Our government needs to be fixed now, The FIRST thing to be done is to completely REMOVE big money from politics.
Wealthy people contributing large sums to parties or candidates should (if found guilty) face MANDITORY time (5 year minimum) with no possible parole.
Rich people using the system to make themselves richer must be GUARANTEED substantial time in the slammer with no possible "get out of jail free" cards available.
Big money in politics IS this country's BIGGEST problem!!
It is the reason we have lost our democracy to Autocratic Fascism.
The NSF has sponsored grants in scientific education from elementary school to high school and community college science education programs. They have also sponsored Teacher Education Programs at the University level. It’s time to turn this around otherwise America won’t even rate in the top 50 of developed nations in science and math education.
I spent 4 years at the NSF as a Division Director in the SBE Directorate. It was a great place to work. The Program Managers who are responsible for most grants were, with rare exceptions, skilled and dedicated workers. They were guided in their funding decisions by panels with rotating memberships that included both upcoming scholars and leaders in their fields. Political pressure, except for the largest investments, was virtually nil. I occasionally received a letter from a Congressman urging funding for a proposal coming from a state university or a constituent and I always wrote back, “I can assure you that this proposal will receive our usual full and fair consideration,“ and I never received any pushback or follow-up request when I responded in this way. Congress, except for a few grandstanders like the late Senator Proxmire, respected our processes and decisions.
After leaving NSF, I spent three years in the Science and Technology Directorate of The Department of Homeland Security. Although this was more than a decade ago, it was still the case that I went from perhaps the best place to work in the federal government to perhaps the worst. But this had more to do with bureaucracies and in the case of the S&T directorate a fuzzy sense of mission than it did to political interference. The Trump administration has been interfering politically to work changes in both NSF and DHS. In each case the agency, whether a good place to work or bad, has been harmed, with the harms having nationwide ramifications. The changes in DHS may be doing the most immediate harm to ordinary people, but the harms to NSF are both tragic and likely to be harming Americans more and doing more to weaken our country over the long run.
The fascist regime is simply grooming more of their voters: uneducated, uninformed, ignorant. Red states have been leading the way for many, many years.
I hope someone in the democratic party is keeping score on what this fascist has already done. If Dems are fortunate enough to take the house and senate then they need to undo the damage.
Let's think back in history to those scientists that made great discoveries. What happened to Copernicus who told everyone the earth was not flat? What about the ongoing battle with man's origins and Darwin. We, of European ancestry, have never been ones to accept scientific reasoning. (most early discoveries in science can be laid at the feet of the Arabs and Egyptians) Instead we are mired in... the earth was created in 7 days and a horse vaccine will cure covid. It is astounding the the Us has done so well leading modern science until we understand the role of the immigrant or Blacks in all of that. Those MAGA's, so poorly educated in science, view science as bumbo jumbo. So what does it matter to loose a few more.
If Republicans hold power in 2029, the U.S. will be over, having become West Russia. Future scientists lost because of terrible K-12 education, the best foreign students turned away, undergraduate science majors seeing no future, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers cut off mid-project, entire programs and departments eliminated, $ billions spent on years of research wasted because the grants were frozen and everything, including the people, was lost. China wins the 21st century.
Even IF there's a blue tsunami this fall and a Democratic/ progressive trifecta in 2028, it will take generations to repair the damage.
I certainly hope that in the basement of some left-leaning think tank a bunch of bright young interns is keeping a list of all these firings/hirings and executive orders so that should a Democrat win the Presidency in 2028 (from my keyboard to The Lord's eyes, although one should never bet against the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot by nominating an unelectable candidate), the next President issues, at 12:01 PM January 20, 2029 one massive executive order reversing every personnel action and executive order promulgated by Don the Con
Trump has zero interest in science, and has not the faintest clue about what it does or how it works. Somebody told him to do this. We'll know who put him up to it only when we have a chance to follow the money.
My bet is on Elon and his fellow tech bros, who stand to reap millions of re-directed federal R&D dollars, but it could easily be anti-vax "alternative medicine" quackery, or something even more stupid than that.
Excellent reporting and perspective. We’ll feel the negative impacts and follow-on from this for a long time.
Our government needs to be fixed now, The FIRST thing to be done is to completely REMOVE big money from politics.
Wealthy people contributing large sums to parties or candidates should (if found guilty) face MANDITORY time (5 year minimum) with no possible parole.
Rich people using the system to make themselves richer must be GUARANTEED substantial time in the slammer with no possible "get out of jail free" cards available.
Big money in politics IS this country's BIGGEST problem!!
It is the reason we have lost our democracy to Autocratic Fascism.
The NSF has sponsored grants in scientific education from elementary school to high school and community college science education programs. They have also sponsored Teacher Education Programs at the University level. It’s time to turn this around otherwise America won’t even rate in the top 50 of developed nations in science and math education.
I spent 4 years at the NSF as a Division Director in the SBE Directorate. It was a great place to work. The Program Managers who are responsible for most grants were, with rare exceptions, skilled and dedicated workers. They were guided in their funding decisions by panels with rotating memberships that included both upcoming scholars and leaders in their fields. Political pressure, except for the largest investments, was virtually nil. I occasionally received a letter from a Congressman urging funding for a proposal coming from a state university or a constituent and I always wrote back, “I can assure you that this proposal will receive our usual full and fair consideration,“ and I never received any pushback or follow-up request when I responded in this way. Congress, except for a few grandstanders like the late Senator Proxmire, respected our processes and decisions.
After leaving NSF, I spent three years in the Science and Technology Directorate of The Department of Homeland Security. Although this was more than a decade ago, it was still the case that I went from perhaps the best place to work in the federal government to perhaps the worst. But this had more to do with bureaucracies and in the case of the S&T directorate a fuzzy sense of mission than it did to political interference. The Trump administration has been interfering politically to work changes in both NSF and DHS. In each case the agency, whether a good place to work or bad, has been harmed, with the harms having nationwide ramifications. The changes in DHS may be doing the most immediate harm to ordinary people, but the harms to NSF are both tragic and likely to be harming Americans more and doing more to weaken our country over the long run.
The fascist regime is simply grooming more of their voters: uneducated, uninformed, ignorant. Red states have been leading the way for many, many years.
I hope someone in the democratic party is keeping score on what this fascist has already done. If Dems are fortunate enough to take the house and senate then they need to undo the damage.
Let's think back in history to those scientists that made great discoveries. What happened to Copernicus who told everyone the earth was not flat? What about the ongoing battle with man's origins and Darwin. We, of European ancestry, have never been ones to accept scientific reasoning. (most early discoveries in science can be laid at the feet of the Arabs and Egyptians) Instead we are mired in... the earth was created in 7 days and a horse vaccine will cure covid. It is astounding the the Us has done so well leading modern science until we understand the role of the immigrant or Blacks in all of that. Those MAGA's, so poorly educated in science, view science as bumbo jumbo. So what does it matter to loose a few more.
If Republicans hold power in 2029, the U.S. will be over, having become West Russia. Future scientists lost because of terrible K-12 education, the best foreign students turned away, undergraduate science majors seeing no future, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers cut off mid-project, entire programs and departments eliminated, $ billions spent on years of research wasted because the grants were frozen and everything, including the people, was lost. China wins the 21st century.
Even IF there's a blue tsunami this fall and a Democratic/ progressive trifecta in 2028, it will take generations to repair the damage.
I certainly hope that in the basement of some left-leaning think tank a bunch of bright young interns is keeping a list of all these firings/hirings and executive orders so that should a Democrat win the Presidency in 2028 (from my keyboard to The Lord's eyes, although one should never bet against the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot by nominating an unelectable candidate), the next President issues, at 12:01 PM January 20, 2029 one massive executive order reversing every personnel action and executive order promulgated by Don the Con
Trump has zero interest in science, and has not the faintest clue about what it does or how it works. Somebody told him to do this. We'll know who put him up to it only when we have a chance to follow the money.
My bet is on Elon and his fellow tech bros, who stand to reap millions of re-directed federal R&D dollars, but it could easily be anti-vax "alternative medicine" quackery, or something even more stupid than that.
Totally agree with all of this! AI isn’t the answer for everything…and we haven’t had bad luck at all with research and science!!