NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders

they admit it. President Trump stated unambiguously that the recent crash and tragic loss of life is due to DEI hires, even though all the pilots and air traffic controllers involved were able-bodied white (presumably heterosexual and cis-gendered) men.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpvmdm1m7m9o

> Asked by a reporter how he could blame diversity programmes for the crash when the investigation had only just begun, the president responded: "Because I have common sense."

For example, I just started in the 90s and worked in tech but I never heard an HR person or hiring manager say “we’re only going to interview applicants of a majority race” but after initiatives, it became common to hear this toward an underrepresented race or gender.

I want a diverse workforce. But explicitly discriminating to attempt to fix the problem is a bad way that makes people angry. I think it’s better to work on systemic fixes (more graduates, more training programs, etc).

Without DEI measures (as implemented by many American institutions in recent years) such decisions would be more meritocratic.

There's still nepotism and rich parents and connections and luck and a whole bunch of random biases by the people making decisions. The point is that while in theory DEI was supposed to be a counter to those forces, in practice it has just become another source of unfairness and injustice.

I've seen it implemented in a couple of ways. One of the simplest is stronger blinding of applications so you aren't biased by irrelevant personal information.

For example this has been pretty effective in astronomy (proposals to get time on competitive instruments) where applications with female names were less likely to be approved. Simply removing the name was enough to improve the situation.

The fallacy is that people think DEI encourages preferential or token "diversity hires". When implemented correctly, it should mean that successful applications (for jobs, grants, whatever) go to the most qualified or deserving candidate using unbiased/impersonal metrics. That may mean encouraging minority groups to apply, but at the time of review, you should have no idea who the applicant is.

There's a book on the topic: "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America" by John McWhorter

Did he fail a critical vibe check / badly fail to read the room? Sure. Given the political climate I'm not surprised he was fired.

But is everyone already forgetting what things were like?

Because it is using racism to try to cure racism and if you point out that this is wrong you will be called racist.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states, ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ If the Constitution does not grant a power to the Congress, it does not have it and it has no more legislative authority in that regard than you or I do.

> equality of outcome (versus opportunity) stuff is extremely new and extremely divisive

Equality of outcome, in the sense that we should hire unqualified people for research positions, is thankfully an incredibly rare and frankly insane position that almost nobody holds. Also thankfully, that's not what these required plans were. The requirement was that groups applying for grants have a specific and actionable plan for making sure that equality of opportunity was ensured. In fact, advantaging one group over another, such as with quotas, would directly violate DEI policy[1]. Typically, a plan would reference existing enrollment/acceptance policies of the company/university/department making an application, which are designed to make sure employees/students are not advantaged or disadvantaged by immutable or protected characteristics. Common examples would be:

- Make sure that your hiring panel is diverse to avoid bias towards whatever groups are over-represented at your company already. It's a well-studied phenomena that people are inclined to like others who are similar to themselves. Without any other factors in play (skill is randomly distributed in applicants, all of your employees are free of sexual/racial bias), if your company consists of, say, 80% men and 20% women, and you pick your interviewers totally at random, you will continue to hire more men than women. If you use a 50/50 split on your interview panel then your hiring becomes more meritocratic by virtue of factoring out self-similarity biases.

- Implement structured interviews and standardized qualifications-based hiring, rather than relying on interviewer preference.

- Learning about potential subconscious biases helps people account for them. Incorporating bias training can mitigate (though not eliminate) hiring biases. Of course, as you have no doubt experienced, these training courses tend to be pretty boring and patronizing, but that's true of most employee training, so /shrug.

- Diversifying applicant sourcing. If you only look for applicants via one platform, adding some more that tend to be used by different groups to your sourcing strategy.

You have bought into the oft-repeated lie that DEI is some Harrison Bergeron-esque attempt to cripple institutions. You were probably pointed to one or two extremely poor implementations of such policies that were genuinely unfair. The broader movement, and most implementations of it, are about equality of opportunity. The intentional destruction of public perception of these policies and subsequent removal only guarantees that existing self-perpetuating gaps in opportunity will persist.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222222206/https://science.o...

Archive link, because of course the new admin took down the page.

They’ve literally banned efforts to ensure research is free of discrimination. We’re in opposite world, or at least pretending to be.

Q: I am only requesting support for one graduate student; do I still need to submit a PIER Plan?

A: Yes, all applications for funding to the Office of Science, with the exception of supplemental proposals, conference proposals, and proposals to the SBIR/STTR Programs (at this time), require a PIER Plan. All applicants are encouraged to consider what contributions they can make to creating more equitable and inclusive research environments. It is expected that the complexity and detail of a PIER Plan for a smaller research project and fewer project personnel would be less than that for a larger research project. [and no we won't provide you an example, it needs to be from your heart]

When you're requiring the greengrocer to submit a personalized statement justifying how each single apple he sells contributes to the project of worldwide socialism you might be risking provoking a reactionary counterrevolution. Americans need to just chill with trying to enforce micromanaged ideological conformity on a continent-sized country of 350 million people. And avoid winding up in a place "eroded by the ideological rituals that the entire power structure depend on, 'that are ever less credible, exactly because they are untested by public discussion and controversy'".

No, Trump brought in a bunch of veterans of Elon’s takeover of Twitter to do the same thing to the federal government. The people at the top have been replaced, and the new agency leaders are focusing on implementing this anti-DEI agenda at the expense of pretty much everything else right now.

The sense I get from friends who work for the federal government is that this really feels like a hostile takeover. These are not changes that people welcome but have been too scared to ask for.

Oh thats an interesting point to make. Were you part of these things? I really like unbiased merit based societies, so I was wondering what your experience was.

When the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act were created, people asked the government to enforces these acts. Whatever you think of merits of DEI, the government decided to create DEI in order to enforce the Civil Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities act.

The problem is because they decided that DEI would be the mechanism to do this with, once DEI is rescinded the question is: If you're not going to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act through DEI, which mechanism do you plan to use to enforce them? According to this take, once DEI is rescinded there is no mechanism to enforce the Civil Right Act and Americans with Disabilities Act anymore.

I'm pretty sure that most leftwing and rightwing people will agree that out of 3 millions government workers it's not entirely unlikely that there would be some some valid cases of discrimination against minorities and those with disabilities. The claim is that, whether DEI sucks or not, there is no avenue to contest racism and discrimination in government hiring anymore.

Assuming "was alot of desire" is meant as "widespread support," not just "the President really desired it," that is an absolutely ridiculous interpretation. Fast does not mean strong consensus.

The government has also moved _ridiculously fast_ to

- pardon/commute the vast majority of J6 defendants including those convicted of violence towards law enforcement

- freeze federal aid across the board

- blame the recent aviation crash on DEI

- rename the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America

- revoke birthright citizenship

Does that mean that there "was alot of desire" to do those things? Absolutely not. It just means that those are things that the President has done unilaterally via executive orders or press release.

To be clear I'm not advocating for or against the govt.

But the idea that the government moving "ridiculously fast" is because there "was alot of desire" is a massive stretch. They are moving fast because they are steamrolling everyone in their path (allies included), and in their desire to "get shit done" they are implementing changes that are riddled with errors, and in some cases, even flat out illegal.

Don't we make movies of the times someone actually got noticed and was able to enrich our society through their merit?

Perhaps I am wrong.

I wonder how his approval will compare with his first term. His final approval rating is the lowest of any president ever: https://news.gallup.com/poll/116677/presidential-approval-ra...

I was referencing what the current Trump administration deems "meritocratic" and seeks to "return" to, their policy changes are in direct response and opposition to the demographics you describe.

This is the case in biological sciences, for instance, the field I am in: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Scissors-Diagram-Showing...

Everyone in the US is getting exactly the government we deserve. That's the beauty of democracy! You get government that's precisely as good, or as bad, as you deserve. And you deserve government no better, or worse, than what you get.

Basically, we deserve it.

Previously, federal funding was controlled by congress, and subject to its collective politics, via long-playing out machinations/compromises/horse-trading, etc, and then to the collective politics of the various enforcement bodies.

It now appears that federal funding is generally subject to the personal politics of the current president. That may seem nice for the specific policies you agree with. But... there are likely to be many policies you don't agree with. Especially since there will be a new president after not too long.

Also, since political purity tests have to be subjectively enforced, they are inevitably subverted to corruption. You can pass the test with the right amount of money delivered to the right people in the right way. That's nice for the people receiving the money, but the corruption quickly becomes horrifically inefficient and costly.

The question isn't whether the previous system was perfect -- it wasn't. The question is whether the new system is worse, and how much worse.

I'm pretty surprised how unaware people seem to be about the power/money grab that is happening. People never seem to learn that you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

As an example, a lot of research into "misinformation" is like that. It's not replicable out of the gate because the papers don't describe their procedure for deciding whether a claim is true or false. They just present random lists of things that conservatives tend to believe, assert that none of them are true / they're conspiracy theories, then do a survey and use the results to conclude that conservatives are dumb / Russian bots. That's it, that's the entire field. There's no methodology, no theories, nothing to be refined or refuted. There are thousands of papers like this, it's astonishing to witness.

I've been writing for years on the topic of bad science, and the fact that universities/granting bodies claim to care about science whilst simultaneously funding and celebrating this stuff is why their reputation has gone down the drain. The consequences were absolutely predictable. Nobody can claim they didn't see it coming.

Right now, there's just a grant freeze combined with a review to find the really nakedly partisan DEI stuff. That's nothing. Much more intense stuff is well within the Overton Window of possibilities by this point, like ramped up prosecutions or large scale defunding.

The opposition is powerless, his own party has become an echo chamber for fascist talking points.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx#:~:text=...

Stacked in the sense that more members were appointed by one party vs the other (including one by dubious means), and those people apparently are quite partisan.

2.) missing the point

3.) pedantic

The point is that the current party in power has had multiple opportunities to reign in the current lawlessness and the current minority party has attempted to do so, to no result.

“The number of Justices on the Supreme Court changed six times before settling at the present total of nine in 1869”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx

Partisanship works in the current political environment. Cutting off your own projects in case the other party follows your lead, has paid off more than bipartisanship. Voting across aisles is strictly controlled.

Trump was voted in precisely because The R base was tired of people talking about identity issues, getting to power, and then doing nothing about it.

Trump is giving people exactly what they were told would solve their problems, for decades.

The balance of powers has been broken, for good reason. It ensures political goals - see Bi-partisanship doesn't pay.

But ultimately a lot of our core foundational agencies have been functioning well regardless. And it's only the right that's intent on tearing them down no matter the consequences. So while the Dems enable this, the Republicans enact it.

Then, either they use existing executive power to ensure Republicans have an insurmountable advantage in national elections, or they haven't thought things through and we'll see even larger shifts in federal regulations after each administration change.

Immigration raids are pretty clearly an executive function, and they happened prior to DACA and prior to ICE. Executive prioritization of federal law enforcement is normal and expected.

It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.

All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.

That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

8 years ago the Trump admin had no idea what to do. Now they’re prepared and much more dangerous.

Some things will be reversed in 4 years time and we can ride out the storm. but others - like renewed emphasis on fossil fuels to reward the big donors and have energy for AI - will have lasting effects on my children and their children — those make me truly furious.

He could have done a lot better with that legal blanket.

If the current "anti-woke" movement were just about shutting down those obnoxious purists, I think it would be a lot less controversial. But from what I've seen, the political rhetoric (and the associated policy positions now being implemented) strikes just as hard or harder at the folks actually trying to do the hard work.

DEI initiatives are reasonable way to increase the likelihood that a minority is considered for a job and not passed over by endemic racism.