HN.zip

The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding

192 points by walrus01 - 81 comments
soundworlds [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"Humanities" is literally on the list. As in, do not fund any Humanities research.

Also not allowed to use "solar energy", "Geothermal energy", "EV infrastructure", "electrification", "Hydrogen energy".

Welp, America, you either gotta kick this administration out, or enjoy cosplaying the 1800s.

hahahaa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Car powered by coal combustion via fast energy transmission systems. "Chemical coal".
Forgeties79 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
My friend lost their research grant because they had “accessibility” - they were going to make sure to accommodate screen readers.
protocolture [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>enjoy cosplaying the 1800s.

Thats what they voted for, dont know why they would get rid of them now.

whatever1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Math professors at my alma mater were instructed to remove references to “inequalities” to increase their chances of getting funded. The <= and >= type of inequalities.
superhuzza [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, same with "diversity" for cellular diversity in the brain. Millions of dollars of grant money withdrawn.
beej71 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We had some trouble with a geology grant that mentioned "mineral inclusion".
transcriptase [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Meanwhile there was a period of time in Canada where to have a chance at funding from federally funded programs, regardless of how absurd or tenuous the relationship to the work, one had to prominently shoehorn “climate change” and “equity” into every grant proposal.

Even provinces and municipalities followed suit. Non-profit community org looking to install some signage and a trash receptacle at the start of a walking trail? Please explain in 300-500 words how this advances the causes of DEI. Studying the genome of a viral pathogen impacting raspberry farmers? Explain how the DNA extraction kits, centrifuge, hot water bath, and pipette tips you’re requesting funding for relate to challenges arising from our changing climate.

cwnyth [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Citation needed.
Yokohiii [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The comment is removed. I was also a bit confused, so I've looked it up. So a very rough overview: Under Trudeau in Canada some regulations around gender politics and climate change, got a bit out of hand in terms of absurd requirements to state how they are helpful in the matter. Even for trivial things, they were not a hard requirements but helpful.

Unlike the US gov in this post, they didn't slash projects with good intentions, they just changed and clarified the requirements.

Correction welcome, I am far away from canadian politics.

transcriptase [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Interesting that an entirely true comment has been removed via flagging. I not only helped write grants during the peak of that trend, but reviewed applications where I was expected to evaluate how other applicants satisfied those priorities of the funding body.
dymk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Because it’s a stupid whataboutism
cwnyth [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Same. I welcome correction, but I need evidence first. I'm not saying there wasn't something silly going on, but the commenter made it seem like the Canadian government did the opposite of DOGE to the same degree rather than just encourage connections to broader societal impact. Such a claim needs to be sourced.
Jtsummers [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The comment isn't removed, it's [dead]. Turn on showdead in your profile and you can still see it.
what [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Weird that you want a citation for this but the GP.
cwnyth [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You find it odd I don't need additional sources for the link that comes sourced and has been in the news for the past few years? I find it "weird" you don't need citations at all.
qsera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Humans are a stupid stupid stupid bunch!
wnevets [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Its important to note that US deficit spending is breaking records. They can't even pretend that they're saving money.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/u-budget-d...

hahahaa [3 hidden]5 mins ago
432bn/month is that right?
happosai [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You would think the "Freedom of speech" crowd was up to to arms over a list of banned words from the deep government.

But no, they still seem to busy on Twitter ä being angry about a Muslim Mayor in New York.

dnautics [3 hidden]5 mins ago
since when does freedom of speech cover "getting money from the government". there is broad latitude for to government to restrict the speech of employees in general (if you are a nonappointed employee of the executive branch you cannot lobby the legislature as a matter of separation of powers, if youre in the military or privy to top secret materials, theres a ton of things you can't say).
walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They can't seem to decide whether Zohran Mamdai is going to first implement total sharia law, or full red banner style communism. In response I have already seen people printing a few satirical tshirts with a mishmash of soviet era/hammer and sickle iconography and minarets and moons glorifying the Socialist Peoples Republic of Mamadanistan.
hn_throwaway_99 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
These people who work for this administration are all so grossly and maliciously incompetent.
throwaway27448 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They are quite competent at causing enough chaos for those with inside knowledge and wealth to exploit.
slater [3 hidden]5 mins ago
And for the next administration to be left holding the bag, teeing it up for another round of "see? SEEEE???? they're terrible at the economy!!" if a Democratic president wins the election
gmueckl [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The next presidential campaign should narrowly focus on the long term effects of existing policies if not corrected and direct blame with name dropping. There is no more moral high ground in this fight. The ugly needs to be pinned on the current administration in way that it can never be removed again.

But of course the Democrats will try to keep their heads high and try to float over all of this mess instead of throwing the dirt back that gets flung around. It's not working anymore.

walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's easier to understand if you consider they might literally be agents of a foreign government.
hamper653 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Never see malice where incompetence is a sufficient explanation.
walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Could be a core cadre of 5% of clearly compromised or foreign agents recruiting a vast amount of fools and putting them in the positions where they can do the most damage.
conception [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They are making hundreds of millions of dollars on the grift. They seem quite comptent.
spit2wind [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Some direct quotes are,

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

We want to put them in trauma.”

That was Russel Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget and key author or Project 2025.

Trump also said, "a whole civilization will die tonight".

hamper653 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
These people aren’t very bright, are they?
dandanua [3 hidden]5 mins ago
more likely alien race
Drupon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind.
walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.

You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.

Varelion [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Should be criminal.
reverius42 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A lot of it is! We live in lawlessness (for those at the top) in the US.
piloto_ciego [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Man, this is the kind of thing I have been trying to tell people. It's unsettling to think about, but I'm like, "look, there are no rules now, it's all a negotiation, the only real laws are the laws of physics and the rules someone selectively enforces under the threat of violence."

It would do us good if we remember this, because this sort of the basic state of nature that most people have lived under most of human history. I'm not saying this is how it should be, but a lot of people are still living in the pearl-clutched "but, that's against the rules!" despite there being basically no real rules for a decade.

When people realize that it's all nonsense, it's going to get weird.

hibikir [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.

All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.

walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.
piloto_ciego [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is fantastically interesting, thanks!
throwaway27448 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
'The last decade has been the Democrats clinging onto the rulebook going "but a dog can't play basketball!" while a dog fucking dunks on us over and over' -@Arr
BLKNSLVR [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We are _in_ the weird stage. The President is someone who has realised the nonsense, because people around him for his whole life have enabled and facilitated the nonsense in order to earn some of his dad's money. And now, instead of his dad's money backing him, he has the US' money, he's got a whole new cabal of enablers and facilitators, and a line as long as roughly 30% of the US population awaiting to fill any role they could get to feed off that fat pipe.

But, yes, when this filters down, and it has started, there's going to need to be a significant amount of legislative strength shown in order to stop the wall from collapsing entirely.

BrenBarn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We're going to need more than just "legislative strength" within the framework of our existing government, because this has shown that that framework is inadequate. I don't see a path to true recovery without a Nuremberg-style process in which essentially everyone who held any position of authority in this administration is called to account, in a manner that does not assume that that process must be done in accordance with pre-existing laws. As a simple example, it will require ignoring the Supreme Court ruling that the president is immune to facing consequences for "official acts" he has taken. Most likely it will require ignoring or scrapping the Supreme Court entirely.
wahnfrieden [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Won’t matter as long as people have Netflix and Chipotle
sublinear [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
macintux [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Do not “both sides” this level of corruption and incompetence.
mrtesthah [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Following the law is not a matter of partisan politics.
zmgsabst [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sure it is — see the Democrats refusing to stop discriminating based on protected class, despite that being illegal.

Quotas, affirmative action, and now DIE have all been ruled illegal bigotry by the US Supreme Court, but Democrats can’t and won’t stop being bigots.

I can’t take a party who has flouted civil rights laws my entire lifetime whining about “muh rule of law!” seriously.

ajross [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What's the counterexample of significant funding withdrawn by democratic administrations because of "possibly conservative" language in the output?

"Tone deaf" seems not to be capturing the essence of the malfeasance here.

rightbyte [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think it is some sort of whataboutism without any regard to proportions. Some people have a really hard time emotionally dealing with systems that occusionally fail.
zmgsabst [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They refused to give money unless your application included a section explaining how you supported Democrat social ideology, during the Biden administration.

So called DIE-statements.

qsera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
sunshinesnacks [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Over-correcting from too much competence? Can’t tell if that’s what you meant (presumably sarcastically) or if you mean over-correcting from too much previous attention to DEI…
qsera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Competence does not require correction.

It is when there is too much stupidity going on that

* Even large number of fairly average people can see it happening...

* large number of fairly average people tries to correct it and overshoots the target, because you know, they are a large number of average people..

The cycle continues...

I won't go into specifics, because read the above.

Yokohiii [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You are governed by fairly average people.

As a fairly above average person you can certainly adapt.

jasonlotito [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Competence does not require correction.

Correct, which is why an even larger number of fairly average and intelligent people are wondering why we are correcting.

> It is when there is too much stupidity going on

Exactly. There is too much stupidity going on in government right now. Exactly.

> I won't go into specifics, because read the above.

Because you don't want to get corrected?

qsera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
He he he he he he.....
floren [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Biologists I know were reporting that they'd changed their grant proposals to study e.g. ovarian cancer in "non-male" mice
BLKNSLVR [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Testosterone-challenged mice?

Not sure if that would get additional funding or have it cut.

dluan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Americas cultural revolution
dandanua [3 hidden]5 mins ago
ancestral values coming back
giardini [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Merely being on a list doesn't cancel research - other factors are involved. But as a first pass methodology for identifying garbage studies and people giving money away to politically-unfavorable groups, this seems like a good start!8-))
ChrisArchitect [3 hidden]5 mins ago
dools [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The trump admin is a hive of scum and villainy worthy of a comic book universe, and Musk is inextricably linked. Thus anyone using twitter or grok or buying a Tesla or using starlink is complicit.

EDIT: or working for these companies!! Couldn’t pay me enough to do it.

BLKNSLVR [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Musk is inextricably linked

That's understating it. Musk was the lead role in the cutting, he'd have OK'd the list if not partially authored it.

inigyou [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"admin" is what we call a regime that works properly. This one doesn't, so it's a "regime".
wiml [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I guess this is from the Bush-era usage of "regime"? It doesn't normally have a negative implication.
deadbabe [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder if just injecting a typo into each banned word when its used will be enough to bypass the keyword search for auto-banning.
walrus01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Or take a page from IDN homograph attacks in phishing/whatever and replace certain 'a', 'e', 'o' letters with their unicode equivalent that's not English.
etchalon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is what right-wing Twitter brain gets you.
forestrywat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's just "Twitter brain" at this point, right? Hard to imagine anyone leftish still being there.
bluecalm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Why not use an LLM to filter research they don't want to fund? Keywords list seem like the dumbest way to go about it.
rjrjrjrj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"Dumbest way to go about it" is SOP for this administration.
secretsatan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They did though, an llm filter is just as dumb. Don”t they have those interviews with the edgelord doge employees trying to justify the stuff they killed?
secretsatan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Adding to this, i think llms are just part of their game, they know well enough they aren’t accurate, but it plays into comments like this, where we’ll think an llm would make a smarter decision, but it’s just a smokescreen, they’re already looking at gaming the bots, musk trying to get grok to abide by his petty worldview is the most obvious ploy. But they’re already obfuscating sources of information as a matter of course, soon, we won’t know anything anymore, we’ll have to trust their machines.
blints [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Under the previous administration there were keyword lists that ensured that not only would you not get funding, but were subjected to a humiliating self-criticism session before being professionally ruined.
mrexroad [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Citation?
secretsatan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It’s the usual stuff, they shut down speech on all sorts of topics, like the superiority of white christian men over everyone else
protocolture [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>And some or all of the Black students across three sections of the course were offended by what they’d heard. So they wrote a letter to the dean of the Marshall School of Business, Geoffrey Garrett, among others, describing Patton as insensitive and incapable of teaching the three-week intensive communications course.

The Biden administration is some students now?