It's hard to imaging a more wasteful and destructive set of actions over the past year, except just shutting it all down. Money was still spent, less than usual, but in a way that ensured it was squandered, and that seeds that were planted could not grow.
However, it was apparently reauthorized on April 14, as my NIH newsletter this week linked to this April 21 announcement that SBIRs and STTRs are back!
https://grants.nih.gov/news-events/nih-extramural-nexus-news...
Who is going to stop a lawless Trump administration? Eventually the courts, at least at the lower levers. The Supreme Court is hyper political and continue making politically-driven rewriting of law, at least as much as the public lets them. Congress has completely abdicated their constitutionally mandated roles, such as being in charge of taxation and tariffs. The government has been completely taken over by a single party, and that party is burning the Constitution and its principles.
As for another example of gross mismanagment, of many many many more I could go on about, the National Cancer Institute's review board was completely disbanded, and put under the National Science Foundation where reviewers have less cancer experience, for example. To a pointy-haired-boss, that might sound like a cost savings measure but it's still the same cost, you just have less experienced people doing reviews.
All this is happening and getting reported on, but it doesn't get attention because every day is pure chaos filled with outrageous violations of what used to be normal activity in the government. And its all covered up by the most popular mainstream news sources, and there's a large body of the US population that has been completely brainwashed and literally refuses to accept any criticism of the Trump administration, outright rejected facts because it hurts their feelings.
I would say no. That doesn't mean it's not happening, just that the law was ignored.
Don't reply, don't feed, just flag and move on.
In the current environment - I would contact the TPOC - it could just be stuck in limbo.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
they're almost certainly going to replace all the board memebers with political loyalists. the board members served six year terms specifically so they'd span multiple administrations and stay independent.
firing them all at once lets you stack the entire board with people. it's not about making science better, it's about removing the people who'd say no.
Maybe you're just (ironically) in the minority, and mad that you don't feel like your opinions are sufficiently included.
If the pathology was entirely within his own privately-owned company that'd be one thing, but Americans are going to continue to get hurt because of it.
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
They’re not. But I’m currently pessimistic about America’s ability to maintain technological leadership beyond the early 2030s and I’d like to see what the alternatives are. (I’ve been impressed by what India is doing, both in research and commercialization, as I have with Ukraine. I’ve been impressed by EU research.)
They have and do oversight, generally with scary commie sounding names but presumably the same day-to-day as the NSF.
No. It should be beholden to the law. And sometimes the law creates independent agencies because that’s the only way to administer a complex, free society.
So it's similar to working for the UN or IAEA where most jobs are fixed term.
> Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better
Prior to Trump probably yes. Post Trump almost certainly.
> and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?
Obviously not. But why are you assuming that those removed from their posts were vocal critics of the CCP?
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
Yeah that is concerning. Glad the US doesn't have any sort of credit scoring system that might make it hard to get out of poverty. That would be really scary. Imagine if you had to pass a credit check to get an apartment!
(Submitted title was "Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation", which was probably just an attempt to fit HN's 80 char limit that had collateral damage)
From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?
[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/all
[2]: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2026/04/nsf-lags-trump-proposes-...
"A Senate bill was introduced in February 1947 to create the National Science Foundation (NSF) to replace the OSRD. This bill favored most of the features advocated by Bush, including the controversial administration by an autonomous scientific board. The bill passed the Senate and the House, but was pocket vetoed by Truman on August 6, on the grounds that the administrative officers were not properly responsible to either the president or Congress."
Also mentions the preceding organization OSRD (Office of Scientific Research & Development) and that they had tried to exempt it from conflict of interest regulations.
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade... [3] https://www.project2025.observer/en
I'll grant you, Clinton single-handedly passed more Conservative reforms than any Republican president ever has.
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
Destroying institutions is one heck of a lot easier than building new ones.
This is the cycle now. 180 degree turns in policy every 4 or 8 years. There's no long term planning.
China and Russia must be enjoying this.
It's a harsher punishment that they live to see the rebuild of what they turned to ash.
> With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing [...] Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense.
Tom over at the Explosions&Fire channel (and Extractions&Ire channel) just published a video[1] about his academic career. In it he noted that in Australia where he's located, the defense companies were an exception to that general rule, and did indeed sponsor a fair bit of basic research, including his PhD. I assume in areas they figured had potential, but still.
I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.
What kind of an agenda does studying Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic carry?
Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.
You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.
Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... the first being GPS. There are way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
EDIT: other folks beat me to it
We are each responsible for learning ourselves, and we live in a time where that is easier than ever. I find it odd your default position is to assume it is not important.
I find in conversations like these, if I don't know something fundamental like the NSF's role in American science, it's pretty easy to do a short bit of research before commenting. It's not bad to ask questions, but I figure if the question has a basic factual answer in wikipedia, it's best to start there.
It's wild how efficient they are, sometimes.
You're either a propagandist or a useful idiot.
Personal: Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
https://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pa...
But if I have a specific question regarding what some entity does, I can always look into it on my own time, rather than have a default stance on what they might do/not do.
We are all failing morally for not revolting at this level of corruption.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
I'm not even American and I've heard of it. The NSF's mission is to promote science and engineering in all 50 states.
What could be the reason he’s doing it, how does he benefit from it, or thinks he benefits from it?
the "benefit" from his perspective is the same playbook trump admin has been running across every federal agency, he wants to replace independent experts with loyalists, remove checks on executive power, and redirect spending toward admin priorities.
the board members served six year terms specifically to insulate science funding from political cycles. that's a feature to everyone else and a bug to this administration.
It A) gives business funding that would otherwise have to give up equity to VCS or sell to PE or whatever other forms of private, for-profit funding. And B) takes away money that could go to the military or ICE or other programs that could be used to concentrate Trumps power or aggrandizement.
> America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community.
Has Trump and his friend benefited from this program? No? Then this doesn't matter.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
What's completely incomprehensible is that the people suffering consequences of the Triffin Dilemma double down on the US dollar as the reserve currency. If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status. It's amazing how easily it is to misdirect blame to immigrants, libs, etc. Absolutely wild.
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
But rather than own their failure, they work - hard - the “OMG it’s all his fault” narrative (read: deflection and distraction) and it works. So well, they keep doing it.
But repetition of a lie doesn’t make it true. Concession to buy into a lie, also doesn’t make it true.
No doubt DJT has his flaws. But he’s still a scapegoat. Why? Because no one is asking “How did we get here?”
Essentially the US cannot improve it's current direction unless it can have an honest discussion about how it got so bad in the first place, with all administrations under the spotlight for failing to address the decline.
Ironically, it's accelerating away from honesty.
Surely, he has made things uniquely worse, and in ways that would not have happened without him.
You don't get the wildfire without all three, and anyone paying attention can observe the looming danger and the inevitability of ignition. Who lights the match matters. But is only a small part of the contributing circumstances.
The wealthy have been manufacturing these issues for decades now by buying up the entire media apparatus and gutting systems to the bone so that they can squeeze out a bit more blood to drink.
This is the stronger part of that statement to me. More than individual responsibility. Collective responsibility of the powerful. It seems to me that there's plenty of blame to spread around, which doesn't negate any of it. I even see ways democrats have contributed by, for example, conspiring to exclude Bernie Sanders who plays to the same feelings of dissatisfaction as Trump, but in a different way. More build it better than burn it down.
Though I think that's what Trump sees himself as doing as well. People don't have to agree - I appreciate some things he's done and recoil in horror at others. But similarly for democrats. I was very displeased with Obama for renewing the Patriot Act while appreciating the difficult compromise of the Affordable Care Act.
Historically, US politics has been quite volatile. The period between WWII and the 90s was unusually stable and prosperous. Which I tend to credit having bombed the rest of the world's manufacturing capacity to smithereens and the recovery period for, mostly. I think we're entering a more volatile period, but who knows?
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
People didn't vote for change, they voted for the same thing they had 4 years ago that changed absolutely nothing.
To quote Vaas from Far Cry 3: Do you know what the definition of insanity is?
And how did the system respond after the first win? It didn’t. It was same ol’ same ol’, and look what the led to.
Blaming Trump for the cluster fuck mess that gave him the opportunity to run and win… Sorry. Absolutely not his fault.
I don’t like the guy. But I’m not going to be foolish and blame him for winning. That’s not his fault.
In both cases, this looks like users using the site normally.
Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.
These are the "fuck your feelings" people whose feelings you're worrying about.
But this is subjective. What you call as "Science" might be pseudoscience for someone else. As an example, some decade back, following and trusting peer reviewed research was "scientific", but even back then I thought it was a stupid, unscientific thing to do. Today the problems with peer review process is pretty widely acknowledged. But back then I would have been considered unscientific to not fully trust peer reviewed research. People also used to say things like "Science is settled" and "Trust the experts", which is the most unscientific thing that one could possibly say.
So since there is a lot of unscientific things that is being called "science" these days, I think this is very subjective.
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
Well done, everybody, the system works.
The presumes that "Trump Administration" and "United States of America" are the same thing. The reality is that a Venn diagram of them would be two circles that barely touch. Is it really an "own goal" if you gravely injure your victim while you rob them?
Until the Trump Administration is replaced, the "Trump Administration" _is_ The United States of America.
It's certainly not what an increasing amount of the population want to be true, but facts can be sticky like that.
The problem is what happens to the created vacuum. We know who is going to fill it, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. The devil we know is dying, the devil we don't know hasn't quite arrived just yet, and is likely going to take a decade or two to settle in.
It's not just American right wingers turning off the world. The world sees how unexceptionally gen pop reacts in the US as our local politics destabilize everyone
America is a normal country now. All the WW2 heroes are dead and soldiers since were imperialist aggressors. We don't dare worship Vietnam vets or middle east vets as those conflicts were not so valorous. That we have to point back so far to feel good about our history says a lot about how long America has been falling apart.
For decades Academics been saying the decline of America started in the 1950s and has accelerated only as countries we bombed to hell to stay ahead normalized. I tend to agree.
America has really not been that great this whole time. But like every other nation, Americans been propagandized by each other to believe their American made bullshit don't stink.
In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
What academics? Links please.
Then it's extremely important to prevent those sweatshop workers from immigrating to the US (legally or illegally), where they and their natural-born citizen descendants will vote against the interests of the average American.
Nor are the Europeans or East Asians.
> In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
What?
Xi, we shall see.
This decapitation of education, military, cyber-defense, public news, the arts, disaster preparedness, climate science ... the list goes on ... is so systematic that it can only be described as a fifth column effort to destroy the U.S. from inside, which Putin can't do from outside.
Could it be that they secretly subscribe to a different version of the same mythical exceptionalism as the president they despise?
really? reproducibility crisis, stagnation in various fundamental fields, and bullshit ive seen with my own eyes working in the salt mines of academic science
> Pretty much the entire rest of the world
no doubt, the irony being that by trying to copy the us' vannevar bush model these other parts of the world will invariably fall into the same p-hacking/publication count/tenure chasing system that leads to the rotten system the us has. except the us got to pick tge low hanging scientific fruit already
There are lots of things where tearing the system down and starting from scratch is a bad idea, especially if you do it while depending on it and before you have a replacement.
Timing matters. Where current resources go matters. Having a plan matters. The current system is not perfect but it’s far better than no system at all.
you should question this assertion. your assertion is dependent on the assumption that science is a strictly positive sum game (with respect to funding). i am saying it is not, and i have provided the mechanistic explanation of why it's not.
all i ask people to think about is: bad science is worth negative.
a better argument would be that trump doing this is possibly toxic because the process of resetting becomes overly political and associated with trump shenanigans. i guess that argument was too sophisticated to make
It's from science.org - how could it be less superficial, in your opinion as a reader?
Largest incarcerated population, highest infant mortality rate in the developed world, highest military spending, highest obesity rate in the developed world, highest rate of school shootings by a huge margin, and the highest gun ownership rate by a long shot (edit: pun not intended)!
USA! USA! USA!
Without question, but despite leading on GDP the USA lags behind in so many other key areas. It's astounding to those of us non-Americans that you can spend 30 Billion on the Iran war but you have elementary school children who are accruing "lunch debt" because they can't afford to pay for meals at school.
Life in America seems so needlessly cruel.
>science and innovation
Not for long. The damage is already done, and America will cease to lead in this area in my lifetime, likely to never recover.
I like Trump.
I never followed US politics before Trump. I didn't think politicians and politics were interesting, until Trump came into the picture. I enjoy watching him speak. There is not a single thing that he said that felt dishonest to me. The fact that he talks with the press casually and frequently is itself a big indicator to me that he is honest. In my mind, I cannot fathom why a dishonest person would do that and risk any slip of tongue that could expose him.
I have found that if I listen to Trump and the administration directly, then it really feel honest and if done via some news channel, the feeling is different.
I don't think he is stupid either. As I said, if he were stupid, I would not have found his speeches enjoyable to listen.
This is same with the other members of the Administration including RFK, Marco Rubio, JD Vance etc.
People say that he lies all the time. That he said he would end the war in three days, but haven't yet done it. To me this is not a lie. This would be a lie if he says it and didn't even try. But as far as I understand, he tries it, and fails. When he says "I will end the war in three days", I think he genuinely believes it. So I think he is genuine. He is really his own master. He does not play safe by tightly following what ever his advisors or PR people (not sure if they even exist) say. This makes him appear incompetent when you compare with presidents who are just a mouthpiece that follow "advisors".
And if I am not mistaken, this is probably why he won. And I think he will win again, and the internet will be shocked again.
Also, he is prohibited by the Constitution from running again.
With any luck, a whole bunch of them are going to end up in prison before this is all over.
The problem with Trump is perception. That what Trump says can appear to be inconsistent if you are looking for it. Or if you want to project that impression. I will give you an example.
This [1] is a comment in one of the /r/worldnews post mocking a comment made by Trump.
>Stable Genius Doctor Jesus on November 16, 2011: “Our president [Obama] will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective.”
Superficially, the comment appear to be legit. But if you look at what Trump said, you can see that here https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-trump-once-sa...
> But to start a war in order to get elected, and I believe that's going to happen, would be an outrage.
> Iran can be taken down in many ways. Their population is in turmoil. They look at what's happening in Syria and other countries where it looked like it was an impossibility. And it looks like that one is going to collapse also. So Iran can be taken.
> I would never take the military card off the table and it's possible that it'll have to be used because Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, but you've gotta exhaust other possibilities. And we're in a great position to do it.
And I think this fits perfectly with what he is trying to do right now, I mean where he says..
> but you've gotta exhaust other possibilities.
So this is what I said earlier. He is not stupid. But he speaks freely. You can cherry pick sentences from what he say and can paint a completely different picture.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1svtrz5/trump_ha...
> For those people, fewer in number now than ever before, that are reading The Failing New York Times, or watching Fake News CNN, that think that I am “anxious” to end the War (if you would even call it that!) with Iran, please be advised that I am possibly the least pressured person ever to be in this position. I have all the time in the World, but Iran doesn’t — The clock is ticking! The reason some of the Media is doing so poorly with Subscribers and Viewers is because they no longer have credibility. Iran’s Navy is lying at the bottom of the Sea, their Air Force is demolished, their Anti Aircraft and Radar Weaponry is gone, their leaders are no longer with us, the Blockade is airtight and strong and, from there, it only gets worse — Time is not on their side! A Deal will only be made when it’s appropriate and good for the United States of America, our Allies and, in fact, the rest of the World. President DONALD J. TRUMP
To me this seems pretty stupid. If someone wrote this message in a social media argument I would block them.
Is it really surprising that I can relate?
> When he says "I will end the war in three days", I think he genuinely believes it. So I think he is genuine.
This is what Putin said about his "Special military operation" that has stretched on for 4 years now. Hostomel turned into an irreversible, taxing conflict on the Russian people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antonov_Airport
If the United States' hubris costs it half as much as Russia's did, we'll never be respected on the global stage again. The best option was to honor and enforce Iran's JCPOA agreement with the IAEA, but that's not possible now that America and Israel climbed the escalation ladder. Any deal we strike under duress will be worse and cost taxpayers more than peacetime diplomacy.
I think we can see eye-to-eye with each other, but I'd have to hear how you think this type of strategy benefits America. From the macro-scale, this does nothing to bolster a conflict over the First island chain and weakens America's strategic credibility abroad. Iran and Israel are a sideshow compared to the eventual conflict with China, and the results we've seen from the Persian Gulf do not bode well for America's power projection.
The only answer I have is the one that Trump keep on repeating, about how Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.
> JCPOA agreement
If I am the POTUS and is really concerned about what happens to US after my term, I would be very concerned about what happens when the term of the agreement expires. This fits with Trump has been saying. That he became the POTUS because he found those that came before him not doing a good job. So it follows that he might think his successors also would not do a good job. So when he says he want a permanent solution to Iran's nuclear threat, I think that is why.
This is what I said before. If you take what Trump says and do, in different contexts, it matches. I mean, he has an underlying philosophy and world view that he has built up, and is not derived from the thoughts and philosophy of others. This is another reason why I like him, but causes a huge majority of intellectuals to hate him. Because most of the intellectuals derive or outsource their view and thinking to other thought leaders...
Then you don't have an answer. The Israeli media played that line for close to 40 years, lamenting Iran being "mere months" away from a nuke - for decades at a time.
Iran has nothing to do with American homeland security. America's involvement in Iran is purely for political and economic reasons, there is no credible threat to America in Iran any more than there is in Sudan or Yemen.
> If I am the POTUS [...] I would be very concerned about what happens when the term of the agreement expires.
Genuinely, why? The JCPOA is a joint plan, America's opinion only matters insofar as we can compel Iran to comply. Pulling out increases the likelihood that Iran races to build a bomb with their HEU. Bombing them, like in the Twelve-Day War and Operation Midnight Hammer, did not compel any compliance. The uranium is still a problem.
> So when he says he want a permanent solution to Iran's nuclear threat, I think that is why.
I think that is bogus. Iran is not a credible nuclear threat to the United States or it's citizens, so the US would only be going to war to protect Israel. In which case, we don't even need the nuke pretext and we can just admit that it's a protectionist war to defend our fragile satellite state instead of lying about ICBM threats.
There really is no moral defense of the US at this point, given the last few years of the genocide it is actively committing under both parties.
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
Trump will have been an incredibly cheap victory for whichever new superpowers emerge.
I half expect the entire Trump family to move to Dubai in 2029.
Russia, maybe Israel. Not Dubai. Dubai will remain too closely tied to the next administration in the US without a major change in our energy supply. But yes I think it is highly likely that many of the criminals in this administration and the trump family will flee the country and take their pilfered millions with them once they are out of power.
