait, most expensive healthcare system in the world, doesn't cover a third of the population, doesn't even crack the top ten in outcomes.

Private sector research basically does not exist anymore, especially basic science research. A lot of truly revolutionary stuff starts in academia and spins into tech and biotech startups.

Not sure how you have such optimism. It will take a lot more than luck to rebuild what's being destroyed and we don't have what it takes.

[edit: Found a less condescending way to make my point.]

That's already happened. China forbids export of rare earth processing equipment and technology to the US.[1]

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/what-chinas-ban-rare-earths-pr...

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/semiconductor-ad...