[flemishgun]

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.

[sega_sai]

I completely agree, the whole type of decision making wrecks people's life. Fine, if the government wants have a discussion of what programs to fund, lets have that, but this id.otic 'stop funding' orders is just horrific for people involved. There could be people on grants, who are just planning to move to the US from some other country, who finished their previous contracts whose lives will be suspended. I remember the same thing happened last time with the 'travel bans'. Obviously this new government does not give a sh.t about people and rational decision making, but it's bizarre how some people in this thread are trying to justify that...

[whynotminot]

> and whether there might have been a less brutalistic way of achieving the same principles.

The cruelty is, and has always been, the whole point with these people.

You’re trying to appeal to decency in a desert of decency.

[archagon]

Actually, there was (and is) a pretty big thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42851248

[9283409232]

HN flags any Trump related topic almost immediately as people are still pretending this doesn't affect them and isn't worth discussing.