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Someone did a look into science grants being cancelled on the ssc sub and their conclusion was that DOGE or whoever basically just ctrl+f'd "diverse", "underrepresented", and "minority" and axed all matches. This would correspond with why REUs are being shuttered.
This feels particularly pernicious because, at least to me, it seems the vibe under the previous administration (and possibly it's predecessors) strongly encouraged sneaking in these terms for effectively opposite reasons to prevent summary rejection by federal funding agencies. There are probably a bunch of projects that, in saner times, would be mostly apolitical, but are going to get sacrificed in this tribal tug-of-war. I guess the folks sneaking diversity statements into particle accelerator funding proposals aren't completely blameless, but I do feel a bit bad for those just going along with the zeitgeist.
Conversely I find it more difficult to fault a sincere "true believer" for acting on their belief, than to excoriate the academic those who hollowed out thier professional principles for the sake of going along with the zeitgeist, for thier moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom for existing funding dollars. Increasing the NSF budget allows the (highly relative) “luxury” of being principled. Clearly, the goals of reforming science and saving money are getting insanely conflated here. I argue that it’s better to do one or the other but not both at once, or you get exactly the current shitshow
It's not "irony", it's "justice".
The idea that principles (be they scientific or moral) are a relative luxury to be discarded or forgone with the moment they become politically inconvenient is cretinous rat-bastard thinking that should be punished.
These people chose to be political operatives first and academics second. Now they get to reap the rewards of that choice.
I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.
In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.
Then you are mistaken. Submitting a grant proposal to the effect of "I am going to use this grant to do science and also further the interests of the Democratic party" makes you a political operative. If you actually use some of the grant funds to do that (as I suspect has often been done, since scientists don't want to be caught committing fraud), even more so.
Forgiveness can only follow acknowledgement of error. I have seen none of that.
I think you should reconsider your definition of "political operative".
The commerce department published a list of what the $2B in defunded "woke" grants was here. Grabbing a random one in the $1-2M range, we get this one which was funded for $1.6M.
As far as I can tell, this grant was defunded because they said "We will hire two grad students. Those two grad students will teach undergraduate classes. Our university has some already-existing programs to recruit undergrads from underrepresented groups, and so maybe the classes the grad students teach will contain members of underrepresented groups."
That... does not sound like something a political operative would say. That sounds like a PI who wanted to do useful research and was told "you have to say how the program will help minorities" and so grudgingly included a line like "the program will help everyone, and minorities are a part of everyone".
What error would you like that researcher to acknowledge? Be concrete.
Just resubmit it without the "no white boys allowed in our science club" line. That's literally it. That's what people find objectionable. I don't know how else to possibly say this.
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