Everyone at NSF overseeing the Platforms for Wireless Experimentation is gone

This is true for many programs for reasons that will be hard to understand if you aren&#x27;t a scientist. The NSF program managers are often pulled out of academia for brief periods of their career to do various tasks as experts. This means they are often probationary. This is the only way to hire people with deep expertise on the topic-du-jour.<p>The trump administration fired in wide swaths many probationary employees at NSF with total disregard for what they were doing or why. Not evaluated efficiency cuts. Just thrashing about.<p>Science in the US will be chaotically torn apart by this and a host of other decisions.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;national-science-foundation-february-2025-firings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;national-science-foundation-febr...</a>

The National Science Foundation funded the original research that became Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;origins-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nsf.gov&#x2F;news&#x2F;origins-google</a><p>That grant in the area of <i>library science</i> led directly to one of the most valuable companies on the planet, creating far more value (2.2 trillion is today&#x27;s market cap) from that one Digital Library Initiative grant to Stanford Professors Hector Garcia-Molina and Terry Winograd (plus a NSF Graduate Student Fellowship that paid for Brin to be at Stanford in the first place) than everything that NSF has spent over it&#x27;s entire history.<p>This is why funding research is incredibly important, and incredibly unpredictable. No one would have looked at the DLI in 1994 and said &quot;Ah yes, this one is the big payoff!&quot; But it was.<p>Basic research is like VC funding, it&#x27;s a portfolio with a huge amount of misses (in the sense that the research doesn&#x27;t change the world), but the winners pay off for all Americans and everyone in the world far more than the losers cost. And, unlike VC&#x27;s and start-ups, basic research has less investment than is socially optimal, because most of the payoffs are far more diffuse and are much harder to capture inside a company that returns profit to investors (the Google example is unusual in how direct the link was between the research and the company). Which is why the NSF (and other agencies like DARPA, NIH, etc.) were created, to fill a hole that exists in a pure market.<p>This really feels more and more every day like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asset_stripping" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asset_stripping</a>

Notwithstanding the other awful aspects of all of this, there’s a certain vibe of, “people who don’t understand how a system works attempting to act like they know how the system works and are too cowardly to admit they are breaking everything.”<p>This just reads like “Character Limit” except replace Twitter with the federal government.

Sad to say but this will be the norm for the next 4 years, don’t expect any federal organization to come out intact. I’ve basically ruled out working as a federal employee as there’s no assurances about anything.

Modest proposal: hacker news is not the most left leaning of web forums, However, there seems to be a fairly consistent and relatively unanimous view that the actions of the current republican administration are deeply problematic.<p>If you happen to be one of those people who thought that voting for the Republicans was in your best interest, yet you are shocked and horrified by what the Republicans are currently doing, I strongly suggest you reevaluate your political epistemology, and interrogate both your sources of information as well as your political stances.<p>Unlike you, others fully expected this as the outcome Of a Republican Administration and Congress.

Interesting approach to competing with China on wireless technology. I would have thought the US having a competitive edge over China in terms of research and development would be important to Republicans.

Don&#x27;t worry about it Elon hired 19 year old criminals to run the agency&#x27;s description through grok and it turned out that isn&#x27;t important.

That area will then be handled by Huawai, which developed the 5G spec. The US no longer has much of a telecommunications technology industry.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itif.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;mapping-international-5g-standards-landscape-and-how-it-impacts-us-strategy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itif.org&#x2F;publications&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;08&#x2F;mapping-internation...</a>

This is inline with “take down anything that shows expertise and competence” approach by this administration. Following the pattern of extremely biased and subservient to the president appointees, I am not sure what it looks like for this specific organization, may be they are fired and that’s it

What a horrible outcome! NIST is, for most of its services, a self-funded agency and they define the acceptable standards for new tech. This makes no sense.<p>Edit: Too much time on screen today. My apologies for muddying the waters!

There are obviously <i>strong</i> emotions on both sides regarding the actions of the first few weeks of the Trump administration. Whether you believe the goals are worthy or not, one must acknowledge that the manner in which all of this is being done is deeply disturbing.<p>Trump will be gone in a few years, one way or the other. However, the foundations that are being poured for legitimizing a strongman, authoritarian role for the executive and almost eliminating the role of the other two branches is deeply dangerous.<p>If you believe the goals are worthy enough that the ends justify the means, think of the worst president ever(in your opinion) and consider whether you&#x27;d want <i>them</i> to have the same power? Because politicians never let power go willingly. They will certainly point to Trump&#x27;s precedent as a means of legitimizing their actions.<p>My fervent hope is that our institutions are strong enough to weather this assault and that enough people make it clear to the administration that there are lines they are not willing to cross. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

&gt; One of the explicit goals of the program is to keep the US competitive<p>Competition doesn&#x27;t matter to a xenophobe. That&#x27;s what the tariffs are for. You admit that you can&#x27;t compete, so you make it too expensive for people to buy the foreign things, forcing them to buy your (inferior&#x2F;expensive) things, with the upside-down belief that that will make your economy strong. When actually the now-captive market is an incentive to make things worse and more expensive. You&#x27;d think the people who &quot;beat communism with choice and competition&quot; would get that.

What is this supposed to be? It&#x27;s a link to a bunch of posts on some kind of social media platform that all say &quot;uspol science funding&quot;. Am I missing something?

The EU countries should be aggressively courting US based scientists. Shower them with money, if they must.<p>This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Wouldn&#x27;t we all love it if some other country(ies) would contribute? Unfortunately, neither Europe nor China will in any appreciable amount, despite whatever the propaganda systems are currently saying. The US is the only game in town, and will remain so.

China will pounce on the opportunity to narrow its technical gap with the U.S. as US research decelerates.

Many are surprised by this, but if you think of it as Trump&#x27;s getting paid to set the US back so others can catch up, then it makes a lot of sense.

Looks like America First actually means America Second.

any thing that leads to or could lead to decentralization will be exterminated smh zuck

Wonder who informed the author? And how did the DOGE thing go exactly?

Why shouldn&#x27;t the three monopoly cellular players in the US do this work themselves? Is there some reason the NSF is doing industry research for them? Are we &#x2F;honestly&#x2F; afraid of &quot;falling behind&quot; in cellular technology if the government doesn&#x27;t do basic research?

I know these cuts make almost no difference to the massive federal spending, but they are putting a spotlight on our nation&#x27;s dire financial situation.<p>Most young people have no hope of owning a home or having kids and our federal government is &quot;borrowing&quot; money to pay for all of these things. Last year it added 1830 billion dollars to the national debt while paying 1126 billion in interest. Take a look at the dollar price of gold chart if you haven&#x27;t recently. This is obviously not sustainable, maybe even in the short term.<p>To continue steal from our children&#x27;s futures to pay for decades of accumulated corruption, appropriated by Congress, is a crime. Can anyone see a reasonable path forward where we don&#x27;t make drastic changes?

Consent matters.<p>There is no worse tyranny than to force someone to pay for something they do not want to buy, simply because you think it would be good for them.<p>I am vehemently pro-research and pro-education, but these tax-funded programs are not it. There must be some meaningful connection to the delivery of value, otherwise this stuff is just public-private wealth transfer. This seems obvious to me. Why should this research be subsidized? Why should government subsidies exist in general?<p>This isn’t crazy stuff. We would like a smaller federal government. Why is everyone acting like the sky is falling when an elected official does the things people voted for them to do?<p>(Note: I did not vote for this administration, but I am happy about some of the policy decisions that are being made (and unhappy about others).)