so much winning, the science edition

America’s compact between science and politics is broken | Scientific American

archive.is link

back in the 1940s, post-WW2, we had some genuinely brilliant people (i’m looking at you ghost of vannevar bush) giving serious thought as to how to best advance the cause of american science and R&D. this period is, aiui, the beautiful period of yore when things were great for america that the MAGA crowd harkens back to.

now …

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Fewer people are entering graduate programs. Nearly 95,000 scientists have left federal government employment. The NIH used to issue as many as 850 “Notices of Funding Opportunity” every year—requests for proposals that sought specific kinds of research. In 2025 the agency issued 120. By mid-March of 2026, the NIH had sent 14.

what’s that erik shinseki quote? oh yeah … “If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more”.