NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy

Seems unconstitutional for congress to be able to create a regulatory agency fully outside of the executive's control, as who will check the congress's power? Appointment and confirmation exists so both branches must assent to all officers of then government

The US has three branches of government.

If you believe the NSF is independent then you are implicitly agreeing with those who claim there is a fourth 'deep state' branch of government that operates without accountability.

Separately: I cited the law that says the president can fire the head of the NSF. So I'm not sure why you'd conclude that any disagreement would be a problem for the president.

I don't know, I can feel everyone who has tried and failed to prevent calamity from inside an organization cringe recalling that they had nothing to show for it except lost years and burn out.

As for GP's options, normally I would think B (standing your ground and throwing them a small bone while waiting to get fired) is the most rational option outside of sheer self-preservation. Since its a federal job if you don't know the law it may get little dicey if you go the C route.

My guess from out of leftfield: there is immense pressure and unseen threats being thrown about by admin goons similar to what they did in the attorney general's office in the Southern District of New York, namely: If you don't resign we will fire everyone underneath you. That's what would easily explain this behavior.

There's also malicious compliance... doing EXACTLY what is asked no matter how damaging or stupid. It's the 'let it all burn down' option but I have found it drives change very quickly... CYA, though.

> since Trump rarely changes his mind

That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.

What they said is "you get less money" and "fire half the people". One of those you can literally not do anything about. I'm not sure how to fire people but do it in the way is the way "I want to".

> Comply but leak the truth to the media.

Doesn't apply, everybody knows what's going on already.

> Comply in a maximally obstructive way.

Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.

> Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.

Doesn't apply, you can't half-fire the specified people, or give just a little bit of money to the people you've been instructed not to fund. You can comply, or not, and it's not going to be any kind of secret which way you chose.

If you want to go out in a blaze of glory and leave the building a day later than you otherwise would, with less dignity, go for it.

> Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.

It's just not that kind of role.

It's hard to "maliciously comply" or be obstructive to someone giving you 55% less budget. They just... give you less money. That's it.

I guess you could slow down the firing process for a bit? That would be a minor obstruction for a short period of time. Then what?

Anyways, "how-to" guides on malicious compliance probably don't tackle situations where an external team, acting on behalf of the president, come into your workplace with unparalleled authority to do whatever they please.

> There's tons of "how-to" guides on how to maliciously comply with work demands without getting fired.

These only apply to countries where the judicial system doesn't bend to whoever's in power.

>or find subversive, incremental ways to undermine it.

I'm asking for concrete examples of what "subversive, incremental ways to undermine it" would be.

You basically just reworded the vague suggestion of "fight back". What are some specific examples of what the NSF director could have done that are subversive, incremental ways to undermine the orders which ultimately came from the president?

I do really enjoy that subreddit, but as you alluded to, I can't think of any stories that would be applicable to the NSF director & president (even if taking them all at face value rather than as writing exercises).

You can't "not do" getting a budget cut. They just give you less money.

I'm also not sure how to just... not fire people. Sure, you can delay it a week or two. Okay. Then what? Get fired for non-compliance? That seems about as effective of a tactic as quitting is.

"Hide perishable foods (fruit) in discreet locations of common areas"

That's helpful for the conversation!

Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears?

(It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)

To support your point, here is a 1975 book: "Resignation in protest : political and ethical choices between loyalty to team and loyalty to conscience in American public life" by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis

From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring."

Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest

Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”"

Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups.

Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c...

==== From there:

I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.

====

RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.

You can do nothing of value if your mental health is declining. Best thing to do is seek shelter somewhere, for some time, to heal. You may do something of value at a later time. If you allow mental health to deteriorate there may be no comeback, ever.

You obviously haven't been through a bad employment situation.

Consider yourself lucky.

And, to be honest, there is almost literally nothing more important than ones own personal mental health. Almost everything someone is able to achieve is built upon a foundation of their mental health. If the foundation is shaky, so will be the building.

[dead]

>I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening

What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?

Switzerland, Malta, the Cayman Islands, all the traditional tax havens I'd assume.

Could be even worse even quicker. The big box CEOs just told Trump that we're two weeks from empty store shelves for at least some things. Welcome to the USSR, don't forget to tithe to the Republican party on your way to the toilet paper line.

Someone's gotta wipe Grandpa's ass.

> I think a lot of the C-suite at big US corporations do not quite realize this about their position

It's true, that they risk the erosion of their status and the assumption of their power by the state over the medium to long term. But it is also true that in the short term they can beat their competitors by a carefully targetted bribe. There are significant upsides to getting behind the administration, and you can't ignore that.

This kind of corruption is literally how feudal oligarchies form.

A general strike is always one more check on political power: "What would a general strike in the US actually look like?" https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/what-would-general-str... "Calls for a general strike in the US are growing. It's important to understand how to organize one, given their key role in overcoming tyrants around the world."

Also from there: "Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”"

For a science-fiction version, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear

Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad. Will that change as things continue to play out?

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics "Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others.""

I mean, there is one more check, one more not so proverbial bullet in a gun.

Because they saw the other side doing nothing about the things they cared about, while also scornfully telling them they were wrong, racist, hateful, and stupid.

Trump could easily have been defeated by a centrist Democrat who focused on kitchen table issues not fringe social ones, and was able to discuss and debate them coherently.

I think the only explanation is that the endless lies coming out of his mouth allowed many uninformed people to build their own Trump in their heads out of all the possible lies they liked the most. They then simultaneously believed everything they didn’t like were the actual lies. A kind of choose your own adventure.

That and term 1 Trump really was basically what was left of the Republican establishment running things while Trump did his reality TV show presidency.

So people wrongly assumed the same people would be there to stop him from driving the country off a cliff.

If you mean the fall of the Roman Republic, that and the succeeding decadence of the Empire was covered in detail by Roman sources. The Annals of Tacitus are just one of many examples. [0] It's how we know what happened.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_(Tacitus)

We need a TRC from the IRS to accept funds from some customers… we applied for that in January for 2025 - the 6/8 week estimate is now doubled.. the phone number that used to dump you into a queue to be answered in an hour is disconnected now. The IRS is not going to be chasing down non-compliant companies in the near future.

The trick is to keep the poor people poor, but not too poor. Nothing left to lose and all that...

Next year’s budget cycle starts in October.. they’re illegally impounding grants today.

There's multiple reasons why what you said is just wrong.

First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.

Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?

The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.

If you cut the grant-funding available by half, we will not, in fact, work on topics benefiting your company.

[dead]

Hmm… where have I seen this strategy play out in recent memory?

It's not a good steel manning. You haven't explained what "too tolerant" is, or how much power we're talking about.

My comment was bitter sarcasm lamenting how much is lost and how little gained, not an argument. And you could call that out. But just flopping the words around doesn't turn it into an argument.

Which people in the woke movement had power, and what were some of the woke policies that they enacted?

Every time I go down this line, it’s all vague boogeymen or claims of events that don’t hold up to scrutiny.