4 ms·

Court lets NSF keep swinging axe at $1B in research grants

76 points by rntn 1y ago

eli_gottlieb 1y ago
> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief. Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
- kolbe 1y ago
  Generally, no, because jobs can be reinstated and money recompensated. Irreparable harm is harm that is... well... not reparable.
  - davidw 1y ago
    When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general) My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country. If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
    - philipallstar 1y ago
      > this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States Science isn't the plaintiff. > If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry. Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
      - vlovich123 1y ago
        > Science isn't the plaintiff. But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed. > Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties. And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
        philipallstar 1y ago
        > whatever little amount of money on The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"? The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2023&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=2000&view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2... [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_... (technically three massively smaller economies contribute more as a % of GDP, but that's off a crazily lower base)
        vlovich123 1y ago
        Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this: > while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties. The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue. You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
        1y ago
    - noobermin 1y ago
      The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
  - mattlutze 1y ago
    Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice. The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered. Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
    - dataflow 1y ago
      > Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
      - roxolotl 1y ago
        The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution. It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
    - kolbe 1y ago
      I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later. It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
- dmoy 1y ago
  "irreparable harm" in this case is a legal term of art, which sort of translates to "cannot be fixed by *any* amount of money later". If you lose a job for 5 years, work a minimum wage burger flipper job, and then win a $100 million judgement, you're more or less made whole in the eyes of the court. So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction. You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
  - prasadjoglekar 1y ago
    Spot on. And the inverse - forcing the govt to dispense the grant is not reversible. Once that money is spent in buying equipment, salaries etc. it's not coming back.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?". We do not allocate grant money to further the career goals of academics. The public and the government that represents it have zero interest in furthering anyone's careers.
    - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
      In the US legal system in general, the interests of the government are not trump cards. If the law says that the government should pay you $1000, it doesn't matter whether the public or the government feel they have an interest in paying you, nor whether some executive official thinks the original purpose of that law is served by paying you. In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
    - 1y ago
- rayiner 1y ago
  The court does not have before it the administration’s policy decision writ large. What it has before it are organizations representing groups of individuals who say their government grants were terminated. Whether or not you had a legal right to be paid money by the government is within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal_Claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal... More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.
bArray 1y ago
[flagged]
- noobermin 1y ago
  Tax payers are not going to be helped by cutting a mere 1B in science funding.
  - vkou 1y ago
    Especially when ICE receives a $75B budget increase to do things that are blatantly unamerican and often illegal. The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.
    - pstuart 1y ago
      These cuts are ideologically driven and use the "saving taxpayers money" line as coverage. As you noted, ICE just got billions more, as well as the military. Not a single cost cutting measure has been announced in those areas. Being mindful of taxpayer dollars is not a bad thing, but it has to be across the board. And more so, some of those dollars spent are an investment that pays off (like scientific research) vs those that don't (like a lot of military spending).
  - bArray 1y ago
    You're right, but making savings is a process of a thousand cuts.
- Herring 1y ago
  The problem with racism is it's not just immoral, it's also short-sighted. It's not like the US South is the richest. Newsflash: investing in your population yields huge dividends. China gets this.
  - rayiner 1y ago
flufluflufluffy 1y ago
> she ruled that the court lacks jurisdiction to order "retrospective relief", forcing NSF to pay out previously cancelled funds, saying those claims should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, which handles lawsuits seeking money from the federal government So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”
- rayiner 1y ago
  The legal system is too complex for your average reporter to understand. They operate at the level of stories rather than systems, rules, allocations of decision making power, etc. I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter. And if you're smart enough to convey it to laymen in a useful way you're making money hand over fist doing something better still.
- SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
  Sometimes I agree, but in other cases a merely administrative problem ends up meaning there's no effective remedy. The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs can't get an injunction against the prospective claims the court does have jurisdiction over. If the government can illegally cancel your grants at any time for any reason, and months of court action isn't enough to get them restored, I think it's fair for a journalist to summarize that as "courts are letting the government break the law without consequence".
nerpderp82 1y ago
Even when reversed, this is going to have a huge impact of the scientific standing of the US for a great long time. These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US. We will now see the world flocking to Asia and Europe as the center of research.
- searine 1y ago
  >These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US Not just PhDs. R&D in general. The big secret is the US government has been subsidizing corporate R&D for 70 years and people seem to have forgotten that fact.
mwkaufma 1y ago
Love to gamble my whole economy on the premise that we've been wrong about Keynesianism for a hundred years.
StTerryADavis 1y ago
I've read the list of the canceled grants, so far it looks like an even mix of Biden-era stereotypical DEI sounding programs that are mostly STEM focused like: 2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413 and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like: 2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000 Is this related to the Trump-Harvard beef?

76 points by rntn 1y ago

> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief. Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.

kolbe 1y ago
Generally, no, because jobs can be reinstated and money recompensated. Irreparable harm is harm that is... well... not reparable.
- davidw 1y ago
  When entire labs are shut down, work halted, experiments frozen, people move on because they need to eat, this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to those specific people and programs, as well as science in the United States. (Edited to reflect that the harm is both specific and general) My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country. If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
  - philipallstar 1y ago
    > this is absolutely going to cause irreparable harm to science in the United States Science isn't the plaintiff. > If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry. Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
    - vlovich123 1y ago
      > Science isn't the plaintiff. But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed. > Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties. And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
      - philipallstar 1y ago
        > whatever little amount of money on The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"? The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2023&most_recent_value_desc=true&start=2000&view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2... [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_... (technically three massively smaller economies contribute more as a % of GDP, but that's off a crazily lower base)
        vlovich123 1y ago
        Reading comprehension is important. Correct. The US as a country spends a lot more on health care than if there was a government-run single-payer system. I'm responding to this: > while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties. The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue. You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
      - 1y ago
  - noobermin 1y ago
    The rest of the world gets to benefit from the american brain drain, already in progress. The US is essentially going to turn into a similar shape as russia, a country with nukes but a shadow of its former prestige and soft power.
- mattlutze 1y ago
  Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Irreparable harm also includes things like injury to reputation, goodwill, professional practice. The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered. Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
  - dataflow 1y ago
    > Except jobs can't be just reinstated when people are out of them so long that the knowledge moves elsewhere or experiments expire. Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
    - roxolotl 1y ago
      The problem with this approach is that so many Americans live paycheck to paycheck that job interruptions quickly become irreparable even with infinite money as the eventual solution. It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      It's a bit odd that we have such a huge personal injury lawsuit industry then? As "pain and suffering" or wrongful death cannot be fixed with money either.
  - kolbe 1y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree with your logic, but that's not what the legal term is referring to. Too many people on HN think law is what they want it to be--not what it is. That term is generally reserved for things that are totally irreparable. Nothing you mentioned can't be made up for later. It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
dmoy 1y ago
"irreparable harm" in this case is a legal term of art, which sort of translates to "cannot be fixed by *any* amount of money later". If you lose a job for 5 years, work a minimum wage burger flipper job, and then win a $100 million judgement, you're more or less made whole in the eyes of the court. So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction. You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
- prasadjoglekar 1y ago
  Spot on. And the inverse - forcing the govt to dispense the grant is not reversible. Once that money is spent in buying equipment, salaries etc. it's not coming back.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Um, this seems ass-backwards to me. If some grant is denied when it should've been approved, the only harm that should be considered is "was this money allocated to the research?"... not "was this researcher's career harmed?". We do not allocate grant money to further the career goals of academics. The public and the government that represents it have zero interest in furthering anyone's careers.
  - SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
    In the US legal system in general, the interests of the government are not trump cards. If the law says that the government should pay you $1000, it doesn't matter whether the public or the government feel they have an interest in paying you, nor whether some executive official thinks the original purpose of that law is served by paying you. In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
  - 1y ago
rayiner 1y ago
The court does not have before it the administration’s policy decision writ large. What it has before it are organizations representing groups of individuals who say their government grants were terminated. Whether or not you had a legal right to be paid money by the government is within the jurisdiction of the Court of Federal Claims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal_Claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Federal... More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.

bArray 1y ago

[flagged]

noobermin 1y ago
Tax payers are not going to be helped by cutting a mere 1B in science funding.
- vkou 1y ago
  Especially when ICE receives a $75B budget increase to do things that are blatantly unamerican and often illegal. The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.
  - pstuart 1y ago
    These cuts are ideologically driven and use the "saving taxpayers money" line as coverage. As you noted, ICE just got billions more, as well as the military. Not a single cost cutting measure has been announced in those areas. Being mindful of taxpayer dollars is not a bad thing, but it has to be across the board. And more so, some of those dollars spent are an investment that pays off (like scientific research) vs those that don't (like a lot of military spending).
- bArray 1y ago
  You're right, but making savings is a process of a thousand cuts.
Herring 1y ago
The problem with racism is it's not just immoral, it's also short-sighted. It's not like the US South is the richest. Newsflash: investing in your population yields huge dividends. China gets this.
- rayiner 1y ago

flufluflufluffy 1y ago

> she ruled that the court lacks jurisdiction to order "retrospective relief", forcing NSF to pay out previously cancelled funds, saying those claims should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, which handles lawsuits seeking money from the federal government So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”

rayiner 1y ago
The legal system is too complex for your average reporter to understand. They operate at the level of stories rather than systems, rules, allocations of decision making power, etc. I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter. And if you're smart enough to convey it to laymen in a useful way you're making money hand over fist doing something better still.
SpicyLemonZest 1y ago
Sometimes I agree, but in other cases a merely administrative problem ends up meaning there's no effective remedy. The judge also ruled that the plaintiffs can't get an injunction against the prospective claims the court does have jurisdiction over. If the government can illegally cancel your grants at any time for any reason, and months of court action isn't enough to get them restored, I think it's fair for a journalist to summarize that as "courts are letting the government break the law without consequence".

nerpderp82 1y ago

Even when reversed, this is going to have a huge impact of the scientific standing of the US for a great long time. These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US. We will now see the world flocking to Asia and Europe as the center of research.

searine 1y ago
>These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US Not just PhDs. R&D in general. The big secret is the US government has been subsidizing corporate R&D for 70 years and people seem to have forgotten that fact.

mwkaufma 1y ago

Love to gamble my whole economy on the premise that we've been wrong about Keynesianism for a hundred years.

StTerryADavis 1y ago

I've read the list of the canceled grants, so far it looks like an even mix of Biden-era stereotypical DEI sounding programs that are mostly STEM focused like: 2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413 and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like: 2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000 Is this related to the Trump-Harvard beef?