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It is, potentially, a massive amount of money; it can, potentially, be specifically targeted and legally obligated to be used for a specific partisan activity; it also leaves a massive ideologically-unappealing penalty that will often be directly acting as a reminder while waving signs on the lawn of the bad actors in question.
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
There's reasons that might not work for the Republican Party -- judges tend to treat colleges better and Republicans worse, having an adequate supply of favorable news coverage seems like it was important, the Red Tribe does not have as many of the relevant dedicated administrative agents required, and there's just a second actor disadvantage. But it's not an Underpants Gnome proposal.
It doesn't reduce the ability of the federal government to act against universities, if that's what you're asking. But that ship has sailed; no one has any proposal with any chance of working to do that. If we want university administrations to be less likely to actively discriminate, and to not promote hilariously fraudulent partisan activities under the auspices and honors of 'research', I'd love an answer that wasn't the government's carrot or stick. But there's zero idea on how to do that.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it, and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
I think it does. There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
And those are just the lawsuits already in pipe. A lot of the other stuff doesn't have lawsuits floating around simply because any lawyer worth their salt knows without a friendly federal admin it'd be a vanity suit.
Again, I'm not convinced this will work! But again, it's also far from Underpants Gnomes.
Potentially, perhaps. Like I mentioned, when I tried following the cites, it often was sort of piddly amounts of money.
Sure, but this has approximately zero to do with the these sorts of settlements, particularly, and more to do with the threat of lawsuits/regulatory action generally.
Where? When? How? At what point did they have to sign their name on the dotted line, with known penalties through known mechanisms, stating that they weren't doing those things?
Funny you say that, because my understanding was that there were clear regulations and universities had to (across the board) sign their names on the dotted lines affirming that they had satisfied certain cybersecurity requirements. Thus, the getting in trouble for it.
That's all perfectly fine. Kinda has nothing to do with these specific types of settlements. It's a complimentary strategy, yes. But it's clear that the admin is struggling with one-offs here and there. Thus, looking for a comprehensive, across-the-board way to use known hooks and known mechanisms to change behaviors.
Most importantly, none of this is "indiscriminate chemotherapy". We're soooooo far past that silly reasoning, which was my original point. Yes, you can use hooks in the federal funding process (across the board, with known mechanisms). Yes, you can use targeted lawsuits. Sure, I guess you can try to have some of those lawsuits produce (bad, partisan) payouts to your favored NGOs. None of those things are silly "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
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