Ron DeSantis signs bill to limit tenure at public universities

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

"We're gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you'll say, 'Please, please. It's too much winning. We can't take it anymore.'"

DeSantis is actually doing what Trump promised rather than whine like a toddler  and lash out in temper tantrums cause someone triggered him

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Then we should privatize research grants more then if that’s the issue cause government subsidized things never can truly be “free” as the government has to actively choose which grants to approve and which not too .

That decision is usually made by people who do have political agendas as well so the this will mainly just provide more oversight over  unelected  bureaucrats which I generally support.

Major grant decisions (at places like NIH and NSF) are made by scientific peers, not by "unelected bureaucrats". It depends on the agency, but a few faculty send our scores in to someone working at the agency. The scores are based on rubrics that are available to anyone and tend to prioritize (1) general academic merit and (2) something specific to the agency (for the NIH, health outcomes; for NSF, "broader impacts", which is generally some sort of community impact or public science education). Critically, the "someone" (usually called a program officer) is someone who has also had academic training and probably has received several grants themselves at some point; it's seen as prestigious, if tedious, to become a program officer. The highest scoring proposals are then discussed as a bunch of peers, and the grants are ranked. Depending on the agency, the program officer may have a bit of discretion for grants that fall right on the boundary of being funded, but again it's based on the same criteria I outlined above.

Only about 10-15% of major grants are funded. I'd say the main issues with funding these days is that (1) one-in-ten isn't a great level of success, so you're incentivized to chase the funding obsessively rather than following the science, and (2) it's often the case that the rich get richer (e.g., you generally need pilot data to get a grant funded these days, but how do you get pilot data if you don't have money in the first place?). The amount of interference from "unelected bureaucrats" is small unless you consider faculty members to be "unelected bureaucrats". (But I think we'd all agree it would be bonkers for elected officials to evaluate scientific grants, right?!) Even then, the folks working at the funding agency aren't just random people with political agendas, they're usually scooped up from tenure-track positions by the NSF or NIH.

 I don’t have any problems with grants for hard science research

NIH and NSF don't just give money to "hard science research"; Republican senators have been targeting the social science directorate of the NSF for budget cuts for years. The grant that funded some of my training was singled out by Rand Paul one year as an example of "flagrant government waste" (except whoops I now do the things that he said the grant didn't accomplish). I also described how grant programs work for funders in education and other fields that you probably call "soft science". (I don't know how funding works in the humanities but it probably follows along similar lines. Grants are less important in those fields, though.)

I also find it funny that OSR with all due respect supports " hard sciences ", when his political party in my view, goes against even the most basic of science foundations.

Wrong you can believe for example climate change is real and believe the Covid vaccines are good without also believing you should try to :


- Get rid of the oil and gas industry through government regulations

- people should be forced to take the vaccines

So you can understand the science behind global warming and pandemics and still think that providing for Public Health and Ecological Welfare are not appropriate roles for the Government. That one's ability to avoid or recover from COVID or not be involved in a Global Warming related natural disaster is a private matter and a personal choice.

I do not believe destroying our economy and also destroying our ability to respond to threats like Russia and China are the way to go at all . The solution is actually encouraging more entrepreneurs  like Elon Musk And of course investing in nuclear energy , not using government regulation to destroy our current energy industry.

So  yes I believe generally in a free market solution to dealing with climate change not a government one .