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by pinko 406 days ago
Nonsense. NSF awards are all public. If you could actually give enough examples of these "extremely large" awards to constitute 55% of the NSF budget you would have.
1 comments

Here you go https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... It's not 55%, it's more like 25% of the budget.
So after the first simple question, we're already at less than half the original claimed figure of 55% (a bad sign for its credibility, if you're a Bayesian!).

But more importantly, I'm familiar with the linked document, and it's garbage. It was thrown together practically overnight to justify a political decision that had already been made, and in its incompetent haste, flagged proposals that had phrases like "diversity of sources" that had nothing to do with DEI and included them in the totals. Not a credible source.

I'm not the one that made the original claim. The 25% is the government's figure. Whether some of it was classified incorrectly is up for debate. I haven't personally double checked every claim, but it is not hard to believe that money is being siphoned via those grants into DEI programs, and it is the government's position to not fund these programs anymore.
Even the word "siphoned" is loaded with bias. Is research aimed at understanding why kids choose to participate in high-school science classes or not, and whether certain teaching approaches lead to better outcomes for boys vs girls, not legitimate NSF research? We can't make improvements to science education without that kind of data.

That's not siphoning anything away from science -- it is science.

Completely aside from the incompetent misidentification of which proposals have anything to do with race, gender, or sexuality (hint: it's a lot less than 25%), the staggeringly stupid premise that all of them are inherently politically-motivated is part of the problem here.

They literally categorized research as DEI ("Status") if it had the keywords "HISTORICALLY", "EXCLUSIVE", "INSTITUTIONAL", "STATUS", "BARRIER" and on and on...these are not serious people.