This should feel personal to a lot of us. I have hopes of applying to the Small Business Innovation Research fund (https://seedfund.nsf.gov), a program that gives small companies a good chunk of money without taking equity, in order to encourage development of technologies deemed of national importance. I’d be curious if anyone here has tried applying in the last 18 months.
I was helping some people working on their phase I SBIR throughout the first year of Trump, and they often didn't know who to report to, as the firings were so relentless and pointless and completely disorganized. They got the highest possible rating upon completion, but have not been able to apply for Phase 2, so the project is effectively dead as they pursued other opportunities.
It's hard to imaging a more wasteful and destructive set of actions over the past year, except just shutting it all down. Money was still spent, less than usual, but in a way that ensured it was squandered, and that seeds that were planted could not grow.
However, it was apparently reauthorized on April 14, as my NIH newsletter this week linked to this April 21 announcement that SBIRs and STTRs are back!
The US government is not currently in a state of following the law or constitution. People get fired, and if authority was not there, a lawsuit 9-18 months later might rectify it, and in the meantime the fired employee has moved on. DOGE cuts were extreme, capricious, and the only rhyme or reason was to try to hyperpoliticize the science to meet what people were guessing that Trump would want. On the grant side, they cut grants in an explictly racist way, according to a Reagan-appointed Republican judge that ruled aganist them way back in June of 2025; what was the remedy? Merely to reinstate the grants.
Who is going to stop a lawless Trump administration? Eventually the courts, at least at the lower levers. The Supreme Court is hyper political and continue making politically-driven rewriting of law, at least as much as the public lets them. Congress has completely abdicated their constitutionally mandated roles, such as being in charge of taxation and tariffs. The government has been completely taken over by a single party, and that party is burning the Constitution and its principles.
As for another example of gross mismanagment, of many many many more I could go on about, the National Cancer Institute's review board was completely disbanded, and put under the National Science Foundation where reviewers have less cancer experience, for example. To a pointy-haired-boss, that might sound like a cost savings measure but it's still the same cost, you just have less experienced people doing reviews.
All this is happening and getting reported on, but it doesn't get attention because every day is pure chaos filled with outrageous violations of what used to be normal activity in the government. And its all covered up by the most popular mainstream news sources, and there's a large body of the US population that has been completely brainwashed and literally refuses to accept any criticism of the Trump administration, outright rejected facts because it hurts their feelings.
You're arrested for trespassing. Remember, the president also effectively controls the security team, the DoJ and the military. It's just a king again, and you're asking the sane question:
The only people that have authority to fire are the people that are heads of that institution.
The president has no connection to this institution. He does not have any power in this context. His power stops at the federal level and even then his power is limited. Nobody has to abide by his orders. Yet, there are plenty of people doing so. Im not understanding why.
If he doesn't have authority to do what he is doing, nobody has to follow any of his actions. In fact I think there is an obligation not to follow the orders of a criminal.
Its an astounding level of naivity from people who have undoubtedly read textbooks filled cover to cover with a human history almost entirely consisting of subjugation through violence.
The president does not have the right to make trade deals or tariff.
Trump has tariffed basically the entire world, and is now paying that money back to... The family of his cabinet.
The president does not have the power to declare war.
We are at war with Iran.
The president does not have the power to unilaterally dissolve agencies or reproportion or refuse their funds or budgeting.
Yet the department of education is being shuttered and numerous agencies are in ongoing lawsuits for DOGE.
It is illegal for the president to use the office for advertisement or personal gain.
Yet he openly allows bribes to advertise products from the white House, creates cryptocurrencies, gives high-level positions to family.
The president is not allowed to direct an angry crowd to the capital with the express intent to stop the wheels of democracy and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
And yet.
The DOJ announced they will not prosecute the predators from Epstein's list after explicitly violating a law from Congress repeatedly for months on disclosing related files.
Congress is too afraid of his power to hurt their reelection. 33% of SCOTUS are his picks, with another 33% being aligned with the party, creating a supermajority. We've seen the majority of military leadership replaced this year. We've seen a plurality of agencies institute loyalty tests, most importantly the FBI. ICE has been repurposed to a private military / secret police.
You seem to believe there is some divine mandate that enforces the constitution. That the president must follow the rules.
There is not. He is not. He got away with it and continues to get away with it. We no longer live in a polite, rule-based society.
Because, fundamentally, might makes right. And the president of the United States has consolidated enough power that there is basically nothing to stop them but how far their cronies are willing to go.
So why can he do this? Because he can. And there's nothing you can do about it. And if you fight back there will be repercussions.
Anyone who can read the above and interpret it as charitable to the administration cannot possibly be a serious person.
You asked a question and I told you the actual answer.
If you're presented with the option to resist and force their hand so you can try to challenge it legally, please do, I respect that idea. But not everyone is willing to make personal sacrifices like that. Of course, everyone should still make sure to vote.
But at the end of the day, we only have representation because of the implied threat of violence if we didn't. And it very much seems like that threat being implied is not effective in this administration.
> If you're presented with the option to resist and force their hand so you can try to challenge it legally, please do, I respect that idea. But not everyone is willing to make personal sacrifices like that. Of course, everyone should still make sure to vote.
I dont see this as us forcing their hand.
I see this as them forcing our hand. We have all the power and they have none.
The longer we wait to get involved to make the world a better place, the worse it will get, for you and the people you love.
A new department head gets installed, DOGE selects people to fire, has complete access to IT etc.
What's not to understand? The government was completely in the control of Trump and DOGE. What type of "authority" do you think did not exist? This is the standard authoritarian playbook that's played out many times over the world over the past century, it's not hard to understand.
Maybe go back and edit or delete your other ignorant comments now that you’ve actually learned something. You sat here derailing the conversation for an hour because you lacked the motivation to look up facts.
I don't need to delete my comments. The stand the way they are. Im comfortable with making mistakes and being wrong. And btw its not a derailment to ask questions related to jurisprudence of this administration's criminal actions.
I agree with this attitude and think it's helpful.
In the modern age there's no one set of things that people have seen, no common base of knowledge, and the process in this comment thread was super informative in the sense that if I had provided some links to start, a lot of confusion could have been avoided.
Maybe you need to be less comfortable with being wrong and educate yourself about politics more before you comment a dozen times with misinformation then claim you’re totally innocent and were just “asking questions”. That shit is so common amongst trump supporters. Not sayings you are but you’re playing the same game as they do.
I was transparent in where I was at. You are making statements based on nothing. We are all human, we make mistakes, your the one with the problem if you cant see this.
You almost seem proud of your ignorance, maybe you should be learning something from this rather than just being fine with your hour of arguing misinformation. If you are truly not ashamed of bring ignorant and spreading FUD because of that, then I guess there’s nothing more for me to say to such a person. You didn’t just make a mistake, you sat here and doubled and tripled and quadrupled down for an hour while people tried to correct you over and over and you simply didn’t even look up anything, only coming to your realization after someone fed you a link.
This is why they say lies go round the world before the truth gets its shoes on.
I'm in academia, so NSF cuts are very misguided in my view, and hopefully will be reversed in the next administration. But the first two sentences of your post immediately contradict one another. You say America is in a state of lawlessness, and then immediately describe the American legal system. So that's exactly what following the law in America has always meant. America is a common law country, not a civil law country... Litigation and court precedent is how laws are tested and affirmed in common law countries, unlike civil law countries. So that legal system isn't lawlessness, its the way law works in common law countries, which America is one of the few not using the Napoleonic code.
well that specific scenario is its own mess of competing authorities. Theoretically, the president is commander in chief, so he controls the armed forces. But congress has the authority to make a declaration of war. But the president as commander in chief can direct troops for national security or other purposes. Military action can happen without a war being declared. It becomes a bit of a game of semantics because the argument is that war is different than military action, then the legal interpretations of words and whatnot becomes the focus. Courts tend to not really go too deep into this issue, I suppose. It's something of a gray area. So the counterpoint is that the law wasn't ignored, it was interpreted differently, because of this concept that military action isn't necessarily war. Courts usually will spell out these interpretations more clearly and refine the law, but when it comes to war, I think they don't want to litigate that too quickly.
Oh good God, I can't listen to this intellectual rot a single second longer.
This is not a gray area unless you're intentionally pretending to be an idiot to steal power.
Congress is the only branch allowed to declare war. Taking targeted military actions against another country repeatedly on their own soil with no provocation is not a "special military action" it's a fucking war.
It's not funny or coy or clever to pretend otherwise. The intent is abundantly clear and it is abundantly clear it is being violated.
All right, let's say that the current war isn't legal, and neither was Korea, Viet Nam, Grenada, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya. It's not what the Constitution says, but it's been that way for a long time, across multiple presidents of both parties.
The current setup has gone from "only Congress can declare war, requiring a majority of Congress" to "Congress has to pass a War Powers resolution to stop the president from going to war, with enough of a majority that they can override a presidential veto". That is a massively different standard, and was done without amending the Constitution.
So I agree with you. Just don't try to make this something special to Trump, because it's not.
I got "rated limited" by HN after 2 whole comments. Rediculous.
Anyway, I agree with you fully. And I firmly believe the world would be a better place had we actually weighed each of those conflicts and voted to officially declare war or not. Those presidents knew what they were doing and should be tried for it.
Just like Trump should be today.
He's not special, but I'm not sure I can bring LBJ or Nixon back from the dead and stop the Vietnam War. Meanwhile this is an active conflict that can be stopped now.
Though I would argue that, yes, this time is different. At least those pretended to have a justification.
People like you sanewashing the actions of this admin are a major part of the problem.
Even if this were how the system was designed, it is time to acknowledge that it is fundamentally broken and needs change. It is mind boggling that the response to these issues amounts to WONTFIX.
There's some troll making a dozen accounts on here to spew alt-right/MAGA nonsense, then deleting their comments (editing them to ".") once their account is burned.
SBIRs have been mucked up since last fall. The program lapsed and it just got reauthorized for certain departments. Without that reauth only those who had phase 1's could apply for phase 2's.
It depends - some agencies you can apply directly without doing a phase 1. Others you need talk to the TPOC of the Phase 1 to find out the process or you have to be invited.
In the current environment - I would contact the TPOC - it could just be stuck in limbo.
