Hope china can step up and fill the gap.
The notion of "governance by putatively neutral experts" was a progressive reform of the early-to-mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. Rolling the government back to 1880-1910--when the modern administrative state was just a twinkle in Woodrow Wilson's racist eye--would hardly be a bad thing. That was a time of tremendous progress in America economically and technologically.
> contrasts with a merit system, where offices are awarded or promoted based on a measure of merit, independent of political activity.
What is commendable about this? Why should anyone who isn’t close enough with political winners to get the spoils want this?
This is your comment basically:
People really need to read their history. When America definitively surpassed the UK in 1880 as the richest country in the world (per capita), tuberculosis was a leading cause of death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis
The advancement of antibiotics did not happen until the mid 20th century, which significantly postdates America's rise to the top. It would be a great idea to rollback science to that time when we didn't have all these life saving vaccines and antibiotics.
Similarly, Germany experienced great economic growth under the Third Reich.
To each his own, I guess, but personally I'll take a less corrupt and more equitable country over a wealthy and powerful one any day.
So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?
There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.
Sounds terrible, but is it? It incentivises high-impact research (otherwise politicians can't boast about it), and less research into trivialities that common sense says aren't worth the public funding.
In your eyes, science and research is a linear process, governed by some "common sense", in which important and high impact discoveries are found as an immediate and direct consequences of the previous important and high impact discovery?
I'm trying not to get angry at a stupid HN comment, but surely we can think through what we write sometimes.
~ https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/03/basic-science-curiosity-...
Some just couldn't grasp the why, others understood perfectly well why their major donors wanted to squash studies on environmental stressors that might impact fisheries.
We could think of this problem as a slider from 0-100 where we allocate from 'none' up to 'all' our research budget to curiosity-driven research.
Political appointees having a say will likely move the slider toward the 0 (not necessarily to zero). I'm just not sure it's a bad thing.
It's a good example of "political types" making a song and dance based on "common sense" to save trivial amounts of money while making the health of marine systems opaque for the benefit of political donors.
That's a bad thing for people at large, and a good thing for polluting mega corps that want to privatise benefits and socialise costs.
Yes
> It incentivises high-impact research
It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.
If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.
> common sense says aren't worth the public funding
who is deciding what is "common sense"?
Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.
The Trump 2.0 administration was already easily the most corrupt in American history well before these rules were proposed.
To their credit(?) they don't even try to hide it, they are just fully corrupt out in the open, because they know the cultists who support them will support anything they do.
In fact, "unelected bureaucrats" have been the key to whatever degree of success this democracy has enjoyed. Politicizing everything replaces non-partisan expertise with political loyalty and favoritism. It's a direct path to the destruction of critical institutions, undermining the public trust, and authoritarianism.
False. The idea of governance by "neutral technocrats" insulated from politics was nascent in the late 19th century. Woodrow Wilson wrote a seminal paper on it in 1887: https://ballotpedia.org/%22The_Study_of_Administration%22_by.... He took steps to implement the idea during his presidency, but the modern administrative state really arose in the 1940s. (For example, the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil service employees from engaging in electoral politics, was enacted in 1939.)
But America had already caught up to Britain as the richest country in the world (per capita) by 1870 or so, and had clearly surpassed Britain by 1900: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/us-gdp-per-cap.... America's "success" is attributable to a stable republican democracy where GDP per capita has grown at a remarkably consistent 1.7% annually since the 1830s. It's not attributable to any political development that arose in the 20th century.
We had all these "unelected bureaucrats" post-WWII, and we did quite well in the following decades.
Scientists and academics fleeing the US is a new phenomenon, driven in no small part by these "unelected bureaucrats" being fired and replaced by political loyalists.
While you're correct in saying that we had lots of success before the establishment of the administrative state, it doesn't then follow that we'd have more (or better) success by abolishing it now. It seems like the opposite is slowly becoming true.
I can only say Bravo to Americans who think this constant fighting is somehow going to help the country.
The upcoming midterms are very plausibly the last free and fair elections we will ever have in this country. As deeply unpopular as this administration is right now, the Democrats will need an enormous amount of luck for the size of historic landslide it will require to take the house and senate, and even then they need to do so by enough that they can impeach and convict.
That is just about the only plausible path towards preserving democracy at this point. And I’m not really holding out hope.
I’d be happy to be told that I’m wrong. So please, tell me I’m wrong.
If you can’t tell, I am not hopeful.
Would he, though? I know the top US military brass have gone through some changes during this administration, but if the military sees a lawful impeachment and lawful conviction, I think enough would refuse (clearly illegal) orders to keep Trump in the White House.
Honestly I'd be more worried about the loyalists at the top of the FBI, US Marshals, Secret Service, etc.
Either way, it's incredibly improbable that Democrats will control a supermajority of the Senate next year (or, failing that, have enough Republican support to convict), so we probably won't have to find out what happens in this scenario.
I don't think Democrats will win the Senate this fall (though there's a chance they will, and I'd be happy to be wrong here). The House is reasonably likely. Either way, they won't have the supermajority needed to convict on impeachment.
Trump is doing a lot to try to destabilize elections and put his thumbs on the scale. His recent order telling USPS not to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone not on some list that the federal government is compiling is troubling. The SAVE Act is troubling, but fortunately still hasn't gained enough support to pass (though it's far from settled that it, or something like it, won't).
But I think a big strength in the US is that all elections, even for federal offices, are administered by the states. The federal government does have some constitutional say in how they're administered, but changes there generally require acts of Congress (which is hard, even with GOP control), and I expect any and all executive orders around election matters to be challenged in court, and hopefully largely thrown out. Red states will continue to do what they usually do to disenfranchise voters they don't like; nothing new there. Blue states will continue to be blue, and will do what they need to do to keep things as sane as possible. Purple states are a more difficult proposition, but there are few enough of them that it's easier for people to keep an eye on what's going on in them.
I think we'll know a lot more after we see what happens during the midterms (not by the outcomes, but in seeing what happens with the electoral process). I wouldn't expect the 2028 elections to be significantly different than what we see this fall. If the courts disagree with election-related changes the GOP have been trying to impose for this year, it's unlikely they'll be more amenable to them in two years.
I expect that the GOP (and MAGA folks in general) will reject the results of the 2028 presidential election if a Democrat wins. They'll dial up the "big steal" lies again, just as in 2020, and will push even harder with that narrative. Hopefully the law changes since then around vote certification will help avoid a repeat of all the crap we saw around that event. Will institutions stand up to that misinformation campaign? I'm not sure. I hope so, I think so, but I'm not sure. I'm cautiously leaning toward optimism.
Marx’s idea of communism required a “dictatorship of the proletariat” as an intermediate stage between capitalism and communism. Lenin took that notion and, under the pretence of needing absolute power to prevent a counter-revolution, turned it into the totalitarian regime of the USSR. Since then, communism and totalitarianism have gone hand in hand.
Marx's "dictatorship" as used by Marx back in the days of late nights in the British Libraries wasn't the authoritarian "dictatorship" we associate with the term today.
In the 19th century, the term "dictatorship" did not yet have the modern connotation of an authoritarian, autocratic one-man rule. Its meaning was derived from the ancient Roman dictatura, a constitutionally sanctioned office for a magistrate granted extraordinary powers during an emergency. For Marx and Engels, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was not a specific form of government but a term for the class content of the state that would follow a proletarian revolution.
Sure, Lenin had a hard on for authoritarian behaviour and started the USSR trend of dangling a communist utopia as a reward for grinding through petty nitpicking committees and even more hard core authoritarians .. but that's more the bait and switch of human greed than any necessary coupling of communes and boot first hierarchies.
effectively what became synonymous with communism just about everywhere
Curiously enough none of the Communist states
ever really transitioned from that intermediate state to full communism.
Much as, say, the notions of freedom, fairness, and making central north america great again has been a beard for robber barons.
What's Happening to Science in America
My question is now: Which company is gonna buy the IRS now?
Science should be guided by science, not ideology.
Or I can be a chickenshit, and praise Trump and have a career, however pathetic. I routinely ask them to approve my results before publishing, just in case. I apply for grants looking at vaccines and autism. Every Friday, I spend an hour talking about how Trump is America's chosen one.
Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?
You say "career bureaucrats" as if they can't be fired or controlled, but that's obviously wrong (since they're being fired and/or controlled right now).
QED, they ARE still under public oversight. (1) Voters vote for (2) elected officials who oversee (3) agency bureaucrats.
Those are the only people who get to decide. Congress can’t turn over the expenditure of taxpayer funds to people who aren’t politically accountable.
If Congress doesn't stop the executive and the Supreme Court overrules any legal blockades then ... I guess they can and are doing so RN.
Congress won't stop the executive because the party that won the executive also won Congress by almost 4 million votes. That's not a sign of the system not working, it's a sign of the system working as intended.
Congress being neutered is not an accident, hopefully it will be less fucked if the power balance shifts.
And as the OP is inherently political in what it's calling out, that is not the motivation -- it's the science. I get the fact that in the end, everything's political but partisanship itself is a cancer on the body politic. Just as we seem to be in late-stage capitalism, we are entering late-stage democracy. It pains me that we effectively arrive here by choice.
The system is fundamentally broken.
The executive branch obviously is going to wield as much power as it can, but only one party is actually advocating for the executive as king.
So yes, both parties are the same when it comes to the corruption of the party leadership, but there are distinctly different platforms and ideals espoused -- and that difference matters.
We are never going back to where we were. That is past us now. There is only forward.
The FDR coalition was literally southern segregationists, immigrants, and black people, all in the same party. If "hate and stupidity" wasn't a barrier to people voting together in their material self-interest in 1936, it sure as hell isn't a barrier in 2026.
But yes, he wielded populism masterfully. As you made a point about southern segregationists it should be noted that it was general economic populism without emphasis on race.
When Johnson championed the Civil Rights act it set the stage for the Southern Strategy where once race was a top tier issue that hate and stupidity was weaponized to move all of those segregationists to the Republican Party.
Rayiner, once again your point does not land because it is not cogent. Not only that, you missed the whole point of "hate and stupidity" as literally a unifying force as a tribal fury that is directed towards "others". In a contemporary case, it is against "liberals". I can only assume that you might have personal insight into this.
The executive branch does not hold the power of the purse, and the fact that you can casually use that phrase in reference to the executive branch shows how far we’ve fallen as a country in a decade.
A very sad state of affairs.
At times they don't even cotify their subservience through the usual measures like legislation and committees, except where needed to slap down any roadblocks to the unitary executive.
It doesn't matter how aligned you are with his worldview, how much you vote alongside his wishes, if you aren't 100% loyal to him personally at all times you're politically dead in the Republican party in much of the US.
While Trump's ability to sway normal elections is next to non-existent anymore (see: the vast majority of special elections held since his inauguration where Republicans are getting roflstomped by Democrats), his endorsement still decides Republican primaries because there's still a lot of brainwashed Republican cultists on the Trump train.
Voters can always choose to turn over those decisions to scientists they trust. For much of the 20th century, that’s what voters did. But if they don’t trust the priorities of the current scientific establishment, they can also choose to put that control back in the hands of political appointees. The institutional principles of science cannot override the prerogative of voters to decide how their money is spent.
I do not intend to live in a country where supposedly unelected organizations think they have independent jurisdiction to spend public money independently of the political system.
Well no wonder we're so fucked. The constitution is a disaster.
FTFY
But then your counter is likely some form of originalism as you've been instructed. The current administration and it's pet SCOTUS have no interest in the Constitution or they wouldn't be so hell bent on making POTUS king for life. A mad king at that.
It doesn't assume that. It's simply a factual matter that the rules that govern the country are those of the constitution. And the institutional principles of particular fields are subordinate to the constitutional structure.
What you're overlooking is that everything is just people. Political appointees are people. But "institutions" are also people. "Science" is just people. And the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?
The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power. People in the scientific establishment--people with degrees from universities and credentials from professional organizations--cannot be granted power to spend taxpayer money independent of the political system. They only have power over those decisions to the extent the political system chooses to confer that power.
However, the nuts-and-bolts day-to-day tactical decisions have before been made through expert peer review, by scientists. Given a fixed and finite budget set by Congress, what is the best way to make discoveries?
Having been on grant review panels, it's brutal--at 5 or 10:1 oversubscription rates, your peers will find any flaw in your proposal.
Political appointees are deeply unqualified to make these judgments. To take a very specific example: the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is headed by Michael Kratsios. He has a BA in politics and has never written a scientific publication. (Every prior OSTP head was a PhD scientist.) The OMB memo says he and those like him should decide what to fund without deferring to scientists. How is he going to assess which of 50 proposals on (say) "hypothalamic SH2B1 neurocircuits and SH2B1 signal transduction pathways" is the good one?
He can't, so he'll either choose AI or graft. Both are destructive to our once world-leading scientific enterprise.
Our laws actually are written to reflect more or less what I'm describing. The laws governing HHS grants, for example, provide for various expert committees and whatnot. But they also provide the appointed director of the HHS tremendous discretion to override those decisions. That's not new--those laws are decades old.
No one is debating that Congress has the power of the purse. That is one of their primary roles. They appropriate, but obviously cannot and should not make every detailed decision, particularly where expertise is required and political neutrality is preferred. Accountability is another primary Congressional role. That comes through oversight, not day-to-day decision making on behalf of those being overseen.
Even if it were desirable to have politicians making decisions in place of scientists, granting that decision-making power to political appointees instead of Congress actually undermines the public's representation and further shifts the balance of power to the Executive.
That's exactly what I meant when I said: "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
Within that framework, the institutional principles of "science" are irrelevant, except insofar as those principles are persuasive to political actors and ultimately voters.
The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades. The left is skeptical of revolving doors between expert agencies and corporations and corporate sponsorship of scientific studies, while the right is skeptical that experts' politics aren't coloring their work. And in such an environment, it's entirely within voters' rights to elect political actors who promise to delegate fewer decisions to scientists.
>The problem scientific institutionalists face is that they've squandered a lot of public trust over the decades
The left generally trusts science and the scientific community, while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth. This war was explicitly designed to enable exactly what is happening here—the transfer of more power to the right, rationalized by a seeded distrust of institutions.
Hence, it's not surprising that the people who want political appointees in charge of science are on the right.
That's at best a misunderstanding of the GP's argument, at worst a bad-faith response. GP said:
> "the important question is: who are the people who have the power to decide how taxpayer money is spent?" The answer obviously is: political actors. Ultimately it's Congress. And sometimes Congress has delegated that role to the President.
That is 100% correct. Congress controls spending. Congress delegated the details of that role in this case to the president, and the president wants political appointees making these decisions, not scientists and subject matter experts.
I don't like this state of affairs, but it seems to be an entirely legal one, consistent with the constitution and how our political system is set up. It sucks, but in 2024 the people decided that this is who they wanted in charge.
> The left generally trusts science and the scientific community
I'm not sure that's actually true in general. The left certainly is much more trusting of scientists than the right, but that trust is not absolute, and things have happened (like initial COVID response, as an example) to erode some of that trust.
> while the right has fallen prey to the right-wing war on science and truth.
Agreed.
How many times has this administration blatantly ignored the Constitution, starting with, for a simple example, separation of powers?
You're all locked in on "scientists should be beholden to the government, as that is the lay and law of the land" which ignoring the rather large mote that is "this current government couldn't give one single fuck about following the laws of the land", like issuing directives to federal agencies to consider federal court rulings as "advisory" or "not final" or "not applicable".
When the corruption of the law of the land starts at the top, you're busy insisting that those trying to follow the stated intention of the institutions that employ them ignore that because, well, what RFK Jr or worse, Stephen Miller, are the way we do things now, law, constitution be damned.
There's no law that says "only scientists and subject matter experts can decide where grant money goes". Congress has largely left it up to the executive branch to set up a group of people, with whatever qualifications it wants (such as "loyal sycophant to the president"), to make these decisions.
I agree that this administration has taken a huge dump on the constitution, but that's a completely separate issue.
We can be angry that this what's happening, and adamant that scientists and experts should be making these decisions, but the people elected a Congress and President that wants to go another way, and that's how our system of government is set up.
We'll have to do better this November and in 2028 if we want to change things.
The question of whether scientists should have independence from the political system in deciding how to spend taxpayer funds is one that can be answered entirely starting from the principles of our republican government, without any consideration of what else the current administration may or may not be doing.
We'd have no choice but to accept that as a legitimate use of funding discretion, assuming that actually is the case (I don't know the law related to this, so I can't say). We can be upset at that decision, but we'd still have to accept it as legitimate.
This is far scarier than any single rule about research grants, and I'm not sure why nobody's talking about this.
The OMB writes the budget to enact federal policy. And critically, no federal regulation can exist with the OMB approving it. By making this appointment explicitly political, they have carte blanche to completely rewrite all federal regulations to be exclusively conservative ones. This would have been crazy to attempt before, but with Trump 2.0, this is the new norm.
One of the things they are doing right now (it's been approved and the rules are now active and legal, so it is now happening) is converting 50,000 civil servant jobs into political appointments. This means having a job in government no longer serves the whole nation, it's now an ideological function to serve a single political party. Literally weaponizes the federal government to punish opposing political views and enforce one view on everyone (there's no other point to political appointment). And if the party in charge ever changes, it now means everyone will be laid off and replaced. Every few years. So nothing will ever get done in government now, except for extreme short-term pushes for radical political agendas, because nobody will stay long enough to know how the government works to do anything else. Move fast and break things with the largest economy in the world, radical political agendas, and 380M people.
The OMB also can review and block all proposed legislation going to Congress, vet all official congressional testimony, and block any agency from publicly disagreeing with the President. Military generals, health officials, science experts, ecologists, intelligence directors... they can block all of them from giving any testimony to Congress. That's an actual power the OMB has.
They can also block money Congress has already allocated, meaning that your representatives in government are now completely useless, because whatever party is in the Executive can nerf anything your reps have passed. The Supreme Court could do something about it, but won't, because it's now a Conservative Supermajority. There is no reason for them to disagree because they already ideologically agree.
Finally, the OMB can issue a rule that every agency that wasn't officially under the Executive before, has to submit all its rules for Executive approval. Meaning the Executive would control all government agencies.
In any other context, in any other country, this would be called a single-party authoritarian coup. When they create rules that outlaw other political parties (that's what authoritarian governments do to retain single party control) - and assuming the democrats don't just give up - it will be the official start of civil war. Coming to you Fall 2028.
Not sure what you mean. Lots of people have been talking about it since he was appointed to the role. I've known about it and been pissed about it for quite a long time now.
If you want to be independent of the government, don't take money from the government. If you are mad because you don't agree with how the government is making decisions, say so. But don't pretend it has anything to do with "government overreach"
Perhaps more political oversight will make research more accountabile to the population at large. In this era I suspect it's far more likely to benefit the few, those born into power and fame who are consolidating their power. Scientists with resources and accountable only to other scientists are uniquely dangerous to those unwilling to give up their power.
We may not like it (I certainly don't), but this is one of the times when Trump seems to actually be acting within his authority, and not pushing at or past those limits.