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National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce
- drawkward 2y agoPff, we didn't need that pesky science contradicting our paleolithic religious views. It confuses the cattle, and hurts the bottom line.
- rqtwteye 2y agoNobody knows more about science than Trump. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR3f95BGIiA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sR3f95BGIiA
- wewewedxfgdf 2y ago>> NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who ordered the firings, did not attend the meeting Such courage. I've had to fire a number of people over the years unfortunately and I've always had the courage to do it myself. >> terminated by the end of the day, without severance As long as its done with humanity.... oh, no? Oh well.
- csa 2y agoI don’t know the specifics for this case, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he was voluntold to do this on very short notice while under duress.
- wholinator2 2y agoStill, seems like it's his responsibility to explain that in the meeting. That message has infinitely more weight if he's the one saying it, otherwise you can just point to his absence and claim its only covering his add
- csa 2y ago> otherwise you can just point to his absence and claim its only covering his add … or trying to arrange to save positions at the last minute. I’ve seen the other side of this before. If he’s a shit leader, he’s just hiding. If he’s a good leader, then he is firing off e-mails and banging down doors explaining how letting go of this position or that position (or department or whatever) will create irreparable harm. And with this administration, he probably has the added task of trying to figure out which aspects of irreparable harm the administration wants and which ones they don’t want — an extreme exercise in doublethink. Once you’re dealing with government leaders at this level, I would default to a charitable view until proven otherwise. They aren’t perfect for sure, but they trend towards being pretty damn good at their jobs.
- rich_sasha 2y agoI get there's no worker rights in the US, but surely do people not have contractual notice period, severance etc? I mean, I'm sure not if you're in a marginal job, but US administration..???
- mistrial9 2y agono you are wrong.. at a certain legal era, worker rights and protections got very strong in the USA. The bounce-back from that (long ago) includes "illegal" international workers, high-tech "anything to win" business practices, and moribund, glacially paced court cases involving retirement and medical coverage. Like education, there is a pendulum effect over time.. but the movement is such that "correcting" for one extreme happens over the enaction of another extreme.. etc
- rich_sasha 2y agoClearly, people with employment rights and contractual rights are not fired with no cause and no severance. So I don't see how to square this with your comment.
- mistrial9 2y agoyou are citing a result, but, I guarantee you that there are a lot of lawyers involved on all sides.. nothing about employment law in the USA is simple IMHO
- twqahg 2y agoWhy was Panchanathan chosen? His Wikipedia is unspectacular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethuraman_Panchanathan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sethuraman_Panchanathan But he was suggested by both Obama and Trump. Is it this? "Panchanathan highlighted how universities like ASU ought to work hand-in-hand with businesses to create curriculum that fosters the entrepreneurial traits employers look for today, in order to produce a future of innovation ecosystems." Or does he facilitate flooding the US with cheaper H1B scientists from India? I no longer understand why people rise to the top (this is not limited to the US, Europe is the same).
- meta_x_ai 2y ago[dead]
- advisedwang 2y agoSo the NSF has to manage $9B in grants but with fewer people to do so. That $9B will probably be less well spent now. So we're risking mis-spending $9B in order to save less than $20MM in salaries. That would be a really stupid move if the motive really was to improve efficiency. Except obviously the motive is to not efficiency. It's about ensuring loyalty and even deliberately breaking the government to justify later actions.
- ashoeafoot 2y agobring back https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism or some equivalent pseudo science. noahs ark shipbuilding sciences or similar .
- gred 2y agoI'd guess that it will be less than $9B pretty soon.
- kjksf 2y agoSo, should they hire 10% more NSF employees to be even more efficient? Or is it your position that NSF has optimal number of employees for managing $9B of grants and adding one more or subtracting one would make NSF less efficient? If you could provide chain of reasoning that led you to opine that the current number of NSF employees is the optimal one?
- snailmailstare 2y agoYes, changing the plan from one arrived at by people familiar with the problem sure sounds like something that would need either talking to those people or engaging with the problem for months or years.
- advisedwang 2y agoOver the years NSF, like any organization, has attempted to staff completely to their needs and faced pushback from those that control the funding. Of course that doesn't result in perfect results, but it is somewhat connected to needed staffing levels. A mandate that was written to apply to every agency in the government is totally disconnected from appropriate staffing.
- perihelions 2y ago- "The firings targeted probationary employees, who have fewer job protections than permanent employees, but still must be fired for cause. Some probationary staff are new to the agency, while others recently promoted or transferred positions. Additionally, all "intermittent experts" — temporary employees hired at-will often for specific subject matter expertise — were terminated." There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.
- gred 2y agoThis is the nature of union employment: seniority >> everything else.
- hiddencost 2y agoNonsense.
- omegaworks 2y agoThis tired trope fails to capture the accelerationism at play. Elon is firing the most ambitious people in government. 8 years in one position, 1 year promoted fired over the person 9 years in one position. This is not the nature of union employment, it is a structural weakness in the way employment has been negotiated. Musk is exploiting that weakness.
- throw0101c 2y ago> This is the nature of union employment: seniority >> everything else. Actors, writers, and directors are in unions in Hollywood, and the seniority plays no part in who gets which part or which crew is hired for a production. Seniority has often been used in factories because it was easy metric where you had 'interchangeable' people doing the labour: the people were treated almost like machines/widgets themselves. But the advantage of seniority in that context was that it helped stability: you stayed at the same company so it reduced retraining / rehiring costs to the company, and in exchange for your loyalty to the company, the company was loyal to folks that didn't jump around constantly looking for greener pastures. But there is nothing inherit in being unionized that mandates the use of seniority as a metric.
- blindriver 2y agoPretty terrible to be fired like that with no severance. I think that's unconscionable. It looks like they targeted mostly probationary employees, which doesn't make it better. However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.
- cyberge99 2y agoThe debt to GDP ratio is the important number.
- aaronbrethorst 2y agoDonald Trump in a hot dog costume: we’re all looking for the guy who did this! https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna191665
- akmarinov 2y agoDebt isn’t always bad. If you take on a trillion in debt but invest it in science and get cold fusion, you’d be endless trillions ahead
- cogman10 2y agoDebt is actually what cements the dollar as the world currency. It's not only not bad, it's a huge positive driver of the US economy. T-Bills are a bedrock of most portfolios. Eliminating them over some bad analogies to household budgets is just misunderstanding what debt actually means for a country/government. Heck, even inflation isn't bad. You need a little bit of it to keep companies and individuals from simply hording assets.
- blindriver 2y agoDebt isn't always bad. But our current debt load is bad and will never be paid off. 50% of our tax revenues are going to be used to pay interest from our debt. That is a huge curtailing of spending because of this unsustainable debt.
- CamperBob2 2y ago10% -- the literal meaning of "decimation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment) The only difference is that when the Romans did it, they had a purpose in mind. What we are seeing now is the act of a Batman villain, not a general or an industrialist or a president.
- rqtwteye 2y agoAre they actually doing anything to improve processes or are they just firing people without changing how the agencies work? Doing it by end of day without severance seems unnecessarily cruel. And the director is a coward if he didn't attend the meeting.
- bongodongobob 2y agoJust firing people with 0 research or understanding. To do an actual audit would take a team months at least.
- cogman10 2y agoNot something some racist teenagers that told elon he's good at computer games are apt to do.
- cyberge99 2y agoGovernment is supposed to move slowly.
- bongodongobob 2y agoExactly.
- throw0101c 2y ago> Doing it by end of day without severance seems unnecessarily cruel. The Cruelty Is the Point: * https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/ https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive... * https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-is-the-point-by-adam-serwer/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/665171/the-cruelty-... > “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” * https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...
- karaterobot 2y agoI'm all for government efficiency, but this brainless approach is counterproductive. It's just surgery with a hatchet. They don't know anything about the systematic problems with the agencies they're cutting, and don't bother to learn them, so their approach is more likely to create inefficiencies than to eliminate the ones that were there. In cases like this, they're cutting off the next generation of scientists, along with the staff that make research feasible. To the extent—and I believe it's true—that innovation will remain America's lifeblood and saving grace in the coming decades, this catastrophically bad plan is doing more damage than any foreign adversary could hope for.
- blindriver 2y agoIf they did it the "normal" way, there would be so much time wasted that it would be useless. Elon already proved that taking a chainsaw to a large org has practically no effect on the outcome. He fired over 80% of Twitter and even I thought it would go down for days at a time at some point, but I was wrong. He's taking this experience and acting at scale on the Federal government. I don't know if he's right or he's wrong, but I'm willing to try it out and live with the consequences.
- karaterobot 2y agoIf the only problem in government is that agencies are overstaffed, this move addresses it. But, if it's anything other than that, it doesn't, and at some point a plan will have to be developed on an agency-specific basis to implement real fixes. By firing people and ruining morale, Musk is leaving the remaining people to do more work with fewer resources. Since I don't assume Musk or DOGE is going to spend the time to embed with the agencies and come up with innovative, tactical, agency-specific fixes, who will? The remaining workforce, who is demoralized, and understaffed? I'm not confident that will work. Twitter seems like a dysfunctional company at this point, and I'm not sure it's a good model for how to fix government.
- blindriver 2y ago[flagged]
- sega_sai 2y agoThe decimation of science continues. I am sure the consequences of this will be seen in the future. And I truly feel sorry for people affected, people who sacrificed their lives, their pay, to work in science, and now are dealt with like garbage, and have their careers destroyed.
- wileydragonfly 2y agoThis is the first time in my life I’ve seen someone use decimate correctly!
- LiquidSky 2y agoYou've seen it used correctly many times because language evolves and "decimate" has taken on a new meaning other than the one used to describe ancient Roman military practice.
- wileydragonfly 2y agoLet me have this. It’s a fun pet peeve. I have little else.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- just_steve_h 2y agoTHIS is what your “disruptive” heroes have bought & paid for. Yes, I’m talking specifically about paulg and his buddies in the VC world, who’ve stepped up their funding & lobbying to levels matching folks like Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaifie. They’re on an ideological vendetta to DESTROY functioning government and leave themselves with near-dictatorial private power, unconstrained by governments anywhere. These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate. This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for. May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.
- sadcodemonkey 2y agoYes, this needs to be pointed out a lot more. The hero worship is one aspect of a much larger problem, I think, which is that technology culture is almost entirely defined by trends in the startup and VC spaces. It's been that way for at least a decade and a half, by my reckoning. There is very little genuine technology subculture anymore that is willing to critique dominant trends, raise up our own heroes, and create alternatives. I'm really hoping that demystifying "disruption" will create a moment of reckoning for technologists. [edited to say "decade and a half"]
- rich_sasha 2y agoI assume Trump and Musk are not insane, just cynical and with some unusual objective. Now, what might that objective be? I doubt they really care about US personnel cost, it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. Violent deregulation? But what does this, or WHO membership, or nuclear safety have to do with that? Or maybe they really are crazy. But that would be a conclusion of last resort.
- TFYS 2y agoMy guess is that they want capital to have power over everything. Organizations that you can't buy and that have any amount of power are going to get destroyed. That's why the opposition is doing nothing about this. They're also servants of capital.
- cyberge99 2y agoThey want to break what they can and reign of what’s left.
- rich_sasha 2y agoWell, fine, but FAA? WHO? NSF? I would be totally unconfused if they were (and indeed they are) going after FBI, CIA, financial regulators - the sinews of power. But they seem to be going after everything. Even really boring things that they might as well leave be so as not to create a headache for themselves.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoLast time, a bunch of pieces of the federal government resisted Trump's attempts to ignore the constitution. I think the goal this time is to break everything in the government that did that last time, or might consider doing it this time. Note well: That's my guess. I have no definite knowledge.
- abeppu 2y agoWhere are the corporate lobbyists on this stuff? My understanding is that public research funding (and its associated administration) periodically yields results that either turn into viable commercial products or tools for whole sub-industries. Lasik surgery, PCR, CRISPR, MRIs are supposed to have come out of NSF projects, and these all became someone's line of business. Why are the heads of biotech or pharma or medical device companies not publicly stating that destabilizing the apparatus for early research risks shrinking these fields?
- kjksf 2y agoPer Grok, no NSF funding was used to develop CRISPR. I'm too lazy to fact check other. This doesn't affect the NSF grants. They fired 10% of middle managers distributing the grants. The actual scientific work is not done by employees of NSF but by employees of universities etc. Finally, it's a stretch to argue that even if NSF grants go away, the progress of science stops. Universities have other sources of funds and I don't see why businesses need government subsidies. They are not giving free lasik surgeries or MRI scans, they can fund their products and services from profits not taxpayer (i.e. you and me) money.
- UncleMeat 2y agoEvery professor in a scientific field that I know is telling me that their university leadership is preparing for indefinite hiring freezes and massive cost cutting in preparation for huge slashes in funding from these institutions.
- rsfern 2y ago“Middle managers” is a pretty gross mischaracterization of NSF program managers. They are more like investment portfolio managers, responsible for coordinating and leading the external reviews of research proposals, evaluating the proposal and reviews to prioritize which projects to invest in to achieve a good risk/reward profile for the goals of the broader program, and working with the academics doing the research to help them stay on track and increase the impact of their ideas. I don’t totally disagree with your point about scientific progress continuing with a diminished NSF, but NSF does place a lot of emphasis on early stage fundamental high risk / high reward research, which industry has been trending away from in favor of quicker and clearer returns. Having an evidence-based discussion about how the US should allocate resources for scientific discovery is great - but it should be a clear discussion within the norms of our democratic institutions instead of a unilateral move by a few that stand to personally gain at the expense of the broader interest of the the American people
- miiiiiike 2y agoNature, Radiolab, NOVA, I probably haven't gone a week without watching or listening to something funded by the NSF since I was a kid. That's just the media stuff off the top of my head, hard to put a finger on just how much NSF funded research and projects impact our daily lives.
- actionfromafar 2y agoThat's all time you could have listened to Conservative Talk Radio. So you were corrupted by woke science instead, very tragic, very bad. /s
- miiiiiike 2y agoI actually grew up listening to talk radio; still do. The nationally syndicated stuff is whatever, but, the locally produced stuff is useful. Gotta know what the people around you are thinking and saying. Before we had an FM radio I used to listen to a lot of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura when I was little. Listening to something at an early age and thinking "I don't agree" was a good experience. To this day I don't like reading, watching, or listening to stuff that I "agree" with.
- rookderby 2y agoPlease call your representatives and senators. https://5calls.org/ https://5calls.org/ offers some scripts if you're unsure of what to say.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhy? Do they not follow the news?
- greggyb 2y agoBecause your representatives don't actually know what is important to their constituents without hearing about it. The news says what is happening, not what you, in your district and state, care about.
- bongodongobob 2y agoHow could any rep either not think any of this is important or not be actively involved? This is some of the craziest shit the US government has ever seen.
- LiquidSky 2y agoObviously Democrat politicians will make noise over this, but Trump just won an election and the Republican may believe that this is what their voters want, or at least they don't really care about it. They may be unaware of how things are actually playing out.
- kjksf 2y agoNSF is part of executive branch. Everyone in executive branch, as the saying goes, serves at the pleasure of the President of United States. That's what constitution says. President ordered reduction of number of government employees, as is his right and authority. Hence NSF and other government departments are following the President orders and firing people, starting with those easiest to fire i.e. probatory workers. I'm sure that's just the beginning and they will follow with firing people for not showing up to work, having second jobs, lack of performance etc. Congress is the other branch of government and has no power or authority here. Contacting representatives and senators would be a waste of time.
- waltercool 2y ago[dead]