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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Reuters:

Trump orders sweeping freeze for federal grants and loans

Trump order set to halt supply of HIV, malaria drugs to poor countries, sources say

Apparently based on this memo (pdf).

This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.

Also, impoundment? We'll see?

The question is if it's purposefully crude

Depends on what you mean by 'purposefully crude'. Most government-waste-cutting enthusiasts have a dubious understanding of the causes of government inefficiency, have an ideological presupposition that government spending is a waste, and have never heard the term 'market failure'. The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence. My view is that "they have no idea what they're doing" is significantly more likely than deliberate clumsiness.

There's a side problem wherein the major drivers of government spending are politically untouchable but you need to grandstand about how you're making cuts so you attack the Everything Else bucket even though it tends to be short-sighted penny-wise behavior.

The result tends to be that they approach the problem by driving a bulldozer through Chesterton's fence.

I am a big fan of Chesterton's fence but I don't think that it really applies here. The US government's wasteful spending on creating novel coronaviruses in countries with poor biolab security policies is in no way a tradition that we don't understand the reason for. These programs aren't fences, they're noxious externality generators that have caused an incredible amount of suffering and economic damage. Furthermore, we actually understand the reasons behind this spending to a great degree - to hand out wealth to people who know how to manipulate the machinery of the US government. This cutting of funding might be bad for the infrastructure of the deep state, but nobody objects to chemotherapy on the basis that you might hurt the tumor.

Nowadays I'm writing my own grants for my research and talk enough with the other side to understand their reasoning and tbh the entire grant-based funding scheme has horrible, horrible structural incentives. To begin with, both sides have a strong incentive to bloat. You know what is more prestigious than managing 50k grants? It's managing 100k grants. On the grant writer side, if a grant is offering 25k but we only have a small project that needs 10k for some extra consumables, what do you think we'll do? Exactly, I say a pilot single cell RNAseq experiment for 4 of the samples adding up to 12k is totally a great idea and make the grant sound as if this was the plan from the start (and it sounds really prestigious since scRNA-seq is a reasonably new tech that the committee deciding the grant is likely to be impressed). This is most obvious in the fact that you're not just not rewarded for saving money, you're actively punished (if you didn't spend all the money you were granted, this makes people angry - they don't want it back - and it's significantly less likely to get your next grant). Second, as already alluded, it's all strongly optimized to sound new, exceptional and fancy. If people handle their own money, they want boring, reliable and necessary (which is imo severely missing in current science). Third, behind closed doors the money often gets shuffled around for other purposes, so the text of the project proposal does not even necessarily reflect the project on-the-ground very well anyway (this is worst for very large projects in which an easy overview of point-by-point financing for every little consumable, staff or outsourced services is just not feasible).

And I'm quite sure that I'm in a comparatively functional field - at least in principle we're investigating stuff like new treatments for cancer, which particular variants cause genetic diseases and similar. I have a colleague working with humanities people and not only are they explicitly identifying as activists fighting for disabled rights as opposed to, you know, scientists, they also try to bully her into stopping her research since investigating severe inborn disabilities is ableist. But the official projects they're part of all sound really nice and positive at first glance.

Also, the problem on cutting the other way around - looking for the X most-stupid-sounding projects - has been tried multiple times, in multiple countries, by different libertarian-inclined parties and it just doesn't work. If you try to go through all funding one-by-one and cut the most stupid sounding, you will first have to fight and justify a lot "but why this", then you're likely getting hit with a lawsuit that tries to prove that you did cut funding in some discriminatory way (which isn't unlikely because there's probably some equally stupid project that you didn't hit since you tried to be more targeted), and then after all the fighting you maybe saved 0.1% of the budget and might not even have hit the actually worst and most useless programs, because the descriptions are optimized to sound nice and the structures behind it are optimized to hide wasteful spending.

At this point I'm willing to turn it on the head: Cut as much as possible, then reinstitute only the absolutely necessary (ideally now not even grant-dependent anymore - if it's necessary it shouldn't be grant-dependent!), and then everyone has to prove again that whatever they're doing is actually a good ROI for society. If my research gets cut, that's probably worth it & I just go into industry.

Speaking of fences - do you have any guesses how did the US survive with government spending per capita dramatically lower than now for the first couple hundred years of its history?

Big thing - most people didn't live long enough to get old, and the ones who did were supported by their children, or they weren't. We (across Western civilisation - this is profoundly not US-specific) have socialised the cost of elder care (including healthcare), and didn't realise at the time we did it how big the bill could get when everyone would survive to old age.

Medium thing - as spiritual coercion (the implied threat of donate to church-funded public services or go to hell) stopped working, we had to use a lot more temporal coercion to fund the sort of thing that used to be funded by churches and is now funded by the State. Also, the main relevant service is education, and at some point we made the (mostly correct) decision that education through high school should be universal, which dramatically raises the cost and makes charging parents impractical (because a substantial minority can't pay).

Medium thing - post sexual revolution, we normalised single motherhood. That requires a system of transfer payments to single mothers. (Child support is insufficient, because the percentage of a man's potential earning power that the child support infrastructure can extract is MUCH lower than the percentage that a wife and kids can extract in an intact marriage by relying on natural affection).

Small thing - more complex societies need more infrastructure, which costs money, and is often easier to fund through the state than privately, although libertarians have found rare historical examples of things like roads being funded privately.

By not having 11 super carriers or providing an inflation adjusted pension to every citizen.

how did the US survive with government spending per capita dramatically lower than now for the first couple hundred years of its history

Since I'm sure you're aware of the differences, at least at a high level, I will note that there's quite a bit of daylight between "the country would not survive" and "abolishing these programs would be a net negative". Especially given, as mentioned, that the major cost drivers are politically untouchable.

I will note that there's quite a bit of daylight between "the country would not survive" and "abolishing these programs would be a net negative".

Ha, my bad, unnecessary rhetorical flair. Of course, this is a complex topic and big spending can be broken down and justified in any number of ways. I just had strong impression that you're from the team that says "no, it's okay to bulldoze over this fence, you just watch!", not the other one, so seeing you, in the context of this discussion, attempting to wield this weapon left me briefly disoriented.

Even today after all the money is spent on defence, veteran benefits, SSI, medicare, other health progams (medicaid), income security (TANF, Section 8, WIC etc), and eduation. The remaining stuff that comes to mind when you think of government (basically all the bureaucracies, parks, etc) adds up to a bit over $100 billion so far this year or about 5.5% of 1.8 trillion spent so far this fiscal year.

What percentage of the deficit though?

So far fiscal 2025 YTD it's about 14%. The money goes to the big transfers. Last year Medicare, Social Security, Defense, Interest, Medicaid, Income Security and Veterans Benefits and housing were 80% of the budget and 430% of the deficit.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Last year Medicare, Social Security, Defense, Interest, Medicaid, Income Security and Veterans Benefits and housing were 80% of the budget and 430% of the deficit.

Sure, OK -- but if you're trying to kill the deficit, grabbing whatever low-hanging portion of that 14% exists while you're figuring out what you can do about the big, popular things seems logical?

National debt was much lower, so very little interest to pay; no social welfare programs; small army except in wartime; no horde of "alphabet agencies" interfering with everything.

Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina or Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff? The government workers I know tell me it’s a joke and few people work hard. (True of white collar private sector too)

Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina

Argentina is a basket case, so the chance of a positive outcome from pushing Argentina hard in roughly the right direction without thinking about the details is high. I would have given Milei a 20% chance of success if he applied a Trumpian chainsaw and a 50% chance of success if he spent a week thinking and cut the 10 most obviously stupid things.

America is the richest and most successful country in the world, and considerably better governed than average, so pushing hard in roughly the right direction is almost certain to make things worse unless you do the work to find out precisely what the right direction is. The 10 most obviously stupid things to cut aren't as stupid as they look, because the US system is functional enough that anything that obviously stupid either has already been cut or is hard to cut because the stupid is supported by a powerful constituency.

Did you also maybe believe that Milei would fail in Argentina

No, but then, Argentina is not the US.

Twitter would collapse when Elon fired 80% of staff

Twitter is a billionaire vanity project (or alternatively, an influence op). It is markedly worse as a service post Musk takeover and sacking 80% of the staff hasn't made it any less unprofitable.

The divisions of Twitter where 80% of the staff were sacked stopped functioning (temporarily in the case of HR and finance, permanently and deliberately in the case of content moderation, permanently and accidentally in the case of ad sales). The actual numbers haven't been published, but my read is that only about 25% of the core technical staff were sacked.

I've never worked in government, but I've witnessed how bloat and apathy have rendered many workers borderline-useless in the private sector—where the profit motive demands efficiency. So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.

where the profit motive demands efficiency

The profit motive in the private sector largely doesn't apply to individual employees (or rather, doesn't demand efficiency), who are mostly incentivized to work just hard enough to not have to worry about being fired.

What the market really does is punish (too much) inefficiency. But that logic can't be applied to the government, because the government can't fail (at least, not in the way a mismanaged firm fails).

So I have to suppose that bloat is off the scales where no such motive exists.

Per FRED, Federal staffing was approximately 2.3 million in 1955 and 3 million in 2025 (and has remained steadyish since the late 60s). The US population in 1955 was 160m; in 2025 it was 340m.

Fed staffing is a politically contentious issue and there is a lot of pressure to keep it low even as the country grows. Bloat largely comes in the form of contractors - since hiring adequate civil servants is politically impossible, contractors are used to make up the shortfall, and if you thing the Feds have bad incentives, wait until you meet the contractors. USG habitually overpays for services for the sake of keeping nominal headcount down.

I can understand the logic of cutting off all funding first and then re-opening the spigot only to programs that reveal themselves as essential, so I will reserve judgement on this policy (if it even survives its first appearance in court) until we see how the second part is supposed to work. If it ends up taking long enough that most university and national lab research grinds to a halt and children in Africa start dying of AIDS because local workers are not allowed to hand over drugs that have been already been purchased and delivered, then I will consider it a grave blunder.

Are you counting malicious compliance in that assessment?

I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"

We saw it in Florida with the don't say gay bill, where a bunch of pro keeping pornography in schools teachers just got rid of all their books because "they were just so afraid of getting in trouble".

Arguably we've seen it repeatedly with pro-abortion doctors letting patients die, where the law clearly states that are allowed to treat them, because of abortion bans. Or maybe to be more charitable to the doctors, the patients make a lot of really dumb healthcare choices, and the press invents that story around it.

I've seen enough of it where I simply do not care. These people are going to throw temper tantrums, sociopathically let people come to harm despite the obvious reading of the order not requiring them to do, or even explicitly telling them not to, and they'll blame Trump. Every single day will be a new misleading headline characterizing every one of these bureaucratic tantrums as Trump's singular fault.

Honestly it's not all that different from when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan, and the generals did it in the shittiest most passive aggressive way possible to make him look like an idiot retard. Which... I mean we've since learned he may have been. Which I guess made the general's sabotage super effective. Supposedly that was the moment his popularity tanked and never recovered.

But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.

"Malicious compliance" is an old political procedure. If you're told to reduce the library department because of budget cuts, you don't start looking at the programs people don't attend. You cut the hours of the desk clerks, closing the library early. You let the Karens complain to city council - who probably reverse the decision - and you force some other poor sap to make cuts instead.

This is a textbook application, and it's no surprise it's making the news cycle.

I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance. Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum, and Trump only walked this back when it became clear it was upsetting the normies. There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum

No, the GOP thinks the Tuskegee airmen are a perfectly acceptable and normal thing to have as a history lesson in Air Force basic training.

There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

Because the south surrendered and accepted reintegration into the United States. Bragg is a singularly unimpressive figure, but the existence of confederate names is to celebrate the south’s American-ness. The occupation is over and it has been for centuries. We don’t want a designated villain role that allows a de-facto not de-jure occupation.

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues

My employer's annual DEI training (required by government contracts...) for the last few years has included mandatory reporting of discrimination and harassment, with the explicit warning that witnessing such and not reporting it will result in punishment "up to and including termination". It seems more likely to me that they adopted the same reporting policy as before just with different behavior to report than that they were intending "panicked overcompliance".

There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.

One is viewed as a rebel, the other as a traitor. To a European, the former is a subset of the latter. To Americans, not so much.

Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance.

The snitch hotline is there because we know high level employees WILL do DEI sub rosa. ATF got caught trying to hide their DEI by changing publicly visible titles, and we have two people on this very group who have said that two different directors of national labs told their employees they would be doing DEI sub rosa. There's no panicked overcompliance, there is only malicious compliance.

Most people don't know that Braxton Bragg was a bad general. The default assumption of an uninformed person is that Fort Bragg must have been named after somebody cool. But a little digging reveals the man wasn't cool, not even by the standards of a Southern sympathizer.

Maybe the man wasn't cool, but the name is.

But that is these people's game. Malicious compliance, and crying to the media about unnecessary problems they created, which everyone spins to blame the executive who dared to give the bureaucrats a lawful order they didn't agree with. It's ok, you can tune them out. Or shoot them in the streets. I heard that's part of Project 2025.

How are you sure this is malicious compliance, and not just a combination of chilling effects and most people not knowing the limits of new, unfamiliar laws?

For your teacher example, I could easily see a situation where they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place), and thus found it easier to nuke the classroom library than it would be to comb through all of them and make sure they don't run afoul of the law.

And in the case of the doctors and anti-abortion laws, it really feels like you're doing the thing so many people do where they assume they live in the "most convenient world" for their worldview. Like, how convenient that anti-abortion laws would never lead to any negative outcomes ever, if not for malicious compliance on the part of doctors.

Just as police officers are not lawyers, and they deserve a little bit of charity when they misinterpret or misapply a law, doctors are not lawyers and it is not at all surprising to me that a new set of laws whose limits haven't fully been tested in the courts is leading them to fail to treat patients even when it might technically be permissible under the law. I suspect that once the dust is settled and doctors are less spooked by the threat of being charged under the new law, fewer women will die this way, but I don't think chalking it up to a "tantrum" is the most likely reading of the cases that have been making headlines.

they genuinely don't know whether books in their classroom library violate some part of the law (because, say, LGBT content wasn't among the things they screened for when buying the books in the first place)

They could have just kept the books from before 1990; that was safely before LGBTQ stuff started to get shoveled into everything.

They could have just kept the books from before 1990; that was safely before LGBTQ stuff started to get shoveled into everything.

You can't just go off of dates though. Lots of ancient Greek books are arguably suitable for children, but also contain LGBT content. Like, I could see a classroom having a copy of Plato's Symposium, which is super gay.

I mean, you could compromise by having the bowdlerized Victorian translations or something. But that doesn't help if you already have a modern translation.

But I remember reading A Rose for Emily in high school which is from 1930, and features a gay character (depicted as a bad or tragic thing though.) Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.

Even in eras where it isn't shoehorned in to everything, there will be a trickle of LGBT characters.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

It's not the homo- or gyno- that causes the problem, it's the -supremacy; and absent an inquisition Hays Code-style paragovernmental organization that "knows it when it sees it" there's no particularly logical way to go about erasing it.

Yes, but the trick in the eras where they aren't shoehorned into everything is that they tend not to be introduced for homosupremacist reasons (much like how women are shoehorned into works in certain ways for gynosupremacist reasons).

"Tend to" is doing a lot of work here. Plato's Symposium says that the ultimate love is the love between two men, and it includes the idea that the "offspring" of such heavenly love is art, statecraft and philosophical ideas.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘those who are pregnant in their bodies are more inclined towards women and are affected by love in this way, believing that they will secure immortality, fame and happiness for themselves for all time by begetting children. While as far as soul 209A is concerned,’ said she, ‘those who are pregnant in their souls, even more than in their bodies, conceive and bring forth what belongs to the soul. So, what belongs to the soul? Understanding and excellence in general are indeed begotten by all the poets and by any artificers who are regarded as creative. Yet the most extensive and most beautiful understanding, by far, is the setting in order of our cities and our households, and its name is sound-mindedness and justice.

What is more, when someone is pregnant with these in soul from a young age, 209B being divine, and reaching an age where he develops a desire to bring forth and beget, he then I presume, goes around searching for the beauty in which he may beget, for he will never beget in ugliness. Since the person is pregnant, he welcomes beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, and should he also encounter a beautiful, noble and well-developed soul, he welcomes the twofold combination all the more. And towards this person he is immediately well-resourced with words about excellence, and what a good man 209C should be like, and how he should behave, and he sets about educating him.

For being in contact with the beautiful one, and consorting therewith, what was conceived in times past is brought forth and begotten when the beautiful one is present, and when he is absent but remembered. And he joins with that person in the shared nurture of what they have begotten, so that such people maintain a much greater communion with one another, and a more constant friendship than children would afford, since their communion involves children who are more beautiful and more immortal. And everyone would prefer to have such children as these rather than the human 209D kind and looking at Homer and Hesiod and the other good poets, they envy the offspring of themselves that these poets leave behind, which furnish the poets with immortal glory and fame, since that is what the offspring itself is like.

Or if you prefer,’ said she, ‘look at the sort of children Lycurgus left behind him in Sparta, saviours of Sparta and, in a sense, of Greece. Solon too is revered among yourselves as the begetter of your laws,[50] as are other men in many other places, 209E among Greeks and barbarians, for their display of so many noble deeds, and for begetting excellence of every kind. Many shrines have already been established for them because they had such children as these, but this has never yet happened because of human children.

(Paragraph breaks mine, mostly because this ended up being a big block of text.)

Homosupremacist thinking has a long history in Western culture.

You have to go a little bit earlier; "Heather Has Two Mommies" is the ur-example and is from 1989.

Or how about 1979, my last year in elementary school. If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for today's kids.

And in the case of the doctors and anti-abortion laws, it really feels like you're doing the thing so many people do where they assume they live in the "most convenient world" for their worldview. Like, how convenient that anti-abortion laws would never lead to any negative outcomes ever, if not for malicious compliance on the part of doctors.

Am doctor. Spend a lot of time here defending doctors.

The level of overreaction and fear mongering from the relevant physicians on social media was profoundly immense, these people are grossly ideologically captured, and I could absolutely see them letting someone die because of it.

Am lawyer. Spend a lot of time here defending lawyers.

One of the things I've always told clients asking for advice on specific actions is that you don't be the one who finds out where the line is. Yes, you may have a strong argument that your actions are legal, but you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to make that argument and hope that someone with your liberty and livelihood in your hands agrees with it. People on this sub who were responding that these women's cases were obviously covered by the exception were woefully misinformed on how these things actually work. First, unless you're a doctor, and I mean an OB/GYN with 30 years of experience and a CV as long as your arm, AND you have access to the patient's medical records and anything else that could be used as evidence in the case, you're not qualified to offer an opinion on what treatment was appropriate.

Second, I remember a lot of arguments along the lines of "If you can get a hundred doctors to say the treatment was reasonable..."; well, no, that's not how it works. Maybe you can get a hundred doctors to say so, in which case you can ask them to write letters to the DA asking him not to prosecute. At trial, you get one. You'll have your expert, the prosecution will have theirs, and you have to hope the jury believes yours. And you have to keep in mind that the prosecution expert is going to be just as qualified as your guy and sound just as reasonable to a lay audience as your guy, even if you know the guy is a witch doctor who is full of shit.

And then you have to consider the political elements at play. This is a new law passed by parties who are strongly ideologically motivated. The case in question, IIRC, involved a woman with a nonviable pregnancy who was forced to wait until she miscarried before they would remove the fetus, and in the meantime she became septic. The Texas legislature has been under pressure to amend the law to specifically allow for termination of nonviable pregnancies, but has steadfastly refused to do so. So now the doctors have to rely on the much vaguer "risk of death or serious bodily injury" standard. Was there some extenuating circumstance that made this particular woman's risk of infection substantially greater than that of the average woman with a nonviable pregnancy? Unless there was, by terminating this woman's pregnancy they would effectively be instituting a policy that all nonviable pregnancies are covered under the exception. Since the legislature explicitly refused to carve out that exception, the prosecutor is likely to view the policy as pretext to perform prohibited abortions, and will be under pressure to prosecute to reassert that the exception does not exist.

Arguing something on the internet where you can press enter and not have to worry about any consequences is one thing. Making a decision that could result in a lengthy prison sentence, substantial fines, and loss of your license in quite another. Regardless of how ideologically captured they may be, their actions are reasonable. I know that if I were advising any of these doctors, I'd tell them not to perform any abortions at all unless they were on the right side of a bright line or the woman was on her death bed. If it comes down to an argument about increased risk or relies on some reasonableness standard, I'm not touching it with a ten foot pole.

I think their is some truth to this but I also saw a lot of people saying things that amounted to "well if I can't provide abortions than I'll just leave the state and leave their mothers/babies to die" which suggests their is some mean spirited and political aspects to the whole thing.

Although, in support of your point (incoming vagueness because OPSEC) I was talking to a prominent medical ethicist a few months ago and he was telling a story about how he was doing something in two different states with mutually incompatible laws, and reached out to the state AGs for both to ask which situation took precedence (ex: when the patient calls the doctor from one place but the doctor is in a different state). Shocking both of them said "our rules!"

Nobody knows what would actually happen unless you run afoul of something and it actually goes to court, but actually following the rules is at times inadvisable and awkwardly at times outright impossible.

One of the things I've always told clients asking for advice on specific actions is that you don't be the one who finds out where the line is. Yes, you may have a strong argument that your actions are legal, but you don't want to put yourself in a position where you have to make that argument and hope that someone with your liberty and livelihood in your hands agrees with it.

Right, this is why you only ask a lawyer about something like that if you want a "no". If you want to be able to do anything at all without risking losing your life, liberty, and/or property to government action, you need true anarchy.

Nevertheless, it doesn't apply in some of the situations promoted in the press, because respecting a 200-mile zone around the abortion law's actual strictures would and did force the hospitals and doctors into non-compliance with other laws and regulations. Unless discharging patients with life-threatening conditions like sepsis is somehow black-letter legal?

respecting a 200-mile zone around the abortion law's actual strictures would and did force the hospitals and doctors into non-compliance with other laws and regulations. Unless discharging patients with life-threatening conditions like sepsis is somehow black-letter legal?

I mean, I'm not sure what you're talking about. First, none of the Texas cases at issue involved patients who were discharged, but lets forget that for a minute because it doesn't mean that future cases won't. What is it about exercising extreme caution that requires the hospital to discharge a septic patient? In one of the cases the septic woman was being monitored in the hospital the entire time, so this is obviously the preferred course of action. Third, even if the hospital did discharge a septic patient, well, I'm unaware of any laws that prohibit that, black letter or otherwise. the closest laws I'm aware of are those that prohibit hospitals with EDs from turning away patients with emergency medical conditions due to inability to pay.

So doctors and hospitals realistically have two options:

  1. Perform the abortion, which creates a potential criminal liability, the consequences of which are up to 99 years in prison, substantial fines, loss of license, and various other administrative penalties. If this liability is pursued I have a good defense.

  2. Don't perform the abortion and treat the patient using other means. This MAY create a civil liability IF the patient actually suffers adverse consequences, which they may not. In the event that happens, the civil liability is limited to money damages the doctor and hospital are insured against it. The doctor and hospital have a good defense here as well, as they can argue that they reasonably assumed that the abortion would have been illegal under Texas law.

the defenses cancel each other out. So what you have here is a fully mature criminal liability with severe consequences that can't be indemnified, vs. a potential civil liability with mild to moderate consequences that already are indemnified. What doctor in his right mind would select option 1?

The other interesting thing I would point out about this is that, for all the guarantees I've seen here and elsewhere that the doctor's actions in any of these deaths would have totally been covered by the exception, they've been curiously absent coming from anyone who actually matters. I haven't heard Ken Paxton or anyone else from the AG's office saying that performing an abortion in those circumstances would not be criminal, nor have I heard it from the governor. I haven't heard any state legislator suggest that those circumstances were of the type the exception was intended to cover. The Supreme Court declared that the law wasn't vague and declined to offer any further guidance. The only Texas politician who has done so was Ted Cruz, but he's in no position to actually make determinations about these things. It's easy to say what we think would have happened because we know that the woman ended up dying. But if she lives, it's a different story. We now have a perfectly healthy woman and a dead baby and the Terri Schaivo crowd who is behind limiting these exceptions would claim that there's no way we can know that the baby wouldn't have been perfectly healthy had it not been killed in the womb. There have been no prosecutions thus far, and as such we have no idea what to expect. Any doctor who decides to perform an abortion he can't absolutely, 100% say is necessary to prevent death or permanent impairment, not simply a reasonable precaution against an increased risk, is taking a 99 year gamble. You'd better believe he's not getting within 200 miles of that law.

I mean, I'm not sure what you're talking about. First, none of the Texas cases at issue involved patients who were discharged, but lets forget that for a minute because it doesn't mean that future cases won't. What is it about exercising extreme caution that requires the hospital to discharge a septic patient?

Nevaeh Crain

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

Neither of these have anything to do with over-reaction, even justified over-reaction, to the heartbeat law. Nor do they demonstrate a precautionary attitude in the first place.

She went to a third hospital where care was supposedly delayed two hours because they needed two ultrasounds (it doesn't take two hours to get two ultrasounds if your hospital is at all competent) to confirm fetal death. But that doesn't explain the first two hospitals.

The other interesting thing I would point out about this is that, for all the guarantees I've seen here and elsewhere that the doctor's actions in any of these deaths would have totally been covered by the exception, they've been curiously absent coming from anyone who actually matters. I haven't heard Ken Paxton or anyone else from the AG's office saying that performing an abortion in those circumstances would not be criminal, nor have I heard it from the governor. I haven't heard any state legislator suggest that those circumstances were of the type the exception was intended to cover. The Supreme Court declared that the law wasn't vague and declined to offer any further guidance.

The Supreme Court:

A physician who tells a patient, “Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,” and in the same breath states “but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances” is simply wrong in that legal assessment.

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I think one of the posters here had a very interesting point on one of the abortion cases that the choice facing hospital administrators may in loudly published cases look more like deciding whether to provide expensive emergency treatment to likely-uninsured pregnant patients (as begrudgingly required without payment by federal law), or discharging actively-septic patients while blaming state lawmakers for tying their hands. I don't have faith that the bean counters running the show universally have patient interests first in mind regardless of financial incentives.

The elimination of DEI programs was a separate executive order and one that I have no problems with, but certainly if progressive beauracrats tie themselves like a dead weight to programs or people that do actual work and threaten to drag them down into the depths then any damage done is on them and not the fault of the Trump administration.

Doctors letting patients die intentionally to make a point about abortion seems much less likely to me than them being incompetent and dealing with idiot patients, but I haven't looked into the details of these cases so I could be wrong. Most people I know working on government research grants (in the physical or non-medical life sciences) just want to do their jobs and resent any interruption, so halting or sabotaging their work as a protest would be inconceivable to them. NIH may have a different internal culture, and it seems the hammer came down on them first and harder than the rest.

Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!

We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..

Sorry, but as a grad school STEM student you're already eminently employable, it sucks to possibly be the cohort when the music stops (I do not think that will happen here) but the government isn't obligated to dump money in it. As someone who went through grad school unfunded, the whole system is quite unequal, but I saw funded people fail to complete their degrees and still do very well with ABD. I know the argument is that the funding gets people (including smart foreigners who will continue to work in the US after graduation) lucrative employment in the US and they will contribute to the 'scientific powerhouse' as you call it, but given how little people's coursework is often used in their later careers, and how an advanced degree just felt more of slog of mortgaging my youth for money later, I think we should look into this credentialism fueled education cost-inflation run amok and ask if there is a better way.

Not only that, but very little of our powerhouse STEM sector comes about because the government funded it, in fact most of the innovations have come from private companies despite government interference.

AI is coming out of private companies, so did much of our Internet companies stating with Amazon and moving through Zillio. Even in the past, most American innovation came from private research firms like Bell Labs or the Edison Labs or Tesla’s company. Modern robotics will come out of Boston dynamics.

At best, the government grant system works well for very basic research into pure sciences. It doesn’t work well to create new technologies that people will actually use. SpaceX has done more to improve space travel than NASA has in 50 years.

AI is coming out of private companies, so did much of our Internet companies stating with Amazon and moving through Zillio.

The Internet and the WWW both came out of government-funded research though. It's one of the best examples of why government-funded basic research and private-sector R&D are complements, not substitutes.

You’re not really doing the “no innovations came from basic publicly funded scientific research” thing?

Let’s just take biology: CRISPR, the polymerase chain reaction, green fluorescent protein, huge numbers of basic discoveries that inform things like cancer therapy research, discoveries of new classes of drug such as discovering GLP-1s in Gila Monster saliva, surely one could write a book on all the contributions of the last couple decades.

That’s a ridiculous opinion that basic science with the support of public funding hasn’t contributed anything lately.

Chinese value excellence. No politics in universities either, they make students take an hour or two of political theory at universities, but that's about it. Activism is not tolerated at all.

Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.

Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!

These days you can evaluate that quite fast. The idea no doubt is to starve the beast of left-wing NGOs that infests so much of the West.

It's depressing that in Europe, the Comission of Retards funds 'climate' NGOs which are then used to justify these policies and lobby for more of it. The end result is, insofar climate is concerned dismal. Once the truly impactful policies like banning ICE in cars or banning all heating that's not a heat pump, politicians balk because it's political suicide and activists howl in outrage how they're dooming the planet.

In the US you have the same thing. Veritas, ever ready to ruin someone's horny time sent some hunk at an EPA official who then proceeded to blab about how they're throwing 'gold bricks off the Titanic' to fund the NGO complex. Of course, the funniest part is that a lot of this was happening under the "Inflation Reduction Act".

Chinese value excellence.

A bizarre statement to make about the country that has sewer oil, tofu-dreg buildings, mass counterfeiting of products, extreme academic cheating, among other fraudulent practices.

I don't want to overstate the amount of fraudulent activity that occurs in China, but clearly China's version of "excellence" is a less virtuous and more selfish that how most people would use the term. "Results and personal gain at all costs, even if it's fraud" is certainly one way to define excellence.

Yes, because prestigious university administrators are using exactly the same criteria for offering jobs to scholars as the worst of lowest bidder construction vendors.

Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.

I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing. People around here keep calling things "slop". This is the real slop we need not concern ourselves with.

I've worked in China a bit. I married a Chinese woman. I understand that they are smart and hardworking. If this were a computer game then their high stats would make them win. But they just don't. The factory workers can't follow instructions without a taskmaster standing over them. The researchers publish large numbers of papers worth nothing at all. Something is missing. I blame culture. Chinese people in America working as engineers are productive. Participating in our work culture cures them.

I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing.

I can confirm this. I have rejected many papers from solely Chinese authors, many of which are on the spectrum from "not even wrong" to "what are you even thinking that you're doing here?!" I've now accepted one, from a guy who got his PhD in China, but then spent several years on post-docs in the west before returning to China. They're definitely not stupid, but they're still really catching up. Over time, they may take over, but the state as of today, right now, is that their fundamental scientific research output is mostly hot garbage.

Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of hot garbage coming out of American universities, too. But in my discipline, your filtering algorithm would have very few false negatives if it just rejected everything from China... and it would be much more mixed with American submissions.

In the fields I'm familiar with, this was true ten years ago, but there has been significant improvement in the quality of Chinese publications since then. My understanding is that this is the result of targeted government pressure in a few areas deemed nationally significant and may not generalize.

How do we square this with real world happenings? Deepseek, DF-21, Chinese batteries, the fact that they're now selling basic everything at competitive prices etc?

I am aware there's shitty research and Chinese are unusually good at gaming systems, but they deliver.

Or, you know, they operate the world's biggest HSR system without incurring massive casualties.

What fraction of a billion 100+ IQ people need to deliver to generate a GDP per capita similar to Mexico driven by, largely, the same factor- heavy industry.

I doubt that PPP adjusted Mexican GDP is same ad Chinese..

Their high speed trains derail sometimes and some have been slowed down to make them less likely to derail. They also have high ticket costs and low ridership. The system is propped up by government spending and could not sustain itself on ticket costs. I know some people really like high speed rail, but I'm not too hot on it in general and Chinese HSR in particular.

I have worked in Chinese factories. I know they can make stuff. I also know Chinese factory workers need constant monitoring and correction. There's something off with their work culture. They are not lazy. But if they have to be careful rather than fast they can't do it without someone like me watching them. And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and fast.

I don't see any contradiction between Chinese research publications being trash and also they make batteries and electric cars and DJI drones. They just need good factory supervision and quality control.

I think you are extremely overindexing on your experience. A century or so ago they were stereotyped as lazy too. This is a matter of culture that can change very quickly.

I've never heard of a lazy Chinese stereotype. My American public schooling taught me about how they were worked very hard in abusive indentured servitude in the 1800s.

And 150 years ago they were stereotyped as undesirable immigrants because they were able/willing to work harder for less money and undercut white workers. "Coolie" had all the connotations of "illegal Mexican day labourer" in the current year.

I have seen exact opposite claim: that ridership is sufficient and there aren't really any new serious crashes. Wasn't the last one in '17?

And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and

Fining them for off tolerance parts didn't work?

This was not a supplier, it was our own factory. Scrapping or reworking parts is burning our own money.

In that sense we had more leverage over external suppliers in that they had to be in spec or we could reject their parts and it is their problem if that makes them lose money.

We had a major customer reject a large order of a part due to it being out of spec. It was a disaster. I was on a plane within a few days.

A bit of googling claims Chinese HSR is not financially sustainable and survives on taxpayer funding and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. But that's true for other HSR projects and not a particularly Chinese issue. Planes are just too fast and cheap and HSR way too expensive for HSR to make financial sense.

The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.

For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.

The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.

I feel like this goes back to the communist roots of the PRC, and it was a similar problem with the USSR in the olden days: tick the boxes, meet the quotas, who gives a damn if the end product is no good? The political officers only care about making things look productive and good.

I expect the NIH and NSF will restart shortly after everyone has a chance to remove the idiotic paragraph where they explain why their research in geology will help marginalized communities.

I do fear for my area of study to be honest.

To doxx myself, I study ecosystems with satellites. I develop models that link what we see in earth observation pixels with how much water is in vegetation.

The problem is that this is something which is verifiably being changed due to climate change, and with that I’m now in political waters.

I think earth science is definitely on the chopping block. Doesn’t seem to be in republicans vision of what we should invest in as a country.

Can't say much, except I fear you're right and hope you're wrong about that.

I'm surprised no one has pointed out that Trump is putting on his best Javier Milei impression and trying to make as wide sweeping cancellations of government spending as possible. If he framed is as 'interest expense is a top 3 government expense and I'm trying to put it in the bottom quartile' he might have a bit more success than being relatively inscrutable, but we'll see how it pans out.

I just can't believe I live in a world where "woke gender ideology" appears in official executive memos.

"Gender ideology" is an old term that's common in global politics, generally associated with Catholic social activism. Though it might be interesting to note that the general line is not "there are two genders" but in fact "there are no genders", because opposition to it globally often holds that the concept of gender is itself an ideological imposition on biological sex. And if the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as the social justice movement would just give itself a name, politicians wouldn't have to use the term "woke" to specify it.

I don't think calling it "woke" has any meaningful advantage over calling it "social justice". Being cynical for a moment, I'm pretty sure that the main reason "social justice" fell out of favor and was replaced by "woke" is that low-information voters are actually stupid enough to fall for rhetorical shenanigans as basic as calling your movement "goodism", that is, they were uncomfortable speaking out against something called "social justice" because justice and being social are widely-agreed-upon virtues. By contrast, "woke", to an outsider, just sounds like a funny made-up word, a failure of grammar.

We’re going to have to link the Freddie Deboer article again aren’t we? Sidebar material!

Woke is a perfectly useful word. Everyone knows what it means even if some people pretend not to.

If this ends the 'we're making super-dangerous diseases with gain of function even after COVID for no clear reason' departments, then Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize and one for Medicine too. Realistically I bet the 'random superweapon creation' researchers will muddle through and find some other source of funding but even so, it's great to see some tentative squelching of these people. If we can't stigmatize the creation of megadeath diseases like we stigmatize adults having sex in the workplace, at least funding is reduced!

https://www.nanoappsmedical.com/boston-university-create-a-deadly-new-covid-19-virus-who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea/

Several hours have passed and this is still the top post, so please forgive me for replying a second time.

Here's a good theory for why this is happening. It's all about immigration. Edit: A large part of it is about immigration.

https://x.com/njhochman/status/1884339632210600161

The whole thread is worth a read but it paints a damning picture of the NGOs who receive these federal grants:

They provide "humanitarian transportation" to ferry immigrants up to our border, waypoints with shelter and medical services along the way, Spanish-language maps showing the best route to the U.S., and legal services for immigrants to beat our immigration laws once they get here.

Oh, and money. They just give them cash cards, vouchers, and often even just stacks of cash in envelopes. Tough to think of a more direct 1:1 redistribution: You pay your taxes. Your government sends that money to the NGOs. The NGOs hand it to immigrants. You work, they benefit.

So, one one hand, the government is funding ICE to deport illegal aliens. On the other hand it's funding thousands of NGOs to encourage illegal immigration. The rot goes really deep, and it's astounding both how many of these orgs there are and how much money they get from the federal government. It's going to be really hard to untangle the mess.

I've been following this Twitter account that is digging into these NGOs on a more systematic level. I'll admit it's a bit of a Gish gallop, but once you see dozens of examples of far-left NGOs who get nearly all their money from the federal government, it's not hard to want to burn it all down. In her words (the owner of the Twitter account):

After spending too much time on the award search tool, I’m starting to wonder if we’ve had a UBI system all along for one political party—just disguised as grants.

If the Trump administration went about rooting out partisan activity deliberately, it would take a lot longer than 4 years. So that's probably why they are doing it all at once. But I still think they should make carve-outs for the best stuff, at least temporarily.

Is there a universe in which a contrived set of laws allows the executive to blanket ban all NGOs (Russia/China) style?

No. But an easy way to go after NGOs that assist illegal immigrants is to treat them as what they effectively are: organized crime.

NGO is UNspeak for any organisation which is neither controlled by government nor a for-profit business. Your local golf club is an NGO.

Banning (or licensing) all NGOs is massively overinclusive for a free country. Even banning political activity by NGOs would shut down Heritage and suchlike. If enforced enthusiastically, stopping or chilling Harvard University (also an NGO) and suchlike from speaking about politically sensitive topics - a list which which currently include meteorology (climate change is a partisan issue), basic pharmacology (using ivermectin to treat non-worm infections is a partisan issue), and increasingly arithmetic (the fact that Republican budgets don't add up is a partisan issue) etc. - would destroy large parts of American science.

A country as rich as America could ban NGOs which accept foreign funding, but that doesn't help much when the largest funders of wokestupid are domestic (I think in the US it is the Ford and Hewlett foundations).

Any country could stop contracting NGOs to deliver government programs, although again you only want a blanket ban if you are planning to move a lot of work back in-house which was contracted for good reasons. The fakecharities project in the UK (run by the libertarian Adam Smith Institute, itself an NGO which has done consultancy work on government contracts) argued that charities that get more than 10% of their funding from the government should be prohibited from engaging in political activity, which might work.

Graham Factor has a nice article(just apply for access, it only takes a day or so to get approved) which includes a part on how de-facto outsourcing of government work to NGOs gives you the worst of all worlds, especially in the context of the police: The same inefficiency as the government but with none of the accountability.

I don't think NGOs need to be banned, but the current reality of government funding of unaccountable NGOs combined with a revolving door between either of them is quite dysfunctional. Nothing raises my cynicism like seeing a high-level government worker being so outrageously incompetent as to lose their position (a tall order to begin with!) due to public pressure, only for them to manage some multi-million government-funded NGO immediately thereafter.

NGO is UNspeak for any organisation which is neither controlled by government nor a for-profit business. Your local golf club is an NGO.

Not exactly. You have governments using NGOs as part of their own operations. For instance crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman funds MiSK Foundation which in turn funds many activities either directly or indirectly. Similarly Chinese govenment funds Confucius Institute which is one of the web of organizations working under United Front umbrella to project soft power of Chinese government.

Bit of an aside, but it's incredible how the Internet allows people to contribute through sheer autistic dedication, even if they're literally deaf mute cripples IRL.

I'd also recommend oilfield rando if you don't follow him. He just does individual grants.

Trump may be doing it because of immigration, but it's not just immigration. DEI/*-Studies. Trans stuff. Environmental/Climate change stuff. Homeless stuff. Criminal justice "reform". Not sure about Palestine stuff but maybe. You name a left-wing issue and it's being funded by an interlocking set of NGOs who are probably siphoning at least some of their money off the US Federal Government. That's the largest part of what I call "Left, Inc." (another part being ordinary for-profit companies which have been co-opted, and another the mainstream-left press), and if Trump can cut it off, it'll be "yuge".

What DataRepublican and others have shown is that many of these NGO's are not just receiving some money from the federal government, it nearly their entire budget.

It's as if the federal government has a 4th branch that is not bound by the rules of the other three and is the exclusive property of the Democratic Party.

The term "Fourth Estate" is as old as the press. It serves the actual Fourth Estate's purposes very well when the low-information voters think it's the media, but if the Fourth Estate is a body, the media is just its Mouth.

There was a push on Twitter to start calling them "Para-Governmental Organizations" instead of "Non Governmental Organizations" because they are intertwined with the government but don't have normal oversight like government groups do.

British English already has a word for this: quango (from quasi-non-governmental organisation)

The meaning of quango shifted very early - the new meaning was backronymed to "quasi-autonomous national governmental organisation".

The current meaning of quango is a central government organisation with deliberately blurred lines of accountability to the responsible minister. The boundaries are intentionally fuzzy, but the central examples are non-departmental public bodies and non-ministerial departments.

This is now the sole de facto meaning of quango - which, for the avoidance of doubt, is a really useful word with its current meaning and the US should probably adopt it. The older meaning referring to a government-organised NGO had ceased to be widely used by 1997.

Incidentally, GONGO is a term that is actually used by the foreign policy establishment to criticise the fake NGOs set up by authoritarian regimes like China. It could usefully be used more widely.

I propose a pithier definition: any organisation set up by the government and not meaningfully accountable to the government.

As always, of course, QUANGO is a concept cluster for which any given definition can only be an approximation and any formal definition is likely to be a malicious mis-classification (EDIT: the latter isn’t pointed at you @MadMonzer).

I propose a pithier definition: any organisation set up by the government and not meaningfully accountable to the government.

In other words, something the government called up that they can not put down?

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I'm not surprised, though I'm certainly not a forensic accountant able to actually figure that out. But I did notice that "New NGO You Never Heard Of And Is An Instant Expert On Everything In This Field" (that's the press part at work) was often funded by grants from other NGOs, which in turn came from other NGOs and larger foundations, and many of those received government grants. My point was just that it's not just immigration they do this with.

Can you copy and paste or screenshot the thread? Twitter is often unreadable if you don't have an account and/or use any effective browser privacy tools/settings.

I'm already satisfied by evidence of NGOs engaging in "open borders with extra steps" jiggery pokery, but pausing all federal grants because of immigration NGOs brings us back to:

This seems very... crude. The question is if it's purposefully crude, if there's some structural reason it can't be better implemented, or if the person in charge is incompetent.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1884339632210600161.html

https://unrollnow.com/status/1884339632210600161

In regards to its crudeness, it's not easy to figure out what these NGOs are up to. You not only have to track the grants, but you have to track who the grantees themselves grant to. Sometimes its a network that includes loops where A owns B and C, and then C owns part of A, D, and E. They all receive grants from the government, other NGOs, individuals, and even grant to each other.

Of course, it's not impossible to figure out if money is being used to encourage illegal immigration. But it would take a very long time.

Maybe it's easy to strike it all and then add back the necessary stuff. I hope they do so quickly.

And they're getting grants from the USDA? And the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Transportation, and VA, plus the FCC, Library of Congress, NASA, and Social Security Administration? Some of the programs listed, I could believe, but why would it be necessary to pause all of them?

Yes, of course all those departments award grants that are used for DEI, encouraging immigration, or other progressive political purposes. But you should tweet this at DataRepublican and see what she can dig up. It might surprise you!

That said, if you want an argument that Trump did the right thing here, please find someone else. I don't think he should have frozen all funding. I can see why he did it, but I think he should have taken more time. Even if the net gains are huge, people will be hurt and it could have been partially avoided.

people will be hurt and it could have been partially avoided.

And that is what some people mean when they repeat the phrase "war is hell".

War is politics (by a particular means), and good people are going to get killed/the works of their lives are going to get wasted.

Yes, of course all those departments award grants that are used for DEI, encouraging immigration, or other progressive political purposes.

I'm missing something - I thought we were having a conversation based on your comment:

Here's a good theory for why this is happening. It's all about immigration.

Are they throwing out the Congressionally-appropriated babies with the DEI-HR Lady-Complex bathwater, as the memo states, or is it "all about immigration," as you say is a good theory? If the latter, why did they need to pause grants from all the departments I listed? The Trump administration's stance on immigration is far from "strategically ambiguous."

Point taken. It's not all about immigration, just a very large chunk of it. Thank you for the clarification. I've edited my original comment.

Use xcancel.com .

Leaving aside the merits of the issue for a moment, this is totally Project 2025 right? They are clearly implementing some sort of plan for steamrolling the federal bureaucracy, the implementation of which looks suspiciously similar to what is outlined in this particular 922-page PDF.

I guess I’m wondering, are there any interpretations of why Trump tried so hard to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign other than the maximally-cynical one? All I can come up with is that there are a whole lot of names on that document that aren’t his, and Trump doesn’t want them taking credit for his glorious presidency.

I believed Trump truthfully repeatedly stated that he hasn't read it and is not familiar with the details.

And also you notice he is directionally aligned with portions of it. No contradiction here.

I don't really get this critique. You're seriously looking at the 922 page long wish list of a major republican thinktank, noticing that a lot of elements of that wish list are being implemented by a republican president and deciding that the parsimonious explanation is that Trump is just following the checklist? It can't be that a Republican president has a lot in common with a Republican think tank?

The reason that people tried to say that project 2025 was the Trump plan was because, in addition to the stuff that is popular enough for Trump to want to run with, it includes stuff not popular enough for Trump to run with. It's like if Kamala won and implemented some passport support for trans people that also happened to be on NAMBLA's "let trans-aged people attend highschool and sleep with children" 2025 agenda and thus it was right to tar her with every policy on the document this whole time.

Well there is also the fact that it was used as a bogeyman in the media, and since no voter is actually going to read something called "Project 2025" but it has kind of an ominous name, its easy to manipulate it into sounding scary.

Because it was a plan created by a group of non-Trump Republicans and contained elements that he disagreed with, some of which were mined for political attacks by those claiming it was his plan. That doesn't mean that he disagrees with everything in it - both Trump and the authors are Republicans, so naturally they have overlap in policy. Nor does it mean that Trump considers people radioactive and unhireable for contributing to it, once again they are Republicans and agree on many things. It just means that people quoting from it as "Trump's plan" were being dishonest, an honest critic could have either quoted Agenda 47 instead or made predictions about his actions without claiming they were from Trump's published plan. I don't think this is ordinarily a concept people have difficulty with, activist groups and think-tanks publish proposals that have partial overlap with politician's actual plans all the time.

I'm guessing the very fact that it wasn't his plan contributed to the focus on it. For anything in Agenda 47 he could just say "yeah that's my plan, it's great!". Whereas the fact that Project 2025 wasn't actually his plan meant that he denied it, which looks weaker and like he has something to hide.

non-Trump Republicans

The people running project 2025 (Paul Dans, Russel Vought, John McEntee) had held prominent positions in the first Trump administration, and expected to have prominent positions in a second Trump administration.

Project 2025 also contains a lot of things that Trump, most Republicans, and virtually all Democrats would disagree with -- I recall there being a lot of debate over a passage in it that called for restrictions on condoms, for instance. It was far more radical than Trump and most Trump supporters, and so tarring him with it was a way to label him extreme. These were fertile areas of attack, which were hard to resist for the Biden/Harris campaign.

are there any interpretations of why Trump tried so hard to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign other than the maximally-cynical one?

The maximally cynical one seems like the most parsimonious.

I don’t think there is an interpretation that isn’t the “maximumally cynical one”. He said multiple times he was not involved with Project 2025, and then signed bills directly from the authors of it. I struggle to imaginr a reasonable interpretation isn’t that he’s a populist who will say anything in the moment to make you like him. I believe when you stop looking at the motivation involving actually being beneficial to America and instead being beneficial to billionaires and foreign agents (China, Russia) the answer to "why do these policy decisions" becomes pretty obvious.

It also appears in Agenda 47, which is what he said he WAS implementing.

In the same way Trump was forced to hire from the existing GOP blob for his first administration (because those were the people the right had ready to move to D.C.), staffers in the new administration will almost by default be closely aligned with the Heritage foundation and therefore with project 2025, whether he wants it or not.

Personally Trump cares primarily about tariffs, which are his baby and his political fascination for 40+ years. The other stuff he can take or leave, although he’s personally relatively socially liberal, areligious and doesn’t have a huge issue with gays, abortion or trans people compared to many on the right.

I'm pretty sure he understand the federally funded NGO ecosystem providing activists and sinecures for the left needs to go. It was a purely political decision that it ever came into being and its existence proves that GOP was fake opposition.

They should've been fighting it tooth and nail, yet it's there.

The other stuff he can take or leave, although he’s personally relatively socially liberal, areligious and doesn’t have a huge issue with gays, abortion or trans people compared to many on the right.

I agree he doesn't personally have much investment in the issues surrounding gay people, abortion and trans people, but he's happy to throw the right a bone on these issues, and if he's doing that it really doesn't make a difference what he personally believes.

Wasn’t the Heritage Foundation part of the existing GOP blob in 2017? The difference between 2017 and 2025 is that conservative think tanks have had four to eight years to go over all of the failures of the first Trump administration and figure out how to do it right the next time. What they came up with was Project 2025.

Can you refer us to a specific part of the 922 page pdf that outlines the plan, and/or this step in the plan?

To be clear, is the maximumally-cynical interpretation "reduced attack surface during a national election"? Because that's the obviously-correct answer to me.

It’s also the most obviously correct strategy.

The irony is that we're getting the worst of both worlds with Trump's brand of isolationism. On one hand, we have Bush lackey Pete Hegseth who thinks Iraq was a great idea. And then we're defunding basic, uncontroversial medical aid and possibly leaving Ukraine defenseless against the mongrels. There's no coherent policy other than doing the opposite of whatever Biden supported.

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How is international free PREP uncontroversial? Mandates that insurance cover it for free domestically are controversial.

For someone with my position on these programs, at best they are a self-licking ice cream cone that spends money on an eternal treadmill, constantly preserving the lives of people who will almost instantly die if aid is ever cut off without any path towards independence from said aid. And, likely, keeping those populations way above stable levels, wherein they will constantly be a threat to migrate to better lands and become wards of the state there.

At worst they are direct subsidies for immoral behavior like sodomy.

There is absolutely nothing "immoral" about sodomy.

Many prominent moral systems disagree with you, as does biology, considering it spreads STDs at extremely high rates.

"Biology" doesn't care what we do, we all die of something in the end. Technology prevents the spread of STDs a lot more effectively than purity culture. I'm not going to spend my limited time living under christian slave morality.

Not having anal sex is better than technology at preventing the spread of STDs, as indicated by the AIDS epidemic, the recent monkeypox epidemic, and whatever one comes next.

That sodomy is bad is not an idea limited to Christians. All the big 3 Abrahamic religions are against it. Buddhism holds it violates the 3rd precept. Hinduism holds it is offense against Dharma possibly requiring being cast out into a lower caste. Confucianism states that it goes against the family, which is held as one of the highest places of honor.

I mean if you like buttsex a lot, thats your thing. But I don't think society should be compelled to subsidize that life choice as if it is as prosocial as married couples having babies (in fact the annualized cost of PREP seems to be a tad higher even than a woman getting pregnant every 2 years!).

the annualized cost of PREP seems to be a tad higher even than a woman getting pregnant every 2 years

But a lot lower than the cost of not preventing the spread of HIV even among men who refuse to stop having promiscuous sex with other mutually consenting men, given that twice as many patients with uncontrolled AIDS equals twice as many chances for HIV to mutate into a form that can easily infect people who are monogamous or celibate and who do not use intravenous drugs.

Certainly a bold and speculative claim considering we don't know the risks of mutation and, just as importantly, the true effect of PREP and what "undetectable" means long term. Its entirely possible that huge swathes of those in that status ARE spreading it in a lower key fashion and by continually maintaining the virus in that state they are contributing to the problem of potential mutation, particularly in a way that would have it eventually adapt against such treatments.

I would be very confident in saying your assertion is unfounded, particularly compared to a more targeted campaign that was combined with a more traditional method of dealing with disease like quarantine. HIV is one of the most quarantine-friendly viruses of all time.

Hinduism holds it is offense against Dharma possibly requiring being cast out into a lower caste

Examples of barbaric cultures that I would never want to live in aren't really going to convince me. All countries that are remotely civilized protect LGBT rights.

I mean if you like buttsex a lot, thats your thing.

I certainly don't, but I'm not going to have christians and jews telling me what I can and can't do. Secularism is what made America great, and religion is what keeps the middle east a dump.

constantly preserving the lives of people who will almost instantly die if aid is ever cut off without any path towards independence from said aid

That proves too much, as it could also be applied to many other life-saving medications, such as, inter alia, anti-rejection drugs for people with organ transplants.

That proves too much, as it could also be applied to many other life-saving medications, such as, inter alia, anti-rejection drugs for people with organ transplants.

The domestic healthcare and health insurance industries do need to be allowed to do much more cost-benefit analysis and let people die more often as well, yes. Society gives into the pressure of tears/potential tears far too often nowadays is one of my consistent positions.

There is nothing uncontroversial about that medical aid. Quite simply, it is not theirs to give.

when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people

Congress has enormous taxation and spending powers. Federal courts recognize this obvious fact.

Federal Courts are more dangerous the more honest they are. That doesn't mean they correctly interpret the Constitution.

It probably doesn't apply in this case, but would Congress have the ability to make treaties with foreign nations and give them medical aid under those enumerated powers? Or could Congress make use of enumerated powers related to raising armies, and provision the military with extra medical personnel and supplies, and then (with permission of affected countries) send military doctors in to provide substantially similar medical aid to that currently being given?

Like, I'm all for the idea of doing things "the right way" within the legal framework we have, but surely Congress just giving medical aid to foreign nations isn't far off from things they could do with enumerated powers under the Constitution?

the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.

It's either enumerated or it isn't. "Not far off" means "not enumerated" means "unconstitutional."

It's either enumerated or it isn't. "Not far off" means "not enumerated" means "unconstitutional."

Given the existence of the Necessary and Proper clause, "not far off" means that you have to look into the purpose and see if the activity is necessary and proper to an enumerated power. The framers intended the delegated powers to be broad - particularly the spending power. There is no territorial limit on the spending power in the Constitution, and if controlling communicable diseases isn't the "general welfare" I don't know what is.

I don't know if the early US did contribute financially to the plague-control infrastructure in the Mediterranean (the British certainly did), but am pretty certain that the Framers thought that was the sort of thing that the government should be able to do.

you don't think it's odd the framers bothered with the other "enumerated powers" when your interpretation of Art. I, s 8, cl 1, along with the necessary and proper clause, makes almost all of them entirely superfluous?

it's a wonder why multiple framers wrote multiple letters to the press which repeatedly described how restricted the enumerated powers were, not to mention the Constitution was only ratified based on a promise to include the Bill of Rights which contains the 9th and 10th Amendments again clarifying these powers should be restrictive (as all others were reserved to the people and states, respectively)

the modern interpretation by the courts is, despite all ink to the contrary, pretty much what yours is, but that's because the Constitution has been long dead from prior violations, not because of the Framers' intentions

I think the framers intended the spending power to be broad (the limit on that pre-16th amendment is the limit on the taxes the federal government can raise to pay for spending) and the police power to be narrow. You can read the General Welfare clause to be limited by some requirement of generality (the federal government can't fund things which benefit a specific state or individual), although that isn't consistent with founding-era practice, but I don't think it can be read as being limited by some set of permitted purposes.

Part of the problem here is that it isn't 1789 any more - transport is easier, multi-state joint stock companies are a thing, and so the range of things that really are necessary and proper to the regulation of interstate commerce is large (but not infinite). The actual holding of inverse-Wickard is "The federal government lacks the power to regulate the intermediate processes of a vertically integrated business" (such as a farmer growing wheat which would be fed to animals whose meat would move in interstate commerce) which is a bit of a libertarian gotcha given the way large businesses work in the 20th century.

Okay, so why did they bother with 90% of the rest of section 8 if a broad reading of those two parts make them superfluous? Were their comments, arguments, communications with each other, etc., all just a ploy to pass the only sections which mattered?

It's true it isn't 1789 anymore and the world and its juridical walls are gone and we're left with a document which can be read to have essentially limitless power and that's essentially what it is in the modern day; however, that doesn't mean it was the founders intent. You can read the entirety of clause 1, the tax and spend clause, as being used for the other enumerated clauses and reading it this way doesn't make most of the section, the most important section in the entirety of the Constitution, superfluous. The history of formulation, ratification, and amendment weighs against your claims about the founders intent as well as the repeatedly stated primary purpose of the coup against the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution to begin with which was the power to levy taxes. Indeed this is a supported general characterization of what the founders argued and responded to others when this question and criticism was brought up at the time of the founding and ratification process.

Perhaps some of them did see and want this clause to be essentially limitless, but that's not what they told others nor what they argued for its approval nor would it be anywhere close to the consensus view at the time of the founding.

The actual holding of inverse-Wickard is "The federal government lacks the power to regulate the intermediate processes of a vertically integrated business"

the holding in Wickard v Filburn from the 1940s, over 150 years after the founding, was that if an individual's effort which is entirely intrastate with no showing whatsoever of any interstate movement of anything could be "aggregated" and therefore have a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce then the federal government has the power to regulate it under the interstate commerce clause

the inverse of that holding isn't your statement, the inverse would be the federal government doesn't have the power to regulate entirely intrastate commerce even if aggregated together there is some effect on interstate commerce

the holding itself erased any limit on the commerce clause because any individual act if aggregated enough will have a substantial effect on interstate commerce; do you think a single founder would have seen this case and not been horrified?

Besides, silly FDR, he should have just passed a large tax on all wheat grown and only offered a subsidy if you abide by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Who needs the commerce clause when your tax and spend power is only limited by the apportionment clause, which after the Obamacare cases, means pretty much nothing, another relic of a bygone era.

Do you think the Louisiana purchase was a legal act under the Constitution, given that there is no explicit enumerated power for Congress to acquire territory from other countries?

I get wanting to be something like an Originalist, but I think that a lot of people that hold the position do so as a kind of cop out. It is much easier to say, "We can't debate foreign aid, the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it", than to say, "I am opposed to my tax dollars being spent on foreign aid for reasons X, Y, and Z." But the problem is, sometimes the Constitution does actually seem to allow the thing (and not in a nonsense "Living Constitution" way.)

I think if you're creative, most of the limitations are hardly limitations at all. The Federal government was able to end hotel segregation by using the Interstate Commerce clause to regulate hotels that host people from other states. That seems like a much more justifiable use of the Interstate Commerce clause than that one outrageous case of regulating how much corn a man is allowed to grow on his own property, and which would never cross state lines.

(EDIT: Looking it up, at least one kind of foreign medical aid is done "by the book" in exactly the way I describe. The US Department of Defense will send the military in to foreign disaster areas to set up field hospitals and military medical teams. So, we can ask the object level question - should US tax dollars be spent on such foreign aid? I don't think the "but the Constitution" dodge is really possible here.)

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

by using the Interstate Commerce clause to regulate hotels that host people from other states. That seems like a much more justifiable use of the Interstate Commerce clause than that one outrageous case of regulating how much corn a man is allowed to grow on his own property, and which would never cross state lines.

Wickard v Filburn is a travesty, and every day the Supreme Court goes without reversing it is another day of ignominy and shame.

That still doesn't mean that there's any interstate commerce when someone rents a hotel room. The commerce happens when the man crosses the border with money. The renting of the hotel room only ever occurs within one state.

Looking it up, at least one kind of foreign medical aid is done "by the book" in exactly the way I describe. The US Department of Defense will send the military in to foreign disaster areas to set up field hospitals and military medical teams.

There should be no standing army in the first place, but rather state militias. This is not by the book in any way.

Do you think the Louisiana purchase was a legal act under the Constitution, given that there is no explicit enumerated power for Congress to acquire territory from other countries?

With the caveat that this is way in the past, so it's purely academic: this was very clearly illegal under the Constitution. I don't see any way you can argue that it was legal under a framework where the federal government only is allowed explicitly enumerated powers. The Constitution (well, the bill of rights but since they are amendments it amounts to the same thing) is quite clear that anything not allowed in the Constitution is reserved for the states/people.

I agree. The question was meant to highlight the problems with Originalism and similar positions. The Founding Fathers were wise, but in setting up a government of limited powers, they failed to account for a very obvious case like acquiring new territory. Thomas Jefferson was only the 3rd president of the United States - it didn't take long for the cracks to show.

The Founding Generation were all alive to see how inadequate the Constitution of limited powers they had crafted was. It didn't take long for people like Alexander Hamilton to try to craft a national bank, or for presidents to hide the fact that they were engaging in clandestine naval warfare without congressional approval or oversight, or for the Supreme Court to seize the right of judicial review, or for Jefferson to decide the treaty power includes the ability to acquire more territory. I'm sympathetic to Originalism, and I think in an ideal world it would be how the law was actually interpreted, but the ink had hardly dried on the Constitution when the first violations of its framework happened.

I could imagine a polite, careful argument which included calling people “mongrels,” but this ain’t it.

Mongrels?

A pejorative for the inhabitants of the Russian Federation

Weird thing to call them but thanks for letting me know.

Not really, no- perhaps foreign to the anglosphere(and definitely weird to hear from someone casting himself as a liberal) but 'Russians aren't really white/are mixed race, they're mongolian savages that invade europe again, tatar yoke, muslims in the russian army raping european women, etc' is a common anti-russian canard. It's not even strictly speaking wrong.

It is, strictly speaking, wrong. Russian Federation has Tatars and Siberians and Caucasians but it's ~70%+ Russian slavs, who are genetically really close to Poles and Ukrainians. The constitution also calls said Slavs the foundational ethnicity of the federation.

And 'Mongrel' is always a pejorative when applied to people or a nation. No reason to accept it as anything other than low-resolution name-calling.

In the current year, it's considered a perjorative even when applied to dogs. The politically correct term is "crossbreed".

A dog described as a "mongrel" may be a crossbreed, but the implication is also that they are the product of uncontrolled breeding. A breeder crossing a St. Bernard to a Chihuhaha to make a Mexican mountain rescue dog is making a crossbreed; the cur in the street that some gangbanger's (probably already mixed) pit bull sired on a stray Labrador is a mongrel.

Or 'Canine-American'.

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eh, historically maybe. People on Moscow streets are looking whiter than people on Berlin or London streets to me these days.

This implies that ethnic Russians should be counted as ‘white’ and ethnic Turks shouldn’t.

Now obviously there’s historical reasons for that division but people who hate Russia don’t have to buy into them. It’s literally Ukrainian state ideology that Russians are either mixed race or asiatic rather than European.

This is in the context of a random forum poster on an American forum. Why in the world would anyone care what Ukrainian state ideology is? They aren't really white either by racial purist standards, no matter how many ww2 tattoos they get. I was just pointing out it's funny for someone to try and disparage one county based on racial purity when their own countries are what they are these days.

Yes, but that's not because of mongrelization, but rather population displacement.

Of course there's a coherent policy, and it's mercantilist style gunboat diplomacy.

Trump believes that the US's greatness in that era was the fruit of that policy rather than merely coinciding with it. But you can't accuse the man of having no vision when he's even willing to make fundamental changes to taxation and doing landgrabs to align with it.

He was literally selling that vision on Rogan during the campaign, it's not like it's a mystery. How realistic that is in the modern world is another question, but it's unfair to say it's incoherent.

What's more interesting to me is that this has also been China's declared policy for a while. And whether it would be beneficial or not on the whole for the US to collapse their alliances to become another China. One needs to remember that the US proper and the Imperial infrastructure are two different political entities with nonoverlapping interests.

If he wanted to expand the American empire in an advantageous way, that would be one thing. But based on his appointments it seems like we'll be going on a crusade in the middle east rather than actually annexing any valuable territory or defending the West. The fact that he railed against the Iraq war in 2016 makes me think he has no coherent foreign policy or vision. I don't see how someone can flip-flop on that particular issue.

we'll be going on a crusade in the middle east

If we're bombing things to shit anyway I fully support doing so to return the holy lands to Christendom and the subjugation or expulsion of both saracen and jew.

Well, my holy lands are in Europe, not the middle east. I don't care what happens in the middle east as long as we're not too heavily involved. The Abrahamic religions will be fighting each other until they destroy themselves. America should be aspiring to greatness, not religious barbarism.

The fact that he railed against the Iraq war in 2016

Trump was against the Iraq War during the early Bush years. His foreign policy vision has remained "America First". The Trump Doctrine is extremely legible and coherent, I think trying to deny this is just equivalent to not liking it. Note that Hegseth did not get appointed to lead a new Iraq War (and Trump is not a doddering susceptible who does whatever his last conversation told him). Hegseth got hired to purge the military of political officers, because he will be the first SecDef in a generation who isn't from that class.

(and Trump is not a doddering susceptible who does whatever his last conversation told him)

Trump is 78, was showing visible signs of mild cognitive decline on the campaign trail, and was a notoriously low-detail President in his first term despite being younger. Personnel is policy to a greater extent than usual. (That said, Michael Waltz as NSA is more likely to be deciding who gets attacked than the SecDef - power under a low-detail President leaks to the EOP and not the cabinet).

I think this is an ignorant or helpless point of view: You can watch Trump live, you can see him in action. He'll sign executive orders for hours while answering questions from reporters, he'll be deeply knowledgable about each one. Then he'll go to North Carolina and have a press conference with victims of the hurricane, speaking totally spontaneous, he'll go to LA and meet with the mayor and argue with her and command the room. He's meeting with lawmakers and give speeches, he'll show up for a cameo at Vegas, he's constantly everywhere doing things in command of his faculties. He's in command everywhere he goes, nobody can keep up with him. The "evidence" of decline is a few edited clips taken out of thousands literally thousands of public appearances. Trump is not a pushover, he is not being lead around by his aides, and I think at this late date it's a little absurd to deny his vigor and obvious good health.

Crusade in the middle east? Last I checked neither Greenland nor Panama were in the middle east.

I was referring to Hegseth's book, "American Crusade", where he justifies the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

I do not think we are going to be invading the middle east under Trump. Would it be correct that you think we will, in fact, be "going on a crusade in the middle east"?

Well like I said, I really don't know what Trump's intentions are. Given how easily he seems to be swayed by people around him, I'm definitely worried about Hegseth's influence. I don't know why Trump would appoint him if not to take his opinions seriously. Other than starting a nuclear war, I think putting boots on the ground in the middle east is one of the most catastrophic decisions he could make.

I have not read Hegseth's book. Have you? Where are you drawing the idea that he is in favor of new wars in the Middle East?

Here he is discussing the war in Afghanistan. His critiques match my own well, and I detect no enthusiasm for further middle-east interventionism. This matches the interviews I've watched of him, and also matches the general attitude toward foreign wars that Trump has been hewing to since his run in 2015, which convinced me to back him. I am fairly confident that Trump will not be starting any new wars in the middle east, and I am extremely confident that he will start less wars in the middle east than Kamala would have.

I do not know where your confusion over Trump's intentions come from, but I do not share them. I've heard this sort of FUD during Trump's first term, re: John Bolton. Bolton got no new wars, and his political influence seem to me to have taken a precipitous nose-dive under Trump.

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He had Bolton during his first term and didn't start any major wars. Seems like he often just picks people that are recommended to him by other people he trusts without doing much vetting.

I don't know why Trump would appoint him if not to take his opinions seriously.

Trust, personal loyalty, and unlikeliness to go behind his back to the Chinese like Milley did.

I work at a national lab. Three weeks ago, the director (pronouns in signature) announced that it was management's intention to continue implementing the recommendations of the American Physical Society's "DEI audit," and if this entailed renaming the "DEIA Department" to "Workforce Department," they'd do that. (Don't quote me on this verbatim; I've blurred the details.)

Considering every organization receiving federal funds to be Kim Davis about this by default may be a leap, but perhaps not by that much.

Edit: This week, they've caved.

Weirdly, I also work at a national lab(ish), and about three weeks ago, there was a similar email about the commitment to EEO and diversity. I don't think our GM lists his pronouns, though.

In my case, this was said at a meeting rather than sent out via email, so I don't have anything in writing besides my own notes (though perhaps that meeting was recorded; quite probably there are copies of what was said.)

I more just find the similarity of the timing entertaining.

The Definitely not Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department. It'd be funnier to me if these kinds of tactics didn't work as well as they do, but plausible deniability doesn't even have to pass the "plausible" threshold anymore.

“Workforce Department”

“Manpower Department”, surely?

In any case, why don’t you use that DEI reporting email to tattle? I’m not even being unserious, you may as well try.

Because the next time there's a Democratic administration, every email to that address will be released and all their senders blaocklisted. If I were that brave, I would have burnt myself up a decade ago.

You can sign up for a burner email using a name of an enemy at work and send it that way.

How hard is that?

Post the e-mail here. One of us will be happy to send it.

You may be able to find an anonymising route to send it through.

Get your soon-to-retire coworker to send it, then.

Here are two articles about PEPFAR (EDIT: one of the organizations for which funding has been paused) that I think are worth reading.

https://brendonmarotta.com/4454/pepfar-plans-to-end-infant-circumcision-in-africa/

tl;dr: PEPFAR is responsible for an unknown but very large number of botched circumcisions in Africa, perhaps hundreds of thousands.

https://brendonmarotta.com/4475/pepfar-to-experiment-on-african-children-with-the-shangring/

tl;dr: An article about them moving from a circumcision device with an unacceptable rate of botched circumcisions to a new device with an unknown rate of botched circumcisions.

Any circumcision on someone who cannot consent is a human rights violation. I realize some of PEPFARs other tasks are praise-worthy, but I cannot possibly support an organization that engages in this sort of unnecessary cruelty.

As long as we assume that living with a botched circumcision is still better than dying of AIDS, I don't see how this is sufficient grounds to condemn an organization that has saved tens of millions of lives, perhaps more than any other foreign aid program in history.

Any circumcision on someone who cannot consent is a human rights violation.

Do you think Jews violate human rights in circumcising their children?

Yes. Especially their influence for propagating circumcision on the west.

Yes.

Why would the religion of the perpetrator make a difference in the poster's moral proclamation?

Because it's a way to make concrete a claim about abstract principles. The obvious next question is "what do you think should be done about it?"

"Infant circumcision is a human rights violation" "Judaism is founded on a ritual that is a human rights violation" and "Circumcision should be banned, and Jews who continue the practice should be jailed" are three distinct statements, and it's instructive to see how far someone is willing to ride this particular train.

If one truly believes that it's a human rights violation, then following it through to jailing those who practice it seems like a reasonable conclusion regardless of what cultural practice is hung up on doing it.

Human sacrifice was a much more common religious practice at some point in history too. Eventually practitioners were jailed or exiled enough to greatly reduce its prevalence. I'm sure there were people asking, "do you really think the Aztecs are committing human rights violations by sacrificing to the sun god?"

The only way to answer it is with the chad yes.

As mentioned recently, this is why I'm not a liberal any more. "human rights" doesn't trace back to a set of objective facts, it's a label intended for use in coordinating use of force, and it can and is applied entirely arbitrarily, even to the point of self-contradiction.

Liberalism of this sort is breathtakingly stupid, astonishingly dangerous, and utterly ubiquitous.

It's stupid, because it assumes order and social structure for the foundation of an argument intended to prosecute arbitrary divisions of order and social structure; it's taking a concept intrinsically designed to be applied to the margins and aiming it at the center and expecting everything to work out fine.

It's dangerous because it encourages people to initiate and escalate conflicts they can't actually win.

It's ubiquitous because it's the basic social technology our whole society runs on, and that the majority of people have no defense against.

Liberalism takes it as axiomatic that "Religion" and "Human Rights" and "Freedom" are conceptual primitives. When that turns out to be false, it has no Plan B.

Did you mean to post this as a top-level? Cause I don’t see any mention of “PEPFAR” in the parent.

PEPFAR is among the organizations with paused funding, and when I've seen the executive orders discussed in other places it has been the focus of the discussion.

My guess is the relevance is here:

2019 Background: PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) has used millions of tax dollars in a campaign to circumcise Africa under the guise of reducing HIV risks, based on some very controversial studies.

Links to a blog of an activists who writes books and makes documentaries to end circumcision. IME the intactivist bunch make radical claims well beyond anything the evidence supports, and bring up circumcision whenever possible in hope of ending what just might be the most barbaric practice mankind has ever conceived.

Do I support unnecessary circumcision of children? No, not really. But every time I look at the evidence, I can't see any reason to get worked up about the topic. I hope the bizarre practice dies out.

The claims made in these specific articles are supported by the evidence, which you will see if you read them.

In this case I felt justified in bringing up the subject, because it is the primary organization which is being discussed with respect to foreign aid being paused.

If massive numbers of botched circumcisions isn't a reason to get worked up about the topic, what would be?

So to be fair, I went back and gave a light read to the two linked posts and threw 5 minutes of googling at the results. AFAIKT, the posts contain mostly hysteria, confusion, and misunderstandings. The Mogen Clip is very much around. Complication rates in US setting for serious adverse events is somewhere around 1/1M, or 700/1M for any serious event - usually not enough skin removal, leading to a repeat procedure. Complication rates go up 10-20X 1 year after birth. Any complication, including excess bleeding, 2%.

The PEPFAR program seems like it is regulating itself on the cautionary principle, and winding down circumcision efforts (despite the fact that Hillary Clinton gave PEPFAR $40M in tax dollars OMG!!! Not Hillary!!)

I saw language about "high numbers" of "botched" circumcisions. But I didn't see data or definitions. Maybe I missed it, but given the insanely low serious complication rate in the US, I'm highly suspicious. I imagine this voluntary up to 15 tanner-3 circumcision program has a higher relative rate, but probably a low absolute rate. This is just a guess. Circumcision in Africa are (were?) complicated by dint of being rolled out in AIDS endemic areas (1/3rd of adult male population in 2000 iirc), so its at least plausible that such programs, having performed tens of millions of circumcisions, prevented hundreds or thousands of horrid deaths from HIV/aids. But who knows? They seem to be pulling back in 2019 (when AIDS meds were quite good).

In case its necessary to reiterate, I'm against circumcision.

Well I certainly don't want it to seem like no level of agreement will ever be enough for me.

Illinois and other states claiming that federal Medicaid portals are not working as of this morning. The memo contains a footnote carving out Medicare and Social Security but not Medicaid. I doubt this freeze persists through the end of the week. Someone who was a recipient of a federally authorized grant is going to sue and a court is going to enjoin this in short order.

ETA:

Lawsuit and request for TRO already filed.

ETA2:

Politico has posted what is alleged to be a spreadsheet of the list of impacted programs. I'm sure there's something in here for everyone. Hope people weren't relying on their WIC or SNAP benefits!

ETA3:

Turns out end of the week was wildly conservative. I'm seeing reporting the judge assigned to the lawsuit above granted the TRO from the bench a few minutes ago, lasting at least until Monday Feb 3rd.

What does ETA mean in this context?

Edited to add

Edited To Add. Just a way to specify the content was not in the original comment.

I usually use 'EDIT:' to prevent confusion with the more common meaning of 'ETA'.

TRO

*Request for TRO

Corrected!

Yeah because medicare and social security are direct payments to individuals, medicade is block grants to the states. A lot of people are about to find out why their state can do so much with so little taxes. I wonder if blue states will capitulate on DEI and trans to get back on the federal teat?

They won't have to choose. A judge will enjoin this before the week is out.

Pesky judges ruin all the fun. Sad!

Funding is paused. There is no evidence for negative ramifications of the pause. Democrats are using their agents in the media to depict this as chaotic and bad. That’s because the effects of misinformation linger even when retractions are issued, though there is usually not a salient retraction issued anyway. The intention is to form a negative emotional memory in the consumer’s mind which strengthens for each story. I am filing this under “business as usual”.

Personally, I know several people who work at an FQHC who have suddenly been cut off from their funds and are in a state of disarray at this time. Although too soon to tell, if this continues for long, the network of dozens of clinics in the area will have to shut down. They provide medical and psychiatric care for many people in the area. This definitely would be a negative ramification.

Why wouldn’t there be negative effects for abruptly cutting off funding? You know what they say about the absence of evidence.

The net effect absolutely could be positive, but it’s not going to be free. I am certain the media will be blasting genuine sob stories from whatever percentage of Americans were actually depending on this.

You know what they say about the absence of evidence.

As the story of the dog that did not bark in the nighttime reveals, sometimes it is indeed evidence of absence.

To be clear, I expect the dog will bark, but Trump enthusiasts will cheerfully dismiss it as an injured cat.

Abandoning the metaphor—some people were getting money, and if this works, they won’t keep getting money. Even if this is a good thing, they are going to complain and dig up the most sympathetic first-generation college student flattened by student debt. It’s not a statistical argument, just a political one.

To be clear, I expect the dog will bark, but Trump enthusiasts will cheerfully dismiss it as an injured cat.

We've already learned from coverage of the alleged pet-eating Haitians that calling a cat a dog is "directionally correct" in Trumpworld. Surely the same applies if Peticare cuts injure a cat and I call it a barking dog?

There is no evidence for negative ramifications of the pause.

The pause has just begun. What measurable outcomes or evidence of decreased institutional efficacy would you accept as "negative ramifications," when the effects of the pause are analyzed?

What measurable outcomes or evidence of decreased institutional efficacy would you accept

You're already loading the question. Why should we assume that the institutions carrying out their functions is a good thing?

I’m not sure how else you’d phrase it.

If coffee says there’s No Evidence ™ of negative ramifications, he ought to have some measurable outcome in mind.

I like your VA example, except I don’t know how much of the VA is grant-funded. It’s a government agency, not a separate nonprofit, right?

I like your VA example, except I don’t know how much of the VA is grant-funded. It’s a government agency, not a separate nonprofit, right?

Yeah, I'll grant (heh) that this is a problem with Trump's sweeping approach, and it would be a lot easier to talk about costs and benefits if he tried something more targeted. But I was asked a question on what evidence to accept, and that's the type of thing I'd count as a negative. FWIW, someone else mentioned local clinics that are financed with grant money, I think that counts too.

"or" - what measurable outcomes of any kind would you accept as "negative ramifications," when the effects of the pause are analyzed?

You mentioned the VA in the other comment, if there's a measurable increase in waiting times, or some other decrease in service quality would do it. "Research", and other forms of paper pushing is at the lowest risk of me caring about it getting cut, unless it gets in the way of people doing productive work (like longer waiting times for construction permits, or something? I dunno).

"Research", and other forms of paper pushing is at the lowest risk of me caring about it getting cut, unless it gets in the way of people doing productive work (like longer waiting times for construction permits, or something? I dunno).

Here's 1,877 active and/or recruiting (hopefully...) clinical trials targeted at veterans' health problems. Do you consider this "paper pushing?" (Yes, many are the kinds of "community health" interventions that are easy to be cynical about, but there are also many potentially important RCTs and even basic science like "DNA Methylation Markers in Veterans Exposed to Open Burn Pits," just on the first page.)

Yeah. If we survived this long without them, I'm sure we can wait a bit more.

There's always room for more in the invisible graveyard!

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The White House said the pause would not impact Social Security or Medicare payments or "assistance provided directly to individuals." That means some food aid programs for the poor would not be affected, sources said.

Ok, so people (read: voters) will keep getting payments but the grants and funding to will be cut. It's not at all clear who any of this effects from that first article. As for medicine in poor countries...I'm sure China will be more than happy to fill that void.

I'm pretty sure Bush II did something similar during his second term. I was working at a non-profit. Some amount of funding stopped coming and we had to hustle for more state and charitable funding. I don't think it had any effect on the community, but maybe in the long run some services (like free dental, a school they ran) might have been stopped.

The Reuters piece was super vague, likely because the leak or memo or whatever was super vague. These things happen either out of malice against the rule-makers or to put people on notice. So the effect is a population of chicken-little's crying about the sky falling. Without more specifics it's almost impossible to set any parameters for what may or may not be a negative externality.

I think many here would agree that there's opposing standard of merit from the various NGO's and Universities and Whatever to compare against. We don't have anything aside from numbers going out and maybe the people employed. Grantees report all kinds of things that their program is definitely doing, but no one (I dunno maybe effective altruists) has done the work of presenting whatever the value-add is for society. Hence the, "Why should we assume their functions are good," statement.

So you'll get the people who never question the goodness of their programs screaming to the heavens, the people who doubt the goodness of these programs cheering in the streets and everyone else shrugging their shoulders and getting on with it.

There is no evidence for negative ramifications of the pause.

I mean, “negative” is in the eye of the beholder, but tautologically, the consequence of pausing federal grantmaking is that the people who were doing jobs funded out of federal grants are now no longer getting paid.

You know what's being left out of the conversation?

The fact the the Biden spending spree in the last months of his administration left the government completely broke and at the debt ceiling.

So you know, it sucks that we can't meet our obligations, but if we don't have the money, we don't have the money. I'm sure someone will come along with a "But the law says" argument. But the debt ceiling is also part of the law.

The fact the the Biden spending spree in the last months of his administration left the government completely broke and at the debt ceiling.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by a Biden spending spree? My impression was that congress and Biden signed a continuing resolution bill to fund the government through March so that Trump could enact his priorities, and that Biden can only spend money appropriated by congress. Are you arguing that Biden increased spending in some way in the last few months of his presidency? And you think that Biden should have raised the debt ceiling in the last few months of a lame duck presidency?

First, I believe you have conflated the budget bill with the debt ceiling. Biden authorized a temporary budget through March 14th to avoid a government shutdown. The debt ceiling is untouched, and we are right up against it. We cannot spend money we don't have anymore.

Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.

Now maybe you can frame this in a way where it's all smart politics. One persons "They put party above country" is another persons "The opposition party is entirely illegitimate and we must break off all the levers of power and leave the country crippled before they use the turnkey fascism we set up." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

All the same, given the situation he finds himself in, why shouldn't Trump close every money spigot he possibly can, regardless of the letter of the law, because we've been left completely broke? When we hit the debt ceiling, we start defaulting on our obligations. That's what this looks like. Complaining about Trump making lemonaid out of lemons, since slashing the budget was part of his agenda anyways and he can spin it as a victory, is just spin.

First, I believe you have conflated the budget bill with the debt ceiling. Biden authorized a temporary budget through March 14th to avoid a government shutdown. The debt ceiling is untouched, and we are right up against it. We cannot spend money we don't have anymore.

No, I understand the difference. That's why I asked whether you thought Biden should have pushed congress to raise the debt limit in the last few months of a lame duck presidency.

Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.

lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.

Anyways, the $4 billion for the world bank you linked doesn't get paid until after Trump takes office (and presumably he can, and I presume will, cancel it). Your argument is that Biden went on a spending spree over the last few months - can you explain the timing of how you see that working? The 100 billion for clean energy came from the funds appropriated by congress for the inflation reduction act. Do you think you could also explain how that fits your narrative that Biden went on a 'spending spree' to bankrupt the federal government in his last few months in office? Did you read the articles that you linked?

Your examples don't seem to make your point very well. It's just not clear to me, legally speaking, how a president can go on a spending spree in their last few months in office and bankrupt the government when funding is appropriated by congress.

Now maybe you can frame this in a way where it's all smart politics. One persons "They put party above country" is another persons "The opposition party is entirely illegitimate and we must break off all the levers of power and leave the country crippled before they use the turnkey fascism we set up." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

No, I don't think I would ever argue that harming your own country for partisan gain is a good thing. And broadly speaking, Trump won an election, so let him govern as he sees fit (within the bounds of the constitution and short of Watergate-level offenses) and the voters will decide.

All the same, given the situation he finds himself in, why shouldn't Trump close every money spigot he possibly can, regardless of the letter of the law, because we've been left completely broke? When we hit the debt ceiling, we start defaulting on our obligations. That's what this looks like. Complaining about Trump making lemonaid out of lemons, since slashing the budget was part of his agenda anyways and he can spin it as a victory, is just spin.

I'm not complaining about Trump freezing all federal spending. I'm responding to a comment that you made and asking you to explain what you meant.

I'd be making different arguments for USAID or NIH/NSF/DoE or whatever other department.

lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.

It’s not wrong, though, is it?

So Ukraine is part of the Democratic Patronage Network? Is everything trump spends money on part of the Republican Patronage Network?

Is everything trump spends money on part of the Republican Patronage Network?

Not yet. To the extent that there exists a Republic Patronage network it's still largely inchoate and not integrated with supposedly non-partisan government spending the way that the Democratic Patronage network is. That may change: I think that the American right is wising up to how the game is played.

To state the thesis:

There has been a massive effort in pretty much every Anglosphere country to funnel money away from politicians and nominally neutral civil service towards autonomous, usually left-wing organisations that are not under political control. The usual strategy is to fund large grant-makers, who fund grants for small grant-makers, who pass money between each other and do everything possible to hide it before spending it on left-wing causes that would not normally be acceptable as a use of public money. In short, left-wing (Democrat) grant-making (patronage) networks. These networks feed back into government policy via lobbying and providing 'expert' guidance, sometimes called 'policy laundering'. In effect, you have government money going to supposedly uncontroversial groups like the World Bank to produce results and policy that government officially disavows.

In Ireland for example:

Senator Regina Doherty said the Women’s Council was failing to represent a wide range of views and, critically, noted that the organisation is almost entirely state-funded. And she is right: the NWCI’s latest annual report shows that it received over €800,000 in funding from various government bodies in 2020 versus less than €40,000 raised from its own members.

This is a typical arrangement in a country that has around 33,000 NGOs. The state funds them to the tune of around €5 billion every year, comprising 8% of the national budget. For context, the Irish health service, its largest single item of expenditure, got €21 billion in the last budget.

The organisations funded are almost exclusively socially progressive. The National Council of Women has historically been a relatively neutral organisation, but in recent years it has adopted increasingly progressive positions, such as signing a letter asking the Government to no-platform gender critical voices.

In the UK, we have quasi-non-governmental-organisations (QUANGO)s and a similar set of NGOs. There's a good article about exactly how complex the funding network can get (one local initiative can be funded by a dozen NGOs, which are each funded by a dozen NGOs, which are all ultimately funded by one or two grant-making institutions) but I'm afraid I can't find it now. As an example, Stonewall's (the LGBT organisation turned trans advocacy group) largest source of funding in 2021 was the UK Foreign Office, the Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme, and the Welsh Government. This also gives you a flavour:

Let us consider an example: the Scottish Trans Alliance. This is a project funded by the Scottish Government Equality Unit and delivered by the Equality Network, which is largely funded by the Scottish government as well as by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (funded by UK government).

The project delivers research, advisory, and training, including to government-funded bodies, who in turn repeat the ideas received via reports, training and consultancy back toward policymakers. Thus, a nested series of public sector grants has enabled government to conjure into existence a body that shapes public sector policy. Meanwhile, the pronouncements and statistics produced by this arms-length government body are treated by the (government funded) BBC as though emanating from independent civil society voices.

The whole cycle amounts to a process of laundering, by semi-independent bodies, a series of policies the government already wanted to adopt so they look as though they come spontaneously from the society upon which they will in due course be visited.

The result looks like a thriving voice for civil society in the national debate. But in reality it is more like the government having a conversation with itself, via a series of proxies. Meanwhile, that part of civil society without insider status sits scratching its head trying to work out which form to fill in to get a seat at the table.

(I know I have ignored the US. Others like @jeroboam can provide sources.)

The whole point of the scheme is to launder partisan patronage into harmless-sounding forms, so without digging into vast networks of funding I cannot prove it, but the 100bn to the World Bank is almost certainly going to be spent in this way, as is the green energy funding. Ukraine, I don't know. I think that they probably get more of the actual money without it being siphoned off, but I can't be sure. In the absence of transparency, suspicion flourishes.

This cannot yet be done in reverse because (1) the NGO sector is left-wing for demographic and historical reasons, (2) their supposedly non-partisan funders in the government are left-wing and not easy to replace, and (3) right-wing causes are often officially proscribed and subject to a level of scrutiny that the left is not (yet).

Yeah I understand what a patronage network is, and that the progressives have built one – but for the point under discussion, funding for ukraine, the term is not applicable. That’s the way I interpret @Chrisprattalpharaptr ‘lol’. That the term was rendered meaningless and reduced to a boo-light for ‘democrat spends money on something’ . Though it’s possible he was calling into question the existence of a democratic patronage network, idk.

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Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon.

Go ahead and talk about rabid partisanship, though.

Felt was FBI, not CIA. Unless you're positing something more grandiose than Deep Throat leaking stuff to the press because he was pissed at Nixon's appointment of Gray?

Ironically, claiming that Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon probably has less bipartisan support than the consensus view that it...wasn't.

Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.

Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.

If Nixon doesn't code to Trump/Republicans I am confused as to what you code things as. Nixon faced a hostile legacy media during all 3 runs. Nixon faced a hostile federal workforce when in the Oval office, particularly from intelligence agencies and the FBI/DOJ. And one of Nixon's signature issues was being tough on crime. If that isn't mapping well to Trump for you...IDK what to tell you.

And then, from what little I know about Nixon, he created the EPA and the endangered species/clean air acts. He cozied up to China and brought them into the fold. And some mix of foreign interventionism without boots on the ground? What does that even code as anymore?

My broader point is that it was so far in the past (at least to me) that I wasn't interested in making a partisan point, I was just trying to gesture towards a cultural touchstone I thought most people would recognize. I didn't realize it was such a sore point.

Why would I look to bipartisan consensus?

If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.

Teapot dome, probably.

Nixon is absolutely a paleoconservative. I'd say he's in the mold of Buchanan, but it's more accurate to say the reverse.

Why would I look to bipartisan consensus?

Because if a narrative is broadly believed by both Democrats and Republics, to me it's definitionally not rabidly partisan.

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The first executive order that you linked is really pushing the boundaries of executive power. If congress has the power of the purse and has already allocated the funds, the executive branch does not have the authority to block its disbursement.

I expect this to be litigated and a stay put on that order in the next couple of days.

Additionally, I think that in its current form, if it ends up actually affecting everything from food stamps, to federal loans/grants to cancer research, the move could backfire quickly--if it has any teeth.

His nominee for White House budget director, Russell Vought, who has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, headed a think tank that has argued Congress cannot require a president to spend money.

Can you show me where in the Constitution it says that the President must spend the money Congress allocates? He certainly can't allocate more, but simply stopping payments until they decide if they like who gets them seems perfectly reasonable.

I think that in its current form, if it ends up actually affecting everything from food stamps, to federal loans/grants to cancer research, the move could backfire quickly

Not the case, according to the article you're referring to:

The White House said the pause would not impact Social Security or Medicare payments or "assistance provided directly to individuals."

Can you show me where in the Constitution it says that the President must spend the money Congress allocates? He certainly can't allocate more, but simply stopping payments until they decide if they like who gets them seems perfectly reasonable.

It's called "impoundment," others have already thought of this "one weird trick Congress hates," and there's both statutory and caselaw: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/simulating-doge

Can you show me where in the Constitution it says that the President must spend the money Congress allocates? He certainly can't allocate more, but simply stopping payments until they decide if they like who gets them seems perfectly reasonable.

It is a combination of the 3:

  1. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” President's do not create law, congress does. Withholding funding is considered "Impoundment" by
  2. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which was upheld via judicial review by
  3. The SCOTUS ruling in Train v. City of New York (1975).

This action would go against all 3. The Constitution has not been amended, the law has not been repealed and the supreme court has not seen a case to change that precedent, at least not yet.

Not the case, according to the article you're referring to:

Much of the funding is not disseminated directly to individuals, so that isn't particularly illuminating. For example, federal loans and grants are disbursed from the department of education to the university itself, and then from the university to students.

WIC works the same way, except the funds go from USDA to the states, who then disburse the funds directly to recipients. So unless you have some examples of funds that go directly to individuals, which most funding does not do, the issue remains.

I think part of the problem with the federal government is that ~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour. There are very, very few "no duh this is stupid" cuts to be made, unless you are RonPaulLaserEyes.gif or have either an in-depth investigation or literally magical awareness of government inefficiency.

If you think the feds are spending too much (they are, obviously) then from a certain standpoint it is best to slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on. By changing the status quo from "spending insane amounts of cash" to "spending next to zip" you can shift the burden onto the would-be spenders instead of on the would-be slashers.

Status quo bias isn't lost on me, but I think the stakes are too high for "slash everything and then closely reevaluate which good stuff we should be spending cash on." (Ideally, essential programs wouldn't be dependent on federal grants, but, well, relevant xkcd.)

I dont see how that is a relevant xkcd. The stakes of our spending programs are generally terribly low. We know this because the first thing the complaining parties came up with to try and hammer was international free AIDS drugs. Is it possible to think of a less relevant program to a plumber in Iowa, bank teller in Virginia, or a drug dealer in Chicago? Maybe. They'd have to think hard though. REAL hard.

If essential programs shouldn't be dependent on federal grants, this is a fantastic opportunity to figure out what those essential programs are, and then get them off of the government teat or otherwise de-risk them.

Keep in mind this is just an EO and not something more critical, like a government funding shutdown or some other financial crisis. If there's really some widget farm in Nebraska that is federally funded and keeping the lights on, Trump can greenlight it tomorrow. That won't be true in the event of an actual crisis.

But the stakes of status quo are too high. Our interest owed alone is more than we have allocated to the military. And that’s just with current spending. We cannot sustain ourselves as a country if we end up spending more on interest owed than anything else in the budget. Obligatory welfare spending, which includes social security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare reimbursements, and subsidies to institutions to provide aid are a huge and ever growing burden on the American taxpayers and thus a huge drag on the economy. Quite frankly we’re broke and in fact underwater in ways that will become apparent fairly soon. Any shock to the status quo— our status as reserve currency, a trade war, a large scale war, and we will have a catastrophe on our hands because we no longer have the option to simply money printer go brrrrrr our way out of a fiscal crisis. And if you look to countries where these sorts of currency collapses happened, they’re to quote the President “shithole countries”.

I think doing it this way might be a bit ham handed, but the alternative to “shut it all down” might well be “whelp we tried to get our fiscal house in order, but nobody was willing to cut any programs. I guess we just go along here.” Which I think would be a huge problem because the chickens of too much spending will come home to roost on the taxpayers’ backs or on hyperinflation or both.

What reason is there to believe that this is intended to be part of a plan to balance the budget? That's not the stated purpose, nor did Trump seem to care about deficits during his first term.

I am not sure if this is actually part of a balance-the-budget initiative (this seems to me to perhaps be part of his ongoing operation to essentially purge the executive branch) but Trump has spoken before about the need to balance the budget.

He's also apparently pushed Congress to do away with the income tax, which I don't think is feasible without some extreme budgetary slashing (even if we do ramp up tariffs).

Trump has promised tax cuts, spending increases (on the military, and by implication on immigration enforcement) and a balanced budget. This is fundamentally non-serious, but par for the course for politicians.

Trump has always come across to me as someone who thinks that you can blow past arithmetic by force of personality. His lenders and business partners learned that not even Trump can do that long before he went into politics, and nothing in his first term suggested that thinks have changed.

Yes. I am not saying I think the math works, merely pointing out that there are some reasons to think it's part of a balance-the-budget initiative.

I am coming to believe his first term might not be particularly illuminating when it comes to What Trump Will Get Up To This Time Around but we'll see.

And if you look to countries where these sorts of currency collapses happened, they’re to quote the President “shithole countries”.

There's lots of speculation about America becoming brown Argentina. Why not more like Japan, which is also slowly strangling itself under stagnating productivity and a lolhuge debt?

Honestly either one is bad. What we need is to set ourselves on a steady fiscal course and restructure our economy towards productivity and growth and thus create prosperity. The fiscal part is quite simple — starve the beast that’s eating up not only the vast majority of our money, but creating so many burdens on productivity that even if the government was solvent, it would still be almost impossible to create growth.

The burdens are enormous. You have thousands of regulations to start even a simple business are pretty high. Theres OSHA, labor laws, if you’re doing food service an entire Bible of health code laws. Some rules are necessary, obviously, but at a certain point, you become your own enemy. We can’t create small businesses and new products as we could if you didn’t have so many rules and regulations to follow.

~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour.

Hoooo buddy. At multiple levels. I've just read some BAAs. I've read a variety of papers from labs who cite their federal funding on all of said papers. And I've even talked to folks about their publications and been told, "Yeah, this is pretty dumb, but it's what the BAA called for and what the PM said he wanted us to do." And yes, I've even spoken to PMs who are totally out to lunch.

The problem is that understanding such requires significant domain expertise, and if you're a high-level politician, you have \approx no way of distinguishing between advisers who actually have such expertise and will be honest with you, versus those who are out of their lane or riding a grift.

Sounds like Trump is taking the best approach, then.

I don’t know how to put this politely, but I’m convinced that if Trump took a shit on the sidewalk, you would jump online to tell me it was the obvious way to revitalize struggling American neighborhoods.

Is there anything he’s done that you don’t actually like?

you would jump online to tell me it was the obvious way to revitalize struggling American neighborhoods.

No, but I would ignore it, so you're directionally correct. I'm not interested in making problems for Trump, there are plenty of people perfectly willing to do that on their own.

It's especially funny that Biden was practically in diapers himself due to his physical and cognitive decline, and in fact it was the mainstream media telling me for years on end that he wasn't, and that he was doing fine.

Is there anything he’s done that you don’t actually like?

Amy Barrett. Gorsuch was shockingly great, despite his ruling in Bostock, so I suppose I can't expect that level three times in a row. Kavanaugh seems like a squish, but he's not as bad as Barrett.

As for this term? Nothing yet. A+, keep up the great work.

In general, I dance with the girl that I came with, and fight with the sword in my hand. This is what I've wanted to have happen for years. I wanted an outsider in the white house. I wanted the deep state to be destroyed. I wanted an Andrew Jackson, slay-the-banks type figure. I'm not going to nitpick the details now. Slash the budget, burn the institutions, repeal the income tax, throw up huge tariffs.

You know, drain the swamp.

I didn't vote for Trump in 16 or 20 because I didn't trust him and he didn't deliver much, but after seeing the Biden administration I regret that. I learned my lesson, and so this first week has been exhilarating. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect Trump to hit the ground running like this.

Amy Barrett. Gorsuch was shockingly great, despite his ruling in Bostock, so I suppose I can't expect that level three times in a row. Kavanaugh seems like a squish, but he's not as bad as Barrett.

By what metrics are Kavanaugh and Barrett bad?

How much I like their rulings, of course, and their willingness to stand on principle, bite bullets, and fix wrongs that are long-overdue rather than maintain status quo.

Basically, I think they're too much like Roberts, who I hold in contempt. Kavanaugh, especially, looks like he's in the mold of Roberts. Barrett simply looks like O'Connor, and in ten years she'll be siding with the D appointees more often than not.

Gorsuch gets my respect because he says, "but for sex," and, "the treaty says all of Oklahoma belongs to the Indians." He doesn't narrowly rule to avoid disruption, he rules on principle and the actual laws as they are written. His willingness to bite bullets is a sign of principle and courage, characteristics I do not perceive in Kavanaugh or Barrett.

Can you give some examples of "bad" opinions by Kavanaugh and Barrett and elaborate on how Barrett and O'Connor are worse than Kavanaugh and Roberts? Gorsuch seems to be generally respected by his ideological allies and loyal opposition, alike, for the reasons you cite and more, but opinions of Roberts and O'Connor are more complicated (I can't remember anyone saying O'Connor was outright bad...), and Kavanaugh and Barrett are relatively new and lacking in major decisions.

I mean, I don't know? There's still a lot of really good stuff happening. It's just a fundamentally hard problem to separate the good from the bad. The past approach has been, "Since we can't tell, we'll just fund pretty broadly and hope that there are at least enough good people around that some quantity of it gets oriented well; yes, we know that this will have some waste."

Obviously, the completely opposite response is, "Since we can't tell, let's just not fund any of it." I have a feeling that such a strategy probably doesn't perform better.

Any other strategy mostly comes down to people trying to figure out, "So, uh, how can we tell the difference between the good and the bad?" We then get different funding models, folks studying "progress" or "metascience", and then mostly question marks?

Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

I have a feeling that such a strategy probably doesn't perform better.

It needs to perform substantially worse for the first system to be justified.

When you simply don't spend the money, you don't have to take the money from citizens in the first place. Simply doing nothing is far, far better than taking money from productive people to redistribute to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people.

"So, uh, how can we tell the difference between the good and the bad?"

We haven't even gotten into the fact that what you think is good and bad isn't the same as what I think is good and bad. Another reason why doing nothing is superior to doing anything.

Well, for one example, the biggest funder of such research is the DoD, coming in around 40%. The potential downside of killing them all and letting god determine which are his is that your country's enemies may surpass you in strength and decide to kill all of you and let god determine which are his. This is a threat that may, indeed, be the house of many grifts, but it is entirely possible that those are the stakes. If one cuts everything and then wants to see how the performance of the new system differs from that of the old, how would one measure? You don't get to access the counterfactual.

This is the case for basically all DoD spending in general. You have very few observables to determine the "real" "quality" of the expenditures. They only get meaningfully tested and measured very rarely (hopefully). DoD grift in general is legendary (as it is in every military in the world). Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money? Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius? Just stop taking that money from citizens and redistributing it to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people?

Isn't carving out DOD science totally doable and doesn't leave us funding people studying third genders in treefrogs?

Like yes, the government will always be funding some number of stupid people doing stupid things, because they are trained in the proper mouth noises to pretend that some stupid and worthless fish is worth anything. But it seems like we can cut down on absolutely useless science substantially without impacting military projects.

If one wants to, absolutely. But yeah, my main point is that separating the wheat from the chaff in all of these areas is a near-impossible problem. It is plausible to say, "Some areas are important enough that we'll tolerate more graft," but of course, determining which areas are which is a political problem. You may want to preserve DoD research funding, but I don't know if KMC does. He's almost certainly right that there is graft there, too, so you probably have to convince him (or enough folks that have the ear of the President or whatever) to tolerate that graft, because you're probably not going to be able to really distinguish between the good and the bad at a low level.

Yeah, it's sort of interesting - you run into this problem sometimes with "civilian control of the military" where the military tries to bamboozle Congress, but I suspect "civilian control of SCIENCE" is an even harder nut to crack. At least there are a lot of Congresscritters who are former servicemembers.

Right. But unlike the military, there isn't actually a need for Congress to fund any science. Let it all be done by the private sector publicizing their breakthroughs as patents and citizen-scientists who want to spend their own time and effort and money doing research. Burn academia to the ground.

Who is funding fundamental research into topics like quantum mechanics that don't yield an immediate benefit but is still highly useful for society? The private sector probably wouldn't fund this research because the benefits accrue to a lot of competitors as well. Citizen-scientists can't fund it.

is still highly useful for society

Is it? Honest question.

I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit that I based my opinion on this ChatGPT answer:

Quantum mechanics (QM) underpins much of modern technology, especially in semiconductors, computers, and electronics. Here’s how:

  1. Semiconductors & Transistors Transistors, the building blocks of computers, rely on quantum effects like electron band gaps in semiconductors. Quantum tunneling and electron energy levels determine how silicon chips function, enabling microprocessors and memory storage.
  2. Lasers & LEDs Lasers work because of stimulated emission, a QM principle where electrons in atoms jump between energy levels. LEDs (light-emitting diodes) rely on QM to convert electrical energy into light efficiently.
  3. Computers & Microelectronics Quantum mechanics dictates how electrons move in circuits, affecting everything from chip design to data storage (like flash memory). Modern processor fabrication (like Intel’s 7nm and 3nm chips) requires quantum tunneling models to control electron behavior at microscopic scales.
  4. Magnetic Storage (Hard Drives & MRI) Quantum mechanics enables Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), a phenomenon used in hard drives to read data from magnetic disks. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) exploits nuclear spin states, a QM property, to create detailed images of the body.
  5. Quantum Computing (Future Impact) Unlike classical bits (0 or 1), quantum bits (qubits) use superposition and entanglement to process information in new ways. This could revolutionize fields like cryptography, AI, and simulations for materials science. So, while QM started as abstract math in the early 20th century, it now drives the technology behind modern life.

Okay...but all that I read here is "This stuff already worked before the current iteration of quantum theories, now we just understand it better" and not "novel quantum theories improved our ability to do this stuff". I'm not saying that's how it is, but that's all I gather from this chatbot response.

Sure there is.

That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?

If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.

A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.

That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?

More like saying there is no need for the government to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage people to teach their kids to read. Which is true. When I was a kid in Peru, there were government schools, but they were seen as the last resort of the poor; anybody who could afford it sent their kids to a private school. Which, admittedly, was much cheaper since all anyone needed to set up a private school was a spare garage and enough money to hire a teacher, but that's just another point in favor of the free market.

If you want your kids to have the best chance of success, you’d better provide them support and direction. If you want your fellow citizens to do useful research instead of going into paperclip advertising, maybe you’re going to have to coordinate it.

A separate question: why do we need Congress to handle the military? Why can’t we get equivalent quality defenses via crowdsourcing? Because it’s a distributed benefit, it has to have a coordinated cost. Education and research is the same way.

I'm not seeing the "benefits", is my thing. Like, let's leave aside the nonsense where grifters get paid to do research on hating white males (not because it doesn't happen, but because it is too easy a target) and focus on the strongest arguments for government-funded public research; things like NASA and the LHC that are discovering real scientific data that it is impossible a private non-government actor would have done.

How does the New Horizons probe improve my life? How does finding the Higgs boson? How does developing the correct theory of quantum gravity? Why is the government stealing money from me to pay people to do these things?

The beauty of market-driven research is that it only happens when somebody with money has a positive expected rate of return, which means convincing other people with money to pay for the results, which means that the research is expected to make people's lives better in some way.

Government grants have no such fundamental tether to reality.

That’s like saying there isn’t actually a need to teach your kids to read. The free market will encourage them, right?

While some kids will teach themselves to learn to read, the most critical times to develop are when they are so young they arent reasonably given all sorts of freedoms. So parents need to be somewhat dictatorial in directing that part of development or else it can be entirely missed.

OTOH, government efforts at teaching learning have failed at nearly every level for a century ++

Now think about something more complex than merely reading. What are the chances government is good at enabling it at a wide scale?

Well as pointed out above, there's a "military science" Venn diagram, but yeah generally speaking I think the .gov funding the academy is distortionary and bad.

This is bad for me personally. Very bad. Goodbye F31 funding. Goodbye future career in the sciences.

There is no reason why my tax dollars should be spent on anything in Africa. Not medicine, not food, not anything.

Cut them off. This is not crude, it's deliberate. Cut everything off, the useful stuff will bubble back up eventually.

Do you want drug resistant tuberculosis? Because that's how you get drug resistant tuberculosis.

US not spending that money and lowering taxes, which is desired creates great opportunities for virtuous individuals to do charity and make sure Africans have free PREP, HIV drugs and so on.

Why should USG do everything in the world ? There's plenty of big foundations. If Rockefeller Foundations is spending less money on left-wing NGOs in the West and more money on aid to poor in Africa, that's a win all around.

Wouldn't flood Africa with drugs be what causes drug resistance? How does cutting them off cause it?

I reject your fearmongering. I don't think you know that, and I'm not willing to trust you. I'm unwilling to be manipulated by these kinds of arguments, and I do view them as manipulations instead of true arguments.

There an entire ocean between DC and Africa, and an entire continent between me and DC. I do not want my tax dollars being burned up so an illiterate farmer in Mali can get tuberculosis treatment. I do not want to supplement the birthrate of Africa through medicine and food while they can't even keep their own populations under control, and instead they spill over into Europe, and try to reach America. I do not want the sweat of my brow to clothe another man, to keep another man's wife, to feed another man's children.

Even if you were right, I would take drug resistant tuberculosis if it meant funding the government with tariffs instead of income taxes. You underestimate what I am willing to accept in order to end the unacceptable.

Even if you were right, I would take drug resistant tuberculosis if it meant funding the government with tariffs instead of income taxes. You underestimate what I am willing to accept in order to end the unacceptable.

Why do you have so great a desire for the government to be funded by tariffs, instead of income taxes?

Because income taxes take money from productive people because they are productive. That is wrong and it kills growth more than anything else, including tariffs.

Tariffs, on the other hand, take money from people sending money abroad. This makes it more expensive to import and give domestic producers protection from foreigners.

You tax what you want less of. I don't want less income. I want less imports.

I want less imports.

Why?

Because when you import something, you are sending value produced inside the country, outside to country, in exchange for those goods. When you buy things produced inside the country, all the increased value stays inside the country.

Maybe some countries, due to geography or circumstance, are required to live this way. Not the USA. We can and should be wholly self-sufficient right here on this continent.

Why is China so much wealthier today than fifty years ago? Because we sent them money in exchange for value-added goods. Now they are much wealthier, and we are much poorer in real terms (gold).

More comments

Agree with your response directed at DashesAndUnderscores @----- rather than /u/WhiningCoil who you replied to by mistake I think

Editing because dash's name fucks with name presentation

Edit 2: Can I write dash's name in quotes? "-----"

Edit 3: Does linking to their name work? https://www.themotte.org/@-----

Edit 4: I'm just going to report my own comment to our most excellent mods, punting the underscore issue to people who might be able to address it

Yes, not sure how I messed up. I did want to reply to the parent comment. My mistake.

@-----

No dice, good catch.

"If we dont fund gain of function in in Asia and Africa, where will we find new and novel diseases to justify our salaries?"

-the CDC (I imagine)

There are already strains resistant to individual antibiotics, but not lesser-used antibiotics or antibiotic cocktails (I'm unsure of the details) and not treating these infections allows the strains to spread. Also, incomplete treatment of bacterial infections (e.g., if your supply is suddenly cutoff) is one way antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria evolve.

Disease eradication is good for everyone. It is bad for global health to have a giant reservoir of AIDS, Malaria, Ebola, and god knows what else just waiting to make the jump to the developed world.

None of these programs are even aimed at eradication. They are aimed at managed control in a way that means the program needs to be funded forever unless magic happens and Africans start building pharmaceutical plants, which is unrealistic because they cant maintain roads.

AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).

Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.

gay Canadian flight attendant

They invented the term "patient zero" to describe this guy. They were making a chart of who got HIV from who and all lines led to this guy.

Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good. In order to make a major dent in the rates of either of those two things, you would need massive social change that, realistically speaking, could only come from some kind of massive shift in consciousness that, let's be real, is not going to happen - or it would require massive government intervention that would bring its own host of problems. For the latter, you'd basically need the entire US to become like Singapore, and let's face it, probably all but the most ardent social conservatives would hate that once they saw the downsides of having such a massively interventionist government.

Even if one somehow got rid of those things, the fact would remain that the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use, so it would not even do much to address the overall issue of disease.

If you do literally nothing, the gays and drug addicts will just die from AIDS. I really don’t understand what’s so complicated about it. It’s not even like they have no way of avoiding the fate: all they need to do is to stop rawdogging random guys and stop sharing needles. It’s really not complicated.

IIRC, if you're super promiscuously partyboi gay, condoms don't reduce the lifetime risk of getting HIV that much.

I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.

people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex

Yes, but, the likelihood of contracting HIV from no-condom vaginal sex is a fraction of a percent. It's pretty hard get HIV from straight sex. In a counterfactual world in which everyone is straight, HIV would be nearly extinct.

Yes, but that is not a realistic world. Gay men have existed for, probably, as long as humans have existed, and they will continue to exist.

Yes, it is a counterfactual world that has not and will not exist.

More realistically we could somehow strongly encourage condom use and hand out clean needles.

But PrEP is encouraging not using condoms, so I predict a new wave of STDs as the raw-dogging enthusiasts with imperfect PrEP use spread STDs at even greater rates.

will continue to exist

Hopefully there's a cure some day. Perhaps they could spend some of the Africa AIDS money to search for a cure.

Any @TIRM's point isn't that we live in the counterfactual world, but that the counterfactual world indicates that the promiscuous sex practices of gay men are the cause of the problem: but for their existence, HIV would not be a major issue, as you've just agreed. Earlier you stated that "Even if one somehow got rid of those things... the deadliest diseases in human history were not caused by either promiscuous sex or drug use", and by agreeing to his counterfactual, you've just denied that very statement.

Realistically speaking, people will continue to have promiscuous dangerous sex and to use intravenous drugs. The reason is simple: those things feel good.

Uh, what skin off the back of upstanding citizens is it to just let them die?

Do you remember the '80s? That "since they're gays and addicts, let's just let them die" appeared to have been the Reagan administration's policy / is often how it's characterized, thus the title of the famous history of the early years of the epidemic, And the Band Played On.

My first thought is, there's the issue of HIV in the blood supply. Discussion of the risk of HIV from blood transfusion. "Most of the current risk from HIV in blood transfusion relates to the possibility of blood donation during the preantibody phase of HIV infection. This emphasizes the importance of self-selection by potential donors to eliminate those who have engaged in high-risk behaviors." Even now there are those who claim they still do (donate regardless), saying they feel justified due to homophobia (have personally heard people say this in the past). (See also a case: "A blood center in Missouri discovered that blood components from a donation in November 2008 tested positive for HIV infection. A lookback investigation determined that this donor had last donated in June 2008, at which time he incorrectly reported no HIV risk factors and his donation tested negative for the presence of HIV. One of the two recipients of blood components from this donation, a patient undergoing kidney transplantation, was found to be HIV infected, and an investigation determined that the patient's infection was acquired from the donor's blood products [the other recipient had died despite the transfusion].... Initially, the donor declined repeated contacts by MDHSS to be interviewed. In April 2009, he agreed to a brief interview with MDHSS, and an OraQuick rapid HIV test...was performed. This test was reactive and confirmed by a positive Western blot at MDHSS. During his interview, the donor reported he was married but had sex with both men and women outside of his marriage, including just before his June 2008 donation. He indicated that the sex often was anonymous and occurred while he was intoxicated.... The sequence of events in this case is consistent with transmission by transfusion of HIV-contaminated plasma collected from a donor during the eclipse period of acute infection (i.e., the interval between infection and the development of detectable concentrations of HIV RNA in plasma).") An explicit policy of "just let them die" seems likely to vastly increase the incidence of this.

Then...I'll type in this quote from Maggie Kneip's memoir Now Everyone Will Know because it shows the kind of experience "upstanding citizens" who lived near gay enclaves, and/or worked in professions where a lot of gay men also worked, had with AIDS in the '80s (my parents had gay friends too):

Chris and his boyfriend, Steve, had lived on a charming little stretch of West 13th Street in the Village. Chris and I sang and waited tables together, wearing marinara-stained aprons printed with "Make a cow happy, eat fish today!" After our shifts, we'd close down the place, drinking cheap wine and smoking pot. When I was eventually cast in a regional dinner theater production and Chris was cast as the lead in a national tour of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, we saw less of each other. I did summer stock, met John, and got married; Chris continued his life on the road. Once in a while, I'd get a letter. "Miss you," he'd write.

One chilly April day in 1988, just after [my daughter] Caroline was born, Chris came by to meet her. His normally glowing face was ghostly and he stifled a cough.

"It's just a cold," Chris protested when I expressed concern. He was full of his usual energy and his warm brown eyes shone, especially while he was holding my child. What a sweetheart he was.

Soon afterward, Chris landed an overseas tour of South Pacific while I became consumed with mothering and domesticity. We lost touch.

Two years later, pregnant again, I was reclining on the living room couch, my swollen feet propped up on the coffee table, when the phone rang. It was Steve. "Chris is in the hospital," he said, "and he doesn't have long." It was AIDS....

In the room that was supposed to be Chris's, there was a shriveled old man shivering in one of the beds. "Chris?" I ventured. He slowly turned his head and focused his alert, beautiful brown eyes on mine....

I hugged his sack of bones and sat with him, holding a cup to his cracked lip. His face was burning hot but his stiff little hands were ice cold. I'd never seen anyone that ill.

After a few minutes, I ran out of things to tell him about my absurdly carefree existence. I was swollen with life, while he, at just twenty-seven, was at the end of his. I stood up to leave and leaned over to kiss his lined, sweaty forehead. "I love you," I said.

"I love you, too," he whispered, closing his eyes.

Big as I was, I bolted for the elevator and nearly broke the down button, pounding on it until the doors opened to take me to the lobby. I rammed every pound of my swollen might against the revolving door and burst out into the fresh spring air, gasping. John was there, waiting in the car where I'd left him.

"How was he?" he asked.

"Awful! He--it--was awful," I reported, shaking, unable to make sense of the ghoulish transformation of my once vibrant, magnificent friend.

3 months later, her husband John was diagnosed with AIDS. He remained closeted about being bi right up until he died; he only admitted to her once that he'd ever had sex with men. (Before he met her, he said. When he was diagnosed, 6 years after they'd met, the doctors estimated he'd had it for 7-8 years or more.)

And:

From the moment of his diagnosis, he never once mentioned or acknowledged that he had AIDS. The closet was where he would steadfastly remain. Four times during the course of his illness, John was hospitalized for infections and placed in the hospital's AIDS cluster. And every single time, he demanded to be relocated. "I don't belong here," he'd say.

It seems he was so ashamed of his attraction to men that he was almost incapable of admitting it even to himself; it seems that's what happens in a culture like we had back then where it's considered shameful.

So whaddaya think: Guy is attracted to men, guy has sex with men when young and single, guy decides to settle down and marry a woman and have kids...guy (possibly also unsuspecting wife and minor children) dies of AIDS? Is this...OK? Regrettable but a rounding error? Bad? Unavoidable? Possibly unavoidable but we should still try? Or what do you think?

Kneip was lucky: Her husband also had herpes and was responsible about it, so they often used condoms. So she and the kids didn't get AIDS. (A New Haven doctor OTOH in his summary of his years caring for AIDS babies mentioned that about half the mothers were drug addicts--the other half had gotten it through sex. And the babies caught it not in utero but from the birth or breastfeeding. Like the "Starsky & Hutch" actor's daughter, if you remember that--the guy who played Starsky (who I remember better for being Perchik in Fiddler on the Roof) lost his wife and daughter because his wife got AIDS from a blood transfusion at the birth, then gave it to their daughter through breastfeeding.)

So anyway, in personal instinctive reaction I do agree with many who learn in clear detail about the sexual practices that developed in gay enclaves in the '60s and '70s, that these were completely disgusting and repulsive, that they were behaviors no human being anywhere should ever have engaged in. (Gay Men's Health Crisis co-founder Larry Kramer famously pointed that out himself in his 1978 novel Faggots.) But someone's sexual practices aren't something you normally ever discuss with them, let alone the first thing you know about them. You make a friend because of their good qualities, and aside from their good qualities you have no reason to assume they're particularly disgusting in any way because why would you?

And the Band Played On:

[Describing the experiences of Dr. Selma Dritz, the new assistant director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health's Bureau of Communicable Disease Control] Normally, five or perhaps ten cases of amebic dysentery a year crossed her desk, and they were usually from a day-care center or restaurant. Now [1967] doctors were reporting that many a week. She checked the figures again. Nearly all the cases involved young single men, and an inordinate number were diagnosed at the Davies Medical Center on Castro Street. She mentioned to another health department staffer that it was odd because she hadn't heard any complaints about neighborhood restaurants. Her colleague took Dritz aside to explain that the cases were concentrated among gay men. Dritz didn't understand the relevance of the observation.

"It's oral-anal contact," he said.

"It's what?"

They didn't teach these things when Selma was in medical school in the 1940s, but she quickly learned the down-and-dirty realities about enteric diseases. Gay doctors had long recognized that parasitic diseases like amebiasis, giardiasis, and shigellosis were simply a health hazard of being gay. The problems grew with the new popularity of anal sex, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, because it was nearly impossible to avoid contact with fecal matter during that act. As sexual tastes grew more exotic and rimming became fashionable, the problem exploded. There wasn't a much more efficient way to get a dose of parasite spoor than by such direct ingestion.

Although all this was common knowledge among gay physicians, the awareness had evaded the public health profession. Earnest health officials at one point dispatched inspectors to Greenwich Village to test water after detecting unusual outbreaks of amoebas in the neighborhood.

If even public health officials don't know, what hope has the average "upstanding citizen"?

By the time you find out how unbelievably, vomit-inducingly terrible their behavior has been, you've been friends for years and possibly even already watched them die horribly. You've likely thought and said that "nothing" could justify the terrible suffering you've seen them experience. That's the reality of how this went down.

Personally, because I was a child in the '80s, I saw the illness decades before I happened upon a description of the subcultural sexual practices online.

(With quotes from Faggots. As Wikipedia says: "Reviewers found it difficult to believe that Kramer's accounts of gay relationships were accurate; both the gay and mainstream press panned the book. On the reception of the novel Kramer said: 'The straight world thought I was repulsive, and the gay world treated me like a traitor. People would literally turn their back when I walked by. You know what my real crime was? I put the truth in writing.'" Because yeah. A subculture did evolve of engaging in such behaviors, and generally speaking most people who learn of such behaviors find them unbelievable and repulsive.

Also. A bit after I first read about it online, I mentioned it to my parents--and they dismissed it as a stereotyped myth. As for me, I later read And the Band Played On, which confirms the truth of it. I said "most people" above and not "straight people" because And the Band Played On quotes gay men too who had the same reaction upon encountering that subculture. Anyway the fact remains that my parents still don't know what their friends (or those friends' sex partners) did in the '70s that led to their deaths. BTW they don't know about Rotherham either, same reason, I tried to mention it to them and they just pattern-matched it to "blood libel type things.")

From And the Band Played On:

Most of [New York] city's AIDS babies were born to drug-using parents, and virtually all the cases of heterosexual transmission were among the female sexual partners of minority drug users.... Dr. Arye Rubinstein [pediatric immunologist who had seen many AIDS babies] was afraid that the virus would spread from addicts into high schools, where it could proliferate among sexually active teens.

Dr. Rubinstein is mentioned earlier in the book when he cited 3 patients, all children of the same prostitute, and pointed out that this illness did not fit the pattern of a genetic disease as other pediatric immunologists were assuming, because these children had 3 different fathers.

OK, don't use prostitutes, don't be creating damaged children you never even tried to know about, etc.... Some will, though. Rubinstein had a point that teens are more likely to make bad decisions.

From the New Haven doctor's article linked above:

Among a series of impediments, we faced one insurmountable problem: we were not able to discharge HIV-exposed babies to the care of mothers still battling addiction; and experienced foster parents refused to take “AIDS babies” into their homes for fear of infection. There was only one alternative—the nurses, doctors, and social workers became their de facto guardians. The babies stayed in the hospital for months, sometimes for more than a year....

the hospital was carrying a heavy burden and...babies and toddlers were beginning to fill isolettes in the nurseries and cribs on the wards.... [so they set up an AIDS-focused treatment center]

Connecticut Public Act No. 99-2 [making AIDS testing a standard part of prenatal care] was the powerful tool we were waiting for. We went into the community and educated physicians who cared for pregnant women....

our intensive educational efforts in the hospital and community resulted in a steady decline in the number of newborns testing HIV-positive. The last infant that tested HIV-positive was born at YNHH in 1996. For each of the past 24 years, we have screened and treated about twenty HIV-positive pregnant women, a significant decrease from earlier decades. None of the babies born to HIV-positive mothers between 1996 and late 2019 were infected. Nevertheless, we still care for a few HIV-positive children who have come to us from other parts of the world, mainly Africa, and for a handful of adolescent men who have had sex with older HIV-positive men....

Data collected by the CDC in 2007, revealed that approximately 24,000 American youth, ages 13-24 years, were living with HIV/AIDS. This was a 25 percent increase from 2004, attributed to high-risk adolescent sexual behavior and increasing survival of children infected perinatally....

Unfortunately, in late 2019, an HIV-positive baby was born at YNHH after a gap of 23 years. The teenage mother received prenatal care at a clinic unaffiliated with YNHH. She was non-compliant with the antiretroviral regimen that was prescribed for her. She was surprised to learn that her newborn baby was infected.

So, I'm not sure if you meant to suggest letting AIDS babies die too, but they certainly didn't have any way to avoid it. Then there's again the adolescents...they don't have adult judgement, and may have been groomed...are they included?

(BTW, this is only peripheral to the topic so I'm not going to spend a lot of effort on it, but I personally believe Cochran's "pathogen hypothesis" to be the best fit for the data we currently have re homosexuality. Like I'm not 100% convinced this is definitely the cause, we don't have the data for that, I just think with the data we do have that's the way to bet. And obviously if someone "became gay" due to a pathogen which infected them in childhood, they didn't make a choice. "Dear ants, if you climb up that blade of grass in the middle of the day, you deserve to be eaten. Just choose not to!" Actually I do think "Ants, even if you feel a really really strong compulsion to climb up that blade of grass, it's bad for you so please try your hardest not to do it" is good advice! It's not going to be very effective, but it's better than not giving it. But well...Eliezer was right that it's not really a happy satisfying just world situation, it's a terribly sad one. (The appropriate link here is of course Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided but the quote I was thinking of is from Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?: "When you accurately estimate the Enemy’s psychology—when you know what is really in the Enemy’s mind—that knowledge won’t feel like landing a delicious punch on the opposing side. It won’t give you a warm feeling of righteous indignation. It won’t make you feel good about yourself. If your estimate makes you feel unbearably sad, you may be seeing the world as it really is."))

(BTW2, Maggie Kneip's mom told her that John had once hinted to her about how, as a senior in high school, he was very lonely and an older man "kept inviting him up to his room." A lonely minor, possibly groomed... Plus if Jayman's casual hypothesis is correct, which it may well not be but if, then this happening at 17 rather than say 12 might explain how John kept his attraction to women as well...)

Meanwhile, And the Band Played On:

The anecdote was precisely the story Dr. Jim Curran had feared he might hear, even though it was the kind of information that interviews with 75 percent of the living "gay plague" victims were supposed to engender: One man lives contentedly with his long-time lover in a small, remote town. He doesn't live in the fast lane of big-city gay life; he doesn't use poppers; he's dying. His lover, it turns out, is a traveling salesman who is generally faithful, except when he gets to New York, where he screws his brains out in the gay bathhouses. Shortly after his monogamous lover gets sick, the salesman gets sick too.

(Yeah Larry Kramer didn't die of AIDS...but his semi-autobiographical play about it, The Normal Heart, implies the man he loved did.)

Which brings me back to Maggie Kneip's situation, too.

After her husband's diagnosis, she got a therapist, who connected her to: a support group for AIDS wives. Because she wasn't the only one. Even the social workers running it were AIDS wives.

(Sorry this is kind of thrown together, as a homeschooling mom I don't have time to refine it as I'd like.)

If even public health officials don't know, what hope has the average "upstanding citizen"?

Also. A bit after I first read about it online, I mentioned it to my parents--and they dismissed it as a stereotyped myth... BTW they don't know about Rotherham either, same reason, I tried to mention it to them and they just pattern-matched it to "blood libel type things.")

Excellent post, thank you for it. Saw it in the roundup (well-deserved!) and it stood out to me, that once public health officials didn't know, and now it is more common- among many people, public health officials perhaps most importantly- to refuse to know.

Anyways. An observation. Hope to see more of your writing here.

Wow, that was thoroughly researched. If that's what counts as thrown together for you, I'd love to see what you write when you've got time on your hands.

It's bad karma.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

First they came for the homosexuals, but I was not homosexual, so I stayed silent.

Then they came for the immigrants, but I was not an immigrant, so I stayed silent.

Then they came for the disabled, but I was not disabled, so I stayed silent.

And then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

Isn't this just triage? I don't think anyone has suggested rounding up people who have promiscuous dangerous sex or use intravenous drugs to send them to death camps. It's rather just letting nature take its course while devoting scarce lifesaving resources elsewhere, which I think is a pretty standard thing to do in medicine.

I don't think anyone has suggested rounding up people who have promiscuous dangerous sex or use intravenous drugs to send them to death camps.

They may not be suggesting it now, but if you normalise regarding certain people's lives as a less sacred value than property....

It's rather just letting nature take its course

A principle which, if carried to its ultimate conclusion, leads to 40-50% of babies dying before their fifth birthday.

Given those grim statistics, I hardly think that Nature is a good guide to right and wrong.

while devoting scarce lifesaving resources elsewhere, which I think is a pretty standard thing to do in medicine.

There is a difference between "We're at 200% capacity right now, and getting more resources will take longer than our patients have" versus "We will be over capacity some time in the future, we can get enough resources to save everyone by the time they will be needed, but we don't feel like doing so"; there is also a difference between "prioritising Alice over Bob because Alice has a 90% chance of survival while Bob has a 2% chance" versus "prioritising Alice over Bob because Bob is a member of a group we don't like".

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Pretty much everyone here has had the experience:

First they came for the gay communists, and I spoke out because the gay communists had been teaching me that dumb poem since I was 3.

Then the gay communists came for me and I was like ???

Then when they came for the gay communists again I said "make sure you get all the gay communists. Here I have a list, let me help"

The point of that poem is that when anyone, left or right, starts narrowing the category of 'human beings who deserve to live', they don't stop, and they are likely to end up narrowing it to exclude you. I personally believe that it is morally wrong to have a category of 'human lives that don't matter' (if any exception exists, it is only those who are currently, wilfully harming others and refuse to stop), but even if you do not share this belief, the existence of such a category is not in your self-interest.

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

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No pendulum stops in the middle.

Any damped pendulum stops in the middle. But I don't see any damping.

You start dividing humanity into 'upstanding citizens worthy of life' and 'sub-humans whose life and well-being is not worth any efforts', sooner or later someone will put you into the second category.

Homosexuals already put me in the latter category in their scramble to not suffer such a fate themselves. Why should I care if others want to toss them in the abyss with me?

Homosexuals, immigrants, and disabled are very fond of straight white men and fiercely protect them when they're persecuted or murdered.

I dunno, I think my gay friends would stand up for me.

I suppose if you're so straight and white that you can't imagine ever being on the same side of history as homosexuals, immigrants and disabled, you have nothing to worry about and can continue to sneer at the lower castes. Although, as I suspect you know, there's always such a thing as not white enough.

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Realistically, probably none. But then, for me the morality of the matter is complicated. There are probably plenty of straight, unpromiscuous, sober people who do more to harm the world than the average promiscuous gay or intravenous drug user does. "upstanding" is not necessarily easy to define, and there are plenty of edge cases. I'm not necessarily against just letting socially harmful people die instead of helping them. I'm just writing all this because it seems to me that @wlxd is jumping on the disease issue in order to push a largely orthogonal case against gays and drug addicts, which is only tangentially relevant to the question of stopping disease.

I don't care, and I don't believe you. I don't think disease eradication is good for me at all. I think it's good for poor starving Africans who I don't care about, and don't want to pay for. You have a large hurdle to convince me that tropical diseases a two continents and one ocean away have anything to do with me. You cannot simply assert it blithely.

If I believed that these programs were actually useful instead of leftist patronage networks, then I might be willing to entertain some sort of intervention. But all of this shit is just patronage networks. It's taking money from me to redistribute to loyalists and partisans.

Burn it all down. If ebola flares up again we can simply close the borders, which are far too porous anyway.

AIDS and Malaria programs in Africa are largely Bush era, preach abstinence is best even when they hand out condoms, and tend to be highly effectual and sent through Christian charities when there's patronage networks involved.

Not exactly your typical NGO.

You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy. As currently constituted, large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world. American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers. Even the most nativist Trump supporters, by and large, buy cheap Chinese products when they go to the store instead of seeking out things made in America, and they hire third world immigrants to do manual labor instead of seeking out American citizens, and it is likely that even if a nativist government forced consumers to buy American, those consumers would become annoyed because their living situation would feel worse for them. It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.

We should close the borders AND restructure large parts of the economy.

Specifically, labor laws; see this previous post from yours truly.

American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers

This is a self-inflicted wound that we could be corrected overnight. Again, read my earlier post. Our employment laws cause so much friction in hiring (and firing) that the entire reason we have this indentured servant class of illegal workers is because their very lack of citizenship is a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If you want to see what it looks like when a government screws over its own citizens, look no further than American employment law.

Predictions about rapid price inflation of basic groceries due to border enforcement paper over the fact that the American working class is already unable to afford their own lives because they can't get jobs quickly enough. Some simple math with reasonable assumptions;

  • Job search length; 1 - 3 months
  • Offer to first day; 2 - 4 weeks
  • First day to first paycheck; 2 weeks.

All in, we're talking anywhere from 2.5 - 4.5 months between paychecks for a typical lost-job-need-new-job scenario. You can see how untenable this would be for a single person (let alone a family) living paycheck to paycheck. Lost my job at Waffle House? Oh, no problem, I've got four months of cash savings, right?

Contrast this to off the books cash labor which can and routinely does find work (and payment!) within a single week.

American agriculture is the product of hundreds of years of compounding laws and regulations. I've done a little research into the economics of "family farms" and have discovered that your median small farmer is technically a multi-millionaire, but with both assets and debts backed by oceans of Federal dollars. They pay cash for F-350s and also supplement their groceries with SNAP benefits. It's wild, but, with enough over-regulation, anything is possible!

And that's what we're really talking about. Horrible shit-ass legislation in one area (employment law) has created a wholly separate awful situation in another area (immigration). So it isn't about X or Y, but how X and Y interact.

You can't close the borders without restructuring major parts of the economy.

Better get to work, then.

large sectors of the US economy depend on the cheap labor of, effectively, indentured servants from the third world

A moral problem as pernicious as slavery ever was, to be sure. A great evil, indeed.

American consumers are simply not going to want to pay US citizen level wages to fruit pickers and landscapers.

I disagree. Plenty of people buy expensive fruits now, and having a landscaper is a privilege unbecoming the American yeoman.

It would take major technological progress to replace the role of the third world indentured servants in our economy.

I think war with China is what it will take, because then we don't have a choice. If we don't go to war with China, it will be because they strangled all resistance and took over the USA without needing to fire a shot.

It does seem pointless, especially in light of African TFR dwarfing American TFR. Seems like America needs more aid than Africa from that measure.

Foreign aid includes billions spent on contraception and family planning in poor countries and subsaharan tfr is dropping.

Oh, would you or any of the natalists prefer to live in the high TFR paradise of Niger? Ridiculous to pretend that's the only meaningful metric.

It's not. But it is an important one, especially when people in America repeatedly state they aren't having as many kids as they'd like to have. Why should America be subsidizing African TFR above our own below replacement, and below American family's personally desired, TFR?

They're not subsidizing Nigerian daycare. They're subsidizing life-saving treatment.

If you mean "why don't they cut them off so they have fewer kids": a) see "not everything is about TFR"; some people think it's good that people don't die actually, even if they'd have six kids at their funeral. That is insect logic. b) it's unclear that making their lives more precarious will stop them. They had a higher TFR before. Maybe they'd have fewer kids the less they needed to hedge against disaster.

I don't think the sorts of people who do this stuff are particularly interested in boosting the number of kids every African woman is having, quite the opposite. They're likely the sorts who also support family planning and female emancipation and education that they hope will have the same effect on Africa's TFR as it's had elsewhere. I think we discussed Macron stating this explicitly a while ago.

If you want to go that route you might gain from the soft power and proven competence that comes from stopping people from dying.

Yeah, I'd like to know what they are thinking here. It seems like a bad move.

I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against. You don't win by funding your enemies. But it seems like a crude instrument. We should at least fund the best performing programs, even if the people running them are woke culture warriors.

I do have a somewhat related question though. Last year, I asked themotte which were the best charitable programs to give to. I ended up buying some malaria nets, and funding some other similar EA-type charities, but I did have some disquiet about it. If these charities are so effective that $100 can save 1 life or whatever, than why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project?

The same can be said of these programs. Why must the US do this with taxpayer dollars? If it's so important, why hasn't some billionaire just done the entire thing already. The global NGO complex has trillions of dollars in turnover per year. Why do they insist on funding 99% garbage instead of things which are so obviously high impact? It make me feel like it's actually about political power, not benefiting mankind.

A university might think these HIV drugs are more important than YOUR money, but they don't think it's more important then THEIR money.

I'm guessing that he's going to make the recipients show how they're following the DIEA and biological sex executive orders to get their grants back.

If these charities are so effective that $100 can save 1 life or whatever, than why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project?

It's $3,000+ to prevent a statistical death from malaria, last I checked, and probably not as simple as $30B saving 10 million statistical lives.

Yes, I was joking about $100. It's not $3,000 either and probably not even $30,000.

In any case, even though I don't believe the numbers, I donate anyway just in case they are accurate.

$3K is now at the bottom end of GiveWell's estimates, which go up to $8K on the high end. Maybe some of that increase is better data, but I suspect that some of it is just that the marginal cost of preventing malaria deaths goes up as the number of deaths already prevented does. In the limit, if everyone has an insecticidal bednet, but there's still spread via mosquito bites of people who are awake, what do you do next?

Gates donated some money for bednets, and a little more for anti-mosquito gene drive research, but at some point the Gates Foundation seems to have gone all-in on funding malaria vaccine research instead. Whether this was a good idea (a really effective vaccine could make malaria go the way of smallpox, not just continually fight the problem with nets that wear out every few years) or a bad idea (current generation vaccines are like 33% effective and won't be driving anything extinct) is still an open question IMHO.

The current givewell estimates are around 4-5k per life saved, and the Gates foundation was a significant factor in pushing that number up that high. It is also working more on malaria eradication, which is a project much harder to make marginal donations to.

I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against.

This is going to be the real killer question. Do they have the extreme cajones that would be necessary to, when they decide to start releasing funds again, say, "...and it can't go to any organization that has a DEI/affirmative action program or otherwise discriminates on the basis of race/gender," or some set of qualifiers. It would take huge cajones, because that would immediately leave a huge number of universities, who currently get the bulk of the research dollars, totally frozen out. The stakes would be high. People would point to critical areas that basically cannot be funded. Some unis would crack; others might hold out. Either way, this would be an 'all in' play after he's already gone after this stuff that's directly within the gov't.

I expect it will have a lesser version of that qualification. That is, the grant will say "and you can't use money for this to fund DEI crap", so the Advanced Physics Program won't (openly) do DEI, but the same university will still have its feminist vulcanology program at least nominally not funded by Federal grants.

I'll bet they will have to show they don't have any DEI/Affirmative Action and commit to only two genders to get the money flow turned back on. Punished Trump has no chill

The idea seems to be to cut everything off temporarily, then decide positively what can go back in. Probably a much more effective way of making cuts than directly trying to find things to cut.

That's a good point. And from a PR standpoint, it doesn't matter whether you cut spending by 100%, 10%, or increase it by only 3%, you get called the second coming of Hitler. So why not just go big?

Still, I wish they had tried to make some small cutouts, not for any political reason but just for humanitarian ones.

I disagree vehemently. No sappy heartstrings are worth putting your hand in my pocket. If you're so sad about humanitarian crises, spend your own money, don't spend mine.

why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project

Bill Gates doesn't care about saving lives. You can tell because of the things he does. He cares about power, and shaping the world in the way he thinks is best.

Bold words from someone standing in life-saving range.

If spending that kind of money on saving lives doesn’t demonstrate it, what does?

Spending his money demonstrates that he wants to spend his money on something. I think that something is control and power. The "saving lives" is to stroke his own ego, but I don't believe it and neither should you.

Neither you nor @jeroboam answered my actual question, though. I understand how spending money buys him things aside from lives saved, and I understand that on priors, you (and I!) expect people to care more about power/status than lives saved.

But I’m asking what Gates would do differently if he really did care more about the latter. What could convince you?

This has always be a conundrum for me as well. If Gates, Soros, Musk, WEF are so evil...what should they do instead to prove they are pro-social?

There is nothing that can convince me, since the spectacle of a man "donating" billions of dollars to his own company then calling himself a philanthropist tells me all I need to know about his character. There is nothing he can do now. If he was a different man, he'd have done different things, and I might believe he means well. Now it is too late, and there is very little that he can do to change my mind.

If you knew someone had secretly swapped bodies with Bill Gates overnight (with access to all his passwords etc.), what actions would the New Gates have to take to convince you he was a good person?

Retire to the countryside, and resign from the foundation.

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To be fair the difference between having 200 billion and 300 billion rounds to zero. So there was no personal sacrifice.

And he got a lot of good PR and political power too.

This was not altruism more like enlightened self interest. Which is fine and good but fully consistent with him not actually caring.

Gates is demonstrating Daniel Webster's statement:

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters"

What makes this look crude or incompetent to you? If he cut down something essential by accident I could see your point, but you don't seem to be making that argument.

Anecdotally, medical professionals at the VA are worried about their work being impacted, but I don't know what VA programs are funded by discreet grants. (Social services and research? I know a lot of neurological and psychological research is done through or in association with the VA, and I wouldn't be surprised if they provide a lot of social services that have a separate funding scheme.)

Anecdotally, in the last day I've seen Reddit threads, Facebook posts, and have heard directly from acquaintances who work in government that they worry about their work being impacted. Don't discount the social media effect wherein everyone wants the positive attention that comes with signalling victimization at the hands of the bad man, even before they know if it's actually happening.

The argument previously formulated by these same groups -- "No, it's not happening, but if it is happening it's good" -- is probably a safe fallback response. We can empathetically help anyone who loses their important government job move into the private sector, where their important skills will surely remain valuable.

As a hypothetical, if you're someone that isn't in favor of continuing to spend ~$50 billion annually on USAID, what's the appropriate way to handle it? I don't think this is it because it probably isn't legal, but I'll note that there isn't any way to stop it that is going to avoid the caterwauling about how you're killing innocent children in Africa. From a certain viewpoint, the United States is responsible for the wellbeing of children in Africa in perpetuity and no amount of spending would be too much - would smaller cuts get them to agree that maybe a little bit less is fine? I kind of doubt it.

Phase out the supply chains in an orderly fashion. Right now, there are aid workers and paid-for drugs in foreign countries, but the aid workers are forbidden from distributing the drugs.

Do those drugs not work on Americans? They can just bring them here.

This is one of the bad moves, but.. odds are they're going to simply disobey.

OTOH, US government paying for PREP for sex-happy Africans who hate and envy it due to left-wing indoctrination is very funny, so it's not good it's stopping.

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