[colincooke]

Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run.

You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.

[fooker]

I disagree.

The kind of reform you are talking about does not work against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of small countries.

It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then it'll be a game of whack a mole.

There's a reason things got so bad.

[johnnyanmac]

Translation: it's too slow and you don't care what breaks in the process. You already got yours.

Anyone complaining about slow courts should probably focus on the courts themselves, or the money coming in. Not the act of laws.

[vkou]

Yes, the rule of law is incredibly inconvenient. Why be bound by it, when you can just do anything that you want?

[rayiner]

There is a very basis here for invoking “rule of law” where:

1) we’re talking about discretionary grants being made out of taxpayer dollars;

2) congress has delegated authority to make the grants and to the executive, including determining indirects; and

3) the executive action is being used to save money.

It’s also “the rule of law” in some sense when NIMBYs sue to keep a Ronald Mcdonald House from being built in their posh neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean we need to lionize it on that basis, or preemptively surrender to efforts to invoke the law to block reform. The universities can afford expensive lawyers with their 59% indirects, let those lawyers worry about it.

[fooker]

Yes, that's why countries are not just run by courts and judges.

[vkou]

If you want to change the law, the legislature is right there. All it needs to do is pass a bill.

If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to follow it.

This is generally how civilized people are expected to behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to do away with the rule of law.

[fooker]

There's no law to change here.

Universities have freedom in how to use grant money. The government had so far not bothered with controlling what they do with the money coming from the government. The situation is a bit like you donating to a charity and they spending it on executive bonuses.

Are you proposing that the government has to sign everything into law before taking any action? Can you think of why that might be a terrible idea?

[johnnyanmac]

There isn't. Congress decided the budget. Your goal is to blame your reps and make sure they budget the way you want next time. That's the proper way.

[affinepplan]

this isn't true. I don't think you understand how university funding works.

[cudgy]

And yet everyone was arguing recently about how amazing Deepseek was because they operated on such a smaller budget and how the restriction of chips into China forced them to find an efficient solution to training an LLM model. Sudden and drastic changes don’t always result in bad outcomes; in fact, they can many times produce outcomes that were never possible without the shock to the system.

Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually and systematically through a series of conferences and meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented sometime in the future.