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One thing I don't understand is people resigning on principles. If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and

One thing I don't understand is people resigning on principles. If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.

pigeons 1y ago
If you stay it then becomes your job to do things you disagree with, even if you are attempting to have some mitigating effect.
1970-01-01 1y ago
It's resign or follow my orders. There's not much wiggle room in-between, and the lawsuits will probably cost you everything anyway.
- beeforpork 1y ago
  OK, but isn't getting fired better than resigning? Why resign?
  - 1970-01-01 1y ago
    I can't speak for the NSF director, but the silver lining in a resignation is you leave on your own terms. Being fired is not "better" for everyone.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- sathackr 1y ago
  There's tons of people that don't follow the boss's orders to a T and don't resign and don't get fired. And they would be much less effective at enacting their boss's agenda than someone who "just followed orders"
voidfunc 1y ago
Fighting a meat grinder or a lawnmower is usually a bad strategy especially with an openly corrupt and abusive government with no checks on any of its power. People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.
- sathackr 1y ago
  Protecting your family is why you should fight.
  - warkdarrior 1y ago
    Say you have a family and that you have this NSF director position. You get some orders that you do not agree with, and at the same time you know that your partner could be disappeared tomorrow to El Salvador, by mistake of course. What is your plan to fight and protect your family?
    - brianmurphy 1y ago
      Perhaps take some vacation days to get that "partner" of yours citizenship?
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
        Citizenship status doesn't matter if you create a one-way jurisdictional valve people can be pushed through before there is time to assert status and rights.
AdrianB1 1y ago
There are some hills not worth die on. There are moments when a retreat is better than a worthless fight, saving people in the process. I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.
- sathackr 1y ago
  If more people at the company had followed your example...would it have turned out differently? Seems like you had the right idea just nobody else cared enough to join you
  - AdrianB1 1y ago
    In a company with 100,000 employees even a few hundred will not make a difference, even if they all work in the same department and make it critical for the company. This is my experience, it may be better in other situations and other companies, but when the bad things come from the very top, there is no solution.
patrickdavey 1y ago
Mental health perhaps? If the administration is making the organisations job impossible it could be an incredibly awful time to stay. I don't believe I owe anyone my sanity.
- sathackr 1y ago
  yea that seems to be a common theme with people. Nothing is bigger than them or more important than their own personal mental health. I can't take it myself so I'm just going to roll over and not stand for any principle or fight for any cause because that's just too much for me to handle. And besides you're just one person so what difference is it going to make anyways. Same thing why people don't vote. It's not like their one vote will make a difference. Multiply that times 10 million people and you get what we have.
  - johntitorjr 1y ago
    [dead]
  - tartoran 1y ago
    You can do nothing of value if your mental health is declining. Best thing to do is seek shelter somewhere, for some time, to heal. You may do something of value at a later time. If you allow mental health to deteriorate there may be no comeback, ever.
    - davrosthedalek 1y ago
      I disagree with your first statement. People absolutely can and do provide many things of value while the mental health is declining. In fact, being able to provide things of value is often what helps with the mental health. Don't take that away. Seeking shelter to heal is certainly one good option, but I also encourage everyone who struggles to seek out help. That's not a fight you have to fight alone. If out break your bone, you see a specialist for fractures. If your mental health is damaged, see a specialist for mental health.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
empath75 1y ago
You will only be able to remain on the job by compromising and compromising and compromising until there are none of your principles left. You might as well leave immediately and fight from outside.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  yeah the "use my power to effect positive change" (or "bring them down from the inside") ideal is just a way to convince yourself that complicity is in service to a higher good. Funny enough that's the same argument the other side uses...
danudey 1y ago
It looks a lot better on the resume to say "I quit in protest" than to say "I was fired because I refused to do my job". Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.
ziddoap 1y ago
>I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Can you give me some examples of how you would fight? Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?
- saulpw 1y ago
  https://specificsuggestions.com/ https://specificsuggestions.com/
  - ziddoap 1y ago
    "Hide perishable foods (fruit) in discreet locations of common areas" That's helpful for the conversation! Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears? (It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)
    - dghlsakjg 1y ago
      This is what I got: Send people the http:// http:// version of links instead of https:// https:// I actually have no idea how this would disrupt anything.
      - linkregister 1y ago
        It would slow down the operation of the organization. In this case, it's counterproductive to the director's aims. The director's goal is to maximize grant funding; a functional bureaucracy is essential for that goal. There is nothing the director can do to increase the funding, which is being cut by an external source. The legality of the funding cut is unclear, but the director has no agency in the outcome of a legal challenge.
        dghlsakjg 1y ago
conductr 1y ago
It's certainly going to test your moral fortitude but at some point I think this is a bit like telling a victim of domestic violence to stick it out.
- sathackr 1y ago
  the victim of domestic violence sticking it out doesn't help anyone else. Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone. People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children. If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.
  - conductr 1y ago
    All reasons why the best solution is frankly often to just mind your own damn business, you shouldn't have opinions on others people's life moves which you can't possibly ascertain/judge as you have a huge information asymmetry and very makes decisions differently, has differing tolerances for different stresses/abuses/etc even if you did have all the facts
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
I think there are two problems: - How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside. - Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.
- brianmurphy 1y ago
  It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years. Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    It's not "spilling over" as some kind of inevitable process. The President nominated and the Senate confirmed a health secretary who works hard to cultivate mistrust of vaccines. The scientists didn't make them do that.
rahimnathwani 1y ago
The options you have: A) disagree and commit B) disagree and wait to be fired C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role: SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.
- etskinner 1y ago
  Secret other option: Disagree and convince your boss to change their mind That, of course, probably doesn't apply in this situation since Trump rarely changes his mind. But it does apply in other situations.
  - deeThrow94 1y ago
    > since Trump rarely changes his mind That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.
    - inerte 1y ago
      https://www.axios.com/2025/04/19/inside-trump-mindset-tariffs https://www.axios.com/2025/04/19/inside-trump-mindset-tariff... "We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."
      - 1y ago
LiquidSky 1y ago
In addition to what others have said, in theory it's also a way to call public attention to the problem. These are coveted positions that people don't just walk away from lightly, so someone in this position stepping down and explaining why can serve as an alarm bell. That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.
- BoxFour 1y ago
  The perception shift is key. Getting fired for cause and trying to claim the moral high ground afterward often reads as sour grapes; Bitterness and/or incompetence being rationalized. Quitting, on the other hand, suggests principle and lends credibility.
skeeter2020 1y ago
I get your reaction but it discounts that all of these people are both human (with limited amounts resolve) and have many alternatives. Look at Trump's first cabinet. I believe it had several people who didn't need or want to be there, but felt they needed to supervise: Tillerson, Kelly, Haley - none of them lasted very long.
barkingcat 1y ago
I completely understand resigning on principles. It's a reflection of an internal state where you cannot fight (due to reporting chain of command) and the idea that leaving to fight is a stronger position than staying and fighting within a corrupted/damaged organisation. There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign. In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either 1) start another company to directly compete 2) quit, join another company to compete or 3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place. 3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level. Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later. Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions. Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.
hammock 1y ago
NSF director is a political appointee, as such serves the will of the President. We don't need those people "fighting," we need to elect the people we want to make the right appointments.
- fnordpiglet 1y ago
  Well, I’ve come to learn the best leaders hire people who do fight them. The key is that they’re transparently open to being fought, take all sides under consideration, give deference when they don’t have to, but expect compliance when they make a decision. I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places. I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
  - hammock 1y ago
    >I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Does getting fired by Trump for publicly resisting his changes qualify as disgrace?
      - hammock 1y ago
        When he was initially appointed by the same guy, yeah kind of. Unless you can spin a good story about how you thought Trump was good but changed for the worse (which is a tough story to make believable right now, and will also burn all your Trump-adjacent bridges since he seems to value loyalty above all else)
Tireings 1y ago
It's possible true but look at the current situation: there are people taking trump as face value. They believe in him. They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'. It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something
throwanem 1y ago
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again. I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.
tehjoker 1y ago
Resigning sends a signal to the people under you and outside the organization that fighting back is ok. Staying sends the message that things are ok enough.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  Resigning sends a message fighting back is futile. A praising and grateful resignation letter sends a message things are OK. Staying sends different messages depending on words and actions.
  - tehjoker 1y ago
    Don't praise them in the resignation letter. Say something sharp and critical.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mikestew 1y ago
If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in… Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.
MSM 1y ago
I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize. Additionally, quietly criticizing just means quietly getting fired, then likely still being unable to publicly criticize. The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.
- mandevil 1y ago
  US Government employees basically can't sign non-disparagement agreements, the Federal Government doesn't enter into agreements without a fixed time commitment to judge compliance, and there are incredibly strong whistleblower protection laws for Federal employees which would make any non-disparagement agreement very difficult if not impossible to enforce. A Federal judge held that the Trump 2016 campaign's non-disparagement agreements were unenforceable, and there have been no hints of Federal employees being offered anything even like that. That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    The fact that it is not an anonymous source lends much more weight than leaking to a reporter. Based on your first graph though, how much longer before federal whistle blower laws get DOGE'd?
- thinkcontext 1y ago
  > I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).
hodgesrm 1y ago
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Have you actually done this? It's harder than it sounds.
csours 1y ago
> Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much. Sometimes there is not a direct path to 'good'. Sometimes the path to things getting better goes through a rough patch. It is very dissatisfying that a lot of people are doing very stupid things very publicly right now. --- Politics is an information game, and you can't play an information game without changing the game; all information games are metagames. The way the game is being played right now is drastically changing the game. I won't claim that the game will be better after this (especially in the short term), but it certainly will be different.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Those people are being fired as fast as possible. That's because what's happening is not just changes in policies within these agencies, but essentially a loyalty test / purge. You can either be loyal and do what the new boss wants without disagreement, you can resign in protest, or you can be fired.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
You’re assuming the battle hasn’t been lost. These people didn’t resign at first fight. They resigned when they realised there isn’t a way to fight a President who wants to dismantle an agency underneath him like this.
AcerbicZero 1y ago
You're getting a lot of pushback, but this resonates with me. I guess I have a hard time understanding the value in a "noble departure" rather than just going down swinging. If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life. Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.
- crummy 1y ago
  Historically, 'this decision is so outrageous that three important people have resigned' has been a powerful brake on outrageous decisions. That has stopped being the case recently, for whatever reason.
- KerrAvon 1y ago
  1. The resignation is an important signal to other people that bad things are happening. Not everyone is paying attention; dramatic resignations are events that might help pierce the media veil. 2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.
  - pdfernhout 1y ago
    To support your point, here is a 1975 book: "Resignation in protest : political and ethical choices between loyalty to team and loyalty to conscience in American public life" by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring." Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government-resignations-usds-6b7e9b7022e6d89d69305e9510f2a43c https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”" Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups. Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c... ==== From there: I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students. I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ==== RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.
ugh123 1y ago
I can think of cases where new employers clearly act without integrity and that may make certain employees uneasy about being asked to do things that may be unethical.
flkfsjklfdslkj 1y ago
Honest question - have you ever worked somewhere where people above you in the food chain have made decisions you consider bad or unacceptable? If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan). The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.
dreamcompiler 1y ago
Congress could stop all this nonsense if they wanted to. The congressional leadership just doesn't want to. And in this context it's reins not reigns.
SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
It's just not an option in most leadership positions. When news comes down that the NSF budget is likely to be cut 55%, being the director of the NSF means deciding how that 55% cut is allocated. Your subordinates need advice on how to make funding decisions, and guarantees that you'll preserve funding for X and Y and Z which are particularly important. And once you start offering such advice and guarantees, you're an active participant in the cuts, no matter how much you personally wish they hadn't happened.
yodsanklai 1y ago
Most people just don't make waves and cooperate. The ones who resign at least have principles.
standardUser 1y ago
Or, find a new job that pays better and enjoy your life working for somehow you don't acutely hate. Sounds like all upside to me.
- refurb 1y ago
  Exactly. I don’t understand the emotional attachment to a specific job or organization. I could see if it’s something you built (but then hopefully you call the shots), but otherwise it’s a agreement between two parties and if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll thank you for the time so far and leave without ever looking back. People make their lives far more complex than need be. There isn’t one job you can work or do what you want to do. There are many. Go somewhere else.
  - davkan 1y ago
    The public sector is about service. It’s not emotional attachment that keeps these employees there to the end, it’s a sense of responsibility. There’s no higher calling keeping you at your B2B SaaS company.
    - standardUser 1y ago
      The public sector was about service. Then we elected Donald Trump twice. I wouldn't want to be the last idiot carrying water for a country that rejected my service outright.
    - refurb 1y ago
      The public sector is a job for most. They aren't working at the government because of some higher calling (though some might).
      - davkan 1y ago
        Higher calling might be the wrong phrase, but generally I find that people who work for the forest service etc feel more responsibility for their charge than people making widgets.
anigbrowl 1y ago
By resigning you take the initiative, control the timing, and can put out a statement of what the problem is. If you don't resign and refuse to play along with unethical/illegal directives, you get fired and unethical people who issued the directives tell a story about how you're a saboteur or something. Whoever gets their story out first is likely to set the tone for subsequent public debate. You might be overestiamting how much 'clout and power' people in public life have. Few of them are known outside of their specialty field, so they really don't have much clout. And their power is quite limited; you may have noticed that multiple inspector generals (who are legally independent of the executive branch) were fired early in the administration. Several of them went to court and have obtained judgments that their firings were illegal, but the damage is already done.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
If you're responsible, things are going to hell and you don't have the means to fix things, your only option is resignation. If you don't, then when things inevitably go to hell, people will blame you for it. By resigning, you're washing your hands of the matter.
dfxm12 1y ago
Not everyone has such strong principles, the ability to lead under such different parameters or the wherewithal to deal with the circus that is the current administration. Reading the tea leaves, this guy has less clout and power then he had assumed and fighting has a different meaning when people are threatened with getting disappeared to El Salvador. Maybe he might also have something else lined up.
watwut 1y ago
Leaving is better then becomeming co-guilty. They cant stop this process pushed hard from the top and they can barely slow it down. They can stay and become morally and legaly compromises or go. You wont win this fight from inside Trump administration. You can become colaborant or not.
rsynnott 1y ago
I mean, one might take the view, and one might be right, that these organisations are at this point FUBAR. There might be something to be said for taking a few years out and potentially coming back when Musk, Trump et al have been dislodged.
AndyMcConachie 1y ago
You can't fight the system from within it.

pigeons 1y ago

If you stay it then becomes your job to do things you disagree with, even if you are attempting to have some mitigating effect.

1970-01-01 1y ago

It's resign or follow my orders. There's not much wiggle room in-between, and the lawsuits will probably cost you everything anyway.

beeforpork 1y ago
OK, but isn't getting fired better than resigning? Why resign?
- 1970-01-01 1y ago
  I can't speak for the NSF director, but the silver lining in a resignation is you leave on your own terms. Being fired is not "better" for everyone.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sathackr 1y ago
There's tons of people that don't follow the boss's orders to a T and don't resign and don't get fired. And they would be much less effective at enacting their boss's agenda than someone who "just followed orders"

voidfunc 1y ago

Fighting a meat grinder or a lawnmower is usually a bad strategy especially with an openly corrupt and abusive government with no checks on any of its power. People have families and livelihoods to protect, nobody in these positions signed up for this shit.

sathackr 1y ago
Protecting your family is why you should fight.
- warkdarrior 1y ago
  Say you have a family and that you have this NSF director position. You get some orders that you do not agree with, and at the same time you know that your partner could be disappeared tomorrow to El Salvador, by mistake of course. What is your plan to fight and protect your family?
  - brianmurphy 1y ago
    Perhaps take some vacation days to get that "partner" of yours citizenship?
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago
      Citizenship status doesn't matter if you create a one-way jurisdictional valve people can be pushed through before there is time to assert status and rights.

AdrianB1 1y ago

There are some hills not worth die on. There are moments when a retreat is better than a worthless fight, saving people in the process. I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.

sathackr 1y ago
If more people at the company had followed your example...would it have turned out differently? Seems like you had the right idea just nobody else cared enough to join you
- AdrianB1 1y ago
  In a company with 100,000 employees even a few hundred will not make a difference, even if they all work in the same department and make it critical for the company. This is my experience, it may be better in other situations and other companies, but when the bad things come from the very top, there is no solution.

patrickdavey 1y ago

Mental health perhaps? If the administration is making the organisations job impossible it could be an incredibly awful time to stay. I don't believe I owe anyone my sanity.

sathackr 1y ago
yea that seems to be a common theme with people. Nothing is bigger than them or more important than their own personal mental health. I can't take it myself so I'm just going to roll over and not stand for any principle or fight for any cause because that's just too much for me to handle. And besides you're just one person so what difference is it going to make anyways. Same thing why people don't vote. It's not like their one vote will make a difference. Multiply that times 10 million people and you get what we have.
- johntitorjr 1y ago
  [dead]
- tartoran 1y ago
  You can do nothing of value if your mental health is declining. Best thing to do is seek shelter somewhere, for some time, to heal. You may do something of value at a later time. If you allow mental health to deteriorate there may be no comeback, ever.
  - davrosthedalek 1y ago
    I disagree with your first statement. People absolutely can and do provide many things of value while the mental health is declining. In fact, being able to provide things of value is often what helps with the mental health. Don't take that away. Seeking shelter to heal is certainly one good option, but I also encourage everyone who struggles to seek out help. That's not a fight you have to fight alone. If out break your bone, you see a specialist for fractures. If your mental health is damaged, see a specialist for mental health.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago

empath75 1y ago

You will only be able to remain on the job by compromising and compromising and compromising until there are none of your principles left. You might as well leave immediately and fight from outside.

skeeter2020 1y ago
yeah the "use my power to effect positive change" (or "bring them down from the inside") ideal is just a way to convince yourself that complicity is in service to a higher good. Funny enough that's the same argument the other side uses...

danudey 1y ago

It looks a lot better on the resume to say "I quit in protest" than to say "I was fired because I refused to do my job". Quitting in protest also makes better headlines than getting fired and it lets the person quitting set the narrative. "I quit because the administration was asking me to do something unethical or against the best interests of the American public" makes for good headlines, compared to "Trump admin fires head of the NSF" and then having to go on damage control justifying why you were fired and why it's a good thing actually.

ziddoap 1y ago

>I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Can you give me some examples of how you would fight? Boss comes in (or whoever more powerful than me, e.g. someone acting on the president's orders), says something with the gist of "Do this, or get fired". What are the next steps that I can take that won't get me fired, but also count as fighting back?

saulpw 1y ago
https://specificsuggestions.com/ https://specificsuggestions.com/
- ziddoap 1y ago
  "Hide perishable foods (fruit) in discreet locations of common areas" That's helpful for the conversation! Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears? (It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    This is what I got: Send people the http:// http:// version of links instead of https:// https:// I actually have no idea how this would disrupt anything.
    - linkregister 1y ago
      It would slow down the operation of the organization. In this case, it's counterproductive to the director's aims. The director's goal is to maximize grant funding; a functional bureaucracy is essential for that goal. There is nothing the director can do to increase the funding, which is being cut by an external source. The legality of the funding cut is unclear, but the director has no agency in the outcome of a legal challenge.
      - dghlsakjg 1y ago

conductr 1y ago

It's certainly going to test your moral fortitude but at some point I think this is a bit like telling a victim of domestic violence to stick it out.

sathackr 1y ago
the victim of domestic violence sticking it out doesn't help anyone else. Except maybe the children -- which I could see there are some situations where not sticking it out could be worse for everyone. People look at domestic violence victims and always say "well why didn't they just leave?" as if leaving is the perfect solution -- but it rarely is. There are other factors. Income. Children. If there were a perfect societal safety net for these people, then maybe "just leave" is always the best solution. But there is not, and "just leave" often doesn't quite work out.
- conductr 1y ago
  All reasons why the best solution is frankly often to just mind your own damn business, you shouldn't have opinions on others people's life moves which you can't possibly ascertain/judge as you have a huge information asymmetry and very makes decisions differently, has differing tolerances for different stresses/abuses/etc even if you did have all the facts

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

I think there are two problems: - How can you fight from the inside against people who can get you fired at will? I think it's more effective to fight from the outside. - Science requires a lot of honesty, trust and assumes people generally act in good faith. So Scientists are not well equipped for political fights against hardcore ideologues. Just look at climate or vaccine denial.

brianmurphy 1y ago
It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years. Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  It's not "spilling over" as some kind of inevitable process. The President nominated and the Senate confirmed a health secretary who works hard to cultivate mistrust of vaccines. The scientists didn't make them do that.

rahimnathwani 1y ago

The options you have: A) disagree and commit B) disagree and wait to be fired C) appear to commit, but secretly subvert your (elected) boss's plans/intentions I use the word 'boss' here because the president has the right to hire and fire for this role: SEC. 5. 42 U.S.C. 1864 (a) The Director of the Foundation (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Director’’) shall be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Before any person is appointed as Director, the President shall afford the Board an opportunity to make recommendations to him with respect to such appointment. The Director shall receive basic pay at the rate provided for level II of the Executive Schedule under section 5313 of title 5, United States Code, and shall serve for a term of six years unless sooner removed by the President.

etskinner 1y ago
Secret other option: Disagree and convince your boss to change their mind That, of course, probably doesn't apply in this situation since Trump rarely changes his mind. But it does apply in other situations.
- deeThrow94 1y ago
  > since Trump rarely changes his mind That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.
  - inerte 1y ago
    https://www.axios.com/2025/04/19/inside-trump-mindset-tariffs https://www.axios.com/2025/04/19/inside-trump-mindset-tariff... "We saw it in business with Trump," one adviser said. "He would have these meetings and everyone would agree, and then we would just pray that when he left the office and got on the elevator that the doorman wouldn't share his opinion, because there would be a 50/50 chance [Trump] would suddenly side with the doorman."
    - 1y ago

LiquidSky 1y ago

In addition to what others have said, in theory it's also a way to call public attention to the problem. These are coveted positions that people don't just walk away from lightly, so someone in this position stepping down and explaining why can serve as an alarm bell. That said, I don't know how effective that really is anymore since driving people out is one of the administration's stated goals.

BoxFour 1y ago
The perception shift is key. Getting fired for cause and trying to claim the moral high ground afterward often reads as sour grapes; Bitterness and/or incompetence being rationalized. Quitting, on the other hand, suggests principle and lends credibility.

skeeter2020 1y ago

I get your reaction but it discounts that all of these people are both human (with limited amounts resolve) and have many alternatives. Look at Trump's first cabinet. I believe it had several people who didn't need or want to be there, but felt they needed to supervise: Tillerson, Kelly, Haley - none of them lasted very long.

barkingcat 1y ago

I completely understand resigning on principles. It's a reflection of an internal state where you cannot fight (due to reporting chain of command) and the idea that leaving to fight is a stronger position than staying and fighting within a corrupted/damaged organisation. There is also the idea: you can order other people to do it, but I'm not going to do it - I resign. In business/corporate world, it's more like: I can't fight the idiotic director level decisions, so I'm going to quit and either 1) start another company to directly compete 2) quit, join another company to compete or 3) quit, get more experience, and then come back years later at a much higher pay / position to fire the director who was braindead in the first place. 3) in particular plays out way more often than you'd think in silicon valley/tech industry, where by quitting and changing jobs, you can easily get a bunch of promotions and experience outside, so you can come back in to the company at a much higher level. Think Intel and Pat Gelsinger. As an engineer, Pat couldn't get anywhere so left in 2009 to go lead VMWare. Then he returned to Intel as CEO in 2021. He still didn't get anywhere and got fired, but at least it was for executing his vision. If he stayed at Intel, he would have just been a peon engineer for the rest of his life. At least by quitting he got the CEO job later. Same story re the current Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, by leaving the board, he was signally his unhappiness with the conditions, and by rejoining as CEO, he gets to make the decisions. Resisting and fighting from within is usually your weakest play in organisational change.

hammock 1y ago

NSF director is a political appointee, as such serves the will of the President. We don't need those people "fighting," we need to elect the people we want to make the right appointments.

fnordpiglet 1y ago
Well, I’ve come to learn the best leaders hire people who do fight them. The key is that they’re transparently open to being fought, take all sides under consideration, give deference when they don’t have to, but expect compliance when they make a decision. I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening, so you end up with a globally pessimal decisioning system where you push out the thought leaders and consensus builders and replace them with either people too stupid to have an opinion or just devious enough to appease their master while imposing their will. It’s the most toxic of all work places. I feel genuine sorrow for all federal employees, contractors, and people who do business with or receive money from this government. I’ve worked in both environments, and what’s happening is going to crush a lot of human souls in what was already a pretty soul crushing environment to begin with.
- hammock 1y ago
  >I think we are in a situation where none of the above is happening What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Does getting fired by Trump for publicly resisting his changes qualify as disgrace?
    - hammock 1y ago
      When he was initially appointed by the same guy, yeah kind of. Unless you can spin a good story about how you thought Trump was good but changed for the worse (which is a tough story to make believable right now, and will also burn all your Trump-adjacent bridges since he seems to value loyalty above all else)

Tireings 1y ago

It's possible true but look at the current situation: there are people taking trump as face value. They believe in him. They might struggle between 'whats going on here' 'wtf' 'why is no one doing something ' to 'am I wrong? People voted for that clown'. It's impressive to see how fast society, values and character just degress or becomes mainstream. It has to mean something

throwanem 1y ago

> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. There have been times in my life when I said the same. Now ask me if those experiences incline me to try saying so ever again. I understand perfectly the motivation, and the theoretical appeal of the method. It is only that while in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, in practice this method pursued assiduously enough will see you working actively in support of atrocity before you realize that - past a surprisingly early point which large parts of the US government passed several moons ago - the method simply cannot work.

tehjoker 1y ago

Resigning sends a signal to the people under you and outside the organization that fighting back is ok. Staying sends the message that things are ok enough.

pseudalopex 1y ago
Resigning sends a message fighting back is futile. A praising and grateful resignation letter sends a message things are OK. Staying sends different messages depending on words and actions.
- tehjoker 1y ago
  Don't praise them in the resignation letter. Say something sharp and critical.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mikestew 1y ago

If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in… Seems to me if one held that much “clout and power”, they wouldn’t need to resign on principle. Instead one learns who really holds the clout and power.

MSM 1y ago

I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize. Additionally, quietly criticizing just means quietly getting fired, then likely still being unable to publicly criticize. The only way to say "hey, I don't think this is right and I don't agree with what's happening here" is to publicly resign and hope that alarm bells start going off in people's heads as to why many of these folks are resigning simultaneously.

mandevil 1y ago
US Government employees basically can't sign non-disparagement agreements, the Federal Government doesn't enter into agreements without a fixed time commitment to judge compliance, and there are incredibly strong whistleblower protection laws for Federal employees which would make any non-disparagement agreement very difficult if not impossible to enforce. A Federal judge held that the Trump 2016 campaign's non-disparagement agreements were unenforceable, and there have been no hints of Federal employees being offered anything even like that. That bit of pedantry aside, I agree with you that the purpose is to draw attention to something bad happening, it is a grander version of leaking to a reporter.
- dylan604 1y ago
  The fact that it is not an anonymous source lends much more weight than leaking to a reporter. Based on your first graph though, how much longer before federal whistle blower laws get DOGE'd?
thinkcontext 1y ago
> I think the likely reason is they have signed a non disparagement agreement and have no avenue to publicly criticize That was litigated during Trump's first term and held to be not enforceable. That was the case brought by one of his reality show contestants that he appointed to something (the exact details are too trivial to care about).

hodgesrm 1y ago

> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Have you actually done this? It's harder than it sounds.

csours 1y ago

> Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much. Sometimes there is not a direct path to 'good'. Sometimes the path to things getting better goes through a rough patch. It is very dissatisfying that a lot of people are doing very stupid things very publicly right now. --- Politics is an information game, and you can't play an information game without changing the game; all information games are metagames. The way the game is being played right now is drastically changing the game. I won't claim that the game will be better after this (especially in the short term), but it certainly will be different.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can. Those people are being fired as fast as possible. That's because what's happening is not just changes in policies within these agencies, but essentially a loyalty test / purge. You can either be loyal and do what the new boss wants without disagreement, you can resign in protest, or you can be fired.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

You’re assuming the battle hasn’t been lost. These people didn’t resign at first fight. They resigned when they realised there isn’t a way to fight a President who wants to dismantle an agency underneath him like this.

AcerbicZero 1y ago

You're getting a lot of pushback, but this resonates with me. I guess I have a hard time understanding the value in a "noble departure" rather than just going down swinging. If a shark was eating me, I wouldn't say "welp I'm boned, better just resign from life". I'd punch the shark, until that shark had to fire me from life. Maybe from a PR perspective its somehow better? Idk, I don't see it.

crummy 1y ago
Historically, 'this decision is so outrageous that three important people have resigned' has been a powerful brake on outrageous decisions. That has stopped being the case recently, for whatever reason.
KerrAvon 1y ago
1. The resignation is an important signal to other people that bad things are happening. Not everyone is paying attention; dramatic resignations are events that might help pierce the media veil. 2. At some point, if you can't stop it and they won't fire you, you're a collaborator. There's a point where your noble stance becomes "even though I desperately want not to put people into gas chambers it's better if I'm the concentration camp director because I can reduce the number of people we put into the gas chambers by manipulating spreadsheets behind the scenes." You can justify that to yourself, maybe. I would strongly advise reading some history before going down that road. You and your descendants have to live with that forever.
- pdfernhout 1y ago
  To support your point, here is a 1975 book: "Resignation in protest : political and ethical choices between loyalty to team and loyalty to conscience in American public life" by Edward Weisband and Thomas M. Franck https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis https://archive.org/details/resignationinpro00weis From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring." Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government-resignations-usds-6b7e9b7022e6d89d69305e9510f2a43c https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”" Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups. Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c... ==== From there: I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students. I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ==== RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.

ugh123 1y ago

I can think of cases where new employers clearly act without integrity and that may make certain employees uneasy about being asked to do things that may be unethical.

flkfsjklfdslkj 1y ago

Honest question - have you ever worked somewhere where people above you in the food chain have made decisions you consider bad or unacceptable? If not, it may not be clear that those above you are ultimately going to win any disagreement. If you can't change their mind, there really isn't anything you can do, except limit any damage to your repuation for your next role (ie, leave before the s*it hits the fan). The other effect, explained so well in the short book "The Power of the Powerless", is that the idea of using your increasing clout and power as you rise through an organisation to make changes for the better is largely a fallacy. Paradoxically, the higher up you go, the less freedom you have to use that clout and power.

dreamcompiler 1y ago

Congress could stop all this nonsense if they wanted to. The congressional leadership just doesn't want to. And in this context it's reins not reigns.

SpicyLemonZest 1y ago

It's just not an option in most leadership positions. When news comes down that the NSF budget is likely to be cut 55%, being the director of the NSF means deciding how that 55% cut is allocated. Your subordinates need advice on how to make funding decisions, and guarantees that you'll preserve funding for X and Y and Z which are particularly important. And once you start offering such advice and guarantees, you're an active participant in the cuts, no matter how much you personally wish they hadn't happened.

yodsanklai 1y ago

Most people just don't make waves and cooperate. The ones who resign at least have principles.

standardUser 1y ago

Or, find a new job that pays better and enjoy your life working for somehow you don't acutely hate. Sounds like all upside to me.

refurb 1y ago
Exactly. I don’t understand the emotional attachment to a specific job or organization. I could see if it’s something you built (but then hopefully you call the shots), but otherwise it’s a agreement between two parties and if it doesn’t work for me, I’ll thank you for the time so far and leave without ever looking back. People make their lives far more complex than need be. There isn’t one job you can work or do what you want to do. There are many. Go somewhere else.
- davkan 1y ago
  The public sector is about service. It’s not emotional attachment that keeps these employees there to the end, it’s a sense of responsibility. There’s no higher calling keeping you at your B2B SaaS company.
  - standardUser 1y ago
    The public sector was about service. Then we elected Donald Trump twice. I wouldn't want to be the last idiot carrying water for a country that rejected my service outright.
  - refurb 1y ago
    The public sector is a job for most. They aren't working at the government because of some higher calling (though some might).
    - davkan 1y ago
      Higher calling might be the wrong phrase, but generally I find that people who work for the forest service etc feel more responsibility for their charge than people making widgets.

anigbrowl 1y ago

By resigning you take the initiative, control the timing, and can put out a statement of what the problem is. If you don't resign and refuse to play along with unethical/illegal directives, you get fired and unethical people who issued the directives tell a story about how you're a saboteur or something. Whoever gets their story out first is likely to set the tone for subsequent public debate. You might be overestiamting how much 'clout and power' people in public life have. Few of them are known outside of their specialty field, so they really don't have much clout. And their power is quite limited; you may have noticed that multiple inspector generals (who are legally independent of the executive branch) were fired early in the administration. Several of them went to court and have obtained judgments that their firings were illegal, but the damage is already done.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

If you're responsible, things are going to hell and you don't have the means to fix things, your only option is resignation. If you don't, then when things inevitably go to hell, people will blame you for it. By resigning, you're washing your hands of the matter.

dfxm12 1y ago

Not everyone has such strong principles, the ability to lead under such different parameters or the wherewithal to deal with the circus that is the current administration. Reading the tea leaves, this guy has less clout and power then he had assumed and fighting has a different meaning when people are threatened with getting disappeared to El Salvador. Maybe he might also have something else lined up.

watwut 1y ago

Leaving is better then becomeming co-guilty. They cant stop this process pushed hard from the top and they can barely slow it down. They can stay and become morally and legaly compromises or go. You wont win this fight from inside Trump administration. You can become colaborant or not.

rsynnott 1y ago

I mean, one might take the view, and one might be right, that these organisations are at this point FUBAR. There might be something to be said for taking a few years out and potentially coming back when Musk, Trump et al have been dislodged.

AndyMcConachie 1y ago

You can't fight the system from within it.