Some poignant projects that were canceled after already been awarded:<p>"What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance Versus Material Capacity to Pursue Power", with a slide-reading lecture video on "seemingly intractable conflicts" [1].<p>"Military Adaptation and War Termination" [2]<p>""Un"Resilience: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse" [3]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o</a><p>[2] <a href="https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/3965018/military-adaptation-and-war-termination/" rel="nofollow">https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/3965117/unresilience-drawing-insights-from-societal-collapse/" rel="nofollow">https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...</a>
A lot of the research seems really useful. I don't understand why we wouldn't prioritize understanding how to prevent drug cartel recruitment (one of the examples cited in the article).
> Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel.
These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse. I think that trying to find and exploit loopholes in the constitution breaks the spirit of the document and is traitorous to our form of government. But they don't care for our form of government, they want to undermine it because without government it increases billionaire's "freedom".
Why is every recent thread on DOGE and DOGE-similar stuff <i>always</i> riddled with people asking "this team were supposedly researching [insert apparently useless research topic], how does that help us?!?", as if every god damn research project funded by the US govt. better result in some kind of Manhattan-Project-style leap forward.
It's interesting to see that as of the time I'm writing this, half the top-level comments in this thread are being downvoted.<p>I am NOT writing in support of the current slash-and-burn approach to government, but I suspect that the downvoted half are addressing a significant deficiency in this article -- it doesn't mention what has been meaningfully accomplished by the Minerva Initiative in 17 years, given that the program had a fairly discrete set of objectives. Did they prevent any terrorist attacks? Did they forestall any destabilizing uprisings in significant countries? Did they develop a real and actionable understanding of radicalization or similar movements?<p>This is not to say that those accomplishments don't exist (I wouldn't know, I'd never heard of the program before), but it's extraordinarily lazy writing by a supposedly-premier science publication for these not to be identified and highlighted, if they exist.<p>Edit: clarity.
> Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days.<p>Social scientists researching climate change.<p>With the discussion here on HN often about how misaligned the incentives are and with the replication crisis in mind I get it that funding was cut (<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis</a>).
Soo.. any of these had any real applications by the Pentagon? Or then why is the Pentagon using their budget to fund general research? It could be perfectly valid research, but that's not their job.
36.5 trillion in total national debt<p>Increasing by 1 trillion every 100 days<p>Thats by 10 billion per day<p>Thats 417 million per hour<p>Thats 6.9 million per minute<p>They need to cut more of this kind of stuff, not less.<p>Way more.