The manure’s been accumulating there since 1950
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As his fifth labor, Hercules cleaned the incredibly filthy Augean stables—which held3,000 cattle and hadn't been cleaned in 30 years—in a single day. He accomplished this seemingly impossible task not by shovel, but by diverting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to flow through the stables, washing away the waste.
With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing.
(In other words, they control a very large portion of the loot passed from the government to various NGOs and universities.)
Robert Zimmerman:
“In a move that should surprise no one at this point in Trump’s second term, yesterday President Trump informed all 24 members of the National Science Board, the committee that runs the National Science Foundation (NSF), that they have been fired.”
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” reads a 24 April email from Mary Sprowls of the presidential personnel office to each NSB member. “Thank you for your service.”
The article at the link, from the journal Science, takes the typical one-sided propaganda press anti-Trump view, interviewing only those who oppose Trump and spending most of its time screaming “He’s destroying science!”
A wider view would ask this: Is there a reason that the president of the United States, elected by the American people, might have reasons to question the management of this board? At the moment the federal government is running a deficit that is back-breaking, and this board publicly criticized Trump’s effort to rein in spending when he proposed a 55% cut in NSF’s budget. If they are not going to cooperate with their boss, then maybe they should leave, and not let the door hit them as they head out.
The Science article also included this howler: “the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board’s authority and dictating policies at NSF.” Um, who elected them? No one. In fact, they were appointed by the president himself, and he is the only one with the constitutional authority to decide these matters.
Expect court suits of course, with some lower level unelected judge somewhere attempting to take over running the executive branch by demanding these board members remain in power, defying the elected president of the U.S.
From the comments:
Richard M
There are multiple ways in which a scientific organization can be corrupted. Becoming the plaything of an autocrat is one of them, and we have, alas, plenty of examples of that in the history of the Second and Third World nations over the last century.
But it turns out that the First World has found its own way of corrupting its elite science institutions, too. Consider this example, uncovered by Christopher Rufo last year: “The National Science Foundation is spending $1.5 million on “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing.” That went to Florida State University and it’s still active. It also seems to be impossible to determine how any of that grant is being spent. And if you think this grant was the only such thing of this sort that the NSF has been handing out, well……
Is the NSF yet another elite credentialed institution that’s been hollowed out, ideologically colonized and worn like a skinsuit? Well, I think it might be telling to look not just at the kinds of things it funds, but who runs it. The majority of the 24 NSF members are administrators or emeritus faculty. (This includes the vice provost of the university I graduated from and worked for, by the way — he is cited making an angry denunciation of this move in the article.) How many are currently doing hard, meaningful science research right now? It was not always so.
I have my doubts that the Trump Administration can remake the NSF into an institution capable of fulfilling its original charter once again. What I doubt even more is that the leadership just sacked had any chance of doing so.