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Well, yes, that's the point. Authoritarians want to consolidate power and loot wealth, not improve things or make the world a better place.

> or make the world a better place.

Exactly. The past 163 days have only been about hurting people and cutting things down. There's no hopeful or optimistic rhetoric. Its just hate after hate after hate and blame.

You cannot build a great country on this. But you most certainly can tear one down.

As Lincoln said I hope I have god on my side but I must have...

Same choice faces everyone but there are no Lincolns around. Its a nation of hustlers, podcasters and youtubers who dont really fight for anything other than views, upvotes and likes.

I'm not sure, I think maybe that's the younger generation. But there are amazingly strong people here. I mean, I certainly don't know any podcasters, streamers, or tick tockers. Do you? We do have a problem with celebrity worship in this country, but I think that might be coming to its logical conclusion.

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Ya know, deportations without due process is authoritarianism. So is attacking the media and ignoring the courts. I guess the blinders are up cause you love Trump. More power to you, man, but you are in fact the baddie.

Administrative court rulings is due process for immigration... that's the law. Admin court is part of the Executive branch. That's how the law is set up.

Comprehensive immigration reform (which is sorely needed) can only come from the Congress (who have no incentive to act because everyone is so focused on the Presidency).

Without the laws changing, the only choice is to enforce the laws as they are.

Something that has been ignored since Obama (who deported far more than Trump ever has... Obama deported primarily criminals, however, and Trump is deporting anybody he can)

Congress had an immigration reform act about to pass in 2024. It was killed because the Don first want it to happen under a Democratic president.

Its important to understand that congress explicitly enables this current behavior. In 18 months the people will have the opportunity to express their will. If your congress people are enabling this, then it's your responsibility.

well... sure. I hope we get a Congress that is more balanced and can compromise on things, but I am way too cynical to believe it will happen.

Best case might be a strong Republican majority in both houses that can just say 'no' to Trump or at least stiffle certain agendas. Politics is a blood sport, after all.

Why would you think that a strong Republican majority would say "no" to Trump?

Because they can. Right now they can't. If you think the R party is going along with Trump because of ideological alignment, you'd be wrong. There are very few members that are aligned with him.

The current situation is of political survival. Nothing more.

They're going along with him because of political blackmail. Some agree with him, but some know that if they cross him, he's going to have them primaried, and his odds are good at getting rid of them.

But I don't see how more Rs is going to make it less a matter of political survival to back him. He'll still have them primaried if they don't fall in line.

The constitution is not a suicide pact. If deporting millions of people without due process is authoritarianism, what is letting in millions of people without due process? Rules for thee but not for me?

> what is letting in millions of people without due process?

Nobody is saying this should happen; they are saying that if someone is accused of being in the country illegally then we should investigate that accusation and attempt to arrive at a conclusion that is as close as possible to the truth. Indeed, treating that as optional is authoritarian.

That's some strong shit yer smokin

You're not supposed to take the Democratic talking points about Trump being a "wannabe dictator" seriously. It's just political mudslinging.

I figured that was obvious after Trump and Obama were all buddy-buddy at Carter's funeral.

I mean, typically you don't have a friendly relationship with someone you think is ending democracy in your country.

I take it you're not big on the whole "actions speak louder than words" thing are you?

I absolutely am!

Which is why when Obama and Trump looked like they were best friends, that action spoke way louder than Obama's words.

What you're saying is that Democractic party leadership is so trustworthy that anyone they appear socially friendly with must not be a threat

> You're not supposed to take the Democratic talking points about Trump being a "wannabe dictator" seriously. It's just political mudslinging.

I think you should go up this comment thread and read this[0], it's not the words of Trump but the actions his administration take, they are authoritarian, it's clear to most people outside of the USA with a decent education.

Cynicism about "political mudslinging" as if these actions are all normal and could be taken by any administration, and would be condemned anyway by their opposing side is exactly the shift in Overton Window which legitimises authoritarian overtakes.

Please do read about any authoritarian rise to power in democratic countries in the last 100 years, even better if you read about "competitive authoritarianism" to understand why it might just so be this time is a little different...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44259953

> decent education

Looks like those dividends are finally starting to pay out.

> I figured that was obvious after Trump and Obama were all buddy-buddy at Carter's funeral.

Please tell me this isn't the only data point you're basing your conclusion on.

It's social protocol that funeral attendees treat each other in a civil manner, even if they intensely dislike each other. I'm autistic, but even I know that social rule.

Have you not see the video? It wasn't civil, it looked like a couple of long-lost best friends catching up.

Obama had made his comments about "wannabe dictator" only a week or so earlier.

Actions speak louder than words.

I don't care if they're slapping each other's backs and high-fiving! Trump is currently the most powerful person in the world, and has a long and storied history of using that power to harm those who slight him or bruise his fragile ego in any way.

Obama knows this; he's been on the receiving of Trump's petty vindictiveness too many times to count. And he could just as easily be placating Trump so that he doesn't issue an executive order to, say, require every publicly-funded university in the US to offer a "men's rights studies" major, simply out of spite.

Or, Obama knows it’s all politics and mudslinging, where the truth is irrelevant?

And in reality he’s happy to have Trump as a friend and isn’t really worried about a dictatorship?

Hitler was buddy buddy with all kinds of people (including most wealthy Jews before the concentration camps).

What's your point?

You're defacto not a wannabe dictator because you did anything ever that wasn't dictator-y?

That seems like a low bar.

Americans want looting and authoritarianism, so that’s what they’re getting. There’s no excuses here after a majority of people voted for Trump’s return, with his repeated promises that he wouldn’t be held back this time around.

We got exactly what we voted for — worldwide tariffs, sending the military to round up migrants, a military parade with tanks in DC, antivax boards — all of these things he talked about before election. Everything happening now with the dismantling of science programs and universities is exactly what Americans voted for.

Kinda. More precisely: Americans are getting what they were groomed into thinking they want. Hundreds of billions flowed into conservative media, from Fox News hosts to Rogan's, all manufacturing consent for the destruction of the American Republic in service of the very few.

> Americans want looting and authoritarianism, so that's what they're getting. There's no excuses here after a majority of people voted for Trump's ret with his repeated promises that he wou be held back this time around.

Why do you think it's appropriate to say "Americans want..." and "We got exactly what we voted for..." when only 32% of Americans voted for Trump?

After everything that happened up to the 2024 election, I think it's entirely reasonable to lump anyone who didn't vote at all in with those that explicitly voted for Trump.

I would qualify it a bit: Those who were able to vote. There is a set of people too I'll to vote and there is a group of people who were hindered from voting.

But yes, a big part of not voting people decided to not vote. If one decides to not vote one accepts the outcome and it it was know that the outcome would be Trump, and that Trump (or the people around him) would be more prepared and more unhinged than in the first term.

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We live in an absurd reality. Or do you want to explain to me why Elon can threaten to disassemble the Crew Dragon just to get back at Donald, while somehow we consider women to be too irrational to lead?

Also: all it takes for evil men to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

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Please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Also, please particularly avoid tit-for-tat spats when interacting here.

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Please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Also, please particularly avoid tit-for-tat spats when interacting here.

It’s like the trolley problem, where inaction is a moral choice, and people who vote for Trump are off their trolley.

We are living through the baby boomer going-out-of-business fire sale right now, and it's just so deeply depressing. I have an entire theory of the ideological reasons why the parties are in a political realignment, but none of it really matters much, because the older folks with the least incentive to have long term strategies are staying in office forever.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/04/28/millennia...

Take the derivative of this chart, you see the boomer decline is accelerating to a crescendo. They're about to experience a lot of loss in their lives. They already are. I think their impending doom has a lot to do with what's going on now, given their generation is and has been in charge for the past many decades. If you know you're not going to live to see the next decade, and you're in charge of the whole world, what would you do? What wouldn't you do?

The future is going to be interesting. We have a whole generation of millennials and genx who have had to live in the shadow of boomers for decades, and now that it's fading we're not ready for the spotlight. The boomer generation has been in charge since 1993. And yeah, I had to look it up but Obama is a boomer as well, albeit on the younger side. But we're expect to take over this whole ship pretty quickly, within the next decade or so. Personally I don't feel ready at 40 years old.

It's not even remotely helpful to keep parroting "this is what Americans wanted." Not only do Trump voters not represent a majority of Americans, the media landscape is so fractured that many people did not know what they were voting for and just wanted cheaper groceries. Is that stupid and naive? Yes. But it's also stupid and naive to generalize and say "Americans want this."

I think what they are saying is 'actions have consequences'.

Okay great, that is utterly vacuous. Now what?

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I respect your opinion, but I disagree with it.

Yes, just under half the voters will say they didn't vote for him. But more people did, and that's how democracy works.

After the vote it's easy for people to blame the media, or to claim that he's doing things they didn't vote for. It's easy to just say "I'm not responsible for this".

But democracy means the people vote. The winner is the ones with the most votes. If you voted wrong, that's on you, and you need to understand that, and acknowledge it. Only by taking responsibility can you understand the power you wield, and maybe wield it more carefully in the future.

And no, none of the things he's found are a surprise. His character is no secret. His approach to politics is no secret. His policies are no secret. His willingness to grift is no secret.

A plurality of those who voted chose him. Those that didn't vote decided he deserved half their vote.

In truth I don't think it's stupid to say "Americans want this". Moderate Republicans are scared of being primaried. They know what their constituents want.

I don't think all Americans want this. But I think a lot of them do. No one is predicting a Blue senate in 2 years. Those red seats are safe. Because deep down a big chunk of America is happy with this.

This is the very essence of democracy. A govt of the people, voted by the people. Look at the govt. It's a mirror of the people who got them there, and keep them there.

I get this is frustrating if you are a minority voter. Minorities get stomped on by majorities- that's the very core of democracy.

So forgive me, but at least for 2 years we need to keep saying it - you voted for this. Because until lots of voters figure out just how responsible they are, they're not going to change. If you voted for this, take some responsibility.

Edit: I see you're getting down voted. I disagree either that too. Your point is coherent and a common part of this conversation. Voting here is about conversation, not agreement.

> just wanted cheaper groceries.

1. And why would voting for Trump get that?

2. It didn't happen either way

3. Stupidity is not an acceptable excuse

4. You vote for a person not a specific policy

> You vote for a person not a specific policy

You're not wrong as general rule of thumb imo, or in a straight sense of reality, but tell that to the evangelicals who spend their time slandering abortion.

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It's hard to hear people complain about looting and authoritarianism after watching these same people calling BLM mostly peaceful protest, and had no problem with the authoritarian policies passed during the COVID lockdowns https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-se...

It's easy to play the hypocrisy card, theres plenty to go around.

However in this case you're presenting a false equivalency. Yes, there were issues with BLM. the people got out of control. But that's not authoritarianism- if anything it was a lack of authority with caused dome of those problems.

What you see with protests now is those with authority over-using that authority and wielding it as a weapon against the public.

And I'm not sure COVID lock downs are a useful measure of anything. It was a unprecedented event and countries all over the world had all manner of restrictions, lock downs, and so on. Millions of people died, over a million Americans. It's always going to be easy in hindsight to blame those in authority for doing too much, or too little, too fast or too slow.

Unlike most places, the US politicized the response, and even within the US the death rates varied from one state to the next. Anthropologists will be disecting covid data for generations to try and determine which approach was best.

That's the thing. COVID was a crisis an emergency, and that justified emergency powers. Donald Trump is declaring the current situation an emergency and is making use of emergency powers. You cannot assume "your side" is going to maintain political power forever, and build institutions with that in mind. Build a political system then hand it to your political opponents to run for 4 years. I think people who cheered on the use of emergency powers over the last 4 years are going to have it boomerang back on them, as I predict the next Democratic president will use the precedent set by Trump in a way that will boomerang back on Trump supporters who were cheering him on

While it's easy to play the "both sides behave the same" card, in practice though I dont think they do. Fundamentally democrats are still behaving like a party did and are not excusing or indulging in radical governance.

For example At the first hint of a scandal democrats get pushed from office, whereas we've had plenty of Republicans continue in office despite obvious wrong doing etc.

So no, I don't think the next president would behave in the same way - there are fundamental differences in the way the parties are behaving.

Remind us what both protests are for.

It is the art of the deal with Trump and I would say that he is a narcissist rather than authoritarian.

Trump has a massive ego and I would have expected him to want the biggest rockets, and to pain them gold.

If he did then I would denounce him for spending money on space when America has trillions of debt.

I don't disagree with him on everything he says just because he said it.

So, with space, my honest take is that it was all just a Cold War thing all along. The space race never was about science and exploration, it was always about rocketry for making more devastating missiles. Sure, Voyager went somewhere, but it was all a cover.

It seems to me that China and India are doing space science things now. They can get on with it. We are never going to Mars or the moon to live, earth is our home, and always will be.

If you read about Maduro wanting to imprison the leader of a region of Venezuela, who belongs to the opposition party, you'd call it authoritarianism.

If you read that the Secretary of Defense of Turkey declined to commit to obeying court orders, you'd call it authoritarianism.

If you read about Viktor Orban sending actual troops rather than police to a city because of a flimsy pretext, you'd call it authoritarianism.

It's happening here, and it's real. It isn't consolidated yet, but it's pretty obviously what they want.

You're ignoring the massive elephant in the room. The previous administration let millions and millions of completely unvetted and undocumented immigrants into our county, creating an unprecedented crisis. I view Trump's actions as reclaiming our country from the brink. All of the instances you mentioned are simply fallout from the crises Trump was handed, and it astonishes me how liberals cannot see this simple fact.

People who think that's a massive elephant are shortsighted.

You know what illegal immigrants do?

Work. For shitty wages.

You know what that does?

Boosts the US' labor force and economy, which buffers the declining fertility rate [0].

The fact that anti-immigration (of any sort) folks never think beyond first-effects is mind boggling. Illegal immigration causes some problems; it also solves others.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

You parent is wrong but so are you and you make the same mistakes.

The effects you describe have higher order effects as well that can indeed have negative effects. Not saying republicans would give a crap about them, but they are undeniable. For wages developments and housing prices, topics that fundamentally influence basic needs very much in contrast to GDP growths, even if there are positive side effects as well.

I think compared to the EU these immigrants can only be a net positive because people are forced to ultimately care for themselves.

The wage arguments are somewhat wishy washy, given the extreme concentration of illegal labor in low-skill, low-wage work. Agriculture, meat processing, construction.

Putting aside the moral qualms about underpaying someone for hard, physical work, it's hard to argue that the American economy (and the average American) loses more than it gains from cheaper labor.

Housing would be a clusterfuck without illegal immigration, so I'm also hesitant to draw that connection too boldly. Would stopping all illegal immigration ease prices? A bit. Would it fix an undersupplied housing market and overconsolidated rental market that's driving price inceases? No.

You think illegal immigrants working for sub minimum wages is pushing housing prices up? Care to explain that line of logic? Cheap labor lowers cost of housing development too.

Well they do take up a lot of housing if you live in areas with many illegal aliens, which folks here always complain about.

so your reason that why we need them is because they are wage slaves that will eventually replace us? Why not just use the billions of dollars spent on immigration to boost wages, make life more affordable, and give tax cuts to ACTUAL AMERICANS as an incentive to have more kids?

Tax cuts aren't what people are waiting for to grow their families. It's parental leave, childcare, affordable healthcare, and the feeling that the system their kids will grow up in isn't getting actively gutted in favor of the rich and religious zealots.

Economies run on labor. Raging isn't going to change that hard truth.

I'm also not sure we see the math the same way.

Illegal immigrant = working, not consuming social services (outside of guaranteed entitlements like EMTALA), paying payroll and sales taxes

Tax cuts = ??

You think COVID stimulus would have made people understand that flooding more money into a system with limited supply capacity will just lead to price inflation.

The way to address quality of life for parents and promote having children is to decrease the economic cost of doing so.

PS: Bolding actual americans made me laugh. Actual Americans are anyone who works hard in this country.

I have no problem with legal immigration - people who have worked hard to become citizens via legal channels, and who love our country. They wouldn't dream of rioting or committing violence, all while waving another country's flag. I have a huge problem with what happened over the last 4 years.

So you're out there protesting that they're deporting Afghans who are here legally, who served alongside our military and would likely be killed if they were sent home, right?

https://timesofsandiego.com/military/2025/06/12/afghani-who-...

If he was a citizen, then I would definitely have a problem with it. The problem I see is that asylum claims have been so abused recently that they have become an entitlement rather than an exceptional case. I don't know the specifics of this guy, but a judge ruled in his case to not keep him here. Maybe there's a good reason for that, or maybe the judge is sick of what has transpired over the last 4 years and is over compensating for it. I don't know, but I know things can't continue the way the were going during Biden's term.

So first you're for legal immigration, and then well, no, not like that. "Do things the proper way" is just a facade for the xenophobia.

The guy worked with the US in Afghanistan. Do you not think he has a real case here? He'll get killed if they send him back.

On the surface, yes, it looks like he has a strong case for asylum. But the judge denied it for some reason, which I assume is based on something more than personal feelings. I am not familiar enough with him or his case to judge for myself, and I am certainly not going to blindly accept what the news says, as they have proven to be almost completely void of unbiased information.

The problem with supporting legal immigration only is that Congress has been unable to pass common sense immigration reform over the past decades, because there's not enough political backbone. (And also the Republican Party has made it increasingly toxic)

Illegal immigration = the difference between legal immigration supply and demand for immigration (both external and domestic)

And the rioting / nativist arguments are political theater to score points.

It's a fact that most illegal immigrants don't commit crimes or riot, in the same way that most people in general don't. But distorting frequency and total count has long been a popular pathos argument.

Similarly, enculturation and assimilation is a broader topic than a flag. And more over, the US explicitly and unambiguously grants freedom of expression as a right (all persons in America, not just citizens). So saying "I hate this country; I support ____" is and has always been an option as an American.

What are the symptoms of this "unprecedented crisis" and what makes it a crisis?

Chicago spent $300 Million on freebies for migrants.[0] The mayor of NYC saying that the migrant crisis "will destroy New York City".[1] 1/3 of polled schools said that the influx of ESL migrant children had had a "significant" impact on their school districts, taking resources and attention away from American schoolkids.[2] 77% of Americans considered the border situation to be either a "Crisis" or a "Major Problem"[3]

[0] https://apnews.com/article/chicago-migrants-black-latino-bid...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/nyregion/adams-migrants-d...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/an-american-education...

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/15/how-american...

So apart from some 300 million number, it's just all vibes?

Here I was expecting data about how all these illegal immigrants are causing crimes everywhere at higher rates than americans, or how many cats and dogs they've eaten but I guess there's no actual evidence of a crisis.

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Before I put my fedora back on and leave, could you answer this question:

Do you truly think the evidence you provided would convince someone ignorant on the matter that there really was a migrant crisis that warrants the Trump administration's behavior?

> Do you truly think the evidence you provided would convince someone ignorant on the matter that there really was a migrant crisis that warrants the Trump administration's behavior?

I do!

The term 'crisis' has been politicized to the point where the term's applicability is basically a shibboleth. When Biden called it a crisis in 2021, the White House issued a statement saying "The President’s use of the “crisis” label doesn’t represent the administration’s official position".[0] The administration had an official position on the use of the term 'crisis'! Point being, it's hard to convince someone that the border situation is a "crisis" when their priors on the topic have been prejudiced by political messaging. If someone was new to the topic, it would be easier for them to be objective.

You and I have already been inundated with political messaging, though. The best way to simulate ignorance on the matter is to abstract away the politics and pose the question in a way that doesn't trigger a connection to politics:

"The year is 2034. A situation has arisen. To deal with the situation, the city of Chicago alone has spent $300 dollars. The mayor of New York City has stated that the issue "could destroy the city of New York". 30% of schools say the issue affects their ability to educate our children. 77% of Americans say the situation is either a "crisis" or a "major issue".

Would someone ignorant of the matter be more justified in assuming that this was reflective of a crisis, or mere "vibes"?

> Before I put my fedora back on and leave

I honestly loled.

[0]https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/19/politics/biden-border-crisis-...

> creating an unprecedented crisis

Nope, that's just your brain on right wing propaganda. Nothing of the sort has happened to justify throwing away the rule of law as this administration is doing. It is like murdering someone because you're annoyed that they chew with their mouth open, just an absolutely, wildly disproportionate response to what has happened. Coincidentally (to riff on the GP) it is almost word-for-word the propaganda Orban used in the mid 2010s to consolidate his authoritarian rule of Hungary.

> The previous administration let millions and millions of completely unvetted and undocumented immigrants into our county, creating an unprecedented crisis.

that's a lie.

there were fewer illegal immigrants in 2022 (under Biden) then in 2018 (under Trump) [0]

[0] https://ohss.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2024-06/2024_0418_o...

I am not an American and may not understand what is going on inside, but from the outside it appears that you are simply engaging in political smears.

Authoritarianism means oppressing the masses, having an undemocratic government and acting against the will of the people. It happens in Venezuela. It happens in Turkey. It happens in Hungary. It doesn't happen in the US.

If anything, what is happening in the US is exactly the opposite: Trump, who won the popular vote, therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.

If I go to any American factory right now and ask random blue-collar workers how they feel about, for example, public NASA's commitment to "unity, diversity and inclusion in workforce recruitment, hiring, training and management", what will be their average position on this question?

So if we try to be fair with terms, here it is quite obvious on which side we have an authoritarian institution, whose views are shared only by a narrow group of the elite and those sections of the population that receive money or are otherwise influenced by the authoritarian government, and which side is fighting against those authoritarianism

Orban and Erdogan also won the popular vote, that's hardly a get-out-of-authoritarianism free card.

>Orban and Erdogan also won the popular vote, that's hardly a get-out-of-authoritarianism free card.

You should learn more about the electoral system under authoritarianism. In any free election, Orban or Erdogan have no chance.

You're missing a key point about how modern authoritarian regimes operate. Just because a country holds elections doesn’t mean it’s a democracy. Authoritarian systems like those under Orban or Erdogan often maintain the appearance of democracy free elections, parliaments, courts but in reality, these institutions are hollowed out or heavily controlled.

Orban and Erdogan do win elections, but the playing field is far from level.

In both Hungary and Turkey, the judiciary has been systematically brought under the control of the ruling party. Independent courts are a cornerstone of democracy because they ensure that laws are applied fairly and check the power of the executive. When this independence disappears, so does accountability. Free press is another essential pillar. In these regimes, the government or its allies own or dominate most media outlets. Critical voices are marginalized, harassed etc. As a result, voters are often exposed to only one narrative, the government’s making truly informed choice nearly impossible. NGOs, academic institutions, and opposition are often harassed, defunded, or labeled as enemies of the state. This further reduces checks on power and narrows the public discourse. Gerrymandering, changing election laws, and limiting opposition access to media or funding are common tactics. Even if voting itself is not rigged, the entire process leading up to it is skewed.

So when you say "in any free election, Orban or Erdogan have no chance" you're implying the elections are genuinely free and competitive. They are not. These leaders win not because they represent the will of a fully informed and free electorate, but because they control the information environment, the rules, and institutions that should hold them in check. That’s not democracy, it’s authoritarianism dressed in democratic clothing.

Their first elections were not under an authoritarian system yet, their actions turned it authoritarian afterwards.

Heck, Orban was already prime minister in 1998 before the current stint, similar to Trump.

> If anything, what is happening in the US is exactly the opposite: Trump, who won the popular vote, therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.

This is an absolutely wild way of framing what's happening. The oppressors trying to paint themselves as the oppressed. Who exactly are "the right" oppressed by, and how exactly are they being oppressed? Immigrants? Gays and Transsexuals? Science researchers? DEI HR departments? Because that's who they seem to be going after. These guys historically have not been oppressors.

What's happening in the US may not be authoritarianism, but it is definitely a powerful group, now that they are in power, inflicting cruelty against many smaller, weaker groups who cannot fight back.

Someday right leaning white men will finally live in a country where they can be elected President and no one will think this unusual. Until then the struggle continues.

> If anything, what is happening in the US is exactly the opposite: Trump, who won the popular vote, therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.

Countries have laws that govern how they are nominally meant to operate.

When the ruler of a country breaks the laws that are supposed to constrain his behavior, and faces no consequences, what do you call that?

Governments that were not considered authoritarian have broken laws as well. This didn't start with Trump, I would say Trump is a result of laws being ignored.

For the fight against terrorism or any other shit de jours that caused the current outrage.

So now any reference to laws sound hollow. It doesn't mean anything. What mattered is what governments used their power for.

Authoritarianism means oppressing the masses, having an undemocratic government and acting against the will of the people. It happens in Venezuela. It happens in Turkey. It happens in Hungary. It doesn't happen in the US.

We have an undemocrstic government. Thousands of polling stations have shut down since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Voter rolls have been purged in key swing states. As a result of these things millions of people were unable to vote. Trump has unilaterally rescinded monies appropriated by Congress and duly signed into law. That alone is authoritarian.

…therefore a representative of the oppressed majority, is waging a war against their oppression (as masses seems it) by the authoritarian deep state.

Only a delusional person can possibly believe this. There is no oppressed majority in the U.S.

>As a result of these things millions of people were unable to vote.

By similizing the American electoral system to those in authoritarian countries, you trivialize the suffering of people oppressed and often physically exterminated by authoritarian regimes around the world. Millions? Seriously? Try talking to any refugee from an authoritarian country about this. Just please be as polite as possible and choose a smaller person, I'm afraid that because of your extremely offensive position towards their suffering, they may try to cause you physical harm.

>There is no oppressed majority in the U.S.

Of course not, the US seems to be a fairly authoritarian-free country. It's just that if we assume that the US has these tendencies and try to be fair with the terms, it is quite obvious from whom they come, and against which majority the attempts at oppression are directed.

What do you call it when people are rounded up and sent to a gulag in El Salvador without due process? What do you call it when monies appropriated by Congress that literally kept starving people alive in other parts of the world, are unilaterally rescinded by an executive with no legal power to do so? The richest man in the world caused the deaths of some of the poorest in the world, and fulfilled not one of the benefits he promised.

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Your reasoning is quite. That the U.S. has committed atrocities is not pertinant to whether or not it is becoming an authoritarian state. Please try to stay on point and not bring up irrelevant facts.

What do you call it when people flood into a country without due process?

What do you call it when people supporting an authoritarian deflect to their pet issue because they think it owns the libs?

You don't get to ignore due process just because crimes are alleged. That's the whole fucking point of due process - to ascertain exactly what has happened and not just take some thug's word for it when they want to boost their arrest numbers.

Due process is the wrong term. What you describe is called immigration. Sometimes immigration is illegal.

By similizing the American electoral system to those in authoritarian countries, you trivialize the suffering of people oppressed and often physically exterminated by authoritarian regimes around the world. Millions? Seriously?

There’s a spectrum of authoritarianism. Not all instantiations involve mass murder or other forms of mass suffering.

Your argument boils down to: others have it worse therefore you have no right to complain.

Consider that if we don’t stand up now and complain now that the foundation will be set for the infliction of mass suffering. Your reasoning is quite bad.

> may not understand what is going on

This much is accurate.

Once again, how would this be described in the press if it were another country:

"Secretary for the Homeland said 'We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city'"

And then had a sitting Senator thrown out of the room and handcuffed.

Yeah, that's authoritarianism.

I'm really not sure what you're arguing here?

Are you arguing that the Cold War being the driver of our investment into space invalidates further attempts to explore it?

Also, as per the debt, NASA's is a fraction of the military budget, and the current budget proposal would increase the debt further, so any argument for decreasing science funding in the name of fiscal responsibility rings hollow.

>Trump has a massive ego and I would have expected him to want the biggest rockets, and to pain them gold.

Sure, but he has to weigh the cost of funding intellectual elites against the benefit of what they can make for him. His base wants smaller government and doesn't want intellectuals. So, the move is to defund NASA and fund a military parade on his birthday. This undermines the future, but the future past 3.5 years is not his problem.

Narcissism is actually, in a sense, a very small ego, an enormously fragile sense of self that requires constant validation from outside. It looks a lot like an addiction, with withdrawal occurring when the 'fix' is not obtained.

You can see this clearly in certain individuals with obvious narcissistic personality disorder where withdrawal of approval results in an insanely irrational tantrum where they basically revert to toddler-level psychology. If you're like "wait, is this a grown man/woman?" the answer is yes -- but it's one having a "drug" withdrawal fit.

Unfortunately this often makes narcissists very successful at social climbing. They're hyper-motivated to advance because that's how you get the next fix.

I've never seen this behaviour trough that lens. Thanks, you've made me learn something unexpected today.

It's generally understood that way in psychology. The term "narcissistic supply" is used for the constant approval and praise and adulation that narcissists crave, and the symptoms of its revocation are similar to some forms of drug withdrawal. A narcissist who is confronted or even just cut off will often fly into a blind rage or revert to what seems like an early childhood state of mind and throw tantrums.

There's some evidence that neglectful or abusive parenting during certain developmental phases might predispose one to it, basically creating a very deep emotional imprint of "you aren't good enough and must constantly earn love." There's probably more to it than that but I could see that being a factor. For adults there's probably also an ideology / belief system dimension.

My sense is Trump simply doesn't see the benefit to him. A pretty simple lens to see the world through.

> The space race never was about science and exploration

To just blatantly ignore the decades of widely documented science NASA has done or contributed to is wild. I understand it raises your taxes by 0.5%, but really?? NASA is responsible for a significant portion of what we know about space and our neighboring planets, and that's if you ignore the amount of research and discoveries they've made about Earth, the planet that "always will be" our home.

Even if you ignore the actual scientific discovers, NASA and the space race are (partially or) directly responsible for inventions that benefit your everyday life. CT Scans, improved insulin pumps, scratch-resistant lenses, baby formula, memory foam, etc. You can find a collection of their contributions to your life here[0], though the page seems broken for me.

In 2021, for every dollar we put into NASA, it generated ~$3 in economic value. To say all NASA does is build rockets is just incorrect, NASA's benefit comes from the science they actively do with satellites, telescopes, probes, rovers, etc.

> Sure, Voyager went somewhere, but it was all a cover.

Past a small "Trajectory Correction Maneuver" thruster (which was fired only in 2017 and then 1980 before that), Voyager 1 isn't a rocket or have any other military impact. I'd happily argue the Voyager program is one of the greats feats of human achievement in history. It's in interstellar space for crying out loud!

Frankly, why even call yourself a hacker if you're anti-scientific progress and anti-technology?

[0] https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

He is not that relevant here because he is senile at this point. "Authoritarian" is what is made by people around him.

You mean the unqualified people he specifically put in place because they are malleable toward operating like he wants them to, expendable if they don’t?

Senile or not, he is most definitely in charge of the chaos.

> he is a narcissist rather than authoritarian

Surely you understand that narcissism doesn’t somehow exclude authoritarianism? Rather the opposite, right?

You are rambling around in circles to avoid the plain truth in front of you. Trump is an autocratic authoritarian. His being a narcissist contributes to that. The two are not mutually exclusive.

> I don't disagree with him on everything he says just because he said it.

At this point, doing so is a better strategy than deferring judgement, while even more "shit" continues to "flood the zone". I'm a libertarian, and I gave this guy a benefit of the doubt for far too long. When looked at from a non-partisan view, all of his policies have been somewhere from neutral to bad to terrible for America. Referencing real problems and frustrations, yes. But completely ineffective or even self-defeating for actually helping with those problems.

> So, with space, my honest take is that it was all just a Cold War thing all along

> It seems to me that China and India are doing space science things now. They can get on with it

So you're content to just give up on the current cold war then? Throw in the towel and hand world leadership to China? Why?

Talk: "America first!"

Actual policy: "America... whatever..."

The scale of anti-science policies is historic in their scale and even breadth of topics.

Tout: America is Great!

Actual Words: None of this stuff is Great.

Sentiment: "I don't understand all this stuff. Just cancel it! We don't need it."

The types of personality that turn into an authoritarian when given power tend to have damaged senses of both internal identity and external reality.

When Trump says "America First" or "Leftists hate our country", what he really means is himself. He's not really lying; "America", in that context, is just an extension of his own ego. Likewise when Putin talks about the "Russian state" or "Russian world", that's something that he conceptualizes as an extension of his own physical body. The channels run by Vlad Vexler on YouTube have an accessible discussion of some of this if you're more interested.

It's not that he wants to hurt federal workers, set back science, or destroy US state capacity. But he does so anyway, because his concept of "America" is one that stops at his own ego. Other people aren't really real to him.

America is at the dusk of a new dark age.

Dawn?

I suppose a dark age would be night and therefore preceded by dusk rather than dawn.

No.

Oligarchs first... much like Russia.

That was at first, then Putin started having them murdered. If you think about it, there isn't much of a reason for the individual that is allowed to have all the power to share it with anybody.

The more accurate model for the Russian government is a Mafia family with Putin being the Capo dei capi.

The murders are the visible symptoms of the various factions fighting each other.

Not Mafia but Vor... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law

Mostly the ones that piss him off.

So my, admittedly distant, understanding of modern Russia is that the FSB and Oligarchs have formed a symbiotic relationship, with Putin as its fulcrum.

The FSB secure the oligarchs, and prevent them from being prosecuted for siphoning off billions from the Russian economy. These get distributed down through to FSB leadership as bribes. The whole thing stays loyal to whatever leadership coalition keeps it going. Putin has proved quite good at that.

This arrangement is also underscored by a sort of modern descendent of Chekism. There's an ideological component besides all the corrupt money making.

You do the hard work of getting the oligarchs to buy up and consolidate the private assets first. Then it's even easier to take those large asset bundles.

There were different cliques of oligarchs. Putin had the ones opposing him eliminated, and kept the ones that supported him.

this article is about NASA.. the history of corruption, authoritarianism and consolidation of power in private hands would be books longer than Balzac.

The US is actively choosing to become completely reliant on private providers for access to space, which at this point boils down to SpaceX and Boeing. Both seem unreliable for different reasons. I just cannot see it as anything else than a blunder.

US rockets were always made by private providers like SpaceX or Boeing.

Yes, but the government has much more control over all aspects, especially design. That changed with the commercial crew program.

And that was good because... Why?

It would potentially mitigate the risk identified by the GGP regarding “unreliable” contractors who force risks on you that you may not want. Same reason I often choose to do house maintenance myself. Not to say it’s also not without costs/risks, it just comes down to which balance you prefer.

NASA still makes these competitive contracts though and picks among several contractors. Afterwards NASA is still involved in design through reviews and other lines of communication.

Using your analogy, if I do hire a contractor I'll talk with them a lot about what they're going to do and make sure it's generally in line with what I want, but they're generating most of the ideas and just incorporating what I say.

Eh, not so much. They have reviews, but it is a much more hands off approach. *

There were instances where NASA engineers brought up issues with designs and were told it wasn’t their role to drive the design. The concept of CCP was they were buying a ride, not a rocket. Just like you don’t tell Airbus what engine they should use when you buy a plane ticket.

* IMO the goal of CCP was to find a mechanism to informally circumvent many requirements. NASA could always waive requirements but I don’t think many people were willing to sign on the dotted line even if they disagreed with the requirements. CCP unburdens them from the same requirements while also allowing them to avoid full responsibility for the decision. (More charitably, it also allowed them to avoid some political costs, like having to spread projects across multiple political areas to avoid funding cuts.)

Right, reviews, where important design concerns can be raised. IDK what specific design concerns you're referring to, but just because an issue is raised doesn't mean it's a real issue.

Again, you don't want two different organizations trying to design one thing.

You missed the part where NASA engineers were told to pipe down about concerns because it wasn’t their place to drive the design. There were numerous, the ones I’m familiar with involved touch screens in cockpits and the amount of reliability needed in safety critical hardware.

Everyone is wrong sometimes. Dragon seems to be pretty safe, so idk what else to measure that against?

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NASA still sets requirements and invites several companies to compete for contracts with different solutions. See the lunar lander contracts from a few years ago for example.

You are ascribing beliefs to be based on others in this thread I think.

What I think is that if a company is going to build and provide the solution then they should own the design. NASA should of course get to be involved in reviews and discussions, which they absolutely fucking are, but I do not think that it makes sense for one organization to design something and the other one to build it as if there's like a hard line between these two activities.

I'm not convinced that is how it worked in the days of Apollo either as you've just asserted that without citation.

NASA has not been effective in 50 years. Maybe time to try something else?

How are you measuring effectiveness? It seems like you might have a pretty shallow perspective on what NASA does and what their goals are. For example, do you know how many mission directorates they have and how they differ?

Not the person you're responding to, but JWT, SLS, and several other projects have suffered extreme bloat in both cost and timeline. Mega projects like that are some of the most public -facing things NASA does, so they unfortunately tend to drive public perception.

I will never argue that NASA doesn't accomplish amazing things, but large parts of the organization are ineffective. IDK if I'd go so far as to say the entire organization is ineffective, but large parts are.

I also don't think we should cut NASA's budget at all. We should cut the bloat and redirect it to more projects.

It does read to me that many people view this with the same lens we apply to private companies.

As an example, some of the bloat is intentional because it buys down political risk. It would be more efficient to have a program like SLS done within a single NASA center. But that also makes it easier to cut funding because there are a limited number of constituents affected by those cuts. This is exacerbated by long timeline projects that don’t align with shorter political timelines. By spreading the project to many centers, it adds inefficiency but also ensures the survivability of the project. To an extent, there has a a good chance there never would be audacious projects if they were run with maximum financial efficiency. So you’re stuck with the choice of an efficient project that never gets completed or inefficient one that does. As a taxpayer, I’m not thrilled with that dynamic but I understand why it exists

As I understand it JPL has been pretty effective, but that's a very small part of NASA overall.

JPL is also not really “NASA” in the same sense. There are only a handful of civil servants and the CalTech as a contractor. It’s similar to the “quasi-government” operations of national lab.

Not really. Early rockets included multiple private contractors like Douglas, Boeing and NAA, but those were basically government projects top to bottom.

Single vendor commercial rockets are a recent (2000s) invention.

Think of how wasteful and inefficient multi-vendor rockets are as a concept. What complex machine would you engineer in such a way? Would you have the government, rather than buy cars from Ford, GM, Tesla, etc, instead contract out the production to one company for the motor, one for the frame, and one for the interior and instrumentation?

It was the only way to do it at the time, no company would have had the capacity for such a project, including reserves for damages. And even in private businesses it is common to outsource specific elements to external suppliers. The Saturn program was massive.

Sorry how is SpaceX unreliable?

I personally think we need at least a second reliable launch provider, probably rocket lab, just for redundancy.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/elon-musk-threatened-decom...

So a flame war on X.

Idk, call me crazy but I saw that post and never believed it would actually happen. Call me when something of that magnitude does.

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/24/nx-s1-5087892/nasa-starliner-...

So private contractors are unreliable for a variety of reasons? We should get all of this private bloat out of the government.

What are things the government has actually built themselves without private contracts?

What are some private contracts which do not contain the bloat of private profit?

Government employees profit from work they do too. There is no enterprise that people should engage in that does not provide profit to them personally.

What are you saying?

That’s an odd take, I never said people should not be paid a living wage for their contributions to the country. However, when was the last time the government authorized a multibillion dollar pay package for a single worker? The government doesn’t have stock buy backs, they don’t have dividends to pay out. That is where private business greed comes in and has no place in public government work. That kind bloat is what I am highlighting in private business.

Afaik Tesla is not a government contractor, so your compensation comment is moot.

Where we see waste in government is in big, entrenched, dinosaurs where competition is very difficult and/or limited. What we need is a little more free market capitalism in those areas. Greed is not the driver of waste imo, incompetence is a far bigger contributor.

If you'd like to make tangible arguments instead of vaguely ranting against capitalism then I'm all ears.

Edit: also the multi-billion dollar compensation package was in stock, so it didn't actually waste any money

Edit 2: by the way you're still dodging my original legitimate question about what the government has ever actually built without private contractors. There are real answers to that question and if you are such a big proponent of the government building things themselves maybe you should know something about them.

It may be important to note that SpaceX and Tesla finances are likely intertwined. This is a common dynamic among Musk’s companies. So while Tesla is not a contractor, its finances do affect government contractor risk. Tesla stock has been the main collateral for Musk at the same time he engages in start-ups and I don’t think that is coincidence.

Two edits and you hand waved away the point about CEO compensation? oof. Governments and private businesses have the same problems since they are both made up of imperfect humans. The government has the great oversight mechanism that private businesses don’t which is called voting, which is why I think it takes the cake here.

I never said that the government should never use private contractors (always need janitorial services), but when tax dollars are being used to fund technology and research, the government should never cede ownership of those outputs to private business.

I think the OP was alluding to unreliability in the CEOs mental state, but I’ll add another aspect: they are sometimes skirting well-established norms. An example is not performing material quality checks on critical parts. This is standard practice in the domain, yet they choose not to and it resulted in a loss of a rocket and its payload. They later added those quality checks to their process. SpaceX is good, but there’s no need for repeating well worn industry mistakes just because you fancy yourself as “different”

Because of Musk's mood swings.

What material impact has that had on SpaceX operations?

No tweets as sources.

funny enough that even if US government somehow abandon space x, they would just fine

Space X is literally the best in commercial space right now and its not even close, and they already have starlink which basically cash cow that if somehow US cut off spacex

they would just fine, they lost funding sure but they would happy to take foreign customer

The blunder is choosing only two and including Boeing at all.

It should be SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Blue Origin, and maybe soon Stoke Space.

Were you prescient enough to claim that at the time of the contract or only in hindsight? At the time, most thought Boeing was the safer bet.

I haven't thought Boeing was a good bet pretty much ever, or maybe not since the 1990s but I was a teenager then.

Boeing has been on the same path to decline as old GE was for decades.

Then look harder. The “blunder” was orchestrated by the man who owns one of those two companies.

The primary source this article's reporting on is

https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal... ("NASA's disastrous 2026 budget proposal in seven charts")

These kind of policies and that amortization tax law for software development will probably encourage quite some exodus of talent. Would it be to Europe or South East Asia, though?

A large part of our talent acquisition would stay home, as the Asian countries, especially China, are expanding their investments. American students would go to work in European universities due to the lesser language barrier. When the US was a developing country a large number of children of wealthy families were sent to study in Europe.

I don't think the idea of looking outside the US for knowledge would be natural to many people of this generation. I wonder what the effects on our culture will be - it would certainly reduce the pride.

I think at least some of them will come up to Canada. No language barrier, and close enough geographically and culturally to keep most of your connections. We pay less but live longer on average.

Seeing all this unfold is doing amazing things for our national pride, ironically.

Canada is on the brink of serious economic trouble...

Recession, housing costs, restricted immigration choices coming soon. This has been brewing for years but the US trade war sped up the timeline.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni...

USA pays engineers like 3x as much as those places. It's still global brain drain destination #1.

The US still has the best researchers today too, we're talking about the longer-term effects of anti-science policy in the face of continued development around the world.

And what do you buy with your "triple" income?

A boring mansion, with a boring lawn, in a boring, gated community? -- and all that while the other neighbourhoods are on fire. But at least you can buy $700 sneakers and leave the big garage in style, to work your ass off with a job pretending to "better the world" -- maybe have one or two weeks to fill your social media account with pictures already taken by the millions (you might as well use generative AI).

Congrats to your final destination: hell.

That’s certainly one way to live life, although certainly not the only way. Many people use tech as a path to financial independence. There’s a running joke/groan that the FIRE sub is filled with software engineers making 6 figures.

Its not even that, America pays so much more for food and rent and healthcare that the triple income just gets you "a VCR salesman from the 80s".

For engineers, maybe. But with immigration restrictions, employers can no longer create a workplace where "work with the best in the world" is an attraction.

What's the lag time on migration statistics?

Because, and I say this as one who already decided against the USA in response to Trump's first election, I rather doubt that the new policy of getting in the news for systematically deporting migrants for even minor things — not even offences, theoretically protected things like blogging — is going to put a rather big dent on people willing to go. I mean, right now, I don't even want to visit the US on a holiday, much less live there.

And that's without all the people saying "sure, you get paid 3x on paper, but all of it goes on rent and health insurance that doesn't actually pay out when you need it" that also makes it seem a lot less interesting.

I'm admittedly not very bright, but you could pay me 10x and I still wouldn't go to the US while brown.

Not if the funding is non-existent. Did you even think before posting?

France is explicitly trying to poach researchers. UK is committing higher-ed suicide though it has a better reputation than the US in many ways.

China's pharma/biotech industry is growing rapidly

The All-In-Podcast recently interviewed (1-1) Jared Isaacman (NASA admin nominee) about the bloat.

Worth watching the whole interview ~1 hour.

[0] Jared Isaacman: What went wrong at NASA | The All-In Interview https://youtu.be/6YdOjoaQTOQ?si=FUeL8mJ6LwHwO_B4&t=1275

There's no doubt that there's waste and inefficiency, but it would be nice if it was addressed by parties who are not hostile to the enterprise as a whole.

The concept of a "DOGE" would be wonderful if it actually focused on efficiency of government spending rather than cover to destroy all ideological enemies.

The concept of "Diversity Equity and Inclusion" would be wonderful if it actually focused on ideological diversity and being welcoming to others rather than being a system designed to produce people with different skin tones and the same opinion, and acting as a racial spoil system

From what I've learned about DEI programs is that the crux of it all is simply to ensure jobs are publicly available and not limited to "insiders".

It's been positioned as "Affirmative Action 2.0" by its detractors, and that re-branding is clearly effective as you have been receptive to it.

Now I could be wrong, and there could be cases where it has functioned as you suggest. I'm willing to be corrected if compelling evidence is shown. Are you willing to do the same?

NB: _Former_ NASA Administrator nominee. His nomination has been withdrawn.

The Trump administration is proposing cutting more than half of NASA's scientific research. Calling NASA science "bloat" is absurd.

If the proposed budget cuts go through, NASA's scientific research will be eviscerated. Nearly every planned telescope will be canceled. Most grants for students, postdocs and professors - the people analyzing the data from NASA's missions - will be cut.

We're talking the end of astrophysics and planetary science in the United States. It will just cease to exist.

The interview where several billionaires floated the idea of getting rid of congress so that private industry can then somehow operate unfettered.

At 25m20s [0] mark he talks about senators protecting the jobs (and the money they get from NASA) in their state, which impedes the general direction of NASA:

[0] https://youtu.be/6YdOjoaQTOQ?si=5DsRju_8qdwU29SO&t=1521

It makes sense that NASA should abandon the SLS and focus on where there isn't already heavy private investment, space launch already has like 8-10 companies competing. Artemis should be refactored to be much cheaper and launch via private companies.

It continues to be a long four years.

NASA has become the DMV for space. It's not the NASA of Wernher von Braun anymore. That's what we should be going for.

NASA's scientific research is incredible. Almost everyone here is narrowly focusing on NASA's manned missions, but the scientific side of NASA is doing amazingly.

The James Webb Space Telescope has performed beyond expectations, and is making fundamental discoveries about the history of the Universe and the properties of planets outside our Solar System. NASA has had a string of highly successful scientific missions.

Yet the Trump administration is proposing to completely gut NASA's science funding. If these cuts go through, there basically will be no new NASA scientific missions. It's game over for astrophysics and planetary science in the US.

This quote about New Horizons is puzzling

> The New Horizons spacecraft [...] reached Pluto in 2016 and is currently exploring other distant features of the system [...]. Keeping it running today by receiving its transmitted data and making sure it remains on course costs about $14.7 million a year, or less than 2% of its total price tag.

Does anyone know why this would be so expensive? A slice of Deep Space Network time must be expensive but it still sounds like an outrageous figure to me.

How is that an outrageous figure?

You need people for mission operations, to calibrate the data, and to do science with the data. You need access to the Deep Space Network. Beyond that, there is outreach.

This can easily come to several million dollars a year. It's a tiny fraction of what we pay on completely meaningless stuff. More is spent on the average US Congressional race every two years, and there are 435 of those. Surely we can spend this much to keep one of humanity's most distant spacecraft working.

Right, but that budget is enough to pay 60+ $200k salaries. I'd imagine that New Horizons is mostly coasting and there isn't a lot of new data for long periods of time.

Looking at the mission website,[0] there are still a lot of people involved with the mission, spread across science, engineering, operations and management.

You would be surprised how much science can be done with an old mission like this, both with the data they already have on hand and with new data. It looks like they have several dozen scientists working on the project (not all necessarily full time).

In any case, putting this into perspective, I don't see how it could be a waste to spend $14.7 million / year to keep one of the most distant probes humanity has sent out into space working.

0. https://pluto.jhuapl.edu/Mission/The-Team.php

Sometimes I mourn not finishing my astronomy degree, but ultimately I suppose I went the right direction.

Trump admin is just so selfish and parasitic. How do they not understand that science, research, and innovation are what drive the economy they are trying to rob?

Truly evil and incompetent.

I'm not sure they care. Research etc goes against a lot of their ideological stances from climate policy to gender to economics (eg: there's barely a trickle down the cups at the top are bottomless) so they're just destroying the institutions that oppose them so they can make more money and retreat to their redoubts or just be dead by the time the repercussions of things like climate change become unignorable.

In a thread here a few months back, I said that one good thing about a new social media platform was that it was full of scientists and journalists.

Someone asked, ~"what is about those two groups that you like?"

I had to think about it for a minute, but the reply was ~"neither group is perfect, but it's their actual job to find and present the truth."

I have no idea why it took me so long to realize that this is why authoritarians hate both groups so much.

>~"neither group is perfect, but it's their actual job to find and present the truth."

And let me guess, the cops' job is to protect and serve?

The situation is both more simple and less simple than that.

Journalists and scientists effective top priority is to serve their employers. Sure they want to report the news and shape truth in the same way that cops want to catch real criminals but all of these people are employed by organizations that have other priorities that take precedence.

Authoritarians hate these groups because they're effectively a competing power center. It's as simple as that. You see the same adversarial relationship between secular authoritarians and the clergy in countries with religious populations. It has nothing to do with truth and everything to do with power. Media, religious, and educational institutions power comes from shaping what people believe, truth in your words.

you're mistaking journalists for propagandists. It's an easy mistake to do though, true journalists are rare in the world.

Scientists are a problem to authoritarians simply because they are educated and will likely refute the bs of politicians, let alone authoritarians.

Propagandists aren't the problem. The entire incentive structure of the journalism and consumer media industry (and others too, it's not just them) is the problem. These aren't people problems. These are institutional architecture and incentive problems. Look at the entire western world. We are in way deeper shit than just one political movement or one or a few leaders.

The hubris in the second half of your second sentence is chuckle worthy though.

Who would you say was a real journalist as opposed to a propagandist during the COVID 19 era? I am not asking this as a gimme but out of curiosity of who you thought was a true journalist during a time where many journalists were acting as mouth pieces for the powerful

Not only do they not care, they actually relish destroying anything they consider to be "woke", like science.

It's unfortunate, but modern American conservatism is now defined by hating everything that liberals love.

This is a pity, because there should be a balance between "progress" and "government restraint" -- and that is no longer possible.

> modern American conservatism is now defined by hating everything that liberals love

Please stop giving this movement a disguise by continuing to call it conservatism. I know that word has had negative connotations to a large segment of liberals/progressives, but conservatism actually has a bunch of worthwhile values - despite being harmful when taken to the extreme, like everything.

What we're dealing with now is better described as populist reactionary fascism. There is nothing conservative about it beyond that the people supporting it used to align with conservatism but then got really angry because their fundamentalist mantras didn't pan out. The current home of actual conservatism is the Democratic party, who still have values like believing in American institutions and America being a force for good in the world.

> conservatism actually has some worthwhile values

Did you read the whole of my comment?

As to who to ascribe as "conservatives", the GOP and its voters are a not entirely unreasonable association.

If you have public communicators for "modern conservatism" that you'd care to share I would be happy to check them out as I'm interested in broadening my understanding of the world.

Yes, I did. We are coming from places that are mostly in agreement - I'm not trying to thump some slightly-different no-true-Scotsman version of conservatism here. I am a libertarian, and I was unaligned and came to see the wisdom and failings of both tribes.

My first point is that the people calling themselves conservatives are nowhere close to those values - the people who remain truer to conservatism get called "RINOs" and pushed out of the party (part of the large trend of othering).

My main point is that this distinction is important because calling this movement "conservatism" ends up supporting it - it gives them cover as if they are merely advocating for some measured stick-with-traditions cautious reform and reverting recent developments, while they are actually actively lighting the better part of a century's American institutions on fire and dancing around the blazes - NASA, universities, scientific research, relationships with our allies, foreign outreach, USD as a reserve currency, etc. Never mind their rejection of much older American freedoms like freedom of assembly, right to keep and bear arms, etc.

this point of view is so utterly lacking self-critical thought about "extreme social views, we demand you accept it or you are haters" .. its just a thought-blocker and dead-end. Endless polarization.

I've no shortage of self-critical thought, and your quote is perplexing because you seem to have inserted some preconception into your reading of my comment.

The topic is extremely polarizing by design, and is impossible to discuss without heated emotions, and therefore is never properly explored.

I have no political party allegiance (partisan politics is a toxic waste dump); I try to work from "first principles", and am more than happy to adjust my understandings when compelling evidence is presented.

To circle back to the OP: these program cuts are being made in the name of efficiency, but they're curiously only applied to programs that the admin is ideologically opposed to and applied in a manner meant to kill rather than trim. I find it interesting that the Military Industrial Complex -- a paragon of pork, fraud, and waste -- will not only be untouched but given even more money then before.

Recent polls of Trump supporter show that they expect Trump’s policies to hurt them personally, but they support the policies anyway because they think they will hurt liberals more.

It is difficult to reconcile that viewpoint with any path to a functioning democracy.

At least with tariffs you can understand there will be short term economic pain for presumed long term economic gain Polling of Biden voters seem to suggest they didn't expect the 20% inflation that happened between Biden entering office and Biden leaving office. They didn't think it would hurt Republicans more, they just had experts denying that anything was happening, like the head of the Fed saying inflation was transitory. That situation impedes on the function of democracy in a different way

As a Biden voter, I definitely expected inflation. Trump’s economic policies in the first term were incredibly inflationary, even before covid.

NPR was routinely sounding the alarm back in 2017-18. Inflation typically runs on a ~3-5 year delay vs executive policies.

The crazy thing with the tariffs is that they’re killing investment in domestic production in the US. Check out this graph of private money going to building factories:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA

Any manufacturing job gains over the next few years will clearly be due to Biden’s efforts. (Note that factory construction spending is somehow down slightly for 2025: the deceleration of the investment trend is unprecedented.)

Owning the libs is a thing. Owning the conservatives is not a thing.

If you can extract more while harming everyone its an over all win for these types.

One of the big problems of having a government ran by an oligarchic gerontocracy is that none of the people in charge are going to care about long term effects because they'll be dead before it affects them. So they maximize short term value extraction and destruction.

It's not strictly a far right issue either, the dems are feckless and useless for similar reasons being that any sort of long term consequences does not matter to them.

> the dems are feckless and useless for similar reasons being that any sort of long term consequences does not matter to them.

Please elaborate on this.

Old. They're old. Gerontocracy means old people. Dems, republicans, both are old.

The average age for republicans and democrats in the house is 57 or so. The average in the senate is 62(r) and 65(d).

While 57 isn't ancient, it's also not young enough to give a shit about 2070. 62 and 65 year olds certainly don't care about a date so far in the future that their kids will be dead.

Ok. They are old.

What's the evidence they don't care?

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Breaking the site guidelines like this is not cool and will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. You unfortunately have been in the habit of breaking them.

Edit: we've had to ask you this a lot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42065061 (Nov 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41684566 (Sept 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36870132 (July 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25182199 (Nov 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25146606 (Nov 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24483757 (Sept 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24475231 (Sept 2020)

I literally didn't say any of that. Don't put words in my mouth.

I'm saying they're all old. Their incentives are wildly different than mine because they're older than I am.

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Are both sides equally bad?

Truly Capital Planet tier villains.

I recall a quote from Trump about environmental issues was something to the effect of "I'll be dead by then."

It fits his approach to everything.

Exactly this…it is individualism to the extreme. I don’t think they believe that cutting funding is in the best interest of the collective. But their activists want this so they will do it. It is hard in politics to link cause and effect so the nation as a whole won’t learn from this. I am really heartbroken about all of this. It is possible to reform without burning everything down.

They will build s.th. working eventually. Even if it costs 10x as spaceX and the Russians laugh about it.

Are these people so deluded by American Exceptionalism they think this spending is unnecessary? Or is it that they do not care about anything but accumulating a few extra dollars?

It looks like yes and yes.

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who said he's not cutting enough?

For a starting premise, we might define "enough" as a balanced budget.

NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy. Hastily making cuts into programmes that generate significant economic and scientific value for your nation is a losers strategy.

I'm sure it'll also have other deleterious effects on the economy such as brain drain which would be difficult to reverse.

https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report

> NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy.

Citation absolutely required. Amongst other things, NASA has set huge piles of money on fire (literally!) building a rocket program that should probably be shut down entirely. Now, whether or not these particular scientific programs are a net positive investment is a more subtle point that is certainly up for debate, but "NASA has a positive ROI for the American economy" is pure assertion.

Speaking as someone who is generally pro-science -- to the point where I actually went out and got a PhD, in science -- we can't just assume that "science" is net beneficial to society. From direct experience, most science is just useless crap, and a lot of scientific funding is pure political patronage, dressed up in a white lab coat.

I do think it's a situation where the line item is fairly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but in a world where the government is quickly going broke, hard choices must be made, and cutting this kind of stuff will also not be the end of science.

Here's a citation that says the ROI for NASA is 3x.

https://www.space.com/nasa-economic-impact-us-2023-report

That’s not a study, that’s a report issued by NASA.

You have to be painfully credulous to believe that that NASA would find anything to the contrary.

They presented a logical argument with facts and statistics, which deserves evaluation on its merits.

If a balanced budget is your goal, only two steps are required: reduce military spending, increase taxes. No need to cut research.

In practice the current budget bill is wildly unbalanced and will vastly extend our debt, despite extensive cuts to important programs.

We could zero out the military budget and that still doesn't get us anywhere close to balanced. Even cutting 100% of discretionary spending barely does the job.

We either need massive cuts in mandatory spending (fundamental changes to social contract) or increased revenue (politically not viable).

There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.

> There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.

I don't think this is really supportable. Obviously one can appeal to the practically endless examples of countries that destroyed their own economies with debt. Of course the obvious argument to this is that this hasn't happened to the US. But there were extremely unique, and liminal, circumstances that explain this, that a search on "exporting inflation" [1] can largely explain. And those days are mostly behind us.

We can see this playing out in practice. Current interest payments on the debt are now $1.1 trillion per year. They've grown exponentially, far faster than the debt has. [2] The reason for this is that we can't just handwave away inflation so easily anymore, so we're now experiencing more like what would happen to other countries that let their money printers get a bit too excited. The Fed is keeping rates high in hopes of bringing inflation down, but it's just not really working. What this means is that when the government sells treasuries (which is how they 'print money') they need to offer ever higher interest rates. Notably even 20 year treasuries right now are offering yields of about 5%, so it seems most are not enthusiastic about things getting much better.

I think we're well on our way to becoming another of history's cautionary tales that the next great power will also certainly think doesn't apply to them, because if something hasn't exploded in 50 years, that must mean it'll never explode.

---

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=exporting+inflation

[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A091RC1Q027SBEA

That's fair. I should have been more precise... There's little evidence we need to have a totally balanced budget every year. Current spending levels are likely unsustainable. Either way, we still can't balance the budget by only cutting discretionary spending - any serious discussion of a balanced budget MUST include the revenue side, plus possible changes to the social contract (IE, all the programs that just about everybody wants to keep).

> There's also near zero evidence we actually need a balanced budget for a healthy economy.

The alternative is to pay an ever increasing amount of interest on our ever increasing debt.

The other alternative is to default on our debt obligations.

Neither option is good.

If you borrow at 3% to invest in an asset that yields 10%, you can increase your position forever and will be rewarded.

Sure, but that is not what is happening. In reality, debt is increasing faster than GDP and interest represents a larger part of the budget. Do you think that's sustainable?

It'll be even less sustainable if we cut investment spending in science in favor of uncapitalized spending.

There's some tipping point where it's too much. For example, when the interest on the debt >> defense spending. Agree it doesn't need to be fully balanced, debt is a useful tool.

>increased revenue (politically not viable)

Is that really true? Seems like its just an issue of how you frame it.

The party that controls all three branches of the federal government is pushing a budget that cuts taxes and increase the deficit. There has been zero talk from them about balancing the budget. And there likely won't be, because if they do, they won't be able to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democrats when party control eventually swings the other way.

This [1] is a graph of government receipts (basically all income for the government) over time. It has not only increased exponentially, but basically never decreased except during major economic crises. Yet somehow in that graph, we ended up more than $36 trillion dollars in debt.

It makes it clear that the fundamental issue is not government revenue, but government spending. Every single time you give the government $1 they find a reason to spend $1.05. Why would you expect this to change if you give them $1.05, instead of them now just finding a reason to spend $1.10?

I think that democracies are probably just fundamentally incapable of caring about long-term problems like debt when acting irresponsibly has substantial short-term benefits. It's almost like some spin on a tragedy of the commons.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGRECPT

> politically not viable

These three words are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_U... Defense spending is 12% of the budget. Even if we cut every dime from defense we would still have 88% of the problem and be no closer to a balanced budget

>reduce military spending…No need to cut research

You do know the military spend on research dwarfs any other federal agency, right? The DoD research budget is about 5X that of NASA.

This gets to the point early where it’s easy to be in favor of cuts in the abstract but much harder in practice once you see that it touches something you favor.

>You do know the military spend on research

The charitable reading of parent's comment is "reduce the spending on the parts of the military that aren't research (or research solely dedicated to killing people)".

I'm sure they were thinking more along the lines of bombing various countries (or $40MM birthday parades) rather than the next onion routing protocol coming out of the Naval Research Laboratory.

You can still disagree with that, of course, but responding to the steelman version of someone's argument is much better than a snarky "You do know XYZ, right?".

That’s fair. My intent was not snark but to maybe spark some curiosity about what that military spend goes towards. But I think the OP could have framed it a little better to indicate they understood that nuance. Just like the budget cuts for NASA leave a considerable amount of research in place, it’s about priorities. The problem in many of these discussions is a lack of nuance: eg, not understanding the scope of what the DoD does, for example. The DoD spends as much as 15X as NASA on medical research, but the OP doesn’t acknowledge any of that with a overly generalized recommendation to simply cut defense spending. The difference is I’m not as confident as you to claim I know what they were thinking without further information. That’s why I framed it as a question.

That also assumes that a "balanced budget" is the best macro-economic policy for a country of our size.

Another consideration would be the "Economic Calculation Problem", or our inability measure (price) the utility of state allocations of capital. The deficit is only one implication of the spending program. There are also the unseen factors when these funds are removed from the private sector, not just via taxation but also by comparative valuation of scarce resources.

I.e. if there are 100 cement trucks in the economy and 95 are allocated for state projects, the private sector needs to produce additional cement trucks under the increased burden of taxation. In the near term, cement construction costs have been increased. From this point, perhaps another bureau will enter by nationalizing the cement truck industry, "To secure our vital national interests and remain competitive"

Without decentralized market price signals, we are unable to value the end goals of the state's construction project. More troubling still, we wouldn't know of how the market may have allocated those trucks or if those trucks would have been used in a more productive way. However, we can observe empirical historical examples of lowered productivity which correlates with central planning.

Raise taxes then.

Sorry I thought tariffs would result in our immediate destruction.

There are other kinds of taxes, you know. Or maybe you don't.

We could cut 100% of discretionary spending and might just balance the budget.

If you really want a balanced budget, you need to figure out how to slow the growth of mandatory spending and increase revenue. Neither of which Trump or the GOP seem interested in doing.

Apparently somebody takes issue with my comment, so here's the CBO's own analysis for 2024[1].

Total Revenue: 4.9 trillion

Mandatory Spending: 4.1 trillion

Net Interest: 0.9 trillion

Discretionary Spending: 1.8 trillion

Yes, we could zero out discretionary spending and just barely eke out a balanced budget. We either need more revenue OR a complete reset on the social contract for a long-term balanced budget.

1 - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61185

Ron Paul and one of the GOP congressional members who voted no.

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Please explain how cutting science and medical research helps the country.

While you're at it, I'm also curious how you think cutting profitable departments (such as CPFB) or white-collar law enforcement helps anyone other than the president's friends.

Public research is just government subsidies to corporations, which acquire IP for pennies on the dollar for their own profits while leaving taxpayers with the chaff. It’s a net loss for the public good who has to pay twice.

There is a very long and expensive path from basic research IP to a profitable drug. Private pharma companies already bear the risk of the drug development pipeline, which has a very low probability of success and takes many years. Adding fundamental research to that pipeline would make these companies a riskier investment.

This article is about NASA, and the existence of a large and successful pharmaceutical company industry proves that when there is a public good to be achieved, there is private funding for the research.

The OP asked for an answer, and the fallacy I’m trying to point out is this assumption that “all” research is generally worthwhile. And I don’t mean just that there are exceptions, but swaths of topics and institutions and researchers and methods that aren’t really adding anything of value. Some areas, like aerospace, have been the focus of intense research for a long long time. This is to the point where SpaceX has been able to walk in and build a space program from scratch. I don’t mean to minimize their hard work, but it just shows that we’re not in the 1930s anymore. It makes sense that you should occasionally adjust your priorities from time to time based on your needs.

Apologies for the tangents away from NASA - I was just replying to one of the parent comments that mentioned medical research

I don't think all research is worthwhile; I think grant proposals should get shot down if the lab/idea isn't up to snuff.

I'm happy for companies to do R&D! There's lot of examples over the years (Bell labs, Google, etc). I just don't think it makes sense in high risk situations with long reward lag times. The exceptions will be the really, really big companies flush with cash, which has its own issues.

No one said that all research is of value. The problem with basic research is that you don't know whether it will be of value untill you do the research. All research is potentially of value. The risk of such research is why the government has historically supported it and why so many world-changing ideas come out of gov research programs.

Private investment is risk-averse: they will support reliable short term gains over dubious long term breakthroughs. That's fine, but history has shown it's not the best way.

> government subsidies

No, public research is an investment. The job of the government is to spend money on things that help the country's people. That includes roads, the military, and science.

Research is public funded because it creates public good. Most basic research is not profitable which is why it is in the publics best interests to subsidize it rather than rely in the whims of corporations.

Even then ROI for taxpayers is staggeringly huge in the long run. Calling it a "net-loss" is ... well. It is flat-earth level thinking.

That isn't really an argument to simply say people who don't agree with you aren't sane.

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Can you give an example of austerity working?

Do you remember something that happened in 2018? A budget perhaps passed by the fans of austerity that blew up the deficit harder than anything else?

No, that doesn't follow. The alternative (and to me obviously correct answer) is that "austerity" is a trick and the only alternative to growing deficit spending is higher taxes. Precisely because it's not a transient problem, random unprincipled cuts cannot solve it; there's no baseline healthy budget that we can get back to if we just trim some excess.

Do you have an ideal version of the US government? Just wondering what you think should be cut vs kept.

The way I think about it is this: the bureaucracy of the federal government has accumulated so much tech debt over the years that a rewrite is in order. What that means is that we get rid of everything not immediately essential, then slowly rebuild to meet our needs.

This isn’t the same as a full revolution, where you rewrite the entire government, not just the bureaucracy (I.e. get rid of Congress, Supreme Court, executive branch and replace them with something new).

The government is not software, so not sure what you mean by "tech debt" here. Maybe you're conflating the complexity of our laws with the amount of bureaucracy we have.

If the problem you your thinking is the amount of bureaucracy, what's your specific complaint? It costs too much? Nothing gets done? There's wasteful spending?

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Instead of cutting cancer research or Nasa, maybe tax the rich? Wild idea, I know.

Tariffs are a tax on luxury consumption so he's doing that too.

And once again people are mad and trying to cut off their nose to spite their face.

It’s true that one can design tariffs to target luxury consumption specifically, and that’s been done in the past.

That’s not what is being done by this admin, however. AI-generated tariff rates on 2-letter ISO country codes are not targeted in any meaningful sense.

Tariffs are a tax on the poor.

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Blanket tarrifs can't be avoided. Even limited to "luxuries", which they're not, will still include necessities for a modern productive society.

Hobbling the workforce is not a plan for success. It is robbery by the oligarch class.

What do you think the federal government should be responsible for? I assume only national defense?

Cutting enough to do what?

Address deficit spending? Trump and the GOP do not care about that at all, they're looking at increasing the deficit dramatically.

The GOP has done an amazing job selling people on topics like the deficit, trade, big tech and doing the opposite and people still fall for it.

Would you be willing to put your money where your mouth is on this issue? Bet that the deficit will go up more over the next 4 years compared to the last 4 years? On January 20, 2021, when President Biden took office, the U.S. national debt stood at approximately $27.8 trillion By January 20, 2025, as he exited office, the debt had risen to about $36.1–36.2 trillion. Are you willing to bet that Donald Trump will wrack up more than 8.3 trillion in debt?

Would it matter? I don't put much into "you should bet me / someone" as having any meaning. Let alone on whatever terms they randomly pick.

I don't bet people about anything ...

Weird how all of these budget cuts never actually have any real effect on the national debt. Almost like every time we cut something we end up replacing it with handouts to rich corporations and oligarchs in the form of lower taxes, tax breaks or just plain corruption.

Google up "federal budget pie chart" and look at some of the budget analysis. Most of our spending is mandatory spending. We could cut ALL discretionary spending and that might just barely balance the budget.

We have two options (if you take a balanced budget as a worthy goal, which is debatable)... 1 - rebuild the social contract from the ground up, with massively reduced mandatory spending

2 - increase revenue

Weird how a few presidents get balanced budgets and the next ones all cut taxes and somehow we wonder what we need to do to get a balanced budget.

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This is a illogical position to hold, because clearly nobody applies that same logic about everything else the federal government spends money on.

If Texans want to fund a military parade for $45 million, and spend $16 billion on an armed secret police force, they are welcome to do so, but then Californians should not have to fund that (and neither do the rest of us who do not agree with such things while producing an outsized portion of the federal government's income).

The issue is not which of these are federally funded vs state funded, unless of course the federal income tax for Californians is specifically reduced in turn. It's a zero sum game: as a Californian, your tax dollars (whether state or federal) are now going to more objectively horrible things and few fewer objectively good things. That's the problem.

> This is a illogical position to hold, because clearly nobody applies that same logic about everything else the federal government spends money on.

That doesn't make it illogical, to make it illogical you'd have to do something like identify a fallacy. The same logic does apply to most of the things the US Federal government spends money on; the US baby boomers built a really stupid system that has destroyed a lot of potential for prosperity. In the US, anyway, China has been having a great time.

> If Texans want ...

I don't know where you're going with that paragraph, so I suppose I'll just agree with it. Doesn't sound entirely reasonable to me (US States aren't supposed to maintain things that look like armies and the idea might fall foul of that; but it also might not).

> ... It's a zero sum game: as a Californian, your tax dollars (whether state or federal) are now going to more objectively horrible things ...

The ideal would be Trump cuts spending, cuts taxes and then the Californians take their taxes and spend it on science funding.

I doubt that is going to happen, but the problem here is the taxes and the stuff Congress is going to be funding instead. Complain about that. If it was just a case of cut spending-cut-taxes then there is nothing stopping US citizens funding science to the same tune with the same money in a way that is more responsive to the details of what is going on. It was always a bad idea to route it through the Federal government, they don't have the bandwidth to debate this sort of issue when the world is looking like it might descend into a large multi-front conflict that could end up worse than WWII and there are riots and military deployments inside the US. It isn't important enough to deserve Congressional attention.

Although the article is from the LA Times, California is not the only state with science research. Since research benefits everyone, it makes sense and is more efficient to fund it under the largest possible umbrella.

Counterpoint: No it doesn't. I've included about as convincing an argument so hopefully that satisfies you.

But I feel that is a bit light for a comment so I'll go further - producing food is a benefit to everyone and that isn't funded under the largest possible umbrella. It is funded under a highly decentralised system and works unbelievably efficiently.

There is no reason to think science is different. Even the big projects that need a lot of money (eg, a big Fusion project like ITER) have shown to be fund-able by a disparate group of entities (ironically governments). There doesn't need to be a coordinating central government giving marching orders to make it happen. Interested parties can just fund science directly.

> Counterpoint: No it doesn't. I've included about as convincing an argument so hopefully that satisfies you.

I don't seen any evidence. Would you say that government investment in space, the internet, or medicine does not benefit the general public?

> producing food is a benefit to everyone and that isn't funded under the largest possible umbrella. It is funded under a highly decentralised system and works unbelievably efficiently.

Among other mechanisms, the federal government provides extensive financial support and incentives to food growers. Are you saying that federal food subsidies should be eliminated under the same principle as eliminating research?

> have shown to be fund-able by a disparate group of entities (ironically governments).

I feel like you are undermining your own point here.

> Interested parties can just fund science directly.

They can, but historically, profit-motivated non-governmental entities are sufficiently risk-averse that they are unwilling or unable to invest in basic research, i.e. such research that may or may not have a monetizable application. The internet is the classic example of this class of research.

I have some respect for arguments so I'll avoid the snark this time. However, I don't see how any of this is particularly relevant. It seems to be very pro-government but if you scroll up a bit you'll see my original post was arguing that in this instance the Californian government could fund this; if they care. So I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with.

> Are you saying that federal food subsidies should be eliminated under the same principle as eliminating research?

That sounds like a good idea to me. Probably, yes.

> If Californians have a problem with this, they do have the option to fund the science themselves

That's rather difficult when the federal government takes their tax money, and then:

1. Best-case: Spends it on their cronies and the states that elected it - while gleefully witholding disaster aid from Cali.

2. Worst-case: Spends it on great-leader-army-parades and illegally kidnapping people and deploying the military against California.

Let me turn it around - if flyover country is convinced that immigrants are ruining their glorious utopia, and is willing to destroy fundamental American rights and values to throw them all out - why the hell is it sending it's thugs into blue states? Their 'help' isn't wanted, especially when we get to foot the bill for the shakedown.

Sure, let’s start having Californians not have to pay federal taxes.

I genuinely am not joking, if the govt wants to go this direction then let’s welcome states rights to keep their money within their borders.

It wouldn't actually be a big deal. Some states would win a little and some would lose a little but it wouldn't be life changing for anyone. The cents on the dollar in and out flows fluctuate a lot year to year.

The bigger problem is that damn near every state bureaucracy has forgotten how to actually write and evaluate their own damn rules for all sorts of expenditures that are currently spec'd out on a "follow fed guidelines so we can apply for grants" basis.

> The cents on the dollar in and out flows fluctuate a lot year to year.

This doesn’t imply that the net flows average out to zero.

So what? No state is gonna to tits up because they're no longer getting $1.03 back for every dollar they send to daddy fed.

It'd be a giant nothingburger for the most part.

It isn't that small.

And the swing between states depending on how it's measured can be QUITE large.

As someone from a state that puts in a hell of a lot more than it gets out. I'd be glad for you to reduce my tax load, and let my state improve its services all at once! I can't speak of how happy I'd be.

Even if it is 10-20%, that's nice phat cut. Which isn't far off in the more extreme cases.

See that's the thing. Even the states that turn out ten cents on the dollar (in terms of tax money, not necessarily GDP) poorer would still likely consider themselves better off because they don't have to cater to fed regulations that are at best a compromise and at worst a capitulation to other states.

Those losing states still get to reap all sorts of savings by not doing things that are done at the behest of the feds. Like for example California has dragged its dick all over every policy involving indoor water and plumbing and outdoor rainwater and runoff management in just about the worst ways. Pretty much every state east of the Mississippi could stain to instantly gain more bang for their buck in every expenditure of that nature by simply creating their own (perhaps in cooperation with nearby states) sensible rules on the subject. It's just pants on head retarded that we've got desert states and wet states using the same rule book in this area. Repeat for all sorts of other subject where the sensible policy scoping level is something other than "the entire nation".

This is why I want it to happen.

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The biggest driver of increasing debt has been tax cuts for the rich. If you really cared about the national debt you would be campaigning hard against the proposed budget.

Since the 1960s, revenue from total taxation as a percent of gdp is unchanged. Not also the difference in tax revenue between Europe and America stems mostly from policies that tax the middle class not the "rich":

https://manhattan.institute/article/a-comprehensive-federal-...

The U.S. already taxes the rich—measured by both tax rates and tax revenues—at levels roughly equal to the OECD average. Yes, the other 38 OECD nations collect tax revenues that, on average, exceed the U.S. by 7.5% of GDP (at all levels of government). However, nearly this entire difference results from the other 38 OECD nations hitting their middle class with value-added taxes (VATs) that raise an average of 7.2% of GDP. And while the progressive avatars of Finland, Norway, and Sweden exceed U.S. tax revenues by 16% of GDP, that gap virtually disappears after accounting for the 14.5% of GDP in higher payroll and VAT revenues that broadly hit the Nordic middle class. Europe finances its progressive spending levels on the backs of the middle class, not the wealthy.[37]

This plan should be a must read for people from any spot along the American political spectrum.

If you want to start cutting money from the budget, cut the things that are the: defense spending. There is just so much waste defense procurement.

Defense won't do it.

https://manhattan.institute/article/a-comprehensive-federal-...

"Deep defense cuts. Since the 1980s, the Pentagon budget has fallen from 6% to 3% of GDP—not far above Europe’s target of 2%. Cutting U.S. defense spending to the levels pledged by European members of NATO would save 1% of GDP, or less than one-fifth of the Social Security and Medicare noninterest shortfall by the 2040s and 2050s."

Read the budget. Learn something. None of the partisan mantras solve the problem. The only solution is to trim ss, trim medicare, and raise taxes across the board.

To balance the budget we need to raise taxes (or stop lowering them), reduce the DOD budget (as it is hitting $1 trillion), and cut spending in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (all three are political third rails).

The rest of the budget almost doesn't matter.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

As a hypothetical, if we'd cut everything that isn't in the Social Security, Medicare, Defense, Interest, and Health categories we'd still have $169 billion in deficits. Odds are VA benefits will not be cut any time soon, so if that's preserved we still have $429 billion in deficits.

And we'll never actually cut all of these spending categories. This leaves us having to touch the untouchable and/or raising taxes to balance the budget and get the debt under control.

NASA's budget is a rounding error. Anyone serious about budget deficits should be focusing on increasing taxes on the wealthy, reducing DOD spending, and implementing a better, more affordable healthcare system.

It's all a tradeoff, will we get a better future from these nasa projects, or from spending the money on the currently planned tax cut extentions?

I'd argue that the tax cuts aren't as useful as nasa

I'm completely against the tax cuts, even though I think getting rid of tax on overtime and tips directly benefits lower income households and will be a stimulus for the economy.

Before Trump/Vance nuked US reputation the interest on US bonds was low and provided a safe asset to investors. Spending on scientific research was a no-brainer.

NASA could probably deal with their budget being cut by 20% or so.

The problem is the budget cut combined with the order to axe certain things in favor of other things (like human spaceflight) that happens at the same time as the (even larger) budget cut.

This.

NASA is intentionally hamstrung by congress. It's earmarks on earmarks on earmarks on pork. If they's just lets NASA do its priorities without letting every goddamn junior congressman drag their dick all over the budget damn near at the line item level you'd see twice as much get done for half the money.

That is misplaced. It is robust science and engineering that brings about consistent increases in productivity and introduction of new technologies. The cost of this science is extremely small compared to social assistance programs or the military. If cutting costs is truly a priority then it is necessary to go for where the money is really being spent, and NASA is a small fraction of the national budget.

The Republicans are planning to increase the deficit.

> EDIT: I don't support the tax cuts in the BBB, I think that's counteracting all the efforts to drop spending. But in talking about cuts in general, I think we do need to make painful cuts across the board.

NASA's budget in 2024 was ~24b USD, for the overall debt this is less than a drop in the bucket, for an agency doing cutting-edge R&D which has trickle down technological effects into the rest of society making multiples of their budget in advances to the US's technological prowess.

Are you really defending to cut their budget over so many other options? Yes, the cuts needs to come from somewhere but perhaps not from programs from an agency which has empirically proven to have a very high ROI?

No, everyone's budget needs to get cut. EVERYONE.

Perhaps there are more structural elements to be tackled where cuts won't be enough to balance the budget.

Starting with Medicaid/Medicare since it's a huge expenditure: why even bother running a system that has worse outcomes and is more expensive than a single-payer/socialised system?

There are many models to follow from successful countries, almost all of them would be cheaper than the current one, the population already pays for healthcare insurance, turn it into a tax to spread the insurance pool over the whole population, it's been proven to work.

Why not expand tax income instead of giving tax cuts to corporations and rich folks? It seems like the current arrangement is bankrupting the country, less public investment will cripple potential revenues of undiscovered technology, it's rare that a major new advancement comes straight out of private industry, they're usually pretty good at monetising public research (such as NASA, DARPA, etc.), why continuously give them tax cuts to then defund the whole foundation that actually enables them to even exist?

Sure. Let's just not give a giant handout to the wealthy.

How is a tax cut a handout to the wealthy? The wealthy still have to earn the money. If the Doctors top tax rate goes from 35% to 30%, and his combined State Local and fee burden goes from 50% to 45%, he still has to perform surgeries to get the money. It's not a handout. he's keeping more of what he earned.

The wealthy use a progressively more and more marginal amount of their income for necessities. Consequently, their income gets pumped into assets, which produce still more wealth for them. There are different ways of taxing people. You can tax their income, you can tax their capital gains, you can tax their wealth, you can tax inheritance, etc... It is basically understood at this point that if wealth is relatively untaxed, wealth inequality grows. If wealth inequality is large, society destabilizes.

The example of a doctor isn't really meaningful in isolation. It is also pretty reductive to think only in terms of simple percentages and how much of "what they have earned" they keep. Different parts of the world have a different cost of living. If you live in the states and make $200K per year, you are capable of living a comfortable life anywhere in the country. If you make $400K, how much more comfortable? What about $800K? If the doctor is making $800K and their tax rate drops by half, then what? There is a sense of how much is reasonable for someone to contribute back to society, and if the amount they contribute drops significantly so that they are perceived as not contributing enough, then it is fair to regard that tax cut as a handout.

How much of that 37 Trillion is NASA though? According to the article this reduces it to the 1960s, not 2019.

Well apparently the regime does have extra money to spend on defense. Even though the US already spends as much as, the what? Number 2,3,4,5 and 6 combined or something? Apparently defense needs this money even though there are no more missions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Can you elaborate on how the country would be hamstrung with unaffordable debt? Like, what effects would that have on the country/citizens?

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2025/05/22/japan/gre... Japan would be a classic example of a developed country hamstrung by unaffordable debt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt-trap_diplomacy While Chinese Debt Trap Diplomacy is a classic example of the trap poorer countries can fall into with unaffordable debt

Sure, thank you for the links. I was hoping for the original poster to respond with what they thought being "hamstrung by unaffordable debt" would look like for the United States.

Do you have a vision of that?

The article on Japan illustrated debt looks different between different countries (although Japan and Argentina are always economic exceptions). It's the same with people, I suppose.

Someone with a $100k annual salary and $100k in debt can be a good thing (a mortgage or a cashflowing business) or a bad thing (credit card debt, high-interest student loans and no degree). Although someone with that same salary and $10MM in debt would be a different story, almost regardless of what they did with the money. So there's definitely an upper limit to debt.

Everyone supports spending cuts but is increasing defence spending and cutting science funding the solution ?

>my children living in a US that is hamstrung with unaffordable debt for their entire lifetimes

Have you not lived in the same US that is trillions in debt your entire life?

Also, note my comment up above. If this was about finances, why is Trump's budget proposal increasing the debt?

NASA budget for 2024 was $25 billions.

DoD budget was $850 billions.

Just saying...

I mean yeah, pretty easily. We just have to you know, not have a massive tax cut for the rich people that the Republicans are currently trying to pass.

The plan is working then.

Leading with "Trump" just makes it political/ideological. People need to stop making "the personality" the center of these discussions, because people who like him will just like whatever he does, and immediately disagree with you. Focus on the issue instead and people have to debate on merits rather than ideology.

He’s the President of the United States and the one (officially) making these decisions. It’d be absurd not to include him in talking about these issues.

I think you could very easily debate the merit of such a cut without talking about who proposed it. If you can't talk about the issue without talking about who proposed it, it's likely you don't actually care about the issue itself.

Pretending that Trump isn't a key part of what's going on isn't some kind of noble pure objectivity, it's just being willfully ignorant. Politics doesn't go away just because you ignore it. You have to address reality as it is, not some clean abstraction.

Or until you know… some future President restores the NASA budget?

The budget will shutdown many projects that have been running for decades. Those projects generally can't be restarted.

So we will see the end of James Webb telescope?

It's possible. It depends on how deep the cuts are and how much freedom scientists have in choosing. Scientists would prefer to save the major data collection projects, but the political side has stated a preference for manned exploration. What we know will be lost is all of the less politically armed but more useful small projects, including the ones that are used to study our home planet.

Well, manned exploration does sound pretty cool though.

Sounds like a good summary of the Trump administration -- fund the high profile, low bang for buck projects and cut the boring high bang for buck projects.

Putting people on a moon isn’t low bang for the buck IMO.

> $200B to put a man on the moon vs < $100M to put a robot on the moon.

It is not that massive of a cost. $3 to $4 billion to put men on the moon. And if you’re doing it regularly you can eventually make optimizations to cost and bring that price down at least to 10%. But we’re out of practice. It’s been almost 60 years.

But of course by then the 19 in flight space probes would have floated into the abyss of space costing even more money to redo those project from scratch...

That will be a new NASA institution. The old NASA will be gone.

Wherever budget cuts are proposed, you can rely upon detractors to present the issue in apocalyptic terms. If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending. Furthermore, if we accepted the premise promoted by some commenters here, then research, which is presented as incredibly valuable - would be unable to be funded or valued in the private market. For these reasons I regard this topic to be filled with political hyperbole.

Yes, there will be occasions where valuable research is funded by the state. It doesn't follow that this is the only way to fund research. Arguments can be made for either case. Depending on your ideological background you may find some of them amenable. Pragmatism may also play a role. However, presentations like this are completely divorced from reason.

The sticking point for me is that it’s such a risky bet to assume that something else will fill the gap.

Much of the research impacted by cuts is not the type that private industry has typically conducted because it can’t be performed with a specific profitable result in mind. It’s the kind of research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.

So there’s a decent chance that this kind of research largely just won’t happen any more, which is a net negative for everybody. Numerous advancements will either never happen or instead occur at the hand of other developed countries’ research apparatuses.

This is a common response here and elsewhere. Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital. This is exactly the attitude I was speaking to in my comment above. It would be rare to find a spending program which the proponents didn't claim was incredibly valuable. Here on HN we have an interest in technology. It fits that we value some of the discoveries of NASA.

Down thread, you'll find others suggesting that defense spending should be cut. It isn't hard to imagine nor would you need to look far to find a hawkish interventionist. These communities will assure us that defense spending is vital, absolutely vital not only to our own well-being, but to support the globalized trading system as well.

Choose a topic. Pick a niche. Under every rock from K Street to Capitol Hill, you will find a bureaucrat, politician or lobbyist to justify more spending. Some may like to spend more here and less there. Others might like to spend more everywhere. Almost all of them will have particular issues for which spending cuts are beyond consideration.

>...research that had wound up beneficial in the long run indirectly due to incidental discoveries and unexpected connections.

This is a good point. What is missing here, are the missed opportunities in the private sector, which would have also been, unexpected. We don't know the things which were not built. We do not know what all of those scientists and engineers may have discovered or built, had they not been allocated into government funded research. For me, this is a problem with the post-hoc rationalizations.

> Generally every state allocation of funds is presented as incredibly vital

It’s quite likely that many of them are actually vital, with long term costs outstripping short term savings from cuts to an enormous degree. Nobody is doing the math to figure this out, though. The cuts aren’t calculated, but instead wide and largely blind. Some kind of major fallout is unavoidable when operating in such a manner.

In reality the deepest savings to be had are probably in doing things like cracking down on endless chains of government subcontracting, ousting the numerous middlemen pocketing money the whole way, and cutting places where excess clearly leads to little or no return. That’s a lot of work and takes time, effort, and expertise and doesn’t make a voterbase-placating big media splash though, and so there’s no chance of that happening.

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== If we believed all of these claims, then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending==

What is the goal of cutting government spending? Most would say it is to balance the Federal budget. The controlling party is planning to do the opposite, so the argument kind of falls apart.

The goal of cutting government spending is ultimately to reduce the amount of resources drained out of the economy through taxes/inflation.

Balancing the budget is useful insofar as it reduces the resources that will need to be drained out of the economy in the future to pay interest on our growing debt (currently 11% of all Federal spending).

Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things. Even money to pay down debt isn't removed from the economy since the majority of that debt is held by US citizens who use that money to buy things.

> Tax money isn't drained out of the economy. The money used for NASA goes right back into the economy, since they use it to buy things.

That's not remotely how this works. By this logic, wars are actually free since the money spent goes to defense contractors who use it to buy things and hire employees. We can have an unlimited military budget with no negative repercussions!

As the sibling commenter pointed out, you're engaging in a classic economic fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

To help you avoid this in the future, remember that "the real economy is not money, it is goods & services". Any government spending necessarily takes goods and services out of the real economy and allocates them towards things the government wants done. Some of those things might have a positive ROI, but with government spending there's absolutely no guarantee of that since they're getting those resources through taxes, not through voluntary economic transactions.

The broken windows parable is about causing destruction and then repairing it, which thankfully isn't what NASA is doing. If you read your Wikipedia link you would see that this was never meant to apply to all government spending. To help you avoid this in the future, read the links before you try to correct people.

The fallacy is thinking all money spent "goes right back into the economy" and ignoring opportunity costs. If you pay people to break windows and then repair them, that money "goes right back into the economy" but it's still a net negative.

Government has no mechanism to ensure the money it spends is on things that have a positive ROI, since the money they spend is obtained by force, not by voluntary transactions.

==Government has no mechanism to ensure the money it spends is on things that have a positive ROI==

Sure they do, elections.

And this thread is talking about the result of that, and quite a lot of people seem to think this "control via elections" thing isn't working that well.

Most democracies don’t have 100% vote share or approval going to one party, so we have disagreements. There are also lots of other elections that happen more often than every 4 years.

The broken windows fallacy isn’t about government spending. The parable never mentions governments or taxes, you have added that piece. Voluntary economic transactions don’t have a positive ROI by virtue of being voluntary. People and companies engage in negative ROI activities all the time.

People and private companies that are reliant on voluntary transactions for their funding will go bankrupt and be forced to stop if they spend too much on negative ROI activities. Governments can just raise taxes/borrow more money and keep spending until the whole country implodes, unless voters stop them.

== if they spend too much on negative ROI activities==

This is the key, and it has nothing to do with being private or public. You have brought that bias into the discussion.

> it has nothing to do with being private or public

It has everything to do with being public or private. Private companies exist to generate a positive ROI; that's literally their whole purpose. Companies with high ROIs attract massive investment and expand, companies with low or negative ROIs cease to exist. It's a self-optimizing system.

Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.

== Government programs have no concern for ROI and that's precisely the problem; they just siphon more resources out of the private sector and keep going regardless of whether there's any return or not.==

You have inserted your personal bias and declared it a fact. Many government programs have ended. Many programs have very specific concern for ROI. Government has an ROI timeline lasting generation-to-generation (see: moon landing, interstate, quantum investments), a company has a timeline lasting quarter-to-quarter (see: SEC filings).

Different entities can also measure ROI differently. To you ROI means positive net income and growth. It could mean patent or litigation protection for a large company.

>Tax money isn't drained out of the economy.

You're fractionally engaging in the broken windows fallacy.

Every time we pay for something that wouldn't have got done otherwise it comes at our expense.

That's not to say that some of these things aren't worth doing. But there are a whole great many things the feds spend money on that aren't worth doing.

If two dollars go to invading some stupid sandbox and one dollar goes to Nasa and the NASA dollar pays back a buck fiddy we're half a dollar poorer at the end of the day.

In my field (biotech/pharma), the private market already invests significantly in R&D. This funding largely investigates how to translate basic research (done by gov, edu) into new drugs. You are proposing that the private market covers the whole pipeline.

This will not work because fundamental research is high risk, and even if it is successful it takes decades to turn into profit. No lender or investor is going to finance that kind of pipeline given the opportunity cost; the returns are just not high enough.

You think you could fundraise billions of dollars for science from private sources? You're talking about a $100B (spread out over the next decade) bill on the sidewalk. I don't think there's anything less realistic than the idea that there would be that amount of money available for the asking but unclaimed...

Well, historically, we used to have a robust industrial R&D that even did basic research: Bell Labs (astrophysics, semiconductor physics), IBM, Xerox, RCA, Kodak and many other; even Ford had an R&D lab with physicists. Their record was quite impressive, as we all know. The weird trick that made that work was a tax policy that supported that. IIRC, R&D was expense as opposed to amortization, together with a laxer trust regime that allowed large profits that could pay for all that.

Those are postwar examples, which occurred in unison with the academic funding boom, the space race, etc. The way it worked was you'd have public funding for basic facts ("aluminum is 2.7 times denser than water"), and then scientists would be hired by companies to apply those facts. The revenue model doesn't work out for monetizing basic facts, so to have an advanced industry you need both systems of funding.

Xerox was when the US was on the up-trend, not committing economic suicide at the whim of a mad king.

Well all those companies are dead now... so... clearly spending all that money on research didn't really pan out for them.

I don't agree with the GP either, but I'm pretty sure there are more than 100 B of private capital which are, on the big scheme of things, being spent on quite frivolous things.. if at all. Which reinforces your point: some things good for society as a whole need to be funded by taxes.

The key is that they are investing in frivolous things rather than fundamental medical research because the latter is higher risk and lower reward in money terms. As you say, its precisely the opposite when the metric is future human health.

This is a tiny portion of government spending though. You could completely eliminate the NASA budget entirely and it'd make absolutely no difference on the federal government's bottom line. The NASA budget, the NIH budget, the NSF budget, the USAID budget, the EPA budget, the NOAA budget - all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies combined do not amount to more than the margin of error in the US government's annual yearly deficit.

So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut.

So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt?

The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending.

I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?

"all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies" Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing. I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups supporting the Contras made the CIA offer a high ROI. Those black ops planes carrying cocaine into the United States had some valuable cargo. And yet, after all this came to light I would have had no problem with Bill Clinton reducing the size and scope of the CIA, even if it was offering a high ROI and "was useful"

Useful to whom?

Well first and foremost to these people:

https://pepfar.impactcounter.com/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/children-die-after-usaid-... https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat... https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/nx-s1-5413322/aid-groups-say-... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z

>then it would be impossible to cut the scope of government spending

Despite becoming insular and retreating to being a hermit nation, already outrageous military spending is increasing by $100B+. Add a few trillion in tax cuts for the mega rich.

In the context of those things, dismissing the harm to NASA, with its relatively tiny budget, seems absolutely perverse.

NASA are smart well intentioned people, therefore must be tortured to satisfy the mob.

If it were cutting back, I can see your point. This, however, is a gutting. The proposal is a nearly 25% cut in one year to a funding level not seen since 1961. Talent will leave, institutional knowledge will leave, and rapidly. Knowledge transfer will not happen and projects beyond those explicitly cut may falter (people work on multiple projects).

Keep in mind, NASA accounts for ~0.4% of the national budget. We're not saving a ton of money here, just killing expertise and ceding space excellence to other countries

The fact that you think scientific research, and NASA specifically, are driving our budgetary shortfalls shows your own bias.

You don't cut government budgets because it's intrinsically righteous, you do it to save money that you can then spend on other things. You could cut the NASA budget to zero and it wouldn't get us out of our current fiscal hole.

And it is incontrovertible from any reading of the history that government support is the reason we have modern air travel, the internet, and GPS, among many other facets of modern life. There is no compelling argument I've heard that the private sector can or would develop such things on their own, unless you're arguing that we should be completely reliant on the occasional eccentric billionaire having an interest in something scientific and setting up a foundation.

The problem is the throw out the baby with the bathwater approach to the current administration. Moreover, government funded science often already operates on lean, shoestring budgets. In order to make America great you need to be at the forefront of science and technology, not retreat from it.

What’s divorced from reality is your ignorance about these projects and how tight their budget already is.

You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient.

> You’re rejecting arguments because of ideology, how convenient.

You're being generous. The current administration has no ideology. The cuts are due to partisanship, and they have selected all of science as their political enemies.

Given the changes to R&D taxation and cuckoo tariffs I don't think private research will want to start a lab in the US like Bell did.

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