One thing I don't understand is people resigning on principles.
If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.
C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions
I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role:
SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.
Fun fact: Exactly the stipulation behind this excerpt, whether the President can hire/fire the head of the NSF, is exactly why Truman had vetoed an earlier version of the NSF bill written under the close influence of Vannevar Bush that actively avoided providing for this extent of executive ‘weighing of the scales’ of science.
Source: Bush, V. “Pieces of the Action”, 1970
the “unchecked committee of technocratic experts appeared to be his preferred agency governance form.” refers both to his utterances illustrated in his only biography to date, and particularly to the would-be May-Johnson governance structure he promoted.
Today we see the debate in full swing with discussion of technocratic elitism, (particularly this year more than last when I wrote the piece).
I wrestle with the pitfalls & perceived benefits a technocratic elite sans much representative democratic oversight. But make no mistake, a ‘Vannevarian’ world would appear very different to the current one we prefer to think we live in. The closest example in pop culture to what I imagine is the Fallout franchise’s Vault governance & managed society.
The very namesake building
I’ll keep sensitized to the STS Bonvillian name, I was unfamiliar prior, thank you.
That’s great to hear you sometimes give talks to course 3 students, as maybe some of them will go on to study lattices like:
https://www.sf-uap.com/materials-science
, for which study under what governance structure we may not know.
NSF is an "independent agency" [1] so if the job you were appointed to an confirmed by congress (senate) is at odds with the presidents desires I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a problem for the president not you.
Similar to all those inspector generals who just gave up when they were illegally fired. Literally your job is to prevent the president from corruption, how are you going to do that now?
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.
Nah, people have got to stop buying into this unitary executive stuff! Independent agencies have oversight and accountability. Congress can do whatever they want with them whenever they want.
I think it's imminently reasonable to say that agencies shouldn't be independent of the executive, and that's the default if the legislation passed by Congress (and signed by the current executive!) doesn't specify otherwise. But Congress should, and I believe does, have the power to set things up otherwise.
I agree but only to the point that an independent agency setup by Congress exercises powers granted Congress by the Constitution and does not conflict with powers explicitly granted to other branches.
(And it's pretty unclear to me how the NSF, which is ultimately a method for Congress to spend money, could relate to any Executive powers)
Yeah that's the thing, what powers are even granted directly to the executive by the text? It seems to me that the whole unitary executive theory is based on the clause "The executive Power shall be vested in a President", where "the executive power" is never well defined.
The President commands the military, negotiates treaties, nominates various officials for confirmation. Probably the most leeway relates to being called to ensure laws are faithfully executed.
So it seems reasonable the Executive can police independent agencies to ensure they operate as authorized by law, but I don't see how that challenges the establishment or existence of lawful independent agencies.
NSF is one thing but say an independent agency that does things like negotiate treaties or command the military or nominate Supreme Court justices should be off the table
(But on the other hand, theoretically the Executive should be able to voluntarily authorize legislation that enables those things if they wanted to. Just saying I can see cooperation possible but a veto override probably won't work to force it on an unwilling Executive).
I meant my question to be a rhetorical question, but that was totally unclear in what I wrote. What I meant was to imply "the executive isn't even granted very many powers directly in the text".
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
Yeah this is a silly argument. The check on the actions of independent agencies is the same as the check on the actions of all agencies. The executive obviously isn't a check on the actions of executive agencies...
It's not unconstitutional, it's already been done and the supreme court says it's fine.
They decide what is and is not constitutional, not you. And, contrary to what Internet armchair "textualists" will proclaim, most of the constitution is up for interpretation and actually quite vague.
We've been debating the constitution since the moment we lifted the pen. Or, er, quill. Have some humility.
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.
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.
"We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."
You’re assuming the battle hasn’t been lost. These people didn’t resign at first fight. They resigned when they realised there isn’t a way to fight a President who wants to dismantle an agency underneath him like this.
>I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
Can you give me some examples of how you would fight?
Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?
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.
> Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.
"Obstructive" in this scenario results in the organization keeping functioning effectively. Obstructive of something destructive allows it to keep existing.
I see your point, but I think you are missing their point.
They are saying, the action taken by the administration is to cut funding to the department. This can't really be "obstructed" short of the director using their personal funds to pay people's salaries. It would require either people to work for free, or an outside source of money.
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.
Congress is the body that decides budget, not the President. Convince Congress and you will win budget, and legislative directives to accomplish specific tasks. Putting a man on the moon required Congress.
People are now routinely absolving GOP Congress critters, when they are the actual decision makers.
None of the other points achives win in some kind of fight. They are just turning you into a bitter looser that will be set aside one way or the other - and who still has to do unethical ornillegal things in the process.
The other Trump malingerers are giving adept examples of how to ape compliance while going completely against the law. Complying with the law in contravention of DOGE wishes should be simple in comparison.
If you're in a hierarchical structure and someone higher up gives you an ultimatum, your choices are: comply, resist and face consequences, or find subversive, incremental ways to undermine it. None of those are cost-free.
"Fighting" isn't about magic moves that keep everything safe. It's about choosing when and how to accept the risks. Expecting a fight with no threat to your position is cowardice disguised as pragmatism.
>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?
In labor circles, the "subversive, incremental ways" are known as "work to rule".
You simply do as you're told. Orders are never completely without ambiguity, and the person giving the order has less direct experience with the subject than the person receiving the order. There's wiggle room.
Concrete example: The order is "Do X". The person charged with executing it actually understands that the consequences will be that Y and Z (which the person giving the order cares about) will actually be on fire if you do X.
In a functioning relationship, you speak up and say "Happy to do X, but here's what'll happen, maybe we should consider a different way to achieve your goals". If you're going the subversive route, you say "Sure thing. I'll get right on X. I'll overdeliver on it". Then you do X, and nudge it towards maximally bad impact on Y/Z.
Followed by "Oh, who could've foreseen! Y and Z are in ruins! What would you like me to do, boss?"
Mire things down in bureaucracy. Try and make everything take substantially longer than it should. Throw up hurdles in the face of progress. "Forget" to do important steps in the process so that you have to re-do work. Implement things on the face of it that are correct, but that don't achieve the same result, etc.
I think 4 year olds know how to do that. Follow the exact letter of what they say, but doing everything else outside the bounds of "do this" the way you want to.
I.e. "It's time for bed" means "I'm going to continue to play, just in my bed."
"Go to sleep" means "Pretend to sleep for 5 minutes, then go back to playing." When confronted, say that you woke up after 5 minutes.
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".
If you are a Reddit user r/MaliciousCompliance is full of stories* of people follow orders to the most exacting and absurd extent. Most of them are peon-level folks so I am not sure how those actions would map to a person in a position of real power.
*fact vs embellished fact vs straight fiction is always questionable on Reddit.
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).
Don't do it. Perhaps obfuscate and delay as much as possible that you are not actually doing it. Perhaps get fired. Then go to court for wrongful termination (this would depend on the order being unlawful)?
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.
It would slow down the operation of the organization. In this case, it's counterproductive to the director's aims. The director's goal is to maximize grant funding; a functional bureaucracy is essential for that goal. There is nothing the director can do to increase the funding, which is being cut by an external source. The legality of the funding cut is unclear, but the director has no agency in the outcome of a legal challenge.
It's a silly novelty website. Maybe this no longer happens, but for a period of time, browsers would present a warning that the website was insecure. The user would need to switch to https by updating the address. It was inconvenient.
If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in…
Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.
Honest question - have you ever worked somewhere where people above you in the food chain have made decisions you consider bad or unacceptable?
If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan).
The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.
Mental health perhaps? If the administration is making the organisations job impossible it could be an incredibly awful time to stay. I don't believe I owe anyone my sanity.
yea that seems to be a common theme with people. Nothing is bigger than them or more important than their own personal mental health.
I can't take it myself so I'm just going to roll over and not stand for any principle or fight for any cause because that's just too much for me to handle.
And besides you're just one person so what difference is it going to make anyways.
Same thing why people don't vote. It's not like their one vote will make a difference.
Multiply that times 10 million people and you get what we have.
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.
I disagree with your first statement. People absolutely can and do provide many things of value while the mental health is declining. In fact, being able to provide things of value is often what helps with the mental health. Don't take that away.
Seeking shelter to heal is certainly one good option, but I also encourage everyone who struggles to seek out help. That's not a fight you have to fight alone. If out break your bone, you see a specialist for fractures. If your mental health is damaged, see a specialist for mental health.
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.
NSF director is a political appointee, as such serves the will of the President. We don't need those people "fighting," we need to elect the people we want to make the right appointments.
Well, I’ve come to learn the best leaders hire people who do fight them. The key is that they’re transparently open to being fought, take all sides under consideration, give deference when they don’t have to, but expect compliance when they make a decision.
I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places.
I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
>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?
When he was initially appointed by the same guy, yeah kind of. Unless you can spin a good story about how you thought Trump was good but changed for the worse (which is a tough story to make believable right now, and will also burn all your Trump-adjacent bridges since he seems to value loyalty above all else)
You're getting a lot of pushback, but this resonates with me. I guess I have a hard time understanding the value in a "noble departure" rather than just going down swinging.
If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life.
Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.
1. The resignation is an important signal to other people that bad things are happening. Not everyone is paying attention; dramatic resignations are events that might help pierce the media veil.
2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.
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."
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.
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.
If a shark was eating me, and I have the choice at almost any time to immediately vacate the vicinity of the shark, I'm probably going to just leave. I've had jobs, early in my career, where I figuratively punched the shark instead. The shark won.
I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize. Additionally, quietly criticizing just means quietly getting fired, then likely still being unable to publicly criticize.
The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.
US Government employees basically can't sign non-disparagement agreements, the Federal Government doesn't enter into agreements without a fixed time commitment to judge compliance, and there are incredibly strong whistleblower protection laws for Federal employees which would make any non-disparagement agreement very difficult if not impossible to enforce. A Federal judge held that the Trump 2016 campaign's non-disparagement agreements were unenforceable, and there have been no hints of Federal employees being offered anything even like that.
That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.
> I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize
That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again.
I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.
There's tons of people that don't follow the boss's orders to a T and don't resign and don't get fired. And they would be much less effective at enacting their boss's agenda than someone who "just followed orders"
In addition to what others have said, in theory it's also a way to call public attention to the problem. These are coveted positions that people don't just walk away from lightly, so someone in this position stepping down and explaining why can serve as an alarm bell.
That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.
The perception shift is key. Getting fired for cause and trying to claim the moral high ground afterward often reads as sour grapes; Bitterness and/or incompetence being rationalized. Quitting, on the other hand, suggests principle and lends credibility.
There are some hills not worth die on. There are moments when a retreat is better than a worthless fight, saving people in the process.
I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.
If more people at the company had followed your example...would it have turned out differently? Seems like you had the right idea just nobody else cared enough to join you
In a company with 100,000 employees even a few hundred will not make a difference, even if they all work in the same department and make it critical for the company. This is my experience, it may be better in other situations and other companies, but when the bad things come from the very top, there is no solution.
It's just not an option in most leadership positions. When news comes down that the NSF budget is likely to be cut 55%, being the director of the NSF means deciding how that 55% cut is allocated. Your subordinates need advice on how to make funding decisions, and guarantees that you'll preserve funding for X and Y and Z which are particularly important. And once you start offering such advice and guarantees, you're an active participant in the cuts, no matter how much you personally wish they hadn't happened.
I completely understand resigning on principles. It's a reflection of an internal state where you cannot fight (due to reporting chain of command) and the idea that leaving to fight is a stronger position than staying and fighting within a corrupted/damaged organisation.
There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign.
In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either
1) start another company to directly compete
2) quit, join another company to compete or
3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place.
3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level.
Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later.
Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions.
Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.
By resigning you take the initiative, control the timing, and can put out a statement of what the problem is. If you don't resign and refuse to play along with unethical/illegal directives, you get fired and unethical people who issued the directives tell a story about how you're a saboteur or something. Whoever gets their story out first is likely to set the tone for subsequent public debate.
You might be overestiamting how much 'clout and power' people in public life have. Few of them are known outside of their specialty field, so they really don't have much clout. And their power is quite limited; you may have noticed that multiple inspector generals (who are legally independent of the executive branch) were fired early in the administration. Several of them went to court and have obtained judgments that their firings were illegal, but the damage is already done.
You will only be able to remain on the job by compromising and compromising and compromising until there are none of your principles left. You might as well leave immediately and fight from outside.
yeah the "use my power to effect positive change" (or "bring them down from the inside") ideal is just a way to convince yourself that complicity is in service to a higher good. Funny enough that's the same argument the other side uses...
Resigning sends a signal to the people under you and outside the organization that fighting back is ok. Staying sends the message that things are ok enough.
Resigning sends a message fighting back is futile. A praising and grateful resignation letter sends a message things are OK. Staying sends different messages depending on words and actions.
Not everyone has such strong principles, the ability to lead under such different parameters or the wherewithal to deal with the circus that is the current administration.
Reading the tea leaves, this guy has less clout and power then he had assumed and fighting has a different meaning when people are threatened with getting disappeared to El Salvador.
If you're responsible, things are going to hell and you don't have the means to fix things, your only option is resignation. If you don't, then when things inevitably go to hell, people will blame you for it. By resigning, you're washing your hands of the matter.
I can think of cases where new employers clearly act without integrity and that may make certain employees uneasy about being asked to do things that may be unethical.
I don’t understand the emotional attachment to a specific job or organization. I could see if it’s something you built (but then hopefully you call the shots), but otherwise it’s a agreement between two parties and if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll thank you for the time so far and leave without ever looking back.
People make their lives far more complex than need be. There isn’t one job you can work or do what you want to do. There are many. Go somewhere else.
The public sector is about service. It’s not emotional attachment that keeps these employees there to the end, it’s a sense of responsibility. There’s no higher calling keeping you at your B2B SaaS company.
The public sector was about service. Then we elected Donald Trump twice. I wouldn't want to be the last idiot carrying water for a country that rejected my service outright.
Higher calling might be the wrong phrase, but generally I find that people who work for the forest service etc feel more responsibility for their charge than people making widgets.
I get your reaction but it discounts that all of these people are both human (with limited amounts resolve) and have many alternatives. Look at Trump's first cabinet. I believe it had several people who didn't need or want to be there, but felt they needed to supervise: Tillerson, Kelly, Haley - none of them lasted very long.
the victim of domestic violence sticking it out doesn't help anyone else.
Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone.
People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children.
If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.
All reasons why the best solution is frankly often to just mind your own damn business, you shouldn't have opinions on others people's life moves which you can't possibly ascertain/judge as you have a huge information asymmetry and very makes decisions differently, has differing tolerances for different stresses/abuses/etc even if you did have all the facts
- How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside.
- Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.
It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years.
Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.
It's not "spilling over" as some kind of inevitable process. The President nominated and the Senate confirmed a health secretary who works hard to cultivate mistrust of vaccines. The scientists didn't make them do that.
Leaving is better then becomeming co-guilty. They cant stop this process pushed hard from the top and they can barely slow it down. They can stay and become morally and legaly compromises or go.
You wont win this fight from inside Trump administration. You can become colaborant or not.
Fighting a meat grinder or a lawnmower is usually a bad strategy especially with an openly corrupt and abusive government with no checks on any of its power.
People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.
Say you have a family and that you have this NSF director position. You get some orders that you do not agree with, and at the same time you know that your partner could be disappeared tomorrow to El Salvador, by mistake of course. What is your plan to fight and protect your family?
Citizenship status doesn't matter if you create a one-way jurisdictional valve people can be pushed through before there is time to assert status and rights.
I mean, one might take the view, and one might be right, that these organisations are at this point FUBAR. There might be something to be said for taking a few years out and potentially coming back when Musk, Trump et al have been dislodged.
It looks a lot better on the resume to say "I quit in protest" than to say "I was fired because I refused to do my job".
Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.
Pretty distressing at how there’s basically zero pushback from the American elites at the destruction of all strategic American advantages and only ineffective pushback from the public.
There will be entire genres of books written about how America just said “eh” to being gutted by a bunch of rich psychopaths.
With Brexit Brits got exactly what was promised, they just didn't realize what that promise actually meant and very few are happy about it these days.
This is next level of "I'll deliver anyway, I know what you wanted" while fucking it up spectacularly. If only all of our pensions wouldn't be now siphoned to those few with advanced government access I would be laughing a bit more.
The market’s down what, 10-20%? The dollar’s down 10%.
20-30% of average 401k’s have already been siphoned, and we haven’t even seen the impact of the tariffs or elimination of social security yet.
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.
They did not get what was promised. They were promised large reductions in immigration, instead the Johnson government raised immigration levels to never before seen heights. Brexit enabled them to have lowered it to whatever level they wanted, but the Conservatives preferred to self destruct than compromise with the voters on mass immigration.
I keep hearing this. But for that to work, the elites have to have a bunch of money available, that didn't lose value when everything fell apart. Well, where are they parking that money right now, that won't lose value when everything else does?
Tax havens aren't immune to economic disaster though. If the US dollar becomes worthless, then it doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your offshore bank account. Ditto if you're storing wealth as equities or bonds. Real estate value will collapse if tenants can't pay rent or if the local government decides to confiscate land.
I suppose that you could keep gold or bitcoin wallets in a vault, but then it actually belongs to the vault guards, not to you.
Basically you need a collapse that's bad enough to shrink asset prices but not bad enough to break the social contact.
What makes you think the elites aren’t pushing back? Because they aren’t being public about it? “If it’s not on the internet it didn’t happen”?
I know for a fact the CEO of my Fortune 100 company has talked with the administration to share their views on the potential impact. No press release, no public statement. Just a visit to the White House.
If anything, I’d suggest the public silence indicates the lites are either on board or feel their concerns will be addressed.
Take it to the person who claimed their CEO is doing that fight. My argument was that their CEO is not fighting anything.
> Why would a company "fight the administration"? That sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy.
Just for the record, I agree that this administration is abusing power right and left. And also that it reflects very badly on those who support it or defend it.
Two failed impeachment attempts, countless lawsuits, and now the Supreme Court has more or less inoculated Trump from any further prosecution attempts.
The checks and balances have all been exhausted. There are no bullets left in the gun.
Lots of everyday people have a tremendous amount of power. C-suite executives for example.
The concrete example of this is Harvard and some of the big law firms (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale). That is what resistance looks like now.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is an example of an entity that should have resisted, but folded instead.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the C-suite at big US corporations do not quite realize this about their position. They think that it's not their job; either that they keep their head down and the lawyers and politicians will take care of it, or something far worse, that the system has already fallen so may as well try to make concessions and go along to get along.
> 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.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
If this isn't the tyrannical government (disappearing people, destroying public services even the Dept of Education, deliberately dismantling checks and balances, ...) the 2A was specifically created for, then what would be? And if the 2A isn't about countering tyrannical government, what IS it for?
Trump was elected on deporting illegals, closing the Dept of Education, removing men from women's sports and to stop sending money overseas. The insular HN community doesn't understand this is what the majority of American voters want. Many of us are very happy with the direction things have been moving.
Deportations, I could understand. But extraction to a foreign concentration camp without a sentence or any legal recourse? That is just utterly cruel -- even monstrous. If the majority of American voters want that, then that's what they are, full stop.
> Many of us are very happy with the direction things have been moving.
No, you're not, and yes I am telling you how you feel.
This is, for lack of a better word, "cope".
Even if you think some of this stuff is cool, you can't be so stupid as to just ignore all the economic damage around you. That does affect you, whether you have the conviction to admit it or not. At the end of the day, you _will_ suffer. There is no pride in being both a loser and a coward.
It wasn’t created for that reason and it’s a pretty flimsy justification for it. Odds of the 2nd being a positive force for retaining liberal democracy are fairly low.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t have it—a right doesn’t necessarily need to be useful—but that justification’s not great.
I’m not from the USA, but as far as I understand isn’t education the purview of the states?
And anyway, if you feel that strongly about it, go round up an armed militia and see how far you get. You’re going to need the support of a not insignificant fraction of your fellow citizens, so you’d better get your story straight.
That is to say, you’d better have a rigorous alternative you think will persuade others, and you’re willing to bet your life on.
In theory, 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 of a general strike and related resistance, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear
"The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in Kraków before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""
Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad (including opinions and priorities related to "identity politics"). Will those sentiments change as political things continue to play out (for good or bad) and get to the point where there becomes a broad sentiment for a general strike? Frankly, I don't know. For example, a lot of people think it would be a good thing to reshore manufacturing in the USA which hopefully also might eventually lower prices for manufactured goods (at least relative to wages). But whether current political actions will accomplish any of that is up for debate, as is whether reshoring manufacturing will bring back lots of good paying jobs to the USA or whether reshoring instead will just bring more automation and more wealth concentration. Some people may be willing to wait and see, while other people may have a specific opinion and may want to act politically on it.
As G. William Domhoff wrote decades ago in "Who Rules America":
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_freshstart.h...
"Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't."
So, whatever one's economic opinions, the "identity politics" of it all is a separate issue (as above).
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.""
Some parts from that long article I found especially interesting:
"Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation."
"Sociologist Charles Derber asserts that the American left is "largely an identity-politics party" and that it "offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism." Both he and David North of the Socialist Equality Party posit that these fragmented and isolated identity movements which permeate the left have allowed for a far-right resurgence. Cornel West asserted that discourse on racial, gender and sexual orientation identity was "crucial" and "indispensable", but emphasized that it "must be connected to a moral integrity and deep political solidarity that hones in on a financialized form of predatory capitalism. A capitalism that is killing the planet, poor people, working people here and abroad." Historian Gary Gerstle writes that identity politics and multiculturalism thrived in the neoliberal era precisely because these movements did not threaten capital accumulation, and over the same period "pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class was vanishing." The ideological space to oppose capitalism shrank with the fall of communism, forcing the left to "redefine their radicalism in alternative terms"."
Identity politics is a complex topic, and how it is playing out specifically in the USA is a complex topic -- as is how it seems to relate to recent changes at the NSF including grant terminations.
For the USA to heal as a nation, we need to figure out a way to transcend divisions -- including divisions related to identity politics.
Disclaimer: A NSF grant that was terminated last week has directly affected my family.
Checks and balances aside, a plurality of people voted for this. They saw Jan 6 happen. They saw all the lawsuits and criminal charges. They saw the impeachments. And they just want him anyway. It's been debated ad nauseum already and I don't think anyone has given a satisfactory explanation for how he keeps doing this.
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.
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.
That's clearly just your opinion and it's not something that makes sense to me. Nor does it explain why their supposed disappointment translated into voting for known criminal and fraudster who did even less for anyone.
Nah, nonsense. It was republicans who made trans issues big - because it rally their base. Same with abortions - republicans made them big topic and successfully removed them.
Centrist democrat strategybis what democratic party does, again and again and it just empowers hard rigt to move more right.
Stop constantly blame "the other side" for what republicans consistently do. Democrats did led the economy much better, they cause less debt. Republicans do the above worst and then they blame democrats.
Conservatives dislike it when things improve, again and again. They are in fact hateful and take pleasure at causing harm. The social issues is what motivates republican base.
Lets hope we get to the place were these books will be written. Books are already being banned in the US and some retailers are pulling these books from their selves.
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.
American elites push back when their tax shelters and uninsured deposits (see Silicon Valley Bank collapse) are at risk. That's their line in the sand.
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.
I find it very disappointing that there aren't more public figures speaking on what's happening and calling out Trump's BS and lies. My guess, they are scared of Trump, but also Trump is still popular so they don't want to take a side. The saddest thing is that American people voted for that guy, and that check and balances don't seem to work. So it's not a Trump issue, it's a US problem.
It's been truly amazing how ineffective and half-assed the opposition to this administration has been. I mean, in Trump's recent joint address to Congress, a handful of D's in Congress held up little signs in protest. Little signs! They might as well have shrugged and not done anything. These are the people the other side elected to fight this madness, and they're sitting there on their asses holding up little signs and making frowny faces. If that's all the opposition feels they are capable of doing, they might as well all just resign.
> And NSF said pending proposals that appeared to violate any of Trump’s executive orders—in particular those banning efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, foster environmental justice, and study the spread of misinformation on social media sites—would be returned for “mitigation.”
Basically don't study how Elon's websites are destroying the fabric of society or how Trump's policies will destroy the environment.
Oh, it's a good deal worse than that. The NSF actually has a statutory mandate to ask for those Broader Impact sections; Congress would have to pass a law to stop it. So now the people applying for grants need to include, by law, a section that, by policy, will get the grant application returned for editing and "mitigation", while the Administration is also ordering, again without Congressional authority, that one out of every two dollars spent at the NSF be cut.
The NSF doesn't even cost that much money to run. They're doing this counterproductively and, as far as I can tell, for no good reason at all.
> while the Administration is also ordering, again without Congressional authority
Trump is doing a lot of illegal things. Like, A LOT of illegal things, but if you read the article they specifically said that Trump officials said they were only going to ask for Congress for 55% of the current budget in the next years budget cycle so they are actually doing this one correctly.
Elon’s one of our most successful and accomplished entrepreneurs and that hellsite broke his brain to the point where he’s posting on there hundreds of times per day and spending hours interacting and vouching for some of the most depraved degenerates online rather than running his world-changing companies. That’s really a bad outcome.
Okay, that's a far more reasonable thing to claim. The way you phrased it made me think you thought it was Twitter specifically. It's definitely a group effort on that front.
This is probably a bad faith sarcastic comment, but for others
Pretending social media holds no influence on society was an argument you could have made when it was just kids getting into fights or shooting each other over Internet beef fifteen years ago.
Now it's an essential target in governments all over the world when it comes to spreading propaganda/disinformation. It has a direct link to effecting change in voters and entire governments innumerable times now.
I have to wonder what DOGE (including the alleged wunderkind Farritor that all the SV VCs were hailing) is planning for NSF. It’s amazing the arrogance of these people, to walk in and just do “hulk smash” on decades of hard work, infrastructure and institutional capacity.
It's fairly straightforward really. Academics will work on whatever grant topics are available, most will do anything for money, so expect lots of grants on topics directly benefiting X.ai, Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX.
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.
> 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.
Very few academics become principle investigators. Most every academic who's not a PI is working on something for that PI.
The vast majority of those working for a PI are students and postdocs, which are inherently trainee positions. Though, depending on the field and the PI, trainees may also have plenty of freedom to work on their own topics. If you want an actual career in the academia, the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Do we live on the same planet? I understand that the point of being an academic is to always be learning, but there's no place on earth I know of that thinks of someone with a PhD as a trainee.
> the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Implying that one gets a choice is bold. My understanding is that there's a job for about 1 in 10 postdocs in academia these days.
A postdoc is a training position, where the individual further develops their skills and tries to build an independent profile while being mentored by a more senior academic. PhDs who work in someone else's projects without focusing as much on personal development typically have other job titles, such as project scientist or staff scientist.
Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.
The number of academics who achieve a 50 year career is vanishingly small. I can think of a handful I met in a decade. To call the other 99.9% of academia in-training is a bit of a mis-nomer, whether it's the accepted terminology or not. That was my point.
And my point was that academics whose primary job is doing research in someone else's project are even rarer than tenured professors in research universities.
A postdoc is primarily a career advancement position rather than something where you are expected to contribute full time. Such positions are also pretty rare. There are something like 70k postdocs in the US, vs. almost 190k tenured or tenure-track full-time faculty in research universities.
It's true that serial postdocs exist (though schools tend to have term limits and even limits on years since PhD on postdocs), but it is certainly intended to be a trainee role. Even postdocs with fancy fellowships generally have sponsors.
Sure, but PhD students are still working on topics that they (at least partially) choose. As a PhD student in the USA, you have choice over your advisor, and hence choice over your research niche. Within that niche, you don't necessarily have full control over your project, but it is in everyone's interest to align the project with the student's interests; nobody wants a project that was half-assed because the student hated working on it.
So he had a chance to say what he thinks of these plans to butcher NSF, but he chose to wash his hands and say "I am deeply grateful to the Presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation. " and so on.
Another knowledgeable person leaving due to DOGE, what a surprise. The US is loosing its smartest people due to Trump. Soon we will be a backwater country with lots of weapons, nothing else.
We're going to bring manufacturing back! But we're not bringing back the crappy manufacturing jobs that pay absolute peanuts. No, we're going to automate those! With robots that we don't make here in the US, of course. Those robots don't exist, because if they did then China would be using them, but we'll buy some robots from China at 150% tariffs so that we can set up some degree of manufacturing here in the US!
We'll create jobs! But good-paying jobs, for well-educated people! The kind that we won't be making anymore once we gut the department of education and saddle everyone with crushing student loan debt that we've just announced we're going to be chasing after again! Because the government isn't willing to let people get away without paying their debts! Unless it's a big bank, or a billionaire. Or the US government itself, for that matter! But the US government is in massive debt, and we can't let student loan payments go unpaid! But we can give a $4.5 trillion tax cut to billionaires who don't need it, that's important.
The administration is in this weird limbo of "doesn't know what they're doing" and "is desperately trying to accomplish goals that will clearly and irreparably tank the entire country".
Authoritarians often allow for strong science and engineering skills within an approved range. The Nazis had excellent engineering and so did the Soviet Union in some areas.
Isolating the US from the rest of the world economically and politically and plunging the country into an unforced recession while giving trillions of dollars to billionaires and texting state secrets to journalists and relatives to own the libs.
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.
I have no problem with such claims. It comes down to who says they have the sources and how often they have been right in the past. When Rudy Giuliani says “I have evidence but I can’t show it to you” you can be certain he is lying. When Jeffrey Goldberg says he was texted war plans you can believe him. In this case you can click on the author’s name and review reports from the past and see how those played out.
One thing I don't understand is people resigning on principles.
If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.
The options you have:
A) disagree and commit
B) disagree and wait to be fired
C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions
I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role:
Fun fact: Exactly the stipulation behind this excerpt, whether the President can hire/fire the head of the NSF, is exactly why Truman had vetoed an earlier version of the NSF bill written under the close influence of Vannevar Bush that actively avoided providing for this extent of executive ‘weighing of the scales’ of science. Source: Bush, V. “Pieces of the Action”, 1970
I’m so glad you know this, as I was going to comment on this topic of history.
Bush was a wise man, Truman forgot that government power can be fickle.
For The Tech minded, I wrote an guest column that touched on the autonomy of technical management aspect.
https://thetech.com/2024/07/11/anniversary-vannevar-bush-pas...
the “unchecked committee of technocratic experts appeared to be his preferred agency governance form.” refers both to his utterances illustrated in his only biography to date, and particularly to the would-be May-Johnson governance structure he promoted.
Today we see the debate in full swing with discussion of technocratic elitism, (particularly this year more than last when I wrote the piece).
I wrestle with the pitfalls & perceived benefits a technocratic elite sans much representative democratic oversight. But make no mistake, a ‘Vannevarian’ world would appear very different to the current one we prefer to think we live in. The closest example in pop culture to what I imagine is the Fallout franchise’s Vault governance & managed society.
This is great. I worked in building 13 and speak about V. Bush when I give talks to course 3 phd students occasionally :)
William B. Bonvillian taught me the bit I know about the topic :)
The very namesake building I’ll keep sensitized to the STS Bonvillian name, I was unfamiliar prior, thank you.
That’s great to hear you sometimes give talks to course 3 students, as maybe some of them will go on to study lattices like: https://www.sf-uap.com/materials-science , for which study under what governance structure we may not know.
All the best.
Is it disagree and commit?
NSF is an "independent agency" [1] so if the job you were appointed to an confirmed by congress (senate) is at odds with the presidents desires I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a problem for the president not you.
Similar to all those inspector generals who just gave up when they were illegally fired. Literally your job is to prevent the president from corruption, how are you going to do that now?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
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.
Nah, people have got to stop buying into this unitary executive stuff! Independent agencies have oversight and accountability. Congress can do whatever they want with them whenever they want.
I think it's imminently reasonable to say that agencies shouldn't be independent of the executive, and that's the default if the legislation passed by Congress (and signed by the current executive!) doesn't specify otherwise. But Congress should, and I believe does, have the power to set things up otherwise.
I agree but only to the point that an independent agency setup by Congress exercises powers granted Congress by the Constitution and does not conflict with powers explicitly granted to other branches.
(And it's pretty unclear to me how the NSF, which is ultimately a method for Congress to spend money, could relate to any Executive powers)
Yeah that's the thing, what powers are even granted directly to the executive by the text? It seems to me that the whole unitary executive theory is based on the clause "The executive Power shall be vested in a President", where "the executive power" is never well defined.
The President commands the military, negotiates treaties, nominates various officials for confirmation. Probably the most leeway relates to being called to ensure laws are faithfully executed.
So it seems reasonable the Executive can police independent agencies to ensure they operate as authorized by law, but I don't see how that challenges the establishment or existence of lawful independent agencies.
NSF is one thing but say an independent agency that does things like negotiate treaties or command the military or nominate Supreme Court justices should be off the table
(But on the other hand, theoretically the Executive should be able to voluntarily authorize legislation that enables those things if they wanted to. Just saying I can see cooperation possible but a veto override probably won't work to force it on an unwilling Executive).
I meant my question to be a rhetorical question, but that was totally unclear in what I wrote. What I meant was to imply "the executive isn't even granted very many powers directly in the text".
I agree with you about the powers you enumerated.
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 Judicial Branch is supposed to provide oversight over the Executive and Legislative Branch.
> who will check the congress's power
The judiciary. E.g Bowsher v. Synar
Yeah this is a silly argument. The check on the actions of independent agencies is the same as the check on the actions of all agencies. The executive obviously isn't a check on the actions of executive agencies...
It's not unconstitutional, it's already been done and the supreme court says it's fine.
They decide what is and is not constitutional, not you. And, contrary to what Internet armchair "textualists" will proclaim, most of the constitution is up for interpretation and actually quite vague.
We've been debating the constitution since the moment we lifted the pen. Or, er, quill. Have some humility.
Bills also require the president to sign them, though a supermajority of Congress could override the veto.
Secret other option: Disagree and convince your boss to change their mind
That, of course, probably doesn't apply in this situation since Trump rarely changes his mind. But it does apply in other situations.
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.
Isn't this what is happening now?
Given that the management is choosing who is let go, I believe many are threatening to let crucial people and programs end if funding is cut.
It's extremely effective.
> 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.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/19/inside-trump-mindset-tariff...
"We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."
Trump is known to be that type where if you want him to go with your suggestion, you must be the last person in the room.
Perhaps that's why Elon was following him so closely everywhere at the tail end of his campaign and at the start of his presidency.
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You’re assuming the battle hasn’t been lost. These people didn’t resign at first fight. They resigned when they realised there isn’t a way to fight a President who wants to dismantle an agency underneath him like this.
>I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
Can you give me some examples of how you would fight?
Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?
Comply but leak the truth to the media.
Comply in a maximally obstructive way.
Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.
Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.
There's tons of "how-to" guides on how to maliciously comply with work demands without getting fired.
> 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.
>> 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.
"Obstructive" in this scenario results in the organization keeping functioning effectively. Obstructive of something destructive allows it to keep existing.
> Obstructive of something destructive allows it to keep existing.
Right, but with whose money?
I'm pointing out a definitional misunderstanding. It's was a double negative misinterpreted as a single negative.
I see your point, but I think you are missing their point.
They are saying, the action taken by the administration is to cut funding to the department. This can't really be "obstructed" short of the director using their personal funds to pay people's salaries. It would require either people to work for free, or an outside source of money.
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.
Congress is the body that decides budget, not the President. Convince Congress and you will win budget, and legislative directives to accomplish specific tasks. Putting a man on the moon required Congress.
People are now routinely absolving GOP Congress critters, when they are the actual decision makers.
I'm not sure how the NSF Director should/could by themselves convince congress to not do the funding cut, but sure.
Fred Rogers managed it with PBS. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fredrogerssenatete... Then again, that was Mr Rogers.
They all leak, mostly to cause firings they want.
None of the other points achives win in some kind of fight. They are just turning you into a bitter looser that will be set aside one way or the other - and who still has to do unethical ornillegal things in the process.
> 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.
This comment doesn't make sense if you're aware of the content of the guides under discussion.
Subversion is the goal of them. To be successful requires time and not getting found out. It requires plausible deniability.
Cool, how does the NSF director subvert with plausible deniability?
Maybe the NSF director should confer with their GS peers in other services:
https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/the-art-of-simple-sabotage...
That exact book states that sabotage should only be done with plausible deniability, so I ask again...
So you'll ask... What?
I'm not sure what you're asking at this point.
It's a book about sabotage over a long period of time, written in particular to partisans of various countries.
Plausible deniability is the CIA operating method.
"How to do shit to subvert large orgs covertly via death by a thousand cuts" is another title for the manuscript, in some universe, somewhere.
The other Trump malingerers are giving adept examples of how to ape compliance while going completely against the law. Complying with the law in contravention of DOGE wishes should be simple in comparison.
Okay, if they have, then please explain to me what they did differently.
If you're in a hierarchical structure and someone higher up gives you an ultimatum, your choices are: comply, resist and face consequences, or find subversive, incremental ways to undermine it. None of those are cost-free.
"Fighting" isn't about magic moves that keep everything safe. It's about choosing when and how to accept the risks. Expecting a fight with no threat to your position is cowardice disguised as pragmatism.
>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?
In labor circles, the "subversive, incremental ways" are known as "work to rule".
You simply do as you're told. Orders are never completely without ambiguity, and the person giving the order has less direct experience with the subject than the person receiving the order. There's wiggle room.
Concrete example: The order is "Do X". The person charged with executing it actually understands that the consequences will be that Y and Z (which the person giving the order cares about) will actually be on fire if you do X.
In a functioning relationship, you speak up and say "Happy to do X, but here's what'll happen, maybe we should consider a different way to achieve your goals". If you're going the subversive route, you say "Sure thing. I'll get right on X. I'll overdeliver on it". Then you do X, and nudge it towards maximally bad impact on Y/Z.
Followed by "Oh, who could've foreseen! Y and Z are in ruins! What would you like me to do, boss?"
Mire things down in bureaucracy. Try and make everything take substantially longer than it should. Throw up hurdles in the face of progress. "Forget" to do important steps in the process so that you have to re-do work. Implement things on the face of it that are correct, but that don't achieve the same result, etc.
If having the NSF offer fewer grants is the administration's goal, as it seems to be, wouldn't this help them along?
I think 4 year olds know how to do that. Follow the exact letter of what they say, but doing everything else outside the bounds of "do this" the way you want to.
I.e. "It's time for bed" means "I'm going to continue to play, just in my bed."
"Go to sleep" means "Pretend to sleep for 5 minutes, then go back to playing." When confronted, say that you woke up after 5 minutes.
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".
If you are a Reddit user r/MaliciousCompliance is full of stories* of people follow orders to the most exacting and absurd extent. Most of them are peon-level folks so I am not sure how those actions would map to a person in a position of real power.
*fact vs embellished fact vs straight fiction is always questionable on Reddit.
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).
Don't do it. Perhaps obfuscate and delay as much as possible that you are not actually doing it. Perhaps get fired. Then go to court for wrongful termination (this would depend on the order being unlawful)?
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.
https://specificsuggestions.com/
"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)
This is what I got: Send people the http:// version of links instead of https://
I actually have no idea how this would disrupt anything.
It would slow down the operation of the organization. In this case, it's counterproductive to the director's aims. The director's goal is to maximize grant funding; a functional bureaucracy is essential for that goal. There is nothing the director can do to increase the funding, which is being cut by an external source. The legality of the funding cut is unclear, but the director has no agency in the outcome of a legal challenge.
But how would sending the http link slow things down?
Most link parsers, browsers, and sites will happily redirect you to available encrypted sites these days.
And even when they don't this is extremely dangerous advice to give for people who aren't technical.
It's a silly novelty website. Maybe this no longer happens, but for a period of time, browsers would present a warning that the website was insecure. The user would need to switch to https by updating the address. It was inconvenient.
You total chaos machine!
Give a wrong time. Stop a traffic line!
I've mentioned it too often and sound like a stuck record, but Jaroslav Hasek's Svejk has it perfected [0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Soldier_%C5%A0vejk 11;rgb:0000/0000/0000
If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in…
Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.
Honest question - have you ever worked somewhere where people above you in the food chain have made decisions you consider bad or unacceptable?
If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan).
The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.
Mental health perhaps? If the administration is making the organisations job impossible it could be an incredibly awful time to stay. I don't believe I owe anyone my sanity.
yea that seems to be a common theme with people. Nothing is bigger than them or more important than their own personal mental health.
I can't take it myself so I'm just going to roll over and not stand for any principle or fight for any cause because that's just too much for me to handle.
And besides you're just one person so what difference is it going to make anyways.
Same thing why people don't vote. It's not like their one vote will make a difference.
Multiply that times 10 million people and you get what we have.
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.
I disagree with your first statement. People absolutely can and do provide many things of value while the mental health is declining. In fact, being able to provide things of value is often what helps with the mental health. Don't take that away.
Seeking shelter to heal is certainly one good option, but I also encourage everyone who struggles to seek out help. That's not a fight you have to fight alone. If out break your bone, you see a specialist for fractures. If your mental health is damaged, see a specialist for mental health.
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.
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NSF director is a political appointee, as such serves the will of the President. We don't need those people "fighting," we need to elect the people we want to make the right appointments.
Well, I’ve come to learn the best leaders hire people who do fight them. The key is that they’re transparently open to being fought, take all sides under consideration, give deference when they don’t have to, but expect compliance when they make a decision.
I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places.
I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
>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?
Does getting fired by Trump for publicly resisting his changes qualify as disgrace?
When he was initially appointed by the same guy, yeah kind of. Unless you can spin a good story about how you thought Trump was good but changed for the worse (which is a tough story to make believable right now, and will also burn all your Trump-adjacent bridges since he seems to value loyalty above all else)
this director was appointed by the 45th president in 2017.
You're getting a lot of pushback, but this resonates with me. I guess I have a hard time understanding the value in a "noble departure" rather than just going down swinging.
If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life.
Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.
1. The resignation is an important signal to other people that bad things are happening. Not everyone is paying attention; dramatic resignations are events that might help pierce the media veil.
2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.
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.
Historically, 'this decision is so outrageous that three important people have resigned' has been a powerful brake on outrageous decisions.
That has stopped being the case recently, for whatever reason.
If a shark was eating me, and I have the choice at almost any time to immediately vacate the vicinity of the shark, I'm probably going to just leave. I've had jobs, early in my career, where I figuratively punched the shark instead. The shark won.
Except that your example is not reflective of the situation.
The right example should be: you are enjoying surfing, then a shark arrives and constantly try to eat you.
Now you either keep surfing, at the risk of being eaten or simply hurt by the shark, or you just take your board and go back home.
Either way, your surfing session is ruined.
I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize. Additionally, quietly criticizing just means quietly getting fired, then likely still being unable to publicly criticize.
The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.
US Government employees basically can't sign non-disparagement agreements, the Federal Government doesn't enter into agreements without a fixed time commitment to judge compliance, and there are incredibly strong whistleblower protection laws for Federal employees which would make any non-disparagement agreement very difficult if not impossible to enforce. A Federal judge held that the Trump 2016 campaign's non-disparagement agreements were unenforceable, and there have been no hints of Federal employees being offered anything even like that.
That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.
The fact that it is not an anonymous source lends much more weight than leaking to a reporter.
Based on your first graph though, how much longer before federal whistle blower laws get DOGE'd?
> I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize
That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
Those people are being fired as fast as possible.
That's because what's happening is not just changes in policies within these agencies, but essentially a loyalty test / purge.
You can either be loyal and do what the new boss wants without disagreement, you can resign in protest, or you can be fired.
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again.
I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.
It's resign or follow my orders. There's not much wiggle room in-between, and the lawsuits will probably cost you everything anyway.
There's tons of people that don't follow the boss's orders to a T and don't resign and don't get fired. And they would be much less effective at enacting their boss's agenda than someone who "just followed orders"
OK, but isn't getting fired better than resigning? Why resign?
I can't speak for the NSF director, but the silver lining in a resignation is you leave on your own terms. Being fired is not "better" for everyone.
In addition to what others have said, in theory it's also a way to call public attention to the problem. These are coveted positions that people don't just walk away from lightly, so someone in this position stepping down and explaining why can serve as an alarm bell.
That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.
The perception shift is key. Getting fired for cause and trying to claim the moral high ground afterward often reads as sour grapes; Bitterness and/or incompetence being rationalized. Quitting, on the other hand, suggests principle and lends credibility.
There are some hills not worth die on. There are moments when a retreat is better than a worthless fight, saving people in the process.
I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.
If more people at the company had followed your example...would it have turned out differently? Seems like you had the right idea just nobody else cared enough to join you
In a company with 100,000 employees even a few hundred will not make a difference, even if they all work in the same department and make it critical for the company. This is my experience, it may be better in other situations and other companies, but when the bad things come from the very top, there is no solution.
> Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.
Sometimes there is not a direct path to 'good'. Sometimes the path to things getting better goes through a rough patch.
It is very dissatisfying that a lot of people are doing very stupid things very publicly right now.
---
Politics is an information game, and you can't play an information game without changing the game; all information games are metagames.
The way the game is being played right now is drastically changing the game.
I won't claim that the game will be better after this (especially in the short term), but it certainly will be different.
It's just not an option in most leadership positions. When news comes down that the NSF budget is likely to be cut 55%, being the director of the NSF means deciding how that 55% cut is allocated. Your subordinates need advice on how to make funding decisions, and guarantees that you'll preserve funding for X and Y and Z which are particularly important. And once you start offering such advice and guarantees, you're an active participant in the cuts, no matter how much you personally wish they hadn't happened.
I completely understand resigning on principles. It's a reflection of an internal state where you cannot fight (due to reporting chain of command) and the idea that leaving to fight is a stronger position than staying and fighting within a corrupted/damaged organisation.
There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign.
In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either
1) start another company to directly compete
2) quit, join another company to compete or
3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place.
3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level.
Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later.
Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions.
Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.
By resigning you take the initiative, control the timing, and can put out a statement of what the problem is. If you don't resign and refuse to play along with unethical/illegal directives, you get fired and unethical people who issued the directives tell a story about how you're a saboteur or something. Whoever gets their story out first is likely to set the tone for subsequent public debate.
You might be overestiamting how much 'clout and power' people in public life have. Few of them are known outside of their specialty field, so they really don't have much clout. And their power is quite limited; you may have noticed that multiple inspector generals (who are legally independent of the executive branch) were fired early in the administration. Several of them went to court and have obtained judgments that their firings were illegal, but the damage is already done.
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.
Have you actually done this? It's harder than it sounds.
You will only be able to remain on the job by compromising and compromising and compromising until there are none of your principles left. You might as well leave immediately and fight from outside.
yeah the "use my power to effect positive change" (or "bring them down from the inside") ideal is just a way to convince yourself that complicity is in service to a higher good. Funny enough that's the same argument the other side uses...
Resigning sends a signal to the people under you and outside the organization that fighting back is ok. Staying sends the message that things are ok enough.
Resigning sends a message fighting back is futile. A praising and grateful resignation letter sends a message things are OK. Staying sends different messages depending on words and actions.
Don't praise them in the resignation letter. Say something sharp and critical.
Not everyone has such strong principles, the ability to lead under such different parameters or the wherewithal to deal with the circus that is the current administration.
Reading the tea leaves, this guy has less clout and power then he had assumed and fighting has a different meaning when people are threatened with getting disappeared to El Salvador.
Maybe he might also have something else lined up.
If you're responsible, things are going to hell and you don't have the means to fix things, your only option is resignation. If you don't, then when things inevitably go to hell, people will blame you for it. By resigning, you're washing your hands of the matter.
I can think of cases where new employers clearly act without integrity and that may make certain employees uneasy about being asked to do things that may be unethical.
Or, find a new job that pays better and enjoy your life working for somehow you don't acutely hate. Sounds like all upside to me.
Exactly.
I don’t understand the emotional attachment to a specific job or organization. I could see if it’s something you built (but then hopefully you call the shots), but otherwise it’s a agreement between two parties and if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll thank you for the time so far and leave without ever looking back.
People make their lives far more complex than need be. There isn’t one job you can work or do what you want to do. There are many. Go somewhere else.
The public sector is about service. It’s not emotional attachment that keeps these employees there to the end, it’s a sense of responsibility. There’s no higher calling keeping you at your B2B SaaS company.
The public sector was about service. Then we elected Donald Trump twice. I wouldn't want to be the last idiot carrying water for a country that rejected my service outright.
The public sector is a job for most. They aren't working at the government because of some higher calling (though some might).
Higher calling might be the wrong phrase, but generally I find that people who work for the forest service etc feel more responsibility for their charge than people making widgets.
If you stay it then becomes your job to do things you disagree with, even if you are attempting to have some mitigating effect.
Most people just don't make waves and cooperate. The ones who resign at least have principles.
I get your reaction but it discounts that all of these people are both human (with limited amounts resolve) and have many alternatives. Look at Trump's first cabinet. I believe it had several people who didn't need or want to be there, but felt they needed to supervise: Tillerson, Kelly, Haley - none of them lasted very long.
It's certainly going to test your moral fortitude but at some point I think this is a bit like telling a victim of domestic violence to stick it out.
the victim of domestic violence sticking it out doesn't help anyone else.
Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone.
People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children.
If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.
All reasons why the best solution is frankly often to just mind your own damn business, you shouldn't have opinions on others people's life moves which you can't possibly ascertain/judge as you have a huge information asymmetry and very makes decisions differently, has differing tolerances for different stresses/abuses/etc even if you did have all the facts
I think there are two problems:
- How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside.
- Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.
It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years.
Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.
It's not "spilling over" as some kind of inevitable process. The President nominated and the Senate confirmed a health secretary who works hard to cultivate mistrust of vaccines. The scientists didn't make them do that.
Leaving is better then becomeming co-guilty. They cant stop this process pushed hard from the top and they can barely slow it down. They can stay and become morally and legaly compromises or go.
You wont win this fight from inside Trump administration. You can become colaborant or not.
Fighting a meat grinder or a lawnmower is usually a bad strategy especially with an openly corrupt and abusive government with no checks on any of its power.
People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.
Protecting your family is why you should fight.
Say you have a family and that you have this NSF director position. You get some orders that you do not agree with, and at the same time you know that your partner could be disappeared tomorrow to El Salvador, by mistake of course. What is your plan to fight and protect your family?
Perhaps take some vacation days to get that "partner" of yours citizenship?
Citizenship status doesn't matter if you create a one-way jurisdictional valve people can be pushed through before there is time to assert status and rights.
Congress could stop all this nonsense if they wanted to. The congressional leadership just doesn't want to.
And in this context it's reins not reigns.
You can't fight the system from within it.
I mean, one might take the view, and one might be right, that these organisations are at this point FUBAR. There might be something to be said for taking a few years out and potentially coming back when Musk, Trump et al have been dislodged.
It looks a lot better on the resume to say "I quit in protest" than to say "I was fired because I refused to do my job".
Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.
It's possible true but look at the current situation: there are people taking trump as face value.
They believe in him.
They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'.
It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something
Request to mods: s/NSF/National Science Foundation/ in the title.
Requests are more effective if you send email to hn@ycombinator.com as noted in the footer.
Pretty distressing at how there’s basically zero pushback from the American elites at the destruction of all strategic American advantages and only ineffective pushback from the public.
There will be entire genres of books written about how America just said “eh” to being gutted by a bunch of rich psychopaths.
With Brexit Brits got exactly what was promised, they just didn't realize what that promise actually meant and very few are happy about it these days.
This is next level of "I'll deliver anyway, I know what you wanted" while fucking it up spectacularly. If only all of our pensions wouldn't be now siphoned to those few with advanced government access I would be laughing a bit more.
The market’s down what, 10-20%? The dollar’s down 10%. 20-30% of average 401k’s have already been siphoned, and we haven’t even seen the impact of the tariffs or elimination of social security yet.
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.
They did not get what was promised. They were promised large reductions in immigration, instead the Johnson government raised immigration levels to never before seen heights. Brexit enabled them to have lowered it to whatever level they wanted, but the Conservatives preferred to self destruct than compromise with the voters on mass immigration.
Someone's gotta wipe Grandpa's ass.
Bidets
Well, this is want American Elites want - so they can buy up the pieces at a discount.
I keep hearing this. But for that to work, the elites have to have a bunch of money available, that didn't lose value when everything fell apart. Well, where are they parking that money right now, that won't lose value when everything else does?
Switzerland, Malta, the Cayman Islands, all the traditional tax havens I'd assume.
Tax havens aren't immune to economic disaster though. If the US dollar becomes worthless, then it doesn't matter how many dollars you have in your offshore bank account. Ditto if you're storing wealth as equities or bonds. Real estate value will collapse if tenants can't pay rent or if the local government decides to confiscate land.
I suppose that you could keep gold or bitcoin wallets in a vault, but then it actually belongs to the vault guards, not to you.
Basically you need a collapse that's bad enough to shrink asset prices but not bad enough to break the social contact.
What makes you think the elites aren’t pushing back? Because they aren’t being public about it? “If it’s not on the internet it didn’t happen”?
I know for a fact the CEO of my Fortune 100 company has talked with the administration to share their views on the potential impact. No press release, no public statement. Just a visit to the White House.
If anything, I’d suggest the public silence indicates the lites are either on board or feel their concerns will be addressed.
Trying to get favors for own company or industry is not the same as fighting the administration. That is just dping what Trump loves when you do.
> Trying to get favors for own company or industry is not the same as fighting the administration.
Why would a company "fight the administration"? That sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy.
Take it to the person who claimed their CEO is doing that fight. My argument was that their CEO is not fighting anything.
> Why would a company "fight the administration"? That sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy.
Just for the record, I agree that this administration is abusing power right and left. And also that it reflects very badly on those who support it or defend it.
I think you’re all over the place and unfocused on the matter at hand.
The original comment was that CEOs are pushing back. It’s just not done in the public sphere.
At least at my company, the CEO is satisfied the administration understands their concerns.
Yeah, and my comment is that they are not pushing back. CEO are trying to get favors for themselves from easy to corrupt administration.
That is not pushing back. That is playing along while wanting credit for silent push back that never happened.
For having zero knowledge of the interaction, you seem rather confident of how it went down.
Two failed impeachment attempts, countless lawsuits, and now the Supreme Court has more or less inoculated Trump from any further prosecution attempts.
The checks and balances have all been exhausted. There are no bullets left in the gun.
Lots of everyday people have a tremendous amount of power. C-suite executives for example.
The concrete example of this is Harvard and some of the big law firms (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale). That is what resistance looks like now.
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison is an example of an entity that should have resisted, but folded instead.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the C-suite at big US corporations do not quite realize this about their position. They think that it's not their job; either that they keep their head down and the lawyers and politicians will take care of it, or something far worse, that the system has already fallen so may as well try to make concessions and go along to get along.
> 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.
And the one remaining possible check - a literal Supreme Court order - has also been ignored.
I mean, there is one more check, one more not so proverbial bullet in a gun.
But if not one thing is yielded to him, if without any violence he is simply not obeyed, he becomes naked and undone and nothing, just as when the root receives no nourishment, the branch withers and dies. - Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority
That was tried, too.
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If this isn't the tyrannical government (disappearing people, destroying public services even the Dept of Education, deliberately dismantling checks and balances, ...) the 2A was specifically created for, then what would be? And if the 2A isn't about countering tyrannical government, what IS it for?
Trump was elected on deporting illegals, closing the Dept of Education, removing men from women's sports and to stop sending money overseas. The insular HN community doesn't understand this is what the majority of American voters want. Many of us are very happy with the direction things have been moving.
Deportations, I could understand. But extraction to a foreign concentration camp without a sentence or any legal recourse? That is just utterly cruel -- even monstrous. If the majority of American voters want that, then that's what they are, full stop.
None of those things have happened.
They have. You are lying.
> Many of us are very happy with the direction things have been moving.
No, you're not, and yes I am telling you how you feel.
This is, for lack of a better word, "cope".
Even if you think some of this stuff is cool, you can't be so stupid as to just ignore all the economic damage around you. That does affect you, whether you have the conviction to admit it or not. At the end of the day, you _will_ suffer. There is no pride in being both a loser and a coward.
It would be best to just be a loser.
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It wasn’t created for that reason and it’s a pretty flimsy justification for it. Odds of the 2nd being a positive force for retaining liberal democracy are fairly low.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t have it—a right doesn’t necessarily need to be useful—but that justification’s not great.
I’m not from the USA, but as far as I understand isn’t education the purview of the states?
And anyway, if you feel that strongly about it, go round up an armed militia and see how far you get. You’re going to need the support of a not insignificant fraction of your fellow citizens, so you’d better get your story straight.
That is to say, you’d better have a rigorous alternative you think will persuade others, and you’re willing to bet your life on.
> The Left doesn’t like the current regime and rapidly descends to openly suggesting they should be put to death.
We learned it from watching Trump back in 2016.
In theory, 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 of a general strike and related resistance, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in Kraków before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""
Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad (including opinions and priorities related to "identity politics"). Will those sentiments change as political things continue to play out (for good or bad) and get to the point where there becomes a broad sentiment for a general strike? Frankly, I don't know. For example, a lot of people think it would be a good thing to reshore manufacturing in the USA which hopefully also might eventually lower prices for manufactured goods (at least relative to wages). But whether current political actions will accomplish any of that is up for debate, as is whether reshoring manufacturing will bring back lots of good paying jobs to the USA or whether reshoring instead will just bring more automation and more wealth concentration. Some people may be willing to wait and see, while other people may have a specific opinion and may want to act politically on it.
As G. William Domhoff wrote decades ago in "Who Rules America": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_freshstart.h... "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't."
So, whatever one's economic opinions, the "identity politics" of it all is a separate issue (as above).
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.""
Some parts from that long article I found especially interesting:
"Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation."
"Sociologist Charles Derber asserts that the American left is "largely an identity-politics party" and that it "offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism." Both he and David North of the Socialist Equality Party posit that these fragmented and isolated identity movements which permeate the left have allowed for a far-right resurgence. Cornel West asserted that discourse on racial, gender and sexual orientation identity was "crucial" and "indispensable", but emphasized that it "must be connected to a moral integrity and deep political solidarity that hones in on a financialized form of predatory capitalism. A capitalism that is killing the planet, poor people, working people here and abroad." Historian Gary Gerstle writes that identity politics and multiculturalism thrived in the neoliberal era precisely because these movements did not threaten capital accumulation, and over the same period "pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class was vanishing." The ideological space to oppose capitalism shrank with the fall of communism, forcing the left to "redefine their radicalism in alternative terms"."
Identity politics is a complex topic, and how it is playing out specifically in the USA is a complex topic -- as is how it seems to relate to recent changes at the NSF including grant terminations.
For the USA to heal as a nation, we need to figure out a way to transcend divisions -- including divisions related to identity politics.
Disclaimer: A NSF grant that was terminated last week has directly affected my family.
I'm sorry your family has been affected. I hope they have the means to bounce back.
Thanks! And at least Hacker News can help: :-) "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2025)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43547611
Checks and balances aside, a plurality of people voted for this. They saw Jan 6 happen. They saw all the lawsuits and criminal charges. They saw the impeachments. And they just want him anyway. It's been debated ad nauseum already and I don't think anyone has given a satisfactory explanation for how he keeps doing this.
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.
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.
That's clearly just your opinion and it's not something that makes sense to me. Nor does it explain why their supposed disappointment translated into voting for known criminal and fraudster who did even less for anyone.
Nah, nonsense. It was republicans who made trans issues big - because it rally their base. Same with abortions - republicans made them big topic and successfully removed them.
Centrist democrat strategybis what democratic party does, again and again and it just empowers hard rigt to move more right.
Stop constantly blame "the other side" for what republicans consistently do. Democrats did led the economy much better, they cause less debt. Republicans do the above worst and then they blame democrats.
Conservatives dislike it when things improve, again and again. They are in fact hateful and take pleasure at causing harm. The social issues is what motivates republican base.
Lets hope we get to the place were these books will be written. Books are already being banned in the US and some retailers are pulling these books from their selves.
Books will be written but not by the Americans much like the fall of Rome wasn't covered by the Romans.
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)
Let's be clear, most Americans like paycheck to paycheck and can't afford losing a job or being arrested for saying antigoverment stuff
The starving peasants in <insert any grassroots regime change, peaceful and/or violent> could afford it, right?
The trick is to keep the poor people poor, but not too poor. Nothing left to lose and all that...
Or else they might rebel like the North Koreans, Cubans, and Eritreans do?
American elites push back when their tax shelters and uninsured deposits (see Silicon Valley Bank collapse) are at risk. That's their line in the sand.
The US government has been systematically destroying all the tax shelters.
Switzerland, Cayman Islands, etc now report to the IRS.
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.
I find it very disappointing that there aren't more public figures speaking on what's happening and calling out Trump's BS and lies. My guess, they are scared of Trump, but also Trump is still popular so they don't want to take a side. The saddest thing is that American people voted for that guy, and that check and balances don't seem to work. So it's not a Trump issue, it's a US problem.
It's been truly amazing how ineffective and half-assed the opposition to this administration has been. I mean, in Trump's recent joint address to Congress, a handful of D's in Congress held up little signs in protest. Little signs! They might as well have shrugged and not done anything. These are the people the other side elected to fight this madness, and they're sitting there on their asses holding up little signs and making frowny faces. If that's all the opposition feels they are capable of doing, they might as well all just resign.
I like to save my resignations for the whole "you can't fire me, I quit" part - when the fall is all thats left, it matters a great deal.
> And NSF said pending proposals that appeared to violate any of Trump’s executive orders—in particular those banning efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, foster environmental justice, and study the spread of misinformation on social media sites—would be returned for “mitigation.”
Basically don't study how Elon's websites are destroying the fabric of society or how Trump's policies will destroy the environment.
Oh, it's a good deal worse than that. The NSF actually has a statutory mandate to ask for those Broader Impact sections; Congress would have to pass a law to stop it. So now the people applying for grants need to include, by law, a section that, by policy, will get the grant application returned for editing and "mitigation", while the Administration is also ordering, again without Congressional authority, that one out of every two dollars spent at the NSF be cut.
The NSF doesn't even cost that much money to run. They're doing this counterproductively and, as far as I can tell, for no good reason at all.
> while the Administration is also ordering, again without Congressional authority
Trump is doing a lot of illegal things. Like, A LOT of illegal things, but if you read the article they specifically said that Trump officials said they were only going to ask for Congress for 55% of the current budget in the next years budget cycle so they are actually doing this one correctly.
Next year’s budget cycle starts in October.. they’re illegally impounding grants today.
The site formally known as Twitter is destroying the fabric of society, really? Do you hear yourself?
Elon’s one of our most successful and accomplished entrepreneurs and that hellsite broke his brain to the point where he’s posting on there hundreds of times per day and spending hours interacting and vouching for some of the most depraved degenerates online rather than running his world-changing companies. That’s really a bad outcome.
I think social media as a whole is destroying the fabric of society, yes.
Okay, that's a far more reasonable thing to claim. The way you phrased it made me think you thought it was Twitter specifically. It's definitely a group effort on that front.
This is probably a bad faith sarcastic comment, but for others
Pretending social media holds no influence on society was an argument you could have made when it was just kids getting into fights or shooting each other over Internet beef fifteen years ago.
Now it's an essential target in governments all over the world when it comes to spreading propaganda/disinformation. It has a direct link to effecting change in voters and entire governments innumerable times now.
I would question sanity of anyone who questions this… :)
He was already obeying in advance before DOGE got there, but I guess that wasn't enough. I fear very bad news is coming.
I have to wonder what DOGE (including the alleged wunderkind Farritor that all the SV VCs were hailing) is planning for NSF. It’s amazing the arrogance of these people, to walk in and just do “hulk smash” on decades of hard work, infrastructure and institutional capacity.
It's fairly straightforward really. Academics will work on whatever grant topics are available, most will do anything for money, so expect lots of grants on topics directly benefiting X.ai, Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX.
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.
> 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.
Very few academics become principle investigators. Most every academic who's not a PI is working on something for that PI.
The vast majority of those working for a PI are students and postdocs, which are inherently trainee positions. Though, depending on the field and the PI, trainees may also have plenty of freedom to work on their own topics. If you want an actual career in the academia, the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
> postdocs
> inherently trainee positions
Do we live on the same planet? I understand that the point of being an academic is to always be learning, but there's no place on earth I know of that thinks of someone with a PhD as a trainee.
> the main options are becoming a PI or choosing a teaching-focused position. There are some staff scientists and similar, but such positions are rarer than tenured professors.
Implying that one gets a choice is bold. My understanding is that there's a job for about 1 in 10 postdocs in academia these days.
A postdoc is a training position, where the individual further develops their skills and tries to build an independent profile while being mentored by a more senior academic. PhDs who work in someone else's projects without focusing as much on personal development typically have other job titles, such as project scientist or staff scientist.
Receiving a doctorate does not mean that you have finished your training. Some countries have habilitations or higher doctorates, which can be understood as more formal versions of postdoctoral training. Medical doctors are expected to specialize and receive more training as residents. Other fields have similar arrangements, some more and others less formal. If a full career is 50 years and the job requires a high degree of specialization, it can make sense to use the first ~15 years for training.
The number of academics who achieve a 50 year career is vanishingly small. I can think of a handful I met in a decade. To call the other 99.9% of academia in-training is a bit of a mis-nomer, whether it's the accepted terminology or not. That was my point.
And my point was that academics whose primary job is doing research in someone else's project are even rarer than tenured professors in research universities.
A postdoc is primarily a career advancement position rather than something where you are expected to contribute full time. Such positions are also pretty rare. There are something like 70k postdocs in the US, vs. almost 190k tenured or tenure-track full-time faculty in research universities.
It's true that serial postdocs exist (though schools tend to have term limits and even limits on years since PhD on postdocs), but it is certainly intended to be a trainee role. Even postdocs with fancy fellowships generally have sponsors.
Sure, but PhD students are still working on topics that they (at least partially) choose. As a PhD student in the USA, you have choice over your advisor, and hence choice over your research niche. Within that niche, you don't necessarily have full control over your project, but it is in everyone's interest to align the project with the student's interests; nobody wants a project that was half-assed because the student hated working on it.
If you cut the grant-funding available by half, we will not, in fact, work on topics benefiting your company.
Half won't at least.
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So he had a chance to say what he thinks of these plans to butcher NSF, but he chose to wash his hands and say "I am deeply grateful to the Presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation. " and so on.
Another knowledgeable person leaving due to DOGE, what a surprise. The US is loosing its smartest people due to Trump. Soon we will be a backwater country with lots of weapons, nothing else.
We're going to bring manufacturing back! But we're not bringing back the crappy manufacturing jobs that pay absolute peanuts. No, we're going to automate those! With robots that we don't make here in the US, of course. Those robots don't exist, because if they did then China would be using them, but we'll buy some robots from China at 150% tariffs so that we can set up some degree of manufacturing here in the US!
We'll create jobs! But good-paying jobs, for well-educated people! The kind that we won't be making anymore once we gut the department of education and saddle everyone with crushing student loan debt that we've just announced we're going to be chasing after again! Because the government isn't willing to let people get away without paying their debts! Unless it's a big bank, or a billionaire. Or the US government itself, for that matter! But the US government is in massive debt, and we can't let student loan payments go unpaid! But we can give a $4.5 trillion tax cut to billionaires who don't need it, that's important.
The administration is in this weird limbo of "doesn't know what they're doing" and "is desperately trying to accomplish goals that will clearly and irreparably tank the entire country".
> Soon we will be a backwater country with lots of weapons, nothing else.
Making advanced, superior weapons systems requires a workforce with strong science, engineering, and manufacturing skills.
I struggle to understand how the current administration's policies help.
Authoritarians often allow for strong science and engineering skills within an approved range. The Nazis had excellent engineering and so did the Soviet Union in some areas.
You can always hope your old stockpile of weapons works while bullying smaller countries with it.
Hmm… where have I seen this strategy play out in recent memory?
Seems to be going reasonably well, isn't it?
If the benefits don't outweigh those minor inconveniences, you're just not rich enough.
Yes, but we'll have stuck it to the woke, and that's what counts.
Isolating the US from the rest of the world economically and politically and plunging the country into an unforced recession while giving trillions of dollars to billionaires and texting state secrets to journalists and relatives to own the libs.
“stick it to all the too-tolerent people who let the woke movement gain power” would be a good steel manning of your argument
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.
It is a dog whistle for "We let gays/trans/atheist people exist."
I dont know Im only removing the strawmen of the comment
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“The Great Leap Backwards”
Anonymous. May have. That appear. Knowledgeable source.
Guessing or mind reading passes as journalism and that's frustrating.
What do we know? Budget cut and resignation.
I have no problem with such claims. It comes down to who says they have the sources and how often they have been right in the past. When Rudy Giuliani says “I have evidence but I can’t show it to you” you can be certain he is lying. When Jeffrey Goldberg says he was texted war plans you can believe him. In this case you can click on the author’s name and review reports from the past and see how those played out.