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Notes -
Reuters:
Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans
Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say
Apparently based on this memo (pdf).
This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.
Also, impoundment? We'll see?
Yeah, I'd like to know what they are thinking here. It seems like a bad move.
I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against. You don't win by funding your enemies. But it seems like a crude instrument. We should at least fund the best performing programs, even if the people running them are woke culture warriors.
I do have a somewhat related question though. Last year, I asked themotte which were the best charitable programs to give to. I ended up buying some malaria nets, and funding some other similar EA-type charities, but I did have some disquiet about it. If these charities are so effective that $100 can save 1 life or whatever, than why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project?
The same can be said of these programs. Why must the US do this with taxpayer dollars? If it's so important, why hasn't some billionaire just done the entire thing already. The global NGO complex has trillions of dollars in turnover per year. Why do they insist on funding 99% garbage instead of things which are so obviously high impact? It make me feel like it's actually about political power, not benefiting mankind.
A university might think these HIV drugs are more important than YOUR money, but they don't think it's more important then THEIR money.
This is going to be the real killer question. Do they have the extreme cajones that would be necessary to, when they decide to start releasing funds again, say, "...and it can't go to any organization that has a DEI/affirmative action program or otherwise discriminates on the basis of race/gender," or some set of qualifiers. It would take huge cajones, because that would immediately leave a huge number of universities, who currently get the bulk of the research dollars, totally frozen out. The stakes would be high. People would point to critical areas that basically cannot be funded. Some unis would crack; others might hold out. Either way, this would be an 'all in' play after he's already gone after this stuff that's directly within the gov't.
I expect it will have a lesser version of that qualification. That is, the grant will say "and you can't use money for this to fund DEI crap", so the Advanced Physics Program won't (openly) do DEI, but the same university will still have its feminist vulcanology program at least nominally not funded by Federal grants.
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I'll bet they will have to show they don't have any DEI/Affirmative Action and commit to only two genders to get the money flow turned back on. Punished Trump has no chill
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