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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?
I think part of the problem with the federal government is that ~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour. There are very, very few "no duh this is stupid" cuts to be made, unless you are RonPaulLaserEyes.gif or have either an in-depth investigation or literally magical awareness of government inefficiency.
If you think the feds are spending too much (they are, obviously) then from a certain standpoint it is best to slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on. By changing the status quo from "spending insane amounts of cash" to "spending next to zip" you can shift the burden onto the would-be spenders instead of on the would-be slashers.
Hoooo buddy. At multiple levels. I've just read some BAAs. I've read a variety of papers from labs who cite their federal funding on all of said papers. And I've even talked to folks about their publications and been told, "Yeah, this is pretty dumb, but it's what the BAA called for and what the PM said he wanted us to do." And yes, I've even spoken to PMs who are totally out to lunch.
The problem is that understanding such requires significant domain expertise, and if you're a high-level politician, you have \approx no way of distinguishing between advisers who actually have such expertise and will be honest with you, versus those who are out of their lane or riding a grift.
Yeah, it's sort of interesting - you run into this problem sometimes with "civilian control of the military" where the military tries to bamboozle Congress, but I suspect "civilian control of SCIENCE" is an even harder nut to crack. At least there are a lot of Congresscritters who are former servicemembers.
Right. But unlike the military, there isn't actually a need for Congress to fund any science. Let it all be done by the private sector publicizing their breakthroughs as patents and citizen-scientists who want to spend their own time and effort and money doing research. Burn academia to the ground.
Sure there is.
That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?
If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.
A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.
More like saying there is no need for the government to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage people to teach their kids to read. Which is true. When I was a kid in Peru, there were government schools, but they were seen as the last resort of the poor; anybody who could afford it sent their kids to a private school. Which, admittedly, was much cheaper since all anyone needed to set up a private school was a spare garage and enough money to hire a teacher, but that's just another point in favor of the free market.
I'm not seeing the "benefits", is my thing. Like, let's leave aside the nonsense where grifters get paid to do research on hating white males (not because it doesn't happen, but because it is too easy a target) and focus on the strongest arguments for government-funded public research; things like NASA and the LHC that are discovering real scientific data that it is impossible a private non-government actor would have done.
How does the New Horizons probe improve my life? How does finding the Higgs boson? How does developing the correct theory of quantum gravity? Why is the government stealing money from me to pay people to do these things?
The beauty of market-driven research is that it only happens when somebody with money has a positive expected rate of return, which means convincing other people with money to pay for the results, which means that the research is expected to make people's lives better in some way.
Government grants have no such fundamental tether to reality.
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While some kids will teach themselves to learn to read, the most critical times to develop are when they are so young they arent reasonably given all sorts of freedoms. So parents need to be somewhat dictatorial in directing that part of development or else it can be entirely missed.
OTOH, government efforts at teaching learning have failed at nearly every level for a century ++
Now think about something more complex than merely reading. What are the chances government is good at enabling it at a wide scale?
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