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I highly disagree that adding a single sentence with vaguely DEI-sounding potential benefits to an NSF proposal abstract suddenly makes a researcher into a "political operative". As discussed up-chain, that seems to be the only sin of a large portion of the DOGE-cancelled stuff. I mean I agree that there's some moral failing involved, but you're literally calling this thinking typical of "cretinous rat bastards" and I'm just saying that minor compromises like this are eminently human. It's like being forced to use pronouns in your email signature at work or something. Like, sure, maybe it is compromising your principles. I'm Mormon, I get it, we went through some shit with Prop 8 and gay rights and such and I absolutely admire those moral stands. However, I'm not going to act like that kind of minor moral failing in a flawed system is actually such a huge betrayal that anyone who adds pronouns in their company profile deserves to lose their job... That's just vindictiveness, and of the small-minded variety.
In short, I believe strongly in forgiveness in a society where you have reddit threads telling people to cut off their family for the slightest thing in the liberal space, and calls for unrestricted lawfare on the right. I think it is something both parties need, especially on the granular and individual level. And many NSF grants are for a small handful of professors and grad students each, it's not like all of them are multi-million-dollar boondoggles. And even this moral stuff aside, it's still stupid self-sabotage on a simple practical/pragmatic level.
And i disagree that it doesn't.
Each and every one of these people wanted to be seen aligning themselves with the DEI crowd. DOGE is merely respecting thier wishes by placing them in the set of "people aligned with the DEI crowd" and treating them accordingly.
If you believe in forgiveness, allow them to resubmit thier proposal without the DEI language, and have thier work considered on its merits.
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Then you are mistaken. Submitting a grant proposal to the effect of "I am going to use this grant to do science and also further the interests of the Democratic party" makes you a political operative. If you actually use some of the grant funds to do that (as I suspect has often been done, since scientists don't want to be caught committing fraud), even more so.
Forgiveness can only follow acknowledgement of error. I have seen none of that.
I think you should reconsider your definition of "political operative".
The commerce department published a list of what the $2B in defunded "woke" grants was here. Grabbing a random one in the $1-2M range, we get this one which was funded for $1.6M.
As far as I can tell, this grant was defunded because they said "We will hire two grad students. Those two grad students will teach undergraduate classes. Our university has some already-existing programs to recruit undergrads from underrepresented groups, and so maybe the classes the grad students teach will contain members of underrepresented groups."
That... does not sound like something a political operative would say. That sounds like a PI who wanted to do useful research and was told "you have to say how the program will help minorities" and so grudgingly included a line like "the program will help everyone, and minorities are a part of everyone".
What error would you like that researcher to acknowledge? Be concrete.
Just resubmit it without the "no white boys allowed in our science club" line. That's literally it. That's what people find objectionable. I don't know how else to possibly say this.
Which line of that grant application says "no white boys allowed in our science club"? Be specific.
Do you have a link to the text of that grant application, rather than just the objective description?
Because there's a fair complaint about claims made without evidence, but when randomly selected high-profile examples with public evidence available come about, looking deeper into the matter -- and often not having to scratch the surface that hard! -- shows a lot of stuff getting hollowed out and skinsuited.
((And, yes, there's also the bit where UoI does the greengrocer bit:
But that /could/ have been left off the grant application, and the whistleblower complaints not true. Still, if you have access, I'd be willing to make a bet at some moderate odds.))
I don't know if the grant application is public but here's the NSF page on the award, which has more details including the abstract and resulting publications.
Resulting publications look like real science with plausible important implications for medicine, not ideologically captured garbage:
This is exactly the sort of foundational research I want my tax dollars funding - low immediate commercial value but potentially massive positive externalities.
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What is the benefit of doing it that way, rather than simply saying "we are declaring your people of colour will get preferential treatment void and will punish you if you try to implement them; otherwise, carry on"? That way, proposals where the diversity statement was hot air with no influence whatsoever on how the science was being carried out can go on with their work.
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