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".

My fear as well. I’m not sure if even a magic wish to rearrange stuff back to the before January state of affairs is possible at this point.

Write to your representatives. I fear that if they don’t pull off something the only ethical and responsible thing is civil war. This shit is insane and will destroy everything I like about our government.

Also to quote every true patriot: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.

I’m so angry and mad and wanting to help fix it. My near term approach is write expansively to all my city state and congressional reps.

We already have diarrhea inducing corruption happening in plain view. We have walking piñatas for an urgent need to do campaign finance reform.

I’m not sure if there’s any way to save some of the institutions and programs that make this country actually great without a straight up secession/civil war for the coastal states.

I’m very very scared. And angry.

Alternatively, after the initial shock of ripping off the doge bandaid has subsided, we’ll have saved enough by not funding foreign operas and firing employees who don’t even check their work email to fund plenty of worthwhile research projects.

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 that 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 for one, will miss Pax Americana.

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

Where exactly is the proof that the ship of government funded science in the USA was sinking?

If you don't mean just US funded science, then what evidence is there that the USA was sinking in general? When I look at the graph of debt increase, it was actually decreasing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1366899/percent-change-n...

Government employee payroll makes up a tiny fraction of the budget. It's actually a horrible place to start.

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.

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

4chan regime.

> 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.

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.

[flagged]

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

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.

The reason we have cheap electronic computers now is the government spending on the space race back in the 1960s. It was incredibly expensive at the time, but the overall economic benefits were substantial.

It will be largely filled by Chinese universities and Chinese companies working together. Non-Chinese researchers will probably have to go to Europe.

Why do you think the vacuum won't be filled by other countries willing to fund their scientists?

This is after all the same reasoning used to give tax breaks to get a factory to setup in town

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.]

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

""" I have been informed that everyone at NSF who was overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation (PAWR)[1] project is gone. This program has been providing testbed environments to help drive forward wireless networking, including mobile/cellular networks at locations in Harlem NY, Salt Lake City Utah, Ames Iowa, and Cary North Carolina. One of the explicit goals of the program is to keep the US competitive when it comes to both wireless technology development and training the workforce needed for leading-edge wireless networks.

I do hope that the program will continue with new leadership - some PAWR contracts are still active, and some platforms, including ours[2] have funding outside of PAWR. But the loss of institutional knowledge will seriously hurt these programs, and is definitely not "efficient"

[1] https://advancedwireless.org/ [2] https://www.powderwireless.net/

"""

What a strange UI/UX.