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Comment by bendmorris

2 days ago

In the previous Trump term "diversity related topics" included things like biodiversity which is an important area of research and should be apolitical. Not because of a shift in focus, but because of top-down orders to not fund anything related to "diversity."

Conservatives in the past have also tried to belittle research grants to justify eliminating them, such as "studying X about fruit flies." It might sound silly to a lay person but drosophila is an incredibly important model organism from which many discoveries have come.

The problem is a highly political, often careless or incompetent, and sometimes blatantly corrupt administration taking a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel to so-called "waste."

[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2019...

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bendmorris

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robswc  2 days ago

> "diversity related topics" included things like biodiversity which is an important area of research and should be apolitical. Not because of a shift in focus, but because of top-down orders to not fund anything related to "diversity."

Do you have a source for this? How can you prove it was simply because it was "diversity related" and not because it someone, somewhere determined the budget needed to be cut because the spending was wasteful?

As far as I can tell, the budget never passed, so we have no way to know one way or another the effects.

I have never seen a government entity claim that cutting their budget wouldn't be catastrophic.