> When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead.
If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
> The hardest part, though, is how it happened. DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. “We were never canceled. We were just starved to death.”
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
I would have supported reforming the way science is funded in the US, but the way republicans did it is far worse than if they had done nothing at all.
This administration is both fundamentally anti-science and wants to enforce political control over all government institutions. Science was never a particularly stable work environment, but the sheer insanity you have now makes it a deeply unattractive place. You have no idea if your grant might be denied, or even canceled at any point later by some political commissar that doesn't understand science.
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
_Culture in Nazi Germany_ by Michael H Kater [0] talks about this too.
Adolf Hitler hated universities and their professors. So he took them over and appointed his supporters as the professors. Irony, he grew to hate those he put in place as the professors.
For a Chinese century you'd need there to be anyone in China in a century. With the one child policy they have run out of young women and are running out of middle aged men. The Chinese, and Asian, population pyramids make Europe look young and vibrant.
I’m very familiar with the evangelical types who are running the federal government right now. Anything that doesn’t support the claim that the earth is only 5000 years old is considered a partisan issue to these fuckers.
My friends from grad school who went on to become professors tell me that not only did their grant funding dry up, but they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire, since the students came from foreign countries and faced new visa restrictions. So the money for science is gone, the people to do to the science are gone, and the institutions continue to not support their researchers, workers, and communities. It's the death of research in the usa.
> they were unable to follow through on hiring many of the grad students they had planned to hire
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
Best friend had a masters in Biotech and same thing happened in the mid aughts. All of his funding dried up. He was told repeatedly to leave academia, its not worth it. He had a hard time leaving because he really did love the research they were doing. Said it was one of the hardest decisions he had to make.
He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.
Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
If you knew how the academia sauce was made you'd agree with their drastic actions.
Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now.
The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.
Currently there are lots of systems that are in chaos.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...
But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.
Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
No, this isn't correct. The Scopes Monkey Trial would like a word.
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
I mean, what's more important to you, discovering truths via scientific research and reports, or conforming to your political ideology? (or getting revenge for perceived attacks, I guess)
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
A research system can adapt to lower funding if the rules are stable. What it can't adapt to is grants being frozen, staff disappearing mid-project, forbidden vocabulary changing
This article informs a good understanding and confirms the issues I've witnessed in academia. However, I found that it didn't cover the censorship of any criticism of Israel in science and academics. This was explicitly codified into law with respect to government funding and is a major topic of scientific funding in colleges and universities. Scientific grants and researchers often require a Zionist bias to get funding, something that is unacceptable.
The fact that people think the current state of chaos is a consequence of recent developments clearly tells us more about why it is in chaos than those types of people have the capacity to hear or understand.
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
Yeah, while it's particularly bad lately, I'm remembering Richard Hofstadter's book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life", which one the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for tracing the religious, cultural, and economic roots of american anti-intellectualism.
For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.
117 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 86.8 ms ] threadIf the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things.
I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here.
Maybe time to sue the richest man alive for helping destroy American science.
More efficient than any foreign actor
And it's not just particular topics they hate, they hate the entire system and institutions. And they try to either break them and force them to adopt their political views, or they attack their funding or use any other powers to dismantle them.
Adolf Hitler hated universities and their professors. So he took them over and appointed his supporters as the professors. Irony, he grew to hate those he put in place as the professors.
[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfc542q
Seems to be playing out.
Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now.
The scientists need to market their research to exploit the biases of the administration. Sad that it's come to this.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48568492.
* by "this" I mean posting ideological clichés and internet tropes - This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Most of the "research" done by graduate students and even tenured faculty as a whole is laughable at best. For every lab that produces groundbreaking output, there are countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda.
He was lucky. He was able to make arrangements to go back to school to get his law degree. He then passed the bar and is now doing corporate law at a big firm in the Midwest.
Even now, several years later, he looks back and said he was smart to heed the warnings because its only gotten worse since the time he got out. He also had the ability to pivot into law, which not a lot of people would/could do.
Could it have been done better? Yes. But there is literally no way an attempt at that wouldn't have gone exactly like it is now.
The closer you are to ivy leauge research the worse it looks a huge numbers of researchers have completely lost the plot. I can't imagine how bad that gets the further you get away from ivy leauge.
Rather than demand reversion back to mean, we should be asking, "Before we reset this system back to the way it was, was it working and are there improvements to be made?"
Because the current chaos can be viewed as an opportunity to improve, and we should take it because may of the systems in chaos today, were dysfunctional or in need of modernization yesterday.
https://nsidc.org/ice-sheets-today
There is no reason at all that the biggest military power, richest from GDP and the biggest co2 producer country invests anything in climate research /s
I hope the USA goes down, fast...
Shout out to Elon Musk, the richest asshole on our planet who wants to leave earth to go to a planet which is not inhabitable and a planet which can't keep humans alive without our blue marble...
But hey when we all have starlink in every remote corner of our planet, who cares if our atmosphere is getting poisned by all these rocket starts.
Btw. Starlink has 10 Million customers and putting only a single 'small' datacenter into space needs over 350 starship starts. go figure
Realest comment in this entire post
I grew up conservative and evangelical, and there was always an opposition to "liberal science" simply on the basis of what the science presented. It didn't have anything to do with scientists being mean or "biting the hand that feeds" - the opposition was because scientists claimed that man was descended from other apes, that the Earth was billions of years old, that climate change is real and manmade and going to be damaging.
If scientists present information that's uncomfortable for industry or contradicts conservative religious beliefs, conservatives are going to push back against science. That's where the culture war comes from, and there's no way for scientists to avoid it except by abandoning their commitment to evidence and science.
Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
It also tells us that it’s very unlikely going to be resolved on this side of some catalytic event. If reason prevailed, we would not be in this state of chaos.
People who think this is a consequence of merely the last 10 or 40 years, clearly have no understand of cause and lagging effects.
These problems are not new.
"How Much Is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs through Effective Oversight" (2017) https://www.goacta.org/wp-content/uploads/ee/download/contro...
For the past 20 years the budgets ballooned out of control (alongside the student debt). Yes, this WH admin is anti-science but US academia is due some introspection.
Disclaimer: I'm not from US