They already came for NSF and the NIH, how can they not also come for DARPA?
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.
From what I understand, the funding cuts are primarily related to DEI initiatives. And, generally the administration is trying to align activities with its goals, so it’s understandable that funds will be adjusted. DEI is a target because its goals are steeped in Marxist philosophy, which is antithetical to their own.
Also, Republicans (of whom I’m not one) believe that spending should be controlled by the states. It’s not that they don’t believe in defense - they realize it’s more effective to invest in drones and use nuclear deterrence. Those are more effective and cheaper in terms of lives as well as money. This aligns with the US’s new isolationist strategy as it withdraws from the world.
Do you have any idea of the breakdown? Because everything I've see is that no one knows, and the limited government publications are full of bullshit.
Like, if a project studying biodiversity is cut, is that because it is "related to DEI initiatives" because it shared the word "diversity"?
How many of the laid-off VA staff were DEI? The laid-off forest rangers?
How much of USAID was DEI? The Trump administration says the cut was due to wasteful spending and fraud, not DEI.
How do the cuts in DEI initiatives compare to the massive cuts to indirect grant monies?
If the Republicans believe spending should be more controlled by the states, they have a majority and can, you know, change the law. We have a representative democracy to help balance national interests, rather than the interests of a king.
I don't think we can regard threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or the Panama Canal as part of an isolationist policy. Such threats are more closely aligned with expansionism. An isolationist government would not be involved in international negotiations involving Ukraine, or providing support to Israel, to start.
FWIW, DEI is no more steeped in Marxist philosophy than the Freedman's Bureau, public libraries, or the FDIC. As far as I can tell, "Marxism" when used this way is a boogieman term used to scare off any critique of capitalism or its effects, little different than how Republicans sneered that Dukakis was an "L word", castigating the word "liberal." Both terms are used as rhetorical propaganda.
Given the influence Marx had on studying "class relations, social conflict, and social transformation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism), it's all too easy to say that any study of those topics must be Marxism, and therefore fomenting a communist revolution.
Just to answer your question (not lend any legitimacy), https://doge.gov has been publishing all the details.
I've looked through it a few times to answer the same curiosity you have (I want more specifics, not just the stuff that fits in a tweet). But it still leaves me with questions because I don't know how much of these claims is actually accurate.
> The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.
> Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.
> DOGE says it's now saved $65B in federal funds, but that's still impossible to verify
> It only provides records for $9.6 billion in savings from contract terminations
as well as:
> The official also said they're using a conservative methodology of calculating savings because they're subtracting the contracts' obligated dollars from the ceiling amounts. However, for many contracts the ceiling dollars are much higher than what is actually expected to be spent.
You'll note that there's no information about how much was specifically DEI, while saying the total amount was due to a "combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings."
The hard truth is that they have no clue about what they are cutting and they mainly do not care because the initiative is not to make things better it is to break a currently working system in favour of God knows what.
Every step taken by the current administration has undermined the safety and current position of the US both domestically and on the international stage. The only people that I see profiting from the current situation are Russia and then China.
Regardless of opinions on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, one has to look at the current situation with pragmatism:
Firing all probatory employees is just insane.
Firing the people responsible of your nuclear Arsenal is insane
Firing competent workers because of their skin colour or they do not have the genitalia you prefer is insane.
Sending an emai, on the weekend, requesting 5 accomplishment or risk getting fired is insane.
Let's see it from a different perspective, let's say you have a large company operating on international scale with many stakeholders, you get a consultant tasked with streamlining and optimising operation. Within less than a month, they start arbitrarily firing people based on aggregated numbers from random collection of papers lying around in the office. Would you trust the fact that they would streamline and make things run better or would you assume they just started slashing left and right to justify "optimising". You can tell by my phrasing what my opinion is on the matter but there is no way that you can optimise, let alone understand, those agencies inner working and essential moving parts within less than a month...
Now I will refrain from making any political/legality statements, but from a pure practical standpoint it is, to put it mildly, nuts.
To be clear, I'm not a republican or a conservative. If it matters, I'm a modern liberal (i.e. what existed before progressivism but after classical liberalism). I'm just trying to distill what I believe the right says and what I observe. Also, this is my take on modern American conservatism, in general - individual cases vary.
First, if you look up progressive academic theorists [1] you will see that they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly. The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts. But, man can't, even with best intentions (i.e. ethics professors do not behave more ethically than non-ethicists) [2][3].
There is a belief by the right that the great majority of people working in government and government related industries (e.g. NGOs) have come out of liberal arts programs that were inspired by the academics listed. They also believe that progressive ideology has steeped into the sciences.
I believe the right's goal is total dismantling of the executive branch. The point is really to destroy any power that the executive has down to the bare minimum so that the risk of a king is eliminated. It's interesting that they put a group of potential tyrants in charge of all of this - it's almost as if they want to show everyone how bad of an idea it is for the president to have so much control.
They generally believe that differing cultures are a good thing but because of Human nature integration cannot work. Therefore, in a state system, they believe one should be allowed to move to the state of their choice and enjoy whatever culture they want given the constraints of the constitution.
Furthermore, they believe the constitution is the only way for lasting peace. It sets the bare minimum for a social contract that works across cultures and people. It gives a framework where people can be culturally different but equal. And, they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily (we hope) so that those countries may also share in its glory.
[1] Achille Mbembe, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cheryl Harris, Cornel West, David Graeber, Derrick Bell, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Gayle Rubin, Herbert Marcuse, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, Mariame Kaba, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Naomi Klein, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Patricia Hill Collins, Peggy McIntosh, Richard Delgado, Robin DiAngelo, Robin D.G. Kelley, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Simone de Beauvoir, Thomas Piketty, Frantz Fanon, Pierre Clastres, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Sherry Ortner, Ferdinand de Saussure, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, David Harvey, Murray Bookchin, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Paulo Freire
[2] Schwitzgebel & Rust (2014), etc.
[3] This is also why many Christians align with conservative thinking because in Christianity Jesus is the only Good thing of this world, and every person is equally sinful.
> they are largely inspired by Marxist philosophy either directly or indirectly
As I wrote, Marx's critical analysis of capitalism touched on many social topics. You should not be surprised that his work had merit in later social research. You should not be surprised that others who criticize capitalism have overlapping beliefs.
Though do note that "Marxist philosophy", quoting the Wikipedia entry for Marxism, has "branches and schools of thought, and as a result, there is no single, definitive "Marxist theory".
Just like there isn't a single, definitive "liberalism."
> The right are diametrically opposed to Marxism because it relies on an assumption that Man can rise above his Animal instincts.
I ... what? I have no idea what that means. Where does Marx talk about that? How does that have anything to do with class struggle?
> but because of Human nature integration cannot work
What?!?!? English, Welsh, and Scottish cannot integrate? What about Presbyterians and Anglican? Men and women? People with blue eyes and people with brown eyes? Bourgeoisie and proletariat? Gen X and Gen Y?
What does it mean to not integrate when there are different classes in a shared society? They certainly aren't calling for the abolition of class distinction, which is Marx's Communist solution.
> so that the risk of a king is eliminated
Right, so Communism? Otherwise, when there is a power vacuum, something fills it, and without the consent of the people, that's a king, dictator, strongman, or the like.
As it stand, it looks more like the dismantling of the legislative and judicial branches, with all power in the executive.
> given the constraints of the constitution.
I'm pretty convinced the current government does not at all feel itself constrained by the constitution.
> they hope to expand the US to other countries voluntarily
History shows the US has a long history of not expanding voluntarily. What's changed? How has this new right de-fanged itself from the tendencies of the old right, like Andrew Jackson, that they seem to admire so much?
Many Christians also align with liberal and even radical thinking. Integration is possible because everyone is a child of God, and "When God’s people are in need, be ready to help them. Always be eager to practice hospitality.” ... “The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you; so you must love him as yourself, because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
I don't know, man. You'll have to go talk to some of them to get a better answer. This is my distilling of 8 years of conversations with average, everyday conservatives as I tried to figure out what they were even talking about. Interestingly, the all seem to have a strong intuition of what they want but seem to stumble on articulating it, they get frustrated, and lash out. I had to do a lot of socratic method and ask a lot of questions to come to these conclusions.
However, you are right about Marxism in that it influences a lot of things. Ironically, the accelerationist movement also even has influence from Marx. A lot whom I talked to have disdain for "academia" - I do know that.
I'm guessing here (and a lot of this is guess work) - that integration is difficult because they view "social control" as impossible outside of a cultural context. That is, within a culture, everyone learns all of the subtle rules and order of things - things that you can't codify in law. But, integration requires a lot of frontal lobe activity which is difficult to maintain and is fragile when it fails.
Correct - Nick Land, often regarded as the father of Accelerationism, affirms Marx's fundamental insight that "the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative" [0], though his interpretation aligns itself with capital and its autonomization:
"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]
Find it disappointing that even on HN people seems to blindly parrot manufactured outrage. Do you really think, nay have you ever tried to look a little deeper than surface to see just how preposterous all around the idea is in terms of actual intents and relative numbers that it would be meaningful to "cut" them? US Republicans are not about states rights, its just the excuse they use when they are trying to dismantle or challenge systems.
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.