I was surprised to not find the funding freeze discussed on HN yesterday and I am speechless today at some of the comments I am reading in here. Are readers not aware of the scope and impact of this? I will tell you my story: I am funded by NASA to develop and maintain open-source machine learning software that they use directly on satellites. I am not the only one: many open source scientific software projects that are in widespread use are funded via federal grants of one form or another.
Such grants are funded on a reimbursement basis (or at least mine is): each month, I submit an invoice (via the scientific software 501(c)3 of which I am a part). Then NASA pays it. When the EO was announced, my guidance was simply that NASA was not going to pay out for a while and my February paycheck was just going to not show up for a while. To my knowledge, this was basically the guidance for every NASA, NSF, NIH, etc. grant. (I believe DARPA grants are not frozen.) These do not just fund what the more conservative among us might call 'mathematical wankery', they fund all kinds of things across science.
The issue is not whether some of these grants should have been issued in the first place. The issue is that suddenly, a large group of researchers is either not going to get paid, or their organizations are going to have to float their salary themselves on behalf of the federal government, because the federal government has just said that they plan to renege on their agreements. How many will miss rent or mortgage payments?
Although the order has been blocked for now, it is still unclear what it will mean for me and others. (I would submit an invoice on Feb. 1... would it be paid?) It's not like I just got laid off and can go look for other work now: the funding is likely to come back, I just get the joy of having no idea when.
For those of you who seem to have little problem with the EO itself: please take at least a few moments to consider whether your principles outweigh the real human costs here, and whether there might have been a less brutalistic way of achieving the same principles.
For reference here's an article about the NSF grant pause mentioned in the linked post: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/science-resea...
[Edit: I initially confused the NSF and the NIH. Have now corrected the link]
The NSF's executive orders page says:
> Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-25-13, issued on Jan. 27, 2025, directs all federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of their financial assistance programs to determine programs, projects and activities that may be implicated by the recent executive orders. Therefore, all review panels, new awards and all payments of funds under open awards will be paused as the agency conducts the required reviews and analysis.
The Office of Management and Budget Memorandum M-25-13 lists a series of 8 different EOs none of which seem to be relevant to the NSF (although I haven't looked into them). It also says:
> The guidance establishes a process for agencies to work with OMB to determine quickly whether any program is inconsistent with the President’s Executive Orders. A pause could be as short as day. In fact, OMB has worked with agencies and has already approved many programs to continue even before the pause has gone into effect.
It would be good to know exactly which EOs are blocking the NSF's grants. Also, it sounds like the government are willing to approve spending as long as it has been through an internal review process which presumably if those grants were all but confirmed they should have already been through an internal review process.
For fields like academia it is interesting to see them impacted, but other areas don't even relate to any meaningful government financial sponsorship. I've been wondering for a few decades now if we shouldn't create a rendezvous site outside of all the countries that require a visa to work. It's my understanding that some countries try to make special economic zones that fit the bill, but I'm a little sceptical these are that independent.
As an example, say I want to hire a asylum seeker who will be returned to Syria and wants to go anywhere else, is there a list of anywhere else we could agree to make a contract and done?
Is it also a disaster that many math education programs don't hinge on automated proof assistants?
"we just don't know" is a non-answer.
If Tao's point is in predicting rapid change from a game theoretic perspective, perhaps it would behoove university executives to court industry for research dollars, instead of an ouroboros of invented problems and federal tax dollars.
Even state tax dollars are more likely to have a clear purpose.
how did the joke go: other disciplines need funding, math just needs to chalk.(?)
Hardly surprising that an administration that built its brand on “post truth” has no interest in the good functioning of academic research
I prefer notion to mastodon for blogging
>...this thinking again assumes an oversimplified linear model: in practice, the rest of the world would not be able to absorb all of the lost opportunities in the US in a single job cycle, and some mathematicians may end up leaving the field entirely, or not obtain as enriching a career as they would otherwise have been able to achieve.
Has the author considered the possibility that there may be an misallocation of resources directed towards academia? If the work is valuable, individuals in the private sector will voluntarily pay for it. Decentralized market pricing is the method by which dollar values are assigned.
He could equally say, "My colleagues in the dig holes and refill them field have not received their grants for their important research. Think of all of the missed opportunities. This disruption may result in individuals leaving the dig & refill sector."
Terence Tao is an inspiring person in a field we all find compelling. He's formalized the plight of such field here as a result of the administration's approach to cost-cutting. That doesn't mean that it isn't necessary. Sure, there are better theoretical ways to reduce spending, but it doesn't take a tremendous amount of experience to recognize the incentives just don't align with accomplishing that goal. A cross-the-board stop/cut also neuters the pork-barreling and self-serving political advocacy that would kill more nuanced reductions.