This should feel personal to a lot of us. I have hopes of applying to the Small Business Innovation Research fund (https://seedfund.nsf.gov), a program that gives small companies a good chunk of money without taking equity, in order to encourage development of technologies deemed of national importance. I’d be curious if anyone here has tried applying in the last 18 months.
Very much another "Emperor's New Clothes" situation.
If the pathology was entirely within his own privately-owned company that'd be one thing, but Americans are going to continue to get hurt because of it.
Dr. Jessica Knurick has done a great job IMO breaking down how authoritarian governments co-opt science to their own ends and end up destroying it in the process. Here is one such article, https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/the-authori..., but she has lots of posts and short form videos explaining the topic.
This quote in particular struck me as way out there.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
Trying to find a silver lining and think positively...
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
That’s the best case scenario - requires a lot of people currently involved in this to be jailed or executed before we can even begin to move on though. I’m not super optimistic.
> U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). Many science advocates see it as the latest step by his administration to erode—some would say destroy—the independence of the 76-year-old research agency.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
Meanwhile all the ceos of Apple, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, nvidia and palantir went to kiss his feet one more time. That obviously did not happen now but you would have believed it.
I disagree with this move, but the people who lost these positions were in temporary advisory roles. This isn’t a career job for them.
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
It would be quite amazing if people in the US realized how much brain went to China in the last 16 months. I am a govie (contractor) and just what I know alone is …
Why do you ask? Do you assume those fired NSF workers want to go work in China now? Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?
You missed my point on purpose to argue in bad faith. I never said they have to be CCP members.
I said how many people get to work for Chinese institutions who vocally disagree with the CCP?
Go call Xi Winnie the Poo and the CCP an oppressive regime, and see how your job prospects look like in Chinese academia. The country has a social credit score for a reason, and you don't need to be CCP for it to affect you.
Our entire economy is built on scientific advancement and advantage. The dismantling of everything to maximize executive power in order to maximize grift and corruption will have effects for decades.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
An expected part of Project 2025[1]. The end goal is to install Trump allies as heads of every agency that matters to their agenda, and to shut down all agencies that don't. This way by end of 2028 there is nobody left in government who can speak out against what they're going to do next.
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
I'm OK with it. You're supposed to destroy countries that are committing genocide. And Trump is doing that for us without us even firing a shot. And I really do believe Trump wants to destroy the US, as his base are not aligned with the liberal values that are genocidal anyways.
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
It's just own-goal after owl-goal with this administration.
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
>It's just own-goal after owl-goal with this administration.
The presumes that "Trump Administration" and "United States of America" are the same thing. The reality is that a Venn diagram of them would be two circles that barely touch. Is it really an "own goal" if you gravely injure your victim while you rob them?
No. They are 100% overlapping because democracy. Even if you didn't vote for Trump, you are part of the United States of America that voted for the Trump Administration to represent it.
Until the Trump Administration is replaced, the "Trump Administration" _is_ The United States of America.
It's certainly not what an increasing amount of the population want to be true, but facts can be sticky like that.
He is also the real danger. He is an adult responsible for his own decisions and capable of saying no. Treating him and his supporters like easily manipulated children is not helpful.
77 million people thought he should be in charge. Nearly 40% of Americans still think he's doing a fine job. I'll be glad to see the back of him, but it won't solve the problem.
The only thing that I find positive in this, is how quickly the US is dissolving it's influence over the rest of the world, thus making this 40% of the US population increasingly impotent, at least outside of the US.
The problem is what happens to the created vacuum. We know who is going to fill it, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. The devil we know is dying, the devil we don't know hasn't quite arrived just yet, and is likely going to take a decade or two to settle in.
I have colleagues and friends around the world who are done with Americans over the lack of meaningful political action
It's not just American right wingers turning off the world. The world sees how unexceptionally gen pop reacts in the US as our local politics destabilize everyone
America is a normal country now. All the WW2 heroes are dead and soldiers since were imperialist aggressors. We don't dare worship Vietnam vets or middle east vets as those conflicts were not so valorous. That we have to point back so far to feel good about our history says a lot about how long America has been falling apart.
For decades Academics been saying the decline of America started in the 1950s and has accelerated only as countries we bombed to hell to stay ahead normalized. I tend to agree.
America has really not been that great this whole time. But like every other nation, Americans been propagandized by each other to believe their American made bullshit don't stink.
In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
> To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
Nor are the Europeans or East Asians.
> In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
Every American here has allowed the quickest decline of a superpower in history. The damage to our country is irreparable and going to result in a worse life for generations to come
Sadly, while there is plenty of onus on the average American Joe/Jane/Joaquin Phoenix, this is also the result of systematic defund of education streams, increasing disparities, and big propaganda over the last 50 years.
Best I could tell, we were already there. DJT is simply a symptom. He’s what results after too many years of misrepresentation.
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
Do what you gotta do to feel good. But giving a free pass to all the other contributors - the ones loudest about who is to blame - is foolish, at best. To each their own.
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
Serious question: What exactly do they love America for? I just don’t get it. Seems like in every way that matters to the common people, the US is at best mediocre.
Could it be that they secretly subscribe to a different version of the same mythical exceptionalism as the president they despise?
All systems have problems. What's your evidence that the system in the US is overall net negative? Pretty much the entire rest of the world would have loved to have a scentific system as good as that in the USA. The research output from both government and business was much more extensive and productive of value than the equivalent systems in europe for example.
> What's your evidence that the system in the US is overall net negative?
really? reproducibility crisis, stagnation in various fundamental fields, and bullshit ive seen with my own eyes working in the salt mines of academic science
> Pretty much the entire rest of the world
no doubt, the irony being that by trying to copy the us' vannevar bush model these other parts of the world will invariably fall into the same p-hacking/publication count/tenure chasing system that leads to the rotten system the us has. except the us got to pick tge low hanging scientific fruit already
If a house has a rotten foundation, a good plan will start with "let's tear it down". Not every plan that starts with "let's tear it down" will be a good plan.
I think maybe a better analogy would be "the ladder I'm standing at the top of has some faulty rungs near the bottom. I'll set it on fire."
There are lots of things where tearing the system down and starting from scratch is a bad idea, especially if you do it while depending on it and before you have a replacement.
You will not live forever. Would applying the same logic again suit you?
Timing matters. Where current resources go matters. Having a plan matters. The current system is not perfect but it’s far better than no system at all.
> The current system is not perfect but it’s far better than no system at all.
you should question this assertion. your assertion is dependent on the assumption that science is a strictly positive sum game (with respect to funding). i am saying it is not, and i have provided the mechanistic explanation of why it's not.
all i ask people to think about is: bad science is worth negative.
imagine trying to insinuate with a straight face that firing everyone on a funding oversight body because they queried the executive branch bypassing the oversight is somehow going to reduce fraudulent research and grift in state sponsored science...
Largest incarcerated population, highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, highest military spending, highest obesity rate in the developed world, highest rate of school shootings by a huge margin, and the highest gun ownership rate by a long shot (edit: pun not intended)!
Without question, but despite leading on GDP the USA lags behind in so many other key areas. It's astounding to those of us non-Americans that you can spend 30 Billion on the Iran war but you have elementary school children who are accruing "lunch debt" because they can't afford to pay for meals at school.
Life in America seems so needlessly cruel.
>science and innovation
Not for long. The damage is already done, and America will cease to lead in this area in my lifetime, likely to never recover.
There’s a lot of political commentary in these threads about how dumb the admin is this and that, sarcasm, etc. but is anyone able to share why this is such a truly beneficial org to our country? I’m just out of the loop on this and I’m genuinely asking, I have never really heard of them. But by the reactions in the comments they’re like the most blessed org of our country and accelerate innovation and advancement of the USA. It’s just a foundation? Please just let me know, I’m not trying to be weird and I’d appreciate being civil about it.
> With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing [...] Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense.
This is the kind of scientific research which companies don't generally pay for because it doesn't have direct commercial application, but that companies and the economy benefit from enormously because you can use the results of that science to build a great deal of useful commercial things.
> This is the kind of scientific research which companies don't generally pay for because it doesn't have direct commercial application
Tom over at the Explosions&Fire channel (and Extractions&Ire channel) just published a video[1] about his academic career. In it he noted that in Australia where he's located, the defense companies were an exception to that general rule, and did indeed sponsor a fair bit of basic research, including his PhD. I assume in areas they figured had potential, but still.
The more important research is the kind that the economy doesn't especially benefit from, but which needs to happen in order to improve the quality of human life.
I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.
> the economy benefit from enormously because you can use the results of that science to build a great deal of useful commercial things.
Lately it looks like the focus has changed, example grants "Disrupting Racialized Privilege in the STEM Classroom", "Creating affinity groups in ornithology" and "Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic" Seems oddly specific and agenda driven. How would you "use the results of that science to build a great deal of useful commercial things"?
See sibling comment - NSF also funds science which doesn't have direct or indirect commercial applications (I shouldn't have implied that only commercial applications matter): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47906005
What kind of an agenda does studying Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic carry?
They fund more than 10k research grants a year. These grants are for research into basic, unapplied science that would be extremely unlikely to get funding from the private sector. But this research is the foundation for the applied science whose breakthroughs power our economy.
Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.
So... This is worth a personal Google search in your part. This organization is a large part of the life blood for all research and development in the United States. It funds research, students, projects.
You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.
Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... there's way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.
> the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[5][6] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing
We are each responsible for learning ourselves, and we live in a time where that is easier than ever. I find it odd your default position is to assume it is not important.
My default position is not to assume it’s not important. I’m actually assuming it’s important from everyone’s negative comments. So since I don’t know much about what sort of advancements they’re engineering ( no one is really answering the question specifically I guess bc I can definitely wiki search them too.) so I want to know historically what have they improved and funded that has benefited society etc. so yeah I guess I can just ask AI since you’re saying don’t talk to other humans here…
It's not odd, given the rest of his comment ("they’re like the most blessed org"), it's just plain and simple dishonesty from someone who thinks a top-level comment casting doubt is better for the agitprop than a million follow-ups with explanation.
Yeah but is anything really that important in the long run? We’re all just weird monkeys who are all going to die eventually. If President Trump really wants to do something, why not just let him do it and stop complaining?
This entire thread has swiftly descended upon by bots, shills and sockpuppets. It'll be flagged before any hope of finding good faith conversation in the morass.
I’m a real person who is genuinely asking what sort of projects and advancements have they made for our society. It’s a genuine question for someone doesn’t know. The point is that everyone is negative and I have no idea why… so I’m asking what they’ve done… assuming I’ll be like wow - they were part of x scientific advancement or something. But yeah you’re right I will just talk to AI since this is not a welcome place for genuine discussion.
It's just weird to see it here, honestly. I wouldn't have expected the ROI on this board to be worth it. It just feels, whatever the admins think, more like reddit with this crap.
NSF is one of the primary agencies supporting research in the US. It’s not a “foundation” in the sense of charitable foundations if that’s what’s confusing you about their name. The base research engine that fuels the US in most disciplines comes from support like NSF, DOE, NIH. Damage those, and you damage the foundation upon which a lot of our intellectual strength sits.
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
My understanding is that the national science foundation supports scientific research presumably through grants. Academia is already having a lot of funding troubles, so this likely means things will get worse in the academic sciences.
Wiki:
"With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[5][6] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing."
Personal:
Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.
> but is anyone able to share why this is such a truly beneficial org to our country?
You're correct, the NSF isn't a "beneficial org" to your country.
On the off chance that you're legit, posts in the form of a question like yours are a 98%-specificity tell for influence ops from a certain country that likes to drink its potatoes.
I think you are right that we should focus on the fact that the president raped children, invaded Iran with no plan and for no reason when he promised not to start a war, and violates the constitution and law daily without consequence.
We are all failing morally for not revolting at this level of corruption.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
You're not expected to be in the loop for why every minor org in the government is helpful to the country, much like I'm not supposed to know the roles and responsibilities of everyone else in my company.
But if I have a specific question regarding what some entity does, I can always look into it on my own time, rather than have a default stance on what they might do/not do.
If the pathology was entirely within his own privately-owned company that'd be one thing, but Americans are going to continue to get hurt because of it.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
Maybe you're just (ironically) in the minority, and mad that you don't feel like your opinions are sufficiently included.
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
Destroying institutions is one heck of a lot easier than building new ones.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
It's like totally obvious that our team is the only correct answer.
So it's similar to working for the UN or IAEA where most jobs are fixed term.
You missed my point on purpose to argue in bad faith. I never said they have to be CCP members.
I said how many people get to work for Chinese institutions who vocally disagree with the CCP?
Go call Xi Winnie the Poo and the CCP an oppressive regime, and see how your job prospects look like in Chinese academia. The country has a social credit score for a reason, and you don't need to be CCP for it to affect you.
>And yes, they clearly are more competent.
Compared to you, definitely.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.
Mocking regional accents doesn't really help the conversation.
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade... [3] https://www.project2025.observer/en
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
Well done, everybody, the system works.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
The presumes that "Trump Administration" and "United States of America" are the same thing. The reality is that a Venn diagram of them would be two circles that barely touch. Is it really an "own goal" if you gravely injure your victim while you rob them?
Until the Trump Administration is replaced, the "Trump Administration" _is_ The United States of America.
It's certainly not what an increasing amount of the population want to be true, but facts can be sticky like that.
The problem is what happens to the created vacuum. We know who is going to fill it, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. The devil we know is dying, the devil we don't know hasn't quite arrived just yet, and is likely going to take a decade or two to settle in.
It's not just American right wingers turning off the world. The world sees how unexceptionally gen pop reacts in the US as our local politics destabilize everyone
America is a normal country now. All the WW2 heroes are dead and soldiers since were imperialist aggressors. We don't dare worship Vietnam vets or middle east vets as those conflicts were not so valorous. That we have to point back so far to feel good about our history says a lot about how long America has been falling apart.
For decades Academics been saying the decline of America started in the 1950s and has accelerated only as countries we bombed to hell to stay ahead normalized. I tend to agree.
America has really not been that great this whole time. But like every other nation, Americans been propagandized by each other to believe their American made bullshit don't stink.
In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
Nor are the Europeans or East Asians.
> In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
What?
Xi, we shall see.
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
Surely, he has made things uniquely worse, and in ways that would not have happened without him.
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
Could it be that they secretly subscribe to a different version of the same mythical exceptionalism as the president they despise?
really? reproducibility crisis, stagnation in various fundamental fields, and bullshit ive seen with my own eyes working in the salt mines of academic science
> Pretty much the entire rest of the world
no doubt, the irony being that by trying to copy the us' vannevar bush model these other parts of the world will invariably fall into the same p-hacking/publication count/tenure chasing system that leads to the rotten system the us has. except the us got to pick tge low hanging scientific fruit already
There are lots of things where tearing the system down and starting from scratch is a bad idea, especially if you do it while depending on it and before you have a replacement.
Timing matters. Where current resources go matters. Having a plan matters. The current system is not perfect but it’s far better than no system at all.
you should question this assertion. your assertion is dependent on the assumption that science is a strictly positive sum game (with respect to funding). i am saying it is not, and i have provided the mechanistic explanation of why it's not.
all i ask people to think about is: bad science is worth negative.
It's from science.org - how could it be less superficial, in your opinion as a reader?
Largest incarcerated population, highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, highest military spending, highest obesity rate in the developed world, highest rate of school shootings by a huge margin, and the highest gun ownership rate by a long shot (edit: pun not intended)!
USA! USA! USA!
Without question, but despite leading on GDP the USA lags behind in so many other key areas. It's astounding to those of us non-Americans that you can spend 30 Billion on the Iran war but you have elementary school children who are accruing "lunch debt" because they can't afford to pay for meals at school.
Life in America seems so needlessly cruel.
>science and innovation
Not for long. The damage is already done, and America will cease to lead in this area in my lifetime, likely to never recover.
> With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing [...] Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
Tom over at the Explosions&Fire channel (and Extractions&Ire channel) just published a video[1] about his academic career. In it he noted that in Australia where he's located, the defense companies were an exception to that general rule, and did indeed sponsor a fair bit of basic research, including his PhD. I assume in areas they figured had potential, but still.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CbdVkcr-Nw
I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.
Lately it looks like the focus has changed, example grants "Disrupting Racialized Privilege in the STEM Classroom", "Creating affinity groups in ornithology" and "Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic" Seems oddly specific and agenda driven. How would you "use the results of that science to build a great deal of useful commercial things"?
What kind of an agenda does studying Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic carry?
Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.
You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.
Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... there's way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
EDIT: other folks beat me to it
We are each responsible for learning ourselves, and we live in a time where that is easier than ever. I find it odd your default position is to assume it is not important.
It's wild how efficient they are, sometimes.
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
https://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pa...
Personal: Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.
You're correct, the NSF isn't a "beneficial org" to your country.
On the off chance that you're legit, posts in the form of a question like yours are a 98%-specificity tell for influence ops from a certain country that likes to drink its potatoes.
We are all failing morally for not revolting at this level of corruption.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
But if I have a specific question regarding what some entity does, I can always look into it on my own time, rather than have a default stance on what they might do/not do.
I'm not even American and I've heard of it. The NSF's mission is to promote science and engineering in all 50 states.