NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions

Something, something small enough to drown it in the bathtub.

This isn't new. Republicans have always worked to erode government offerings to justify further cuts. What is new is the scale and speed.

Is there literally nothing Congress can do or are they just doing nothing?

"deliberate sabotage of government functions to erode public trust."

Is there any non-dystopian reason to do this? Is the end game really the collapse of the US?

A great counterexample indeed. Top down hustle getting things moving.

> The article notes that the people being axed are NSF execs making funding decisions, and contrasts this with the NIH, where panels of outside experts make the call.

I believe you're mistaken on both counts? The contrast mentioned in the article is just that for the NSF, division directors alone can potentially scuttle approved grants.

NSF also uses expert panels to recommend grants for funding. The systems are very similar.

I'm one of those garage hackers, I have a quote from PCBWay, $286 for 20 boards including assembly service. I also got quotes from companies in U.S.

- $2700 from a popular company in bay area - $2000 from another new pcb company.

With tarrifs, my PCBWay order is around $789.

I'm new to PCB Design, I cannot afford to do $2700 mistakes, with PCBWay hardware is more accessible.

These tariffs are designed to destroy the American economy and primacy on the world stage.

> If you don't like it: learn to wire wrap

Actually I know how to wire wrap. I last did it 40 years ago. Technology's moved on.

> In case it wasn't completely clear: stop sending the Chinese money

This is the same thing I’m working to sell people on, only in regards to the US. Working hard to get them to dump US software products and services.

Fingers crossed!

What makes you think there will be another democratic president to blame?

Just had to check, and that date was a Sunday, but that's when the big guy rested, so I'd argue that date is inconsistent within the lore to begin with.

The Ussher Chronology, held fast to by many Christian religious fundamentalists / extremists through Young Earth Creationism:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussher_chronology>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Earth_creationism>

The post is a reference to religious fundamentalists that deny science and declare that god made the earth 6000 years ago. Science is an inconvenience for those wishing to make such declarations.

Many scientists believe the earth is, in fact, much older than that.

I have a bit of a bias in advocating more for enabling excellence than accommodating average. I will concede we have done a terrible job at sharing the harvest, but it’s often the excellent that are responsible for our harvest being so plentiful to begin with.

Uh... I think it's more likely this is all the result of the 24 hour for-profit entertainment 'news' network which has been pushing this conspiracy theory bs for the last 40 years.

You have a media ecosystem devoted to encouraging division, inventing problems when there are none, and finding people to blame for things.

Use your eyes and ears. It's right there.

The agencies and programs paying for poor youth work preparation and education were slashed last week or so. Mind you, it was not college education, but basic skills for more manual jobs.

These were also people who would order parts from china for their niche board game or whatever. These were people working fire prevention, people whose lungs are the most affected when there are no safety and environmental regulations.

Well they ought to learn to code /s

Or try out braindead jobs like HR /s

Jibs aside, the key issue is that a lot of folks just seem to stop learning after a certain point, even if it's their chosen occupation since decades. And it's not just limited to the factory workers themselves - how many of us have met a stubborn doctor unwilling to try out a new treatment mode, or a senior banker too stubborn to learn basic Excel functions. While those folks enjoy secure jobs regardless of their proficiency in modern technology, the folks at the lower rungs of the manufacturing ladder don't. Even if they do have the desire to learn, learning anew today has become an onerous process in most fields.

We really have a Continuous Learning problem that has to be solved here - helping people reskill or deepskill easier, if they have the mentality to improve upon themselves.

> "and programs in low priority areas of science"

One man's low priority is another man's life-saving research.

There never was any shortage of opportunists.

The VP seems level-headed? He's a moldable piece of wet clay. How can you even begin to suggest stability would come from this person?

For those who think this is exaggeration, remember that JD Vance wrote a heartfelt endorsement for the skull book, the one arguing that anyone who opposes MAGA is a secret communist revolutionary who needs to be crushed by any means necessary to avoid an imagined communist genocide that they allege we are all plotting. Absolutely wild shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans

It's not even midterm season yet, they are already testing the waters by conducting extrajudicial deportations of random Hispanics to labor camps in El Salvador, and the sitting US President is on record saying the El Salvador labor camps need to be expanded by 5x to accommodate the "home growns."

Dark times ahead.

Only for those too ignorant to actually understand what's being extremely loosely proposed. And he's totally non-committal about the whole vague thing.

Hiking income taxes on W2 salaries isn't going to touch those billionaires. They'll still get massive tax cuts.

And that's assuming he's actually saying these things in good faith.

No this is what most of their supporters genuinely believe. They think people working in a factory generate more real economic value than people working in offices.

Enough people believed it and voted for it such that they won the election.

Is there any evidence towards this allegiance? Why should we attribute to malice what we could attribute to incompetence, or greed?

If you're going with the great conspiracy of GOP as Russian assets, you should also add Elon Musk and the other tech robber barons as Russian assets as well.

I’m not sure I follow… how is that Russian? Wouldn’t it be British?

The terminations so far focus on anything with any mention of a DEI related objective and that may seem "fine", but these don't constitute a lot of the NSF's budget (the terminated grants total < $1 billion and if you click through them you'll see that for many, that's 5 years of funding). The planned cuts are much deeper[1], DEI is just not where the "big bucks" are.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...

Hence the name arpanet

Larry Smarr recently spoke at NCSA and they wrote up a fair bit about the history of the institution: https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/homecoming/

It has links to some of the panel reports that led to the founding of NCSA, but the OSTI website has been having intermittent 502s for me this morning.

The original "black proposal" was online on the NCSA website, but seems to have been missed in a website reorg; wayback has it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161017190452/http://www.ncsa.i... . It's absolutely fascinating reading, over 40 years later.

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Hinton and his students studied for years on US (and then Canadian) government grants. The year Alexnet came out, Nvidia was awarded tens of millions by DARPA for Project Osprey.

It's an odd historical revisionism where from Fairchild to the Internet to the web to AI, government grants and government spending are washed out of the picture. The government funded AI research for decades.

You are suggesting unilateral disarmament. Allowing other nations, not all of them friendly, to take the lead in science and technology as they continue to fund their own research and poach our best and brightest.

Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.

The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.

It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.

Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.

> It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.

Considering this is simply a religious statement posing as an assertion of fact, I would argue it is anti-intellectual to an extreme.

Please share some libertarian paradises where this has proven true. How’s Kentucky doing again?

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I could not have said it better myself.

I’ve seen “behind the curtain” in both private and publicly funded research. I can’t think of a single area where private industry isn’t standing on the shoulders of collective advancement. (I speak from experience as someone who holds a degree in one of the fields I’m about to mention.)

The biggest leaps tend to be made as a result of public-private partnerships. For example, essentially the totality of fundamental knowledge relating to aeronautics and aerospace, advanced medicine and life-saving pharmaceuticals (especially drugs for orphaned diseases), and any of the examples already offered in this thread.

Private ownership of scientific knowledge isn’t inherently a bad thing, but locking it up indirectly by virtue of eliminating all public funding for it does nothing more than to invite a new corporatist driven Dark Age.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a fun place to visit on the screen. I guess some people do want to live there.

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False. Mass accumulations of capital allow exploratory research without a clear path to commercial benefit, but it's a cherry on top, a kind of motivator for researchers.

Yeah that's what I would have done. Don't get me wrong, I am very anti MAGA!

Which is kind of crazy... I'm here on the Internet ranting about DEI, and the MAGA movement is still toxic enough to completely alienate me. MAGA is probably worse than DEI.

Those grants tend to have similar requirements.

Yeah anecdotes don't tell you much. You may have noticed I was also replying to an anecdote.

What tells you more is that the diversity statement exists and they say it's used as part of scoring. Therefore, unless the amount of score it counts for is infinitesimally small, some people win/lose based on the content of their diversity statement.

Was that me? Who knows. But unless the whole thing was just busy work for no reason, it was probably a bunch of people.

How many? Who knows. I'm sure you'd agree that it would be interesting if somebody published that data! Maybe the new NSF will be more transparent than the old one.

Well, you can see by examining the actual list of grants they've defunded from the NSF:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

Take a look. They're almost all political DEI things. That's not science.

This administration is bringing the focus back to science.

> tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs

Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.

When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.

Trump says everything basically and then just repeats what his MAGA crowd cheers the loudest about. "Trump said..." isn't a meaningful indicator of his intent, his beliefs, or his "plan".

> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]

This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.

Seeing as the majority of words coming out of Trump are hyperbole or just straight up lies.. well believe it when it’s written into law.

Where's Trump's socialized medicine plan? That's by far the most populist desire of populist America. It's very easy to get caught up in the name of things and not look at it substantively, which is what you seem to be attacking the other poster for.

Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.

The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.

I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.

I don't particularly care about anything Trump says. He says a lot of things. A lot of what he says is just outright lies. A lot of what he says is just to make a particular audience happy at a particular point in time, and ends up having little relation to any actions he ends up taking. Even when it seems likely that something he says is something he actually wants to do, he'll walk it back in a heartbeat and pretend the opposite was his position all along, if he believes doing so will make him look better.

What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.

(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)

Yes but:

> He is clearly not working for billionaires...

Not working for Wall St or Main St.

It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")

As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.

Who cares? It contributes to the deficit, which is what matters for fiscal policy.

"The masses" are going to spontaneously organize improved state capacity?

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Exactly, coliveira is either really out of touch of reality, or is parroting state-propaganda they have read. Both really bad looks for them.

I think you are missing a bunch, and the average one of those probably has 10x the grad students of a US one, working on in average ten times as important things.

(And then frankly half the papers from these vaunted US institutions have author lists that could equally be from Wuhan or Peking university, and a bunch of those will inevitably return to professorships in their native country, not like anyone is funding professors in the US)

In that context scapy was probably a typo for spaCy, a popular natural language processing library for Python:

https://spacy.io/

After "attention", definitely. :) In broad strokes, the US excels in looking to the future, but compared to e.g. Europe, it's harder for folks to get interested in history.

Should have cut the power off instead.

I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth.

Then I read a few articles.

sigh.

I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with.

I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certain minorities, one in particular, that has teetered on what I would call "unhealthy". That's where a lot of this comes from. Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions.

This is known as "Working Towards the Führer" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw#%22Working_Towards...

> partial list of the studies that were cancelled

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO

Honestly, having seen the list, I reserve judgement.

I read the papers posted by the White House to support their claim of transgendered mice . https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...

I’m not a molecular biologist, but some seemed just good solid research on women’s health, like asthma prevalence, that just happened to study a mixture of transgender individuals and mice models since both are useful for understanding androgen sensitivity. Another included research on disruptors in lutenizing hormone. It still seemed a pretty dumb thing to attack.

Not to mention transgendered people are people too, and allowed to have some medical research related to their existence.

> is not just them being dumb

That's a wild take for anything this admin does.

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> That's not any different than it has been.

Good point. Exactly like when the Biden administration decided to cancel all grants to Harvard University because they didn't allow a government takeover of the university.

Oh, wait, that didn't happen.

If you really think that's the same thing, I'm not sure what to tell you. Your ability to compare situations and evaluate consequences is completely broken.

Was it the Biden administration doing this? Are you sure this wasn’t happening at the university or state level?

I think if Trump just wanted people to swear loyalty statements instead of cutting all the funding, shutting all these departments, cancelling research, etc., they'd be unhappy but still fine with the fact that the research goes on...

My experience is that discrimination in hiring is never openly advocated for obvious reasons. Instead you get what could be called "stochastic discrimination" where there is pressure to "increase diversity" without elaboration on how that should be achieved in the face of a not so diverse pool of qualified candidates.

Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.

Every large company I have ever worked for has had noticeably lower standards for women and minorities (except for Asians of course because fuck them in particular). They will never say it in the trainings because they know it's illegal. They will never tell anyone anything except for "don't discriminate" but then they will incentivize discrimination by things like "diversity goals" (quotas) and setting recruiter bonuses higher when they bring in favored "victim" groups. Of course if they set higher bonuses for hiring white people the courts would immediately smack them down for discrimination, but it's apparently "legal" as long as - 1. it's implicit, 2. you deny it exists, and 3. it favors a group that the liberals approve of.

Interesting, you have a concrete example of any of those programs you mention?

IF they are so into selecting people based on merit, why do they want to know who/what am I having sex with, what do I think I am, what race I am, did my parents went to college, etc? Have you tried to apply for a job online in the last 10 years?

You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result.

i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.

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I took their statement to mean more that "DEI as described by conservatives is already illegal" not that the concept of DEI is illegal. But they did say "in practice" which seems to throw my interpretation off. In practice, DEI initiatives are exactly as you've described. Sometimes with more specific mentoring opportunities and more or less investment in the college or earlier pipeline.

"DEI" is the rebranding of "affirmative action",† which was itself a euphemism for distributing special privileges (most notably jobs, higher education placements, and loan approvals) to members of legally favored racial groups while punishing members of disfavored groups.

All of the relevant laws specify that (1) you are not allowed to treat anybody differently based on their race, and (2) if your outcome numbers don't match what the government wants to see, there will be hell to pay.

Only (2) can be directly measured, so that is the part of the law that's enforced. People report that they treat all races equally for the same reason that Soviet agriculture officials reported that the grain harvest was better than expected.

† It's not clear to me why a rebranding was felt to be necessary. "Affirmative action" was popular; a lot of the loss in status of this type of initiative seems to be fairly directly related to the fact that, once the name was changed, people could reevaluate the concept without being confused by the preexisting knowledge that they approved of it.

Getting downvoted for sarcasm is a noble act.

There is data (e.g. on Harvard university admissions) which shows that average SAT cut-off scores of admitted students are very different for various racial groups, which strongly hints at DEI based discrimination. I don't agree with that happening. I think people should be admitted/rejected based only on their ability, not partly based on whether they happen to fall in some group for which the quota has to be increased/decreased.

You have just described what most people would consider unfair racial discrimination, since it involves picking one of the two equally qualified candidates based solely on their race. You also did that in language that is both mocking and dismissive ("lily white").

And then you wonder why it was so easy for conservatives to rile up the MAGA mob against the intellectuals and radicalize them into full-fledged fascism.

It's not an either-or. This administration can have the average IQ of a bdelloid rotifer, but that doesn't mean that every single ideological position of all the people they are mad at is valid.