National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce

- "The firings targeted probationary employees, who have fewer job protections than permanent employees, but still must be fired for cause. Some probationary staff are new to the agency, while others recently promoted or transferred positions. Additionally, all "intermittent experts" — temporary employees hired at-will often for specific subject matter expertise — were terminated."

There's no pretense of firing anyone other than "the subgroup of federal employees that are technically easiest to fire". Firing everyone who was recently promoted (for one category) is objectively a very absurd selector.

>> NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, who ordered the firings, did not attend the meeting

Such courage. I've had to fire a number of people over the years unfortunately and I've always had the courage to do it myself.

>> terminated by the end of the day, without severance

As long as its done with humanity.... oh, no? Oh well.

THIS is what your “disruptive” heroes have bought & paid for. Yes, I’m talking specifically about paulg and his buddies in the VC world, who’ve stepped up their funding & lobbying to levels matching folks like Adolph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaifie. They’re on an ideological vendetta to DESTROY functioning government and leave themselves with near-dictatorial private power, unconstrained by governments anywhere.

These are the folks so many commenters here worship & wish to emulate.

This is the mindless destruction you’ve all been cheering for.

May this be an opportunity for you to reconsider your goals and priorities.

The decimation of science continues. I am sure the consequences of this will be seen in the future. And I truly feel sorry for people affected, people who sacrificed their lives, their pay, to work in science, and now are dealt with like garbage, and have their careers destroyed.

Are they actually doing anything to improve processes or are they just firing people without changing how the agencies work?

Doing it by end of day without severance seems unnecessarily cruel. And the director is a coward if he didn't attend the meeting.

Nature, Radiolab, NOVA, I probably haven't gone a week without watching or listening to something funded by the NSF since I was a kid. That's just the media stuff off the top of my head, hard to put a finger on just how much NSF funded research and projects impact our daily lives.

Where are the corporate lobbyists on this stuff? My understanding is that public research funding (and its associated administration) periodically yields results that either turn into viable commercial products or tools for whole sub-industries.

Lasik surgery, PCR, CRISPR, MRIs are supposed to have come out of NSF projects, and these all became someone's line of business. Why are the heads of biotech or pharma or medical device companies not publicly stating that destabilizing the apparatus for early research risks shrinking these fields?

10% -- the literal meaning of "decimation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(punishment)

The only difference is that when the Romans did it, they had a purpose in mind. What we are seeing now is the act of a Batman villain, not a general or an industrialist or a president.

Please call your representatives and senators. https://5calls.org/ offers some scripts if you're unsure of what to say.

So the NSF has to manage $9B in grants but with fewer people to do so. That $9B will probably be less well spent now. So we're risking mis-spending $9B in order to save less than $20MM in salaries. That would be a really stupid move if the motive really was to improve efficiency.

Except obviously the motive is to not efficiency. It's about ensuring loyalty and even deliberately breaking the government to justify later actions.

I'm all for government efficiency, but this brainless approach is counterproductive. It's just surgery with a hatchet. They don't know anything about the systematic problems with the agencies they're cutting, and don't bother to learn them, so their approach is more likely to create inefficiencies than to eliminate the ones that were there. In cases like this, they're cutting off the next generation of scientists, along with the staff that make research feasible. To the extent—and I believe it's true—that innovation will remain America's lifeblood and saving grace in the coming decades, this catastrophically bad plan is doing more damage than any foreign adversary could hope for.

I assume Trump and Musk are not insane, just cynical and with some unusual objective. Now, what might that objective be? I doubt they really care about US personnel cost, it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. Violent deregulation? But what does this, or WHO membership, or nuclear safety have to do with that?

Or maybe they really are crazy. But that would be a conclusion of last resort.

Pff, we didn't need that pesky science contradicting our paleolithic religious views. It confuses the cattle, and hurts the bottom line.

Pretty terrible to be fired like that with no severance. I think that's unconscionable. It looks like they targeted mostly probationary employees, which doesn't make it better.

However, is it right to be hiring so many new people when we are $36T in debt, with the debt growing $1T every 100 days. It seems like this was going to happen at some time and the original sin was to expand headcount when debt is already this high.