Other than riling up Democrats into fits of hysteria, has the Trump-Vance administration accomplished anything so far? Or have all of their initiatives been thwarted by judges?
Here’s one where a judge forced the CDC to stick with its old web site (NYT):
A federal judge has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages it has taken down from its website to comply with President Trump’s executive order barring any references to race, gender identity or sexual orientation.
Judge John D. Bates of the D.C. Federal District Court issued the temporary restraining order at the request of a left-leaning advocacy group, Doctors for America, saying the deletions put “everyday Americans and most acutely, underprivileged Americans” in jeopardy.
Let’s look at one that doesn’t seem to fall under the rubric of “race, gender identity, or sexual orientation” .. “Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy” (The Free Press, whose brand is skepticism):
what’s happening at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a very big deal, and has not been previously reported.
NED, a key U.S. instrument for supporting grassroots freedom movements around the world, is under siege from Elon Musk’s DOGE. An order from DOGE to the U.S. Treasury that blocked disbursement of NED funds has crippled the organization—which received $315 million for fiscal year 2025—and its affiliates, The Free Press has learned.
The third-of-a-$billion/year enterprise is all about “democracy”, right? What if we check its web site?
LGBTIQ+ communities in Africa are often on the frontlines of the struggle for human rights in the region,” says Dave Peterson, Senior Director of the Africa program at the National Endowment for Democracy(NED). “As one of the most marginalized groups in many countries, respect for the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is a key indicator for the overall respect for human rights and democracy in a society. Attitudes towards the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons is gradually shifting throughout the continent, which bodes well for the prospects of greater tolerance and inclusion.
It actually is about gender identity and sexual orientation because there is no “democracy” unless Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion. Without this $315 million/year spend there will be no democracy in Africa.
How much is $315 million/year? Compared to the wired-in federal deficit, almost nothing. Compared to what is needed to start a Silicon Valley company, enormous. Let’s look instead, though, at what kind of work by private sector Americans is required to keep the NED desk workers and their NGO pals comfy. We start by assuming a male working class peasant earning $50,000/year. No female is going to want to marry him due to his low wages (she can gain more spending power by having sex with an already-married higher-income guy in Massachusetts or California) and, therefore, he is going to be a single filer. He’ll pay about $6,000/year in federal income tax (nerdwallet). More than 52,000 peasants, then, have 100 percent of their federal income tax spirited away by NED to proselytize for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. For those 52,000 peasants, not a penny of their tax money will be available to spend on roads, airports, border patrol, scientific research, etc.
How about the only American enterprises that make our government look efficient? The gravy train for university administrators cannot legally be slowed down (NYT):
(The NYT article headline says there are “Cuts to Medical Research” and only readers who dig into the article learn that “research” itself is not being cut, but only fees that universities tack on to keep a full slate of deans in central administration. As much of what universities do is promote DEI and 2SLGBTQQIA+, it seems fair to say that government paying overhead fees on research contract is another way that the government promotes Rainbow Flagism. See, for example, University of Michigan’s $250 million in spending on DEI (NYT) or MIT’s “Assistant Dean of LBGTQ+, Women and Gender Services”.)
Fair to say that those with entrenched interests in getting money from federal taxpayers are winning so far?
Loosely related… one area of success seems to be in changing minds at the New York Times. “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship” (Feb 15, 2025) is unthinkable heresy. Two constitutional law professors:
In Wong Kim Ark, the leading case on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court explained that “jurisdiction” referred to being born “within the allegiance” of the sovereign. The court held that a child born of parents with a “permanent domicile and residence in the United States” was a birthright citizen. Wong Kim Ark’s parents, as persons who came in amity, had entered into the social compact and were entitled to all the benefits of that compact, including not only the protection of the laws but also the benefits of citizenship for their children. Under the common law, the court observed, “such allegiance and protection were mutual.”
This is also why, as prominent editions of Blackstone’s commentaries explained, invading armies were excluded. “It is not cœlum nec solum” — it is neither the climate nor the soil — that makes a natural-born subject, “but their being born within the allegiance and under the protection of the king.”
For Trump to prevail, all that a modern court needs to do, in other words, is find that undocumented migrants are “an invading army.”
The recent actions at NIH have jeopardized US supremacy in biomedical research. The ongoing freeze of new funding awards over the last month puts some groups in very tight spots. Had this happened a year earlier, my own lab likely would have shut down. The unilateral cut to indirect costs strikes at the core of the research business model and the government-academia partnership. Perhaps it is just a negotiating posture, we’ll see how the court cases play out.
Facilities and Administration costs (aka indirect costs) include everything the federal government does not permit allocating as direct costs to a given project. They represent long-term costs for shared infrastructure (buildings, equipment, regulatory compliance, etc.) that are negotiated with the federal government (not even directly with NIH). DEI deans are an insignificant distraction in financial terms (and the other EOs focused on DEI had plenty of effect on their own). A bigger issue is how capital depreciation is factored in, and consequently to what extent federal money should subsidize expansion. Or whether NIH should penalize high-cost areas or smaller institutes (both of which tend to have higher indirect rates) by promoting competition on lower indirect rates. Or if NIH regulations should be reduced to reduce the cost of regulatory compliance (keep in mind each additional regulation was prompted by some outcry to congress). But
Probably more damaging than the stayed indirect announcement, the probationary employees comprising ~10% of the NIH fired last weekend are permanently gone. Their firing will not save significant money, and they were not dead wood. Several senior leaders and NIH staffers have resigned rather than be part of this. Notification of cuts to affected individuals was shambolic and cruel.
Federal support is a key financial backstop for the research enterprise, but it plays a much more important role by setting the standard for meritocratic competitive review and distribution of resources. Anyone qualified can submit a proposal and it will be reviewed seriously (highly competitively, but seriously). Europe for example lacks this, and research funding is more specifically tied to specific countries where it is awarded in a less meritocratic fashion. Similarly, the 50 states do not have the technical capacity to fill in for the NIH here, which will result in far less meritocratic distribution of funds. We scientists most of all know the system needs reform. But these actions are clearly intended to make a cheap political point, and to punish the other side.
Finally, I’ll note that biotech (like commercial aviation) is an area where the US retains a significant global lead which supports our economy. Europe will not be able to take up the slack, and the main beneficiary will be China.
The FAA is more your area than mine, and I know you have no shortage of beefs with them. But shortcutting the accident investigation process (attributing AA5342 to DEI) sets a dangerous precedent. Like at NIH, DOGE is cutting probationary employees at FAA because it is what is politically feasible to hit a beancounter target. They dispute its mission and do not want to reform the agency. Musk has chafed under FAA and NASA “interference”, so we must assume he will extract payback. But remember that SpaceX only got off the ground because of two decades of advocacy that established the regulatory framework for commercial launch in the US through DOT AST and eventually FAA Commercial Space Transportation. This is going to result in less technical capacity in government and even less efficiency.
But you know Silicon Valley well enough to have anticipated this!
I don’t understand how NIH and NSF have anyone to fund. Nearly all of the people I know who are funded by these agencies said that if Trump were elected they would flee the U.S. (never to Mexico, though, only to white enclaves in Canada and Europe). The Nakba occurred on November 5, 2024. Why is there anyone left in the U.S. to receive and spend money from either NIH or NSF?
@crazytrainmatt, you said:
> We scientists most of all know the system needs reform. But these actions are clearly intended to make a cheap political point, and to punish the other side.
And yet, for decades, there have been little to no reforms in government agencies. The status quo persists as long as everyone continues to get paid (tax payers money) and the agencies keep growing. Even worse, new agencies are created each year, while old ones either grow larger or are simply rebranded with a new name.
I find it ironic how people sound the alarm when a government program is cut, yet when public or private companies do the same, life goes on without any panic.
@George A
Our host has touched in the past on the power relationship between individual engineers vs. the tech companies. I would say that academic scientists are just as disorganized and shortsighted. Most scientists just want to work on their problem and are pretty bad at thinking systemically in political terms, and even worse in terms of leadership or vision. Furthermore, the major players are congress, NIH, and the universities, medical centers, and independent research institutes. Some of the players are scientists, but most are not. This all worked fine in an era of growth.
But the biggest trend affecting NIH in the last 3 decades was a rapid budget doubling in the 1990s, followed by a steady decline in real-cost terms. This has played out as a squeeze on the younger generations just getting started. Grants are so competitive that you submit 5-10 grants for every one you get.
I think it’s pretty similar to a lot of areas in our economy, where there are some good ideas about how to restart growth and opportunity but the major players have something to lose, so things stay where they are. My fear is not that things might change (in fact they must), but that thoughtless cuts will give the illusion of progress while destroying the good parts and not even addressing the bad parts.
The trap is we don’t have the lead we had 10 years ago: China has made significant investment and progress. They also have a surplus of quality, motivated STEM trainees whereas we rely on immigration given our poor K-12 and undergrad pipeline and the unattractive job market our host has discussed.
@crazytrainmatt, I agree with much of what you’re saying. What frustrates me is that government agencies are virtually untouchable — even when they perform poorly.
Just last month, my Big company conducted a “Resource Action” (i.e., layoffs), resulting in the loss of many employees, including some key individuals. I could not understand the reasoning behind some of these decisions because some folks that we lost are a key to our product. However, when Trump orders the same, legal challenges often follow, with judges ruling against the decision or placing a hold on the hold — making these agencies effectively untouchable.
Some may view President Trump’s actions as irrational, but I believe the current status quo is unsustainable.
@ George A
I share your frustration with government effectiveness. Certainly on the city and state level, public sector unions are a huge factor, and have a lot of the country in a vice grip of decreasing services, unaccountability, and unsustainable debt. I see the public sector unions as just as corrosive as returning to the patronage system, for pretty much the same reason: it destroys effectiveness in government. I see a professional civil service as being the only way to thread the needle given that government is a monopoly, requiring competence in exchange for some job security.
As a young PhD student, I remember scoffing when my advisor told me NIH was the most efficient agency in the federal government. Looking back over my experience since then, I now have to agree with him. So maybe my viewpoint is colored by interacting most with them. That said, most scientists spend a lot of their days frustrated with regulations and bureaucratic frustrations.
Your post made me also think back on the biggest federal reorganization in recent history, the creation of the DHS after 9/11, I notice that a lot of agencies with bad reps these days lie within DHS, including Secret Service, FEMA, TSA, and the immigration bureaucracies. Similarly, a lot of people (including John McCain) attribute military procurement failures to the structure frozen since Goldwater–Nichols in 1986. Reforming these structures would require congress, which may be at the root of a lot of our problems.
Haven’t found any commenters or gootubers who are actually laid off government employees. Sounds like they gave Elon a sandbox to make him happy.
Thanks for hosting the discussions here over the years.
You’re a master at pointing out the gap between what people do and what they say! Another of your themes (if I may) is how tech pays off in the long run less than naive undergrads think. I appreciate having discovered your website before entering a PhD program. These are the sorts of exchange that drew us all to the old internet.
I can’t speak for others, but I admit to have stayed in research through some combination of inertia (changes take time, especially with a family) and lack of better options (Europe in particular). But the main reason is the hope that we can make it through the stagnant morass of the last few decades and start solving problems again.
Moreover, my point in posting today is to highlight that, while you rightly mock those past idle threats (and I know all too well how often my colleagues have cried wolf), the last month has struck directly at the entire research ecosystem. This goes way beyond DEI (which was clearly a part of the electoral mandate), and into unexpected territory.
More broadly, while cynicism may pay off individually, sooner or later we will have to address the broken relationship between the technical and non-technical Americas. I’ll close with a quotation from Carl Sagan: “We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces”
I do think that the axing of probationary employees (cheaper and more likely to be energetic and productive than the 10- and 20-year careerists) is a bad way to trim agencies. On the other hand, it may be the only way that an executive can trim agencies where the typical employee has an “iron rice bowl” (guaranteed paycheck until death).
I don’t think it is bad that universities are having overhead cut. If the overhead expenses are real, as you say, it will give universities “skin in the game” to have to pay some of the costs of ongoing research. Universities that are getting research grants are nearly always rich, either from endowment, outrageous tuition charges, or tapping into state tax dollars (the Universities of State X), States pay out significant $$ to get companies to open factories or make movies in their states. Why shouldn’t they pay out a share of the $$ to get NIH funded research activity in their states? If research is a pure profit center for a university, with the Feds paying more than 100% of the cost, there is no financial incentive for the university to care about quality.
(sorry, I goofed up threading with the parent post)
@philg
I think the focus on number of employees at agencies is misguided. We all know that the federal fiscal problem cannot be solved without touching entitlements. And the bigger argument against the agencies is that regulations cause downstream negative effects on the broader economy. But fixing that requires both a vision and involving Congress. If it requires staffing cuts beyond attrition, they will be programmatically targeted and backed by new mission from leadership. But it just as easily may also require reform and additional staffing. Imagine if the federal government retained technical expertise to reduce the cost of public works construction to European levels (1/10 of ours)!
The deans swear they lose money on research and only support it for prestige. Regardless of the accounting, the universities already have lots of “skin in the game” in terms of capital investment, personnel, and long-term programming tailored to the current system. Renegotiating indirect costs is a valid argument, but it needs to be phased in over years.
But you have touched on one of the big issues being ignored in the discussion: the current NIH system does incentivize expansion, in terms of new buildings and soft-money faculty whose salaries are paid by grants. Addressing skin in the game directly would be a better approach than a hard indirect cap, say by phasing in a floor on how much PI salary must be institutionally supported, or reducing the weight on construction debt in the F&A negotiations.
Finally note that NSF grants are usually capped on a total cost basis, which means that investigators at institutions with lower indirect rates get higher direct cost budgets. So in that sense, there should already be competition to reduce indirect rates, but the reality is there are too many factors for this one lever to fix everything.
My argument against devolving funding to the states is that it will become less meritocratic (see Europe, where funding opportunities in many countries are not really open to outsiders or newcomers).
matt: I agree with you that these agency savings are insignificant compared to the daily waste at Medicare/Medicaid. Perhaps quite a bit of the NIH budget of $50 million could be saved out of Medicare/Medicaid by setting up a system for patients to travel to low-cost high-quality providers rather than going to a monopoly local provider for, e.g., a joint replacement. I haven’t dug into the details, but Trump may actually be making the health care debacle worse by requiring insurance companies to pay for IVF but not requiring patients in high-cost IVF areas to travel to low-cost IVF areas for their babies that Biology doesn’t want them to have.
(We often see the flip side of this. Hospitals in a city are consolidated and the new monopoly provider raises rates to everyone, including Medicare. So we know that increased competition lowers prices because reduced competition, against which there seems to be no protection currently, raises prices.)
Today’s illustration of the ineluctable law of unintended consequences: if the only employees without the iron rice-bowl are those have just been promoted, imagine how likely staff will be to perform their jobs to a standard that could merit promotion.
Price of eggs and tariffs are affecting me personally. I call this Trumpflation. My new house builder increased the estimate by 5% based on the new tariff announcements. All the things you mentioned above is just noise, once I see them taking on military industrial complex, then i believe. All the things they are doing(which i support) is chump change compared to the corruption and waste in military industrial complex.
Trumpflation for us started 20 days before Trump’s Dictatorship v2.0. Our electrician raised his rate from $100/hr (2024) to $125/hr (2025).
@RedneckHippie, I agree about the military industry. We can start by not giving away our hardware for free or inserting ourselves into every conflict. Europe is a Big Boy and more than capable of handling its own defense if they allocate money. If they lack the necessary military technology and require our support, they should be prepared to pay for it.
That being said, U.S. military spending accounts for only about 13% of the federal budget!
@Philip, you asked: How’s the first month of Trump-Vance going? It’s pretty clear — every move the administration makes is scrutinized by the mainstream media, which focuses entirely on fearmongering and predicting disaster. In contrast, during the Biden-Harris administration, the coverage was overwhelmingly positive, painting a picture of “happy days.”
Maybe because Biden was nothing if stable, consistent, and acting in good faith. Trump is saying and doing stupider things by the day, along with appointing nonsensical hacks to his administration. Fox commentator for secretary of defense? God help us. Billionaire nazi salutatorian given extraordinary access and power after contributing a quarter billion to the campaign? Can you even imagine the outrage if Obama had released something similar to Trumps memecoin leading up to taking office? It’s such an obvious political bribery and money laundering mechanism. Republicans have gone completely stupid.
@Senorpablo, I hope you’re not suggesting that the Obama-Biden or Biden-Harris administrations were better all around — because all politicians ultimately look after their own interests and call upon loyalist to work for them. Obama told Dmitri Medvedev he would have “more flexibility” after the election, and Biden pardoned his son while hiding his cognitive decline.
None of this surprises or concerns me — this is what politics is all about going back to the Roman days. What should truly alarm you is when the media selectively hides or sugarcoats one side while relentlessly attacking the other. Why? Because the public is heavily influenced by the media’s narrative not the politicians. As for me, I’m not worried — people see through the bias, which is exactly why they elected the so-called “dictator” and “Hitler” twice. And that is the very point I made in response to Philip’s question.
Trump first months going great, beyond my wildest expectations. Too early to judge on the economy. Results of lawfare against his actions are not yet clear. Russia negotiations are a little worrying but Ukraine reluctance to sign shared rare earthquake minerals mining raises questions on Zelenski intentions: why he is risking loosing Trump support for so little? Is he planning to hawk rare earth’s to China or India, countries that either support Putin or trade with him freely? Or to Iran? Could it be to Saudi Arabia which he dearly supports and which hosts US/Russia talks?
I have been talking to friends and acquaintances who are working on federal IT projects as contractors. It looks like they are letting go the Federal employees not these contractors, which is add, as these contractors rake shit load of free money off these IT projects.