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Because the programs will have to actually explain how they're supposed to be worth the money spent, and useless ones trying to obfuscate their uselessness can simply have their request for an extension denied. The denial process can be unilateral and impossible to appeal, if we want, and that would still be much better than freezing everything Day One while giving grifters no more of an out.
If it's so simple, howcome literally no sense be died that until now?
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This implies that the programs did not have to actually explain before they were given money to spend.
If they never actually explained in the first place, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it?
In the alternative...
If they were useless from the start but also able to obfuscate to both get initially funded and re-funded since, why should a proposal to rely on detecting known liars after their repeated success?
Especially if the system's managers are- by the fact that they were persuaded by the corrupt lies in the first place- either unable or unwilling to screen fraud programs from legitimate programs from the start?
There are certainly reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but your proposals are structured to keep the grifters in, not least because the grifters were clearly not being successfully caught by the people who were supposed to be checking for grifters.
No, it implies that they were explaining to themselves or a very friendly review board why this spending was needed. The relationship between the groups handing out the funds and the people using them isn’t like a normal business relationship. The funding group has no reason to care whether or not the program actually works. They are obligated to spend $XK on grants in a certain period, and they actually get punished for not spending the money. So if you follow tge procedure and say tge right sorts of things about your project, you get money — no matter how bad your previous track record is, no matter how obvious it is that the program you’re proposing wouldn’t work, no matter how obviously you are going to go over budget.
The only answer is to shut it down and have a complete outsider look over these grants. If they can’t explain why Iraqi Sesame Street will improve the security of the Middle East, then is needs to go.
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They previously had to explain it to DEI bureaucrats who thought "we will abide by such-and-such buzzwords" was a good justification. The standards have changed. There is no reason to think the grifters are able to fool people who do not think "but [woke value]!!!" is a conversation-stopper; they've never had to.
To which the question you dodged repeats:
If they never actually explained in the first place to a non-DEI bureaucrat, why should they continue to get more money before having to justify it to a non-DEI bureaucrat?
And they won't have to if the formerly-DEI bureaucrats are the arbitrators of such-and-such buzzwords being sufficient evidence of goodness or not, which is what you have if you insist that they review all the programs and decide which one to cut rather than let their senior executive branch leadership circumvent them and do things like cut.
Note, after all, the reason that they have to be circumvented is because they can't be replaced- the existing employment laws do not allow for just direct firing and replacement hiring of DEI-managers with non-DEI managers. Nor does the budgeting authorities allow for simply hiring a new cadre of reviewers on top of the existing ones- the budgeting authorities are only for so much money and often for so many billets, and the lawful hiring processes are controlled by the category of bureaucrats being circumvented as part of the problem.
Which is among the reasons to think grifters will still be able to 'fool' people- the bureaucracy does not reflect the viewpoint of the executive, and does not change as the executive does, and much of the bureaucracy was never fooled as much as on-board with the measure and sympathetic to keeping it for the same reason they were sympathetic to approving and keeping it before. DEI didn't force approvals of things like operas abroad- it was compatible with the ideological interests of the people who did the approving, and the people who would do the reviewing.
The DEI-shaped bureaucrats who thought 'we will abide by such and such buzzwords' are still DEI-shaped people who think DEI is Good Things that Good People do. The resistance of such bureaucrats to executive branch pressure to change was demonstrated both in the past with The Resistance 1.0, and has been explicitly called for with attempts to build a Resistance 2.0 coalition which opposes the goals, not just the means, of the DOGE.
The (many) examples of internal resistance to first Trump administration are what give plenty of reason to doubt that the current middle-management which previously regularly frustrated efforts will be sincerely compliant this time.
Given the place this thread started, I thought it was obvious that the answer is "because letting a few useless diversity programs persist for a few months before they're inevitably shut down is a lesser evil than interrupting good programs in needlessly disruptive ways". I think it's trivially the lesser evil ethically; it might very well be the lesser evil economically too, depending on how costly it is for good programs to make up for lost time once they get the green light, e.g. restarting studies from scratch or finding replacements for people who quit for lack of pay and found other employment in the private sector. (See Scott Aaronson arguing that every week the NSF is frozen harms American science's future prospects as postdocs either quit their academic career, or move abroad rather than stay in the US - something in which the most competent, most valuable researchers-in-training will be more successful than the rank and file, selecting for mediocrity among the people we'll have left once the gridlock ends.)
I am saying that DOGE should review all the programs and decide which ones to cut. It's not that much work.
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