This framing conveniently ignores the question of whether the president should have the authority to single-handedly withhold funding for universities, broadly considered to be one of the foundational pillars of America's strength in the 20th century. While I think it's interesting and answers the specific question it raises, it's wild that the economist has just accepted that the president has dictatorial powers.
_cs2017_ · 1h ago
"Conveniently" is the wrong word to use here. "Conveniently ignores" implies that the author intentionally disregarded some known facts to make their argument look more persuasive. However, this is not the case here. The article's argument is that a reduction in government funding is very damaging even when it is small relative to the endowment size. This argument would not lose any of its power if the author covered the topic of whether the president has the power to withdraw funding.
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
xracy · 2m ago
There's a reason that court cases typically address standing before addressing the underlying question. It matters much more that you're taking on a case before you determine the case on the merits. If the case doesn't have standing it is not worth considering.
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
nine_k · 3h ago
This is a fair question, but it's being asked a lot already.
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
SpicyLemonZest · 1h ago
What's the point of such an abstract question? The university's goals and expected resolution for the problem would always depend critically on why the stream of grants stopped.
aoanevdus · 31m ago
When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:
1) Fight the administration in the legal system.
2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.
snickerbockers · 3h ago
America is a democracy, not a bureaucracy. The executive branch is governed by a single representative elected by the people. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the people didn't make a great choice this time but our constitutional republic is also one of the foundational pillars of american strength and trump being an idiot doesn't change that.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
otterley · 2h ago
This is true only to the extent that Congress delegates its power to the executive. Per Article I of the Constitution, Congress has the plenary power of the purse.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
ok_dad · 1h ago
In fact, when Congress passes a budget, it’s actually a law that must be executed by the executive. There are actually other laws against impoundment and against the executive changing the budget.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
otterley · 1h ago
I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that Trump is breaking the law. I'm no expert in NSF funding, but Congress may well have delegated its authority over how the funds in the pool are to be allocated and distributed to the executive.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
Detrytus · 1h ago
Well, it's not that simple. Yes, Congress passes the bill saying that X billions of dollars have to be spent on universities, but that bill does not name every single university in US as beneficiary. That's what executive branch is for: to work out the details of how to implement the law passed by Congress.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
superturkey650 · 42m ago
Why can’t he discriminate on political affiliation?
No comments yet
mmooss · 4m ago
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
UncleMeat · 38m ago
> The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional.
This is not true. They can also stop him if what he is doing is illegal. Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
boothby · 10m ago
> Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
This is an open question. The judicial branch has authority, on paper. But without means of enforcing that authority, it cannot truly constrain the executive.
mmooss · 3m ago
> This is an open question.
It's not. Statute has constrained the executive for all of American history.
kevin_thibedeau · 6m ago
Congress has a jail. He's already refused to answer to a subpoena. They can arrest him any time they want.
epistasis · 1h ago
If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is factually wrong.
mmooss · 3m ago
> We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.
Also the law must be followed.
jimbokun · 59m ago
> If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law.
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
mrkstu · 21m ago
Sort of. He would still be breaking the law, it’s just that if it’s an ‘official act’ then the judiciary can’t do anything about it, just Congress via impeachment.
aag · 31m ago
The Economist has articles on that subject already. They do their homework. Here's just one:
if you want to go that way, you're conveniently ignoring if congress should have the authority to allocate funds to nonprofits that aren't part of the government under the enumerated uses in article I section 8.
Yeeep. This is the only thing worth knowing about this whole mess. The people trust their reps to handle the money, and the reps are the only people who are supposed to be able to manage that money.
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
ahmeneeroe-v2 · 1h ago
Why are you citing the these institutions' contribution to the 20th century? We are 25 years past the 20th century, 35 years since the end of the Cold War (which was the spiritual end of the 20th century).
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
renewiltord · 56m ago
Certainly one could argue if evidence of widespread racism by specific institutions should face punishment by the executive. It is entirely reasonable to believe that we should turn the cheek to institutional racism so that we can get good research out of it.
bitwize · 1h ago
This question was not raised when the Obama administration dictated procedures and evidentiary standards to universities in cases of sexual assault, with threats of being found liable under Title IX for noncompliance. Well it was raised by some on the right, and then dismissed because, you know, the right, and who wants to defend campus rapists anyway? Those Duke University lacrosse kids should have hung -- even if they didn't actually rape that girl, they might have... or they might have raped some other girl.
When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
mmooss · 29s ago
This unlimited relativism is bizarre. If Trump invaded Canada, is his argument that Roosevelt invaded Germany? There is a difference between one and the other.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
onepointsixC · 1h ago
Obama threatened, but did not make good on those threats. Trump is threatening and actively withholding funds even to Columbia which bent the knee, because these are institutions which are seen as political enemies by the administration.
guelo · 1h ago
But why are those on the right that objected to Obama not objecting to Trump?
onepointsixC · 1h ago
Because double standards.
bitwize · 1h ago
Because to them, the "right person" is doing it for the "right reasons". Same as the Obama supporters, really. It's like, do we live in a constitutional republic with consistent rules the government is expected to follow, or is it "for my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law"?
steveBK123 · 4h ago
I am not a fan of the orange man.
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads.
SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive.
BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
mattlutze · 1h ago
Too many people think these are funds to just run the universities. By and large, what is being withheld are funds for research.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
1. The university + government fund/run a project
2. Project creates new knowledge (cool!)
3. The government gets a pretty awesome license to use that knowledge
4. The government more often than not gives that knowledge away (or offers great accessible licensing), so that
5. Private industry can adapt, apply and commercialize the knowledge, driving new GDP growth and opportunities for improving life, etc.
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.
lowercased · 1h ago
It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
ajmurmann · 33m ago
It even goes beyond the concrete research that eventually gets commercialized. One pharma startup I am familiar with has much of its research-related leadership and board staffed with very successful current or former academic researchers who used to run their own labs or even departments. We cannot shift skill acquisition like that over night to private industry.
treis · 10m ago
This is somewhat disingenuous. Something like half of the grant is handed over to the University as overhead. Much of that is legit to cover things like labs but a lot of it goes to a cover a massive amount of administrative bloat.
Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
timewizard · 22m ago
On #3 "government gets a pretty awesome license" seems disingenuous. From what I've witnessed some specific agencies get to use that license in a rather limited way. It's often not broadly available to the public and commercial rights tend to be reserved to the University. Is that actually what most people would think of as "pretty awesome?"
On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
dragonwriter · 4h ago
> But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
umanwizard · 4h ago
The feds aren’t funding ivies for the purpose of education, they’re funding researchers who happen to work at the ivies to do research.
steveBK123 · 4h ago
Multiple people pointing this out, and absolutely right.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
jasonhong · 1h ago
This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago.
Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
nine_k · 3h ago
> why do we collocate research and teaching?
Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic.
As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
onepointsixC · 1h ago
We did so because having all laboratories be government run was inefficient so in WW2 we decided to split the costs with private and public universities who will maintain labs, equipment, and the federal government will pay directly for the research.
foobiekr · 1h ago
"Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?"
Because you need a second generation of researchers.
onepointsixC · 1h ago
The feds are funding research, which elite schools have the best faculty and scholars who are conducting the very best research. May as well as why are VC’s funding promising startups instead of less promising ones, when those promising ones have already wealthy founders who have exited their previous venture.
cg5280 · 4h ago
Many of the "good" universities in general seem more focused on prestige and acceptance rates than they do educating the masses. The Ivies could significantly expand the sizes of their student bodies (and to their credit they do make some content accessible online), but they don't because a lot of the value of a Harvard education is the exclusivity and the social network it gets you into.
lenerdenator · 1h ago
And therein lies why a lot of Trump's base has a massive problem with them.
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
jccalhoun · 4h ago
It isn't about that efficiency. I teach at a community college and my state's republican supermajority just cut our budget by 10%.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
Oh absolutely agreed, the GOP is anti-education however you slice it.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
etrautmann · 3h ago
This framing is a little strange, since these universities serve multiple purposes. Much of this funding is for scientific research, which is somewhat distinct from the undergraduate teaching mission.
titanomachy · 4h ago
Most of the money is research grants, not for training undergrads.
e40 · 4h ago
It's unfortunate that a rational discussion could not be had before the cuts were made. I can see a scenario where you and I and many others agree with cuts to many organizations.
joshuanapoli · 4h ago
So far, the funding in question is research grants. There's an argument that research is more effective at the universities that have concentrated the best researchers.
jimbokun · 52m ago
Top US state schools have a lot of really good researchers.
mcmcmc · 4h ago
There’s also an argument that public funds should go to public schools.
op00to · 58m ago
What about private research institutes? They don’t really educate anyone, not in the way that people think of when they say education. Why must all funds only go to public organizations?
yieldcrv · 3h ago
Yes, complementing an observation that there are many funding sources that aren't the Federal Government
From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is.
The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about.
“Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
senderista · 4h ago
Funding teaching is not the same as funding research. Some of the best research talent is concentrated in the Ivies.
ahahahahah · 2h ago
> All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
tencentshill · 3h ago
It's one of the only ways people can still get into "The Club" without having a lineage of wealthy connections.
mandmandam · 3h ago
Not a selling point.
The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
ToucanLoucan · 4h ago
> BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
lenerdenator · 1h ago
> Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
RE: our parents working their way through college, I think two things happened at least, yes.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
ryan93 · 39m ago
How credulous do you have to be to attribute education funding to a president from 40 years ago?
ToucanLoucan · 3h ago
> But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Which can also be blamed on Reagan specifically and the larger "trickle down" movement he inspired, which gutted protections for unionized labor and badmouthed unions in general so they became a dirty word in American politics, only very recently finally getting back at least some credibility.
That old meme comes to mind where someone is like "my hobby is putting Reagan's face on graphs of economic data the year he got elected" and watching everything just go completely tits up after that point.
Public schools in the US get a relatively small fraction of their budget from state funding. The distinction between public and private is not as large or substantial as one might imagine.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund.
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
niemandhier · 41m ago
Göttingen and Berlin were arguably the best universities in the world in 1930.
They were not in 1940.
WorkerBee28474 · 21m ago
When a university loses its Jews it is in for a bad time. That's one of many reasons why the watermelon crowd should not rule a campus.
pjc50 · 4h ago
"Free speech" is when the President unilaterally withholds research grants from universities, based on statements made by students (not faculty)?
ty6853 · 4h ago
This is the double edge sword of moving away from voluntary transaction in the market and towards government-imposed funding. The government takes away your ability to choose what to fund, holds the purse, then smacks the purse at you filled with the weight of your own money.
freeone3000 · 4h ago
The government, with laws as written, has more restrictions on when it can pull money than private parties, due to its legal obligation to be content-of-speech-neutral. We are discovering that United Stares law is meaningless.
umanwizard · 4h ago
Law everywhere is meaningless unless “we have to follow the law” is a cultural norm. This is why norms are more fundamental and more important than laws.
ty6853 · 4h ago
You are discovering this. It wasn't that long ago when the national guard took tuition money away from Kent State in the form of executing their students for free speech.
No comments yet
timewizard · 18m ago
Federal law is insanely complex. It's written by humans in an abstract legislative process so there's not even a guarantee that it won't conflict with _itself_. We have, several times, added laws to the register that were later determined to be in conflict with the Constitution itself.
This is why courts exist.
This is also why libertarians exist.
No comments yet
scottiebarnes · 4h ago
I'm not sure this is a "free market choices" problem. Some institutions like education should be funded by government, in part or in whole.
The government threatening to take away that funding based on "taste" is more of a problem of authoritarianism.
boplicity · 51m ago
To be clear: It's not as simple as funding for these schools being taken away.
What's being threatened is funding for research being done at these schools. That's a huge difference.
arduanika · 33m ago
It's not as simple as that, either. Every research grant comes with an "overhead" charge on top that goes to the university admin, which can be something like 60%.
And moreover, it's not just the research grants that are being threatened, as seen in TFA. There's also the massive subsidy in the form of tax exemption. No other hedge funds receive that kind of preferred tax treatment. Only universities.
boplicity · 9m ago
So I have a rare disease. The only treatment is surgery. However, there is an ongoing study on a promising treatment at an elite university for a very effective and simple drug-based treatment. That type of research funding is absolutely being threatened. So, yes, it really is that simple.
If only Trump were trying to force universities to be more efficient with their spending. However, both of us clearly know that is not what is going on here.
aianus · 37m ago
Does the admin of the school get any of this money today or is it entirely allocated to the individual researchers?
mathgradthrow · 4h ago
They might also be happy for an excuse to implement some of these policies and have the administration as scapegoat.
steveBK123 · 4h ago
Yes some of them have said as much...
linguistbreaker · 4h ago
The POTUS should not have this authority obviously, BUT
As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.
xnx · 4h ago
I keep seeing this presented as if the money were being given away, but isn't it more accurate to describe it as payment for services (e.g. access to research facilities)?
primer42 · 4h ago
As I understand it, billionaires take out loans with their stock/investments as collateral to get cash without selling said assets.
Why can't universities do the same? Or is my understanding of billionaire money shenanigans incorrect?
The yield on ~20 year Harvard bonds seems to be about one percentage point higher than the yield on 20 year treasuries.
vonmoltke · 18m ago
Those are standard, unsecured bonds. They're not loans against anything in the endowment.
rahimnathwani · 2m ago
Right, and the endowment already uses leverage, so many of the endowment's assets will already serve as security for loans.
jmyeet · 1h ago
People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.
The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.
Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.
Now I have a lot of problems with this system:
1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;
2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;
3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.
But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?
1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;
2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).
Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.
And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.
dekhn · 39m ago
pharma does plenty of research outside of patent extension.
didgetmaster · 1h ago
It is part of the political reality that we live in. Whichever party is currently in power, will inevitably use that power to promote ideas that are favorable to them and to dissuade ideas that they are opposed to.
The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.
This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.
lief79 · 1h ago
The last part is accurate, but equating the two is a bit of stretch. The democrats went out their way to do everything by the book. They also generally took the time to understand the systems they were working with.
The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.
The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.
nickff · 7m ago
Biden had the bureaucracy on his side (it’s well known that government employees are largely left-Democrats), so he was able to collaborate with it. In his first term, Trump learned that insiders were good at preventing him from accomplishing his goals when he ‘played by the rules’, so now he’s just ignored ‘the system’.
Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.
gs17 · 54m ago
I'm not aware of mass cancelling of research grants under Biden in the same way Trump is doing. The Trump to Biden transition took place during my PhD, and I never heard a peep about anything similar. Now all I hear about is cancelled grants.
Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.
gryfft · 1h ago
> cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle
What is the #1 thing you consider "a similar thing from an opposite angle?"
didgetmaster · 51m ago
The complete disregard for our immigration laws was probably the biggest thing, even though there were a number of things that came close.
Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.
lordfrito · 1h ago
Biden's multiple student loan forgivness attempts come to mind? He might have been handing out money, as opposed to taking it away like Trump. But the underlying issues are the same: he did it unilaterally using executive order, and the courts had to get involved because there were concerns about constitutionality.
If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.
I feel things like Universities and Hospitals are some of the most questionable non-profits in existence.
They operate and appear as for profits businesses to most people.
amazingamazing · 4h ago
private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.
that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.
e40 · 4h ago
> private schools shouldn't be getting public money. shocking people disagree. yes they do research that benefits the public. so does Meta and Google, who don't get public money. public money should go to public schools.
Those two are not the same. Research funded by Meta/Google doesn't benefit the public in the same way as research in Ivies (and non-Ivies).
op00to · 55m ago
What about private research institutes which do no education of undergraduates? What do you base your pronouncement on?
djtriptych · 4h ago
Meta and Google definitely get a ton of public money.
amazingamazing · 3h ago
they shouldn't.
s1artibartfast · 3h ago
This is the government paying for a service.
Should a private cement company get public money for delivering cement?
amazingamazing · 3h ago
> This is the government paying for a service.
a service public schools can do.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
Sure, and if there were a law proposed in Congress to restrict federal research funding to public institutions and bar all private institutions, we could debate the merits of that.
That is not, however, what is happening. Institutions, without regard to whether they are public or private, are having research funding used as a lever to secure adherence to the political ideology of the ruling party, unilaterally by the executive branch.
The attempt to make this a debate about public vs private institutions is a distraction from and cover for that.
op00to · 54m ago
Public works departments can deliver the cement. It’s more efficient to have the cement hauler do so.
s1artibartfast · 3h ago
not as well. Grants are a competitive process.
When building a highway, the government should put out notice and buy the best offering.
Im not sure why you would want government buying sub-par research just because it comes from a public school
amazingamazing · 2h ago
it would solve themselves. all of the good PIs at the good private schools would go to the good public schools. there's no actual inherent reason why private schools are bad like you're implying.
s1artibartfast · 2h ago
I'm skeptical of the idea that money and fix any problem, and that there are no inherent differences.
Setting that aside, why do you think it is even desirable to limit funding to public institutions in the first place?
Seems like you're starting from this position and moving backwards.
If Public schools are superior, why haven't they already out competed private institutions? They have a pretty huge advantage from additional tax revenue.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
Meta and Google absolutely do get public money, for another commonly known example, every single one of Elon Musk's companies have gotten significant funding paid for through our taxes — government contracts, subsidies, grants, you name it
amazingamazing · 3h ago
those also shouldn't - at least without the government getting an equity stake.
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
don't really disagree, but also this is a "get money out of politics" level change — next to impossible because there are piles of money to be made by the people in charge
(On a side note, the word "framing" is also the wrong word to use.)
One way to phrase your message correctly would be: "This article is about the impact of the president's decision, but I wish it also talked about whether the president has the authority to make that decision in the first place".
"Conveniently Ignoring" the standing question is frankly an admission of compliance to something that is not the law. Who cares "why people can't live without food" if someone is saying "let's starve the population." One question isn't worth platforming while the other is on the table.
Let's imagine that completely legitimate circumstances lead to the US Government stopping the stream of grants to the Ivy League universities. How would they cope, given their enormous endowments that generate significant interest? This question is asked much less, and the answer is much less obvious. Hence the value of TFA.
1) Fight the administration in the legal system.
2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.
The judicial branch has authority to stop him but they're only supposed to use it if they are convinced that what he's doing is unconstitutional. Some of the executive branch's appointee's have authority over him but only in specific circumstances (such as 25th amendment) and they're usually in agreement with him since he gets to appoint them anyways. Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
So if it decides to spend $X on something specific, it has to be spent on whatever that something is. The President doesn't have discretion in that case.
Trump is literally breaking the law but no one really cares to discuss that anymore since the gish gallop has be so quick this term.
If someone has more knowledge to contribute, that'd be most welcome.
So, Trump taking money from Harvard and giving it to say, a community college in Tampa is technically still correct implementation of the law. I mean, it all depends if he can defend his decision in court, because of course he cannot discriminate based on race, ethnicity, political affiliation etc.
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That omits a crucial issue that many amazingly overlook: The bar isn't constitutional but legal. Congress makes the laws, not the President. The President is bound by those laws, and in fact their job is to enforce the laws that Congress makes. They cannot do things unless empowered by the law.
This is not true. They can also stop him if what he is doing is illegal. Statute can absolutely constrain the executive.
This is an open question. The judicial branch has authority, on paper. But without means of enforcing that authority, it cannot truly constrain the executive.
It's not. Statute has constrained the executive for all of American history.
It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.
> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.
This is factually wrong.
Also the law must be followed.
The Supreme Court ruled otherwise.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/04/24/who-will-...
Yet here we have tacit acceptance that the president can fuck with citizens' money just because he's in his feels about something. Absolute clownery.
What have these elite institutions contributed to the 1990+ world order?
When Orange Man exercises a power he presumes to have, it's "dictatorial", but when "Pen and a Phone" Obama exercised that same power -- together with the people, follow where Obama leads.
What does the Duke lacrosse case have to do with it?
But I think its an interesting question if the feds should be funding rich Ivies with small numbers of students vs more efficient state universities which educated 100s of thousands each at a fraction of the cost per student.
All of the Ivy League combined educate 65k undergrads. SUNY by comparison educates 5x that many at a tuition of 1/5th to 1/10th depending on in/out of state and community vs vs 4 year college.
Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
Federally-funded academic science often looks like:
Withholding these funds ends the research projects, because Universities are not startup incubators. So the research stops, and one of the highest returning pipelines of new GDP growth for the US dries up—unless today, the professors and universities kiss the president's ring and promise to wipe out 50-100 years of human rights improvements.Also, nobody really objects to the research that leads directly to stuff private industry can use. That's not what people want to cut.
On #4, "more often than not" and "offers great accessible licensing" seems equally disingenuous. Further, why should any of us have to license technology or patents that were primarily funded by tax revenue? Shouldn't that just be automatically and fully open? When the government decides to sequester that knowledge what process do I have to challenge that?
On #5, outside of pharmaceutical companies, what are these new GDP growth and returning pipelines that actually get created and impact citizens directly?
The funding at issue is research funding, not educational funding, and it goes to both kinds of universities (vastly more, in aggregate, to state universities than Ivies.)
> Obviously what he is doing is punitive. BUT, I think the constant focus in the press on the Ivys when we talk about education is a huge distraction from how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education in this county.
If research funding is used as a lever to establish political control, those things literally do not matter, since whatever universities survive will simply be tools of totalitarian indoctrination by the regime.
Some question though of how all the research grants do kind of cross-subsidize the education in a way as it pays for research professors, their graduate staff, etc? Otherwise why do we collocate research and teaching?
See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien...
And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360
Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.
Because we want the same scientists who do, or recently did, advanced research to teach students? Because we want students to be involved in actual real genuine cutting-edge research? I suppose this is the logic.
As a student back in the day I worked in a university lab, and it was pretty interesting to play a role in solving problems that don't have answers in the end of a textbook.
Because you need a second generation of researchers.
To be fair, the exclusive social network very much includes Trump, but it spent most of the last 50 years bringing itself capital at the expense of Trump's base.
In a less partisan world, it would be nice to see a version of this that was more about efficient allocation of education dollars rather than an attack on education.
From my conversations with people, this university funding topic is a mere proxy for their disdain with Trump on every topic, in a fairly incoherent rehash of random headlines. Have found very few people willing to discuss how universities are funded like this article is.
The last 75 years of interacting with the federal government and proletariat will be a footnote in these school’s half millenium history. It won’t even be controversial. Non-upper class people won’t be using them to get into corporations, a mere happenstance of the last 75 years and not what these universities view themselves as. Non-upper class people won’t be worried about how many of them are in, and what criteria is involved, and how fair. And the Federal government won’t be using their one avenue of funding to bother them about it. 75 out of 400, and then 1,000 years. A footnote. Probably laughed about.
“Remember when we had $50bn from daytrading tax free and got the US government to pay for our toys every year until a total populist uprising occurred at the expense of the entire nation. Other People’s Money! Rowing club later?”
What a weird comparison. Yes, picking a group of universities that comprises 64 campuses is going to have more students than a group with a small fraction of that.
The Ivies do a hell of a lot more for 'The Club' than for the people not in it.
(To be clear, I don't think giving Trump the authority to pull hundreds of millions in funding if they teach things he doesn't like, or allow anti-genocide protests etc, is in any way a solution to the above issue.)
Because the entire discussion around colleges of all sizes, who gets to go and who pays has been turned entirely into yet another fucking stupid culture war issue by Republicans, putting rural/tradesman "real" Americans against the "educated coastal elites" of which it is far easier to cast Ivy league schools, professors and students as, rather than your local grocery store stock boy who is attending a tech school to go into STEM.
At this point the notion of the actual issue as in: "how we are actually going to improve access, quality & cost to education" is barely a factor in it. It's just about pitting poor people against other poor people and a handful of rich nepo-babies who are so insulated from the consequences of our system they might as well not be considered to be part of it.
For anyone interested, college used to be nearly in totality funded by the state, not per student, but via the grant system. Our parents will talk about "working their way through college" working as waitstaff, because that was once an achievable thing: to work while you studied and pay your tuition, and graduate with little if any debt, and go on to do all sorts of things my generation struggles to do, like buy a home and a car, and not a run down refrigerator box and an old wreck from the side of the road that barely runs, no. They got to buy good homes, at fair prices, and cars that were if not new, really close to it.
Then as with everything Reagan fucked it up, the "no more free lunch" lobby got to add another notch to their bedpost as they set about destroying yet another fucking thing funded with public money that was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing to pass yet another goddamn tax cut and worsen the ability of America to compete on the global stage.
That can't happen in a vacuum, though.
50 years ago, there was a far narrower gap between the two groups. Now it's expanding. That "no more free lunch" crowd was that "educated coastal elite" of the time. Remember, Reagan was elected governor of California twice.
Reagan gutted education spending.
But also the bifurcation of blue vs white collar wages really accelerated through the last 40 years. That is the spread between what my dad made working at a record store vs the professor/admin staff/etc at his college made increased tremendously. Think about it - minimum wage at federal level has only doubled in the last 40 years, while some quick googling looks like professors make 5-10x what they made 40 years ago (as most white collar has).
Plus all the discussion about the bloating of college non-teaching administrative staffing.
Which can also be blamed on Reagan specifically and the larger "trickle down" movement he inspired, which gutted protections for unionized labor and badmouthed unions in general so they became a dirty word in American politics, only very recently finally getting back at least some credibility.
That old meme comes to mind where someone is like "my hobby is putting Reagan's face on graphs of economic data the year he got elected" and watching everything just go completely tits up after that point.
For example the 10-campus UC system's total budget is $54 billion of which $4.6 billion comes directly from the state's general fund. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4998 - the federal funding here is the same as for private universities, to do research or other work in the form of contracts/ grants.
They were not in 1940.
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This is why courts exist.
This is also why libertarians exist.
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The government threatening to take away that funding based on "taste" is more of a problem of authoritarianism.
What's being threatened is funding for research being done at these schools. That's a huge difference.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/02/10/lies-damn-lies-and-un...
And moreover, it's not just the research grants that are being threatened, as seen in TFA. There's also the massive subsidy in the form of tax exemption. No other hedge funds receive that kind of preferred tax treatment. Only universities.
If only Trump were trying to force universities to be more efficient with their spending. However, both of us clearly know that is not what is going on here.
As "Ivies" grew their endowments at hundreds of percent faster than their student bodies, they became essentially hedge funds that do some education.
Why can't universities do the same? Or is my understanding of billionaire money shenanigans incorrect?
https://public.com/bonds/screener?issuerSymbol=PDFHV
The yield on ~20 year Harvard bonds seems to be about one percentage point higher than the yield on 20 year treasuries.
The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.
Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.
Now I have a lot of problems with this system:
1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;
2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;
3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.
But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?
1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;
2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).
Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.
And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.
The same people who are whining about the Trump administration abusing their power by doing these things; were cheering on the Biden administration for doing similar things from the opposite angle.
This is why we have to be very careful when crafting laws. Before passing it because we want our party to use it to help us, we have to imagine what would happen when the opposing party tries to use this law against us.
The current presidency went in with the assumption that everything was wasteful, and didn't take the time to understand what they were cutting. Hence, emergency rehires, judicial blocks on firing, etc.
The amount of noise about it was the same, but the root causes and support are far from equivical.
Insiders have plainly ignored the law in the past when it was convenient, (see all the agencies which violated notice-and-comment rule-making in the Obama years,) we’ve just never seen anyone ignore the administrative agencies to this degree before.
Under Biden, many grants did have to appeal to liberal sensibilities to be selected, but he didn't order all grants that didn't focus on DEI cancelled in 2021. I'm not even sure if "inclusion" was added to the NSF's list of "broader impacts" under Biden or well before him.
What is the #1 thing you consider "a similar thing from an opposite angle?"
Millions were let across our borders with almost no vetting whatsoever. Criminals came in freely from all over the world bringing drugs, violence, and human trafficking with them.
The Biden administration acted more like a travel agent than a border enforcement force. Anyone who spoke up about it, was attacked.
Something more closely related to Trump's current actions against universities, was Biden's war on energy. Pipelines canceled. Lands and leases locked up. Taxes and regulations designed to reduce energy production.
If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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They operate and appear as for profits businesses to most people.
especially considering that the PIs who do the work in the private school scenario effectively boost the private school's clout with public money, but these private schools do not increase accessibility by opening up admission further.
that said, trump is also doing this for the wrong reasons, sadly.
Those two are not the same. Research funded by Meta/Google doesn't benefit the public in the same way as research in Ivies (and non-Ivies).
Should a private cement company get public money for delivering cement?
a service public schools can do.
That is not, however, what is happening. Institutions, without regard to whether they are public or private, are having research funding used as a lever to secure adherence to the political ideology of the ruling party, unilaterally by the executive branch.
The attempt to make this a debate about public vs private institutions is a distraction from and cover for that.
When building a highway, the government should put out notice and buy the best offering.
Im not sure why you would want government buying sub-par research just because it comes from a public school
Setting that aside, why do you think it is even desirable to limit funding to public institutions in the first place?
Seems like you're starting from this position and moving backwards.
If Public schools are superior, why haven't they already out competed private institutions? They have a pretty huge advantage from additional tax revenue.