alt Hacker NewsMy father was a Ph.D., a research scientist at a large state university. After understanding how political everything is under the surface, he cautioned me from ever working in a field that depended on government funding. "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
Outsiders like to imagine that the pure pursuit of science without any agendas is what university research is all about. That is mostly a veneer.
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> "What one administration gives you, the next one can take away" is close to a literal quote.
We created laws to prevent this from being the case. They work(ed) most of the time.
The current administration believed that it didn't have to follow those laws. After being slapped down multiple times by courts for this, they want to change the law(s) so that what your father said becomes true. But worse - "what the administration gave you last week, they can take away next week".
"Political" in the context of research funding generally doesn't mean what it means under this administration. Administrations have always shifted priorities as far as what scientific fields they want to fund, and individual PMs have also made more opinionated choices. This is normal and expected. A DARPA PM is limited to a 7-year term to ensure that fresh blood constantly enters the system. What's happening now is political in the "partisan political" sense, where specific grants are being killed because they violate political priorities or because the researchers spoke up against the President. This is new.
ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.