If you believe the NSF is independent then you are implicitly agreeing with those who claim there is a fourth 'deep state' branch of government that operates without accountability.

Separately: I cited the law that says the president can fire the head of the NSF. So I'm not sure why you'd conclude that any disagreement would be a problem for the president.

As for GP's options, normally I would think B (standing your ground and throwing them a small bone while waiting to get fired) is the most rational option outside of sheer self-preservation. Since its a federal job if you don't know the law it may get little dicey if you go the C route.

My guess from out of leftfield: there is immense pressure and unseen threats being thrown about by admin goons similar to what they did in the attorney general's office in the Southern District of New York, namely: If you don't resign we will fire everyone underneath you. That's what would easily explain this behavior.

That's not true; he changes his mind all the time, particularly as media coverage changes. It's just not necessarily something you can persuade him to do without catering to his ego.

Doesn't apply, everybody knows what's going on already.

> Comply in a maximally obstructive way.

Doesn't apply, the whole point is that the executive wants to obstruct things, and that's what we're talking about fighting against.

> Comply just enough to not get fired but not as much as someone who may be more inclined to please their boss.

Doesn't apply, you can't half-fire the specified people, or give just a little bit of money to the people you've been instructed not to fund. You can comply, or not, and it's not going to be any kind of secret which way you chose.

If you want to go out in a blaze of glory and leave the building a day later than you otherwise would, with less dignity, go for it.

> Enlist other opposition and find ways to multiply your obstructive compliance into other departments.

It's just not that kind of role.

I guess you could slow down the firing process for a bit? That would be a minor obstruction for a short period of time. Then what?

Anyways, "how-to" guides on malicious compliance probably don't tackle situations where an external team, acting on behalf of the president, come into your workplace with unparalleled authority to do whatever they please.

These only apply to countries where the judicial system doesn't bend to whoever's in power.

I'm asking for concrete examples of what "subversive, incremental ways to undermine it" would be.

You basically just reworded the vague suggestion of "fight back". What are some specific examples of what the NSF director could have done that are subversive, incremental ways to undermine the orders which ultimately came from the president?

I'm also not sure how to just... not fire people. Sure, you can delay it a week or two. Okay. Then what? Get fired for non-compliance? That seems about as effective of a tactic as quitting is.

That's helpful for the conversation!

Should I just keep clicking through this entire site until an answer related to my question appears?

(It's a neat site, but... I'm not going to sit here playing go fish until an applicable one-liner appears)

From an Amazon review comment: "This book offers an insightful analysis into the history and norms involved in the tradition of resignation in the U.S. and the U.K. Why do the British tend to resign loudly in protest and Americans resign “to spend more time with family” while praising their president? How do these norms benefit and harm their respective systems? The book offered hints at the determinants of these norms. Written shortly after Nixon’s resignation, the principles discussed are enduring."

Some interesting results: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resignation+in+protest

Including: "Federal technology staffers resign rather than help Musk and DOGE" https://apnews.com/article/doge-elon-musk-federal-government... " More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”"

Disclaimer: A four year NSF grant which my wife was on and which was recently awarded and getting started was just terminated last Friday. The grant was to promote STEM interest in a specific historically-disadvantaged neighborhood in part by helping people (especially kids) see how things that they did everyday were connected to STEM -- with hopes the idea could then be used nationwide to promote STEM learning. It took about four calendar years of her (unpaid) involvement to get that grant -- including the main organization getting cooperation and commitment by many other people in various local groups.

Tangentially related: "The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein (1994) https://web.archive.org/web/20240327073938/https://www.its.c...

==== From there:

I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows exponentially. A pipeline, leaky or otherwise, would not have that result. It would only produce scientists in proportion to the flow of entering students.

I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.

====

RIP Dr. David Gooodstein. I enjoyed your writing and your "Mechanical Universe" videos that helped people learn physics in a fun way. Sad to see your Caltech faculty website is no more, but thank goodness for the Internet Archive. Makes me a bit sad I turned down admission at Caltech and my chance to study with you.

Consider yourself lucky.

And, to be honest, there is almost literally nothing more important than ones own personal mental health. Almost everything someone is able to achieve is built upon a foundation of their mental health. If the foundation is shaky, so will be the building.

What leads you to believe the guy hasn't fought? He literally said "I have done all I can." Do you want him to create so much conflict that he is forced to leave in disgrace, burning every bridge he comes across? Or is it OK that a good guy fights behind the scenes, and resigns with grace when he has lost that fight?

Based on your first graph though, how much longer before federal whistle blower laws get DOGE'd?

It's true, that they risk the erosion of their status and the assumption of their power by the state over the medium to long term. But it is also true that in the short term they can beat their competitors by a carefully targetted bribe. There are significant upsides to getting behind the administration, and you can't ignore that.

This kind of corruption is literally how feudal oligarchies form.

Also from there: "Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”"

For a science-fiction version of a general strike and related resistance, see James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_from_Yesteryear "The story was republished in other Eastern European countries where its depiction of nonviolent resistance against authority proved popular. In 1989, Hogan attended a convention in Kraków before travelling to Warsaw to meet the publishers of the magazine serial and draw out the money he had been paid. However, inflation following the collapse of the communist regime had reduced the value of the money in the account to just $8.43. Hogan concluded: "So after the U.S. had spent trillions on its B-52s, Trident submarines, NSA, CIA, and the rest, that was my tab for toppling the Soviet empire. There's always an easy way if you just look.""

Of course, opinions across the political spectrum still widely differ on whether what is going on is good or bad (including opinions and priorities related to "identity politics"). Will those sentiments change as political things continue to play out (for good or bad) and get to the point where there becomes a broad sentiment for a general strike? Frankly, I don't know. For example, a lot of people think it would be a good thing to reshore manufacturing in the USA which hopefully also might eventually lower prices for manufactured goods (at least relative to wages). But whether current political actions will accomplish any of that is up for debate, as is whether reshoring manufacturing will bring back lots of good paying jobs to the USA or whether reshoring instead will just bring more automation and more wealth concentration. Some people may be willing to wait and see, while other people may have a specific opinion and may want to act politically on it.

As G. William Domhoff wrote decades ago in "Who Rules America": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_freshstart.h... "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't."

So, whatever one's economic opinions, the "identity politics" of it all is a separate issue (as above).

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics "Identity politics is politics based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, political affiliation, caste, age, education, disability, intelligence, and social class. The term encompasses various often-populist political phenomena and rhetoric, such as governmental migration policies that regulate mobility and opportunity based on identities, left-wing agendas involving intersectional politics or class reductionism, and right-wing nationalist agendas of exclusion of national or ethnic "others.""

Some parts from that long article I found especially interesting:

"Criticism of identity politics often comes from either the center-right or the far-left on the political spectrum. Many socialists, anarchists and Marxists have criticized identity politics for its divisive nature, claiming that it forms identities that can undermine their goals of proletariat unity and class struggle. On the other hand, many conservative think tanks and media outlets have criticized identity politics for other reasons, such as that it is inherently collectivist and prejudicial. Center-right critics of identity politics have seen it as particularist, in contrast to the universalism espoused by many liberal politics, or argue that it detracts attention from non-identity based structures of oppression and exploitation."

"Sociologist Charles Derber asserts that the American left is "largely an identity-politics party" and that it "offers no broad critique of the political economy of capitalism. It focuses on reforms for blacks and women and so forth. But it doesn't offer a contextual analysis within capitalism." Both he and David North of the Socialist Equality Party posit that these fragmented and isolated identity movements which permeate the left have allowed for a far-right resurgence. Cornel West asserted that discourse on racial, gender and sexual orientation identity was "crucial" and "indispensable", but emphasized that it "must be connected to a moral integrity and deep political solidarity that hones in on a financialized form of predatory capitalism. A capitalism that is killing the planet, poor people, working people here and abroad." Historian Gary Gerstle writes that identity politics and multiculturalism thrived in the neoliberal era precisely because these movements did not threaten capital accumulation, and over the same period "pressure on capitalist elites and their supporters to compromise with the working class was vanishing." The ideological space to oppose capitalism shrank with the fall of communism, forcing the left to "redefine their radicalism in alternative terms"."

Identity politics is a complex topic, and how it is playing out specifically in the USA is a complex topic -- as is how it seems to relate to recent changes at the NSF including grant terminations.

For the USA to heal as a nation, we need to figure out a way to transcend divisions -- including divisions related to identity politics.

Disclaimer: A NSF grant that was terminated last week has directly affected my family.

That and term 1 Trump really was basically what was left of the Republican establishment running things while Trump did his reality TV show presidency.

So people wrongly assumed the same people would be there to stop him from driving the country off a cliff.

Trump could easily have been defeated by a centrist Democrat who focused on kitchen table issues not fringe social ones, and was able to discuss and debate them coherently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_(Tacitus)

First, if academics wanted to work on topics mandated by somebody else, they would go work in industry for that somebody, and earn much more money than they earn right now.

Second, most academic scientists do not do anything relevant to Musk's companies. Do you expect a chemist to pivot to self-driving cars? Or a pure mathematician to whatever X.ai is doing?

The only thing this will lead to is a destruction of American capacity to carry out independent scientific research.

My comment was bitter sarcasm lamenting how much is lost and how little gained, not an argument. And you could call that out. But just flopping the words around doesn't turn it into an argument.

Every time I go down this line, it’s all vague boogeymen or claims of events that don’t hold up to scrutiny.