Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspir | Hacker News Reader

This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.

Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.

View on HN

The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.

US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.

I wonder, how likely do you think there would be a retaliatory threat of revoking PSF’s nonprofit status for a perceived snub in rejecting the offer?

The IRS has withheld 501(c) status from the president’s perceived adversaries before[0]. But I haven’t heard of 501(c) status being revoked.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "

The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...

Even the people buried deep in the most podunk regulatory department you've never even heard of are smart enough to re-order the priority list on a change of administration. They don't need to be told and there is no paper trail. They just know what's good for their boss's boss's boss's boss^n is good for them and that kicking a potential hornet's nest is bad for them.

And even if you personally want to hassle someone with friends in the right places, what are the odds every other leaf of every other part of the organization(s) does? There will always be someone who has no morals and wants to climb the ladder who's happy to read between the lines and drop the ball.

It's just how it is. On some level, I'm not even sure this is a bad thing. If the executive can't change prioritization implicitly then the organization is either stupid or unaccountable.

I don't think that's a good summary of what happened. From your wiki link

> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.

> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."

The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected

The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...

It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.

Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.

This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.

Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.

I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.

it never had a claw back clause -- that is the real problem here. And we've seen that the Trump admin is willing to actually claw back granted funds.

not at all the same

Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.

Seems you comment agrees with the parent.

Did it have a claw back clause? If not, then it's quite different than the current situation?

Also, DEI in recruitment / screening can be important to ensure that the results of the study apply not just to the majority demographic. It's just common sense.

They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)

It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.

> However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.

It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.

> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.

Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.

Is the restriction on grantees not violating federal law a new one, or has it been around for ages?

The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.

It would be very good for the PSF if it can get grant money without DEI things. Before you needed to have them to get much of a look-in.

Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.

The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).

If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.

> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?

I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.

However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.

OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.

You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."

Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].

Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?

[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...

> It has no weight; it is inoperative.

You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?

If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.

The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"

In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.

> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.

It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)

> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.

If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.

If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...

The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation

Grant agreements are not statutes but contracts, and canons of statutory interpretation do not apply to contracts.

Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):

"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."

Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com