Some poignant projects that were canceled after already been awarded:
"What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance Versus Material Capacity to Pursue Power", with a slide-reading lecture video on "seemingly intractable conflicts" [1].
"Military Adaptation and War Termination" [2]
""Un"Resilience: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse" [3]
> Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel.
I might agree that investigation is a bit unneeded. Overfishing is about to do that way before climate change: like the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet illegally fishing in other nations' waters.
They aren't independent ideas, effects of climate change would likely lead to higher pressures on fishing while at the same time reducing the number of fish if habitats change faster than species can adapt.
A lot of the research seems really useful. I don't understand why we wouldn't prioritize understanding how to prevent drug cartel recruitment (one of the examples cited in the article).
Well, if “we” were deliberately weakening the US, either to destabilize the government in order to being about a radically different system of government, or on behalf of a hostile foreign power (or, perhaps most relevantly, as part of a hybrid movement whose members have a mix of those motivations), then “we” might want to cut a large number of things that would seem nonsensical to cut for people who don’t share that goal.
The research is useful in the sense that actually understanding the issues being investigated would be valuable. The question is, would the funded research actually deliver a better understanding of those issues? Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.
Yeah this is an under discussed aspect of the grant issues, it's important to decide whether or not to fund something, but just as if not more important is to make sure that the funding is used in a way that actually delivers the promised effect.
The DoD employs experts from many different fields. Wars aren’t just won on the battlefront. PSYOPS is an obvious example of applied social science, but it extends far beyond that.
> Mexico has sent 29 drug cartel figures, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985, to the United States as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on drug trafficking organizations.. “This is historical, this has really never happened in the history of Mexico,” said Mike Vigil, former DEA chief of international operations.. The unprecedented show of security cooperation comes as top Mexican officials are in Washington trying to head off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports starting Tuesday.
The original article references cartels in Colombia, not Mexico. Also, the goal of the research is to prevent people from joining crime organizations, not how to catch existing heads of criminal organizations. It's not clear what you implied by the text that you quoted.
> the Ombudsman’s Office, an agency of Colombia’s Public Ministry, highlights the presence and the areas of operations of three of the strongest Mexican drug cartels: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Los Zetas, and the Sinaloa Cartel.. there is a belief among foreign consumers that Colombian drugs are of high quality, so the narcos capitalize on that.
the goal of the research is to prevent people from joining crime organizations, not how to catch existing heads of criminal organizations
If budgets are constrained, which is a higher priority?
History suggests cutting off the head of a drug cartel is just a Tier 2 career advancement opportunity.
Did the aquisition of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán as a token trophy head put much of a dent in the ongoing activity of the Sinaloa Cartel Ship of Theseus?
There's much to be said for understanding an organism (an entire cartel dynamic in this case) in order to eliminate it.
> Political history would suggest that many good suggestions of social change were likely ignored in favour of operations with a lot of smoke and noise.
It might have been a smarter move by the US back in the day to extend USAID and collective forming business support to poor south american farmers rather than have the CIA indirectly fund cartels to run drugs into poor US communities in order to distance themselves from supplying arms to overthrow other governments.
Today that horse is dead and well beaten .. but maybe guns will solve things this time 'round.
Why is every recent thread on DOGE and DOGE-similar stuff always riddled with people asking "this team were supposedly researching [insert apparently useless research topic], how does that help us?!?", as if every god damn research project funded by the US govt. better result in some kind of Manhattan-Project-style leap forward.
> Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days.
Social scientists researching climate change.
With the discussion here on HN often about how misaligned the incentives are and with the replication crisis in mind I get it that funding was cut (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
"Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel."
It's about understanding how a society can change due to climate change, not understanding the actual mechanics of climate change. Do you think that understanding whether or not conflicts stemming from climate change are not useful?
Makes sense to me that violence could be related to climate phenomena like draught, and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.
I always thought the heat was the driver. There has historically been more crime in the summer than in the winter, for example. Heat makes you do crazy things, as some noir novel probably said.
I guess it'd be nice to have some research to try and find out the real reason and challenge our own hypothesis, rather than always fall back on "I thought X was the reason". This is why the defunding of these programs is so frustrating, because especially around the social sciences, Americans tend to value their own gut rather than empirical studies.
Or. You use technology. Even places like Saudi Arabia have water for everyone. We cannot after hundreds of years predict human behavior with much accuracy but we can fix water problems.
When you are a small country where much of it is bordered by water and the largest distance from tip to next border is ~300km, and you have immense oil wealth, desal and distribution makes sense.
Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas.
I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.
This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.
I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.
That's like saying HR's budget is the same as Accounting's budget because they're both part of Incorporated Widgets, and that we should fire Bob in HR because Sandra is a good accountant. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense or reflect how these decisions are actually made. Funding more social sciences doesn't actually mean funding less other science, just like hiring an HR rep doesn't entail firing an accountant.
Different funds are appropriated for different purposes, funding the kind of research you're talking about would likely be connected to an NSF grant or a national lab. Note as well that science, like everything else, experiences diminishing returns. Putting 1000x the money into water treatment research won't get you 1000x the return. Allocating funds at the scale of the federal government isn't zero sum; you can saturate the amount of funding it's possible to provide, and it does make sense to spread funding around many different areas.
Incidentally, that research you want to see is probably in jeopardy because the grant funding it contains forbidden words like "environment."
> ... and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.
Unless of course you happen to be one of the people actively and directly causing the problem they're studying. Then it might seem like a smart idea to put those people out of work.
This misunderstanding lead you astray: this is social scientists studying social impacts. Look at the list of the most recent awards - all of these sound like good social science and useful things for the DoD to fund since, for example, climate change-caused economic woes and migration were key to events they do directly care about like the Syrian civil war and rise of ISIS.
Conflict Resilience Across Scales: Theory and Data to Evaluate Societal Resilience to Water and Climate Shock
Anticipating Coastal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability
Modeling Climate-Induced Societal Adaptation and Population Displacement
Take a look sometime at where India and Pakistan get much of their fresh water, and what climate change is expected to do for that. Then contemplate the testy relationship between those two countries and consider the likelihood that they will peacefully work out a way to deal with the situation.
They both have nukes. If a war between them turned nuclear it would of course be pretty bad for the people of those countries, but you might think that the rest of the world would be OK. After all both of them only have fairly small warheads, mostly around the size of the nukes the US used in WWII.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Even if they only nuked each other, an exchange of around 100 of their nukes from each side (about 1/3 of their arsenals) directed at each other's major population centers would be felt around the world.
Here's a paper that analyzed this [1], and an article about it [2].
Here's the abstract from that paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
It's interesting to see that as of the time I'm writing this, half the top-level comments in this thread are being downvoted.
I am NOT writing in support of the current slash-and-burn approach to government, but I suspect that the downvoted half are addressing a significant deficiency in this article -- it doesn't mention what has been meaningfully accomplished by the Minerva Initiative in 17 years, given that the program had a fairly discrete set of objectives. Did they prevent any terrorist attacks? Did they forestall any destabilizing uprisings in significant countries? Did they develop a real and actionable understanding of radicalization or similar movements?
This is not to say that those accomplishments don't exist (I wouldn't know, I'd never heard of the program before), but it's extraordinarily lazy writing by a supposedly-premier science publication for these not to be identified and highlighted, if they exist.
>> The Minerva Research Initiative supports social science research aimed at improving our basic understanding of security, broadly defined. [...] The goal is to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S. [0]
The emphasis here is on background, that should then better inform regional DoD strategy, that will then... well, 'not screw up things like Iraq' seems a fair summary.
For the amounts, this seems like an excellent use of DoD money. Throwing military hardware and soldier time/lives away in pursuit of doomed to fail goals is expensive and often counterproductive.
Soo.. any of these had any real applications by the Pentagon? Or then why is the Pentagon using their budget to fund general research? It could be perfectly valid research, but that's not their job.
No clear value to some of these projects. What did we get out of it, in specifics? Many of the projects in the article feel like something that could be learned from other places. Like this:
> Renard Sexton, a researcher at Emory University who’s studying whether Taiwan’s recent defense reforms help deter an attack from China, has also been told his project is terminated.
The answer is “no”. It’s obvious. China has made it clear as well. It doesn’t need this researcher to figure out.
Then there’s this part…
> Jettisoning the entire … initiative, whose yearly cost is that of a single F-16, [would be] about the most cost-ineffective measure that DoD and the nation could implement
These people are lazy with money that isn’t theirs. A single F16 is still a lot of money, to almost anyone. Why don’t they ever make clear the exact return on these investments?
These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse. I think that trying to find and exploit loopholes in the constitution breaks the spirit of the document and is traitorous to our form of government. But they don't care for our form of government, they want to undermine it because without government it increases billionaire's "freedom".
> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists
Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.
"in 2008" means during the Bush administration. The fact that Gates was selected as Obama's defense secretary as a bipartisan pick later means very little.
You're not actually responding to the comment by immediately drawing a comparison and saying nothing else. It's a lazy way of making comments.
On quick glance, the article you're citing doesn't support the equivalence of cutting already awarded funding as the current American executive is doing now. It talks about calling meetings.
The article doesn't demonstrate Obama stealing Congress's power of the purse. Can you show me an example?
I'm quibbling with implications of "there's nothing new, they're both the same".
In the article he can sign an executive order to make college more affordable, but this is using Congress's budget allocation, and powers provided for the department of education though is it not?
Trump is literally dismantling departments approved by Congress, and using the budget in completely different areas as far as I can tell. He's not simply redirecting what X department should be doing, as compared to Obama.
I agreed with you until the last bit. I don’t think there’s a uniform “they” with a stable set of goals. All of the heritage foundation, Vance, Trump, Elon, congress, the Christian nationalists, etc I’m certain have different and probably often conflicting goals… that also shift constantly depending on the context.
In some respects, I agree. But they aren’t touching much that voters do care about and that’s where the overwhelming majority of spending comes from. Every valid path to actually reducing debt pisses off most of the electorate. It’s “chasing” a noble goal with political theater. What’s happening now is a path to privatization of large swaths of current govt.
That's what representation in Congress is for, and why the Constitution specifies that Congress holds the power of the purse, not the president, and especially not an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest.
the purse is quite litteraly drawing a hard vacume its so empty.
the power to suck money from the future at an ever increasing rate was never put to any proper scruteny, and hopefully, the experiment will now end, through the process of defunding anything and everything that is of zero practical and imediate utility.
And even on the other end of the political spectrum you'll find individuals and groups using loopholes or trying to use tactics/interpretations that suit their goals. This isn't something new. Pretty much any of these EOs have similar past ones that are either forgotten or were largely ignored because they happened one at a time. The scope and rate of change is just much higher now than in any memorable past (eg wouldn't count internment camps etc as they are too far past).
The really interesting part is what if the agencies were a product of a prior loophole? We seem to be several generations deep in tenuous interpretations, using loopholes to counteract other loopholes. For example, if the executive branch is tasked with carrying out the law, how can we have independent agencies not subject to the executive power in Article 2 Section 1? How do we ignore the 10th amendment on the tenuous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause? It's all a game.
(1) I am wary that the Pentagon aims to make the world safer, at least in the sense of the word that most regular people share, (2) I particularly dislike the Pentagon meddling in secret social science undertakings to pursue those goals, (3) even if the Pentagon's efforts were benign, I believe there are better places and ways for those pursuits to be undertaken.
Many of the countries they might want to move to have higher tax rates than the US. And, until recently, the US probably had the most significant global clout to back their business ventures with.
You’re assuming that if the US tried a serious wealth distribution tax hike, a country like China, India, South Korea, Japan, you name it, would not immediately offer sweetheart deals. The UK is currently learning this the hard way relative to the US with talent fleeing.
Nor did I write anything about "significant tax hikes".
How do you get from these comments to significant tax hikes? Not giving tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans and not increasing our deficit further is not the same thing as a significant tax hike. If you cannot distinguish these two things, I don't know how any productive conversation could ever be had here.
And if billionaires choose to leave the US to avoid these non tax-hikes, that's their choice. But most countries they'd presently opt for do tax higher than the US does.
With this attitude you should probably pack up the US and call it a day.
1. Inequality has been constantly decreasing for most of the 20th century, worldwide.
2. Income redistribution has happened multiple times throughout history, and you can argue about the process and also about the results but it has happened repeatedly (French Revolution, Communist Revolution in Russia and all associated revolutions and coups, etc, etc).
> The French revolution was a complete mess that ended in a tyranny (Napoleon).
Umm... I see that you were schooled in the Anglo-American tradition (classical Conservative, I guess Edmund Burke?).
Let me expand on that... the French Revolution was a mess, like any revolution, that's true.
A mess that:
- shattered MANY legal abuses (primarily stemming from divine right, feudalism, etc) in a lot of Europe, in about 3 major shocks (the initial one which led to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, then 1848, then slowly to the abolition of any feudal remains around 1918)
- greatly expanded personal and collective freedoms in Europe, freedoms that weren't abolished even by the "tyranny"
- served as a model for a better society for many oppressed countries and regions in Europe (I come from one, Romania)
And it did not end in a tyranny. It went through mass executions, lead to an absolutist regime, back to a monarchy, then back to a democracy, then back to a monarchy, and then finally back to a democracy, for good. All of that was started and made possible by the French Revolution.
> The Communist revolution initiated a sequence of events that make communism the #1 cause of death ever. From purges, to famine, wars...
That's only if you look at global Communism like a single phenomenon and you consider say, monarchy, as a set of disjointed ideologies. Communism also brought great equality in countries that were some of the most unequal and abusive on the planet, it greatly accelerated women's rights to the point to this day, Eastern Europe (for example) has more equal political representation and more women in STEM than Western Europe.
You could argue that fear of Communism also led the West to adopt policies such as high taxes on high earners, that led to more equality during the post war era. Look at what's happening now when Communism is basically gone for good. The US is falling back into a Gilded Era.
I don’t think that citing the Russian revolution is the best argument you have. That wealth redistribution attempt took 30 million lives. That’s probably one of the best arguments why we should absolutely not kill the golden geese.
Raise taxes on rich people, rich people leave the country or invest offshore; or put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again.
What is $1 billion to destroy a political career over $10 billion in taxes?
They aren’t leaving the country easily: not paying taxes would mean selling their properties, relocating their businesses, and renouncing their citizenship. Most of the alternatives have higher tax rates, fewer economic options, or both – and they lose significant benefits like preferential access to the U.S. government. Anyone who wanted to pay 0% could already become a citizen of Anguilla, Barbados, etc. but the fact that most haven’t suggests that there is more to the decision than sorting by tax rate and picking the lowest.
> put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again.
That’s what happened in 2024 and we are facing rising inflation and a severe recession in the middle of a constitutional crisis. It’s unclear to me why anyone would think that the people who orchestrated that should be catered to.
Or accept, and recognize, that things kind of go both ways:
The rich can be exploitative of the poor relative to themselves and heavily motivated by greed;
But it can be equally true that the poor hate the rich with motivations based on greed and envy themselves. Poor people, ironically, can be extremely greedy, more greedy than many wealthy people - they aren’t incompatible.
I agree that it goes both ways, in the sense that I support UBI. As I think there is a level of wealth that society has an interest in preventing anyone being above, I also think there is a level of poverty that society has an interest in preventing anyone being below.
That’s just FUD. Do you see Bezos leaving the country for Argentina? Yeah, me neither. What’s the alternative you’re proposing? Just accept our new billionaire overlords?
The former; by amassing that much money, they gain the ability to both exploit the system to their personal gain, and shape it to their personal preferences, which grow ever less aligned with those of the general population. We're on our way to a techno-feudalism right now.
Don't worry, this debt will keep increasing, and will likely accelerate in the coming years.
Maybe the public will just not know the numbers anymore.
Either way, I am not from the US, so I read these threads for my own amusement. I am fine with what is happen over there, in a way I wouldn't be in my country of residence :)
You could cut all of it and it wouldn’t solve the problems you listed. It would just create new ones by closing off a major valve to the country’s R&D pipeline.
Assuming you believe R&D is a worthwhile investment, what non-government alternatives would you propose for funding it?
Yes - this isn’t some new or controversial phenomenon, DoD has funded all kinds of academic research for a long time through organizations like the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, etc.
The article says one of the programs that was cut studied how drug cartels operate, organize, and recruit, which seems quite in line with global security and US priorities on fighting narcotics trafficking
How many other programs were studying the same subject? That's what we don't know. Insiders have reported for decades about redundant research, programs, etc.
But then you dont cut with non insiders. You instead reward the reporting of bogus science and corruption bx handling a reward grant worth half the cut grand to the reporter. Make experts clean the house, instead of idiots tearing the house down , becsuse they can not tell apart a load bearing beam from drywall .
That question is a general problem with anything secret. Or rather, potential problem, because "can this research be reproduced?" is also a useful question, which means random replication of such work is genuinely desirable.
In any case, this specific program wasn't one of the secret ones.
Regardless, much of this was known already if you would just look. The idea that Elon is discovering anything other than for himself, to say the least of being in a position to decide what to do about what is "found", is laughable. They can't even tell the difference between millions and billions of dollars, or who is vital to nuclear safety.
It's like Chesterton's fence, but where the fence turns out to be vital, where you could find out what the fence is for by just asking the farmer, and where the person tearing down the fence knows nothing about fences or farming, and happens to run an animal and wildlife control company.
If that was your goal, you’d need to use a mechanism which actually targets it such as a tariff based on reliable audits of factory conditions. A tariff applied to a country does nothing to improve working conditions until prices rise above the alternatives, and then businesses are going to pick the next cheapest option.
None of this is speculative or something we need to study ancient history to understand, either. When Trump enacted tariffs during his first term prices for American consumers went up 10-30%, tens of thousands of American jobs were lost due to rising prices on intermediate goods and retaliatory tariffs, and manufacturing shifted to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh where working conditions are not notably better. If you want to improve working conditions, you have to make that the best business choice.
Well, to clarify at least one core aspect, tariffs can't cover the gap.
I think the estimate was income taxes in the US represented a few trillion dollars while estimated tariff revenue was a few hundreds of billions. Leaving a gap of... a few trillion dollars.
Some poignant projects that were canceled after already been awarded:
"What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance Versus Material Capacity to Pursue Power", with a slide-reading lecture video on "seemingly intractable conflicts" [1].
"Military Adaptation and War Termination" [2]
""Un"Resilience: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse" [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o
[2] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
[3] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
[flagged]
> Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel.
I might agree that investigation is a bit unneeded. Overfishing is about to do that way before climate change: like the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet illegally fishing in other nations' waters.
They aren't independent ideas, effects of climate change would likely lead to higher pressures on fishing while at the same time reducing the number of fish if habitats change faster than species can adapt.
Photo of a Chinese fishing fleet, taken from International Space Station, https://x.com/pettitfrontier/status/1894497444303396978
A lot of the research seems really useful. I don't understand why we wouldn't prioritize understanding how to prevent drug cartel recruitment (one of the examples cited in the article).
Well, if “we” were deliberately weakening the US, either to destabilize the government in order to being about a radically different system of government, or on behalf of a hostile foreign power (or, perhaps most relevantly, as part of a hybrid movement whose members have a mix of those motivations), then “we” might want to cut a large number of things that would seem nonsensical to cut for people who don’t share that goal.
The research is useful in the sense that actually understanding the issues being investigated would be valuable. The question is, would the funded research actually deliver a better understanding of those issues? Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.
> Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.
Why not? That's a really broad brush.
Google “replication crisis” just for starters.
Yeah this is an under discussed aspect of the grant issues, it's important to decide whether or not to fund something, but just as if not more important is to make sure that the funding is used in a way that actually delivers the promised effect.
I also don't think the Pentagon has the expertise necessary to tell good social science from bad.
The DoD employs experts from many different fields. Wars aren’t just won on the battlefront. PSYOPS is an obvious example of applied social science, but it extends far beyond that.
Feb 27, https://apnews.com/article/mexico-drug-lord-rafael-caro-quin...
> Mexico has sent 29 drug cartel figures, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985, to the United States as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on drug trafficking organizations.. “This is historical, this has really never happened in the history of Mexico,” said Mike Vigil, former DEA chief of international operations.. The unprecedented show of security cooperation comes as top Mexican officials are in Washington trying to head off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports starting Tuesday.
The original article references cartels in Colombia, not Mexico. Also, the goal of the research is to prevent people from joining crime organizations, not how to catch existing heads of criminal organizations. It's not clear what you implied by the text that you quoted.
> the Ombudsman’s Office, an agency of Colombia’s Public Ministry, highlights the presence and the areas of operations of three of the strongest Mexican drug cartels: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Los Zetas, and the Sinaloa Cartel.. there is a belief among foreign consumers that Colombian drugs are of high quality, so the narcos capitalize on that.
If budgets are constrained, which is a higher priority?Starving the body of the snake ?
History suggests cutting off the head of a drug cartel is just a Tier 2 career advancement opportunity.
Did the aquisition of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán as a token trophy head put much of a dent in the ongoing activity of the Sinaloa Cartel Ship of Theseus?
There's much to be said for understanding an organism (an entire cartel dynamic in this case) in order to eliminate it.
Was this research the first social science project to seek an understanding of cartels?
If not, what actions were taken based on previous social science research?
You asked a question, I offered an answer.
> Was this research the first social science project to seek an understanding of cartels?
Very probably not. Not in the US and not globally.
> what actions were taken based on previous social science research?
That'd be a question best answered by digging through the Hansards, Parliamentary Archives, Congressional Records, etc. of respective governments.
Political history would suggest that many good suggestions of social change were likely ignored in favour of operations with a lot of smoke and noise.
> Political history would suggest that many good suggestions of social change were likely ignored in favour of operations with a lot of smoke and noise.
Likely to increase with terrorist designation, https://apnews.com/article/gangs-cartels-sinaloa-aragua-trum...
Organizations sometimes optimize for the problem to which they are the solution, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863
It might have been a smarter move by the US back in the day to extend USAID and collective forming business support to poor south american farmers rather than have the CIA indirectly fund cartels to run drugs into poor US communities in order to distance themselves from supplying arms to overthrow other governments.
Today that horse is dead and well beaten .. but maybe guns will solve things this time 'round.
Tariffs are part of the current round.
https://archive.is/4luZu
Why is every recent thread on DOGE and DOGE-similar stuff always riddled with people asking "this team were supposedly researching [insert apparently useless research topic], how does that help us?!?", as if every god damn research project funded by the US govt. better result in some kind of Manhattan-Project-style leap forward.
> Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days.
Social scientists researching climate change.
With the discussion here on HN often about how misaligned the incentives are and with the replication crisis in mind I get it that funding was cut (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
"Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel."
It's about understanding how a society can change due to climate change, not understanding the actual mechanics of climate change. Do you think that understanding whether or not conflicts stemming from climate change are not useful?
Makes sense to me that violence could be related to climate phenomena like draught, and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.
I always thought the heat was the driver. There has historically been more crime in the summer than in the winter, for example. Heat makes you do crazy things, as some noir novel probably said.
I guess it'd be nice to have some research to try and find out the real reason and challenge our own hypothesis, rather than always fall back on "I thought X was the reason". This is why the defunding of these programs is so frustrating, because especially around the social sciences, Americans tend to value their own gut rather than empirical studies.
This assumes that the research was finding the real reason and not just finding evidence for the researcher's gut reasoning.
Or. You use technology. Even places like Saudi Arabia have water for everyone. We cannot after hundreds of years predict human behavior with much accuracy but we can fix water problems.
When you are a small country where much of it is bordered by water and the largest distance from tip to next border is ~300km, and you have immense oil wealth, desal and distribution makes sense.
Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas.
I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.
This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.
I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.
> They're not coming out of the same budget
Federal budget is federal budget.
That's like saying HR's budget is the same as Accounting's budget because they're both part of Incorporated Widgets, and that we should fire Bob in HR because Sandra is a good accountant. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense or reflect how these decisions are actually made. Funding more social sciences doesn't actually mean funding less other science, just like hiring an HR rep doesn't entail firing an accountant.
Different funds are appropriated for different purposes, funding the kind of research you're talking about would likely be connected to an NSF grant or a national lab. Note as well that science, like everything else, experiences diminishing returns. Putting 1000x the money into water treatment research won't get you 1000x the return. Allocating funds at the scale of the federal government isn't zero sum; you can saturate the amount of funding it's possible to provide, and it does make sense to spread funding around many different areas.
Incidentally, that research you want to see is probably in jeopardy because the grant funding it contains forbidden words like "environment."
That is one of the purposes of USAID, but that’s been defunded too.
> ... and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.
Unless of course you happen to be one of the people actively and directly causing the problem they're studying. Then it might seem like a smart idea to put those people out of work.
> Social scientists researching climate chanage
This misunderstanding lead you astray: this is social scientists studying social impacts. Look at the list of the most recent awards - all of these sound like good social science and useful things for the DoD to fund since, for example, climate change-caused economic woes and migration were key to events they do directly care about like the Syrian civil war and rise of ISIS.
Conflict Resilience Across Scales: Theory and Data to Evaluate Societal Resilience to Water and Climate Shock
Anticipating Coastal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability
Modeling Climate-Induced Societal Adaptation and Population Displacement
Take a look sometime at where India and Pakistan get much of their fresh water, and what climate change is expected to do for that. Then contemplate the testy relationship between those two countries and consider the likelihood that they will peacefully work out a way to deal with the situation.
They both have nukes. If a war between them turned nuclear it would of course be pretty bad for the people of those countries, but you might think that the rest of the world would be OK. After all both of them only have fairly small warheads, mostly around the size of the nukes the US used in WWII.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Even if they only nuked each other, an exchange of around 100 of their nukes from each side (about 1/3 of their arsenals) directed at each other's major population centers would be felt around the world.
Here's a paper that analyzed this [1], and an article about it [2].
Here's the abstract from that paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117
[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...
Social scientists researching the likely social effects of climate change.
They seem more qualified for that specific question than climate scientists, honestly.
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Understanding how changes affect other cultures/regions can be useful in a globally connected world and world conflict.
It's interesting to see that as of the time I'm writing this, half the top-level comments in this thread are being downvoted.
I am NOT writing in support of the current slash-and-burn approach to government, but I suspect that the downvoted half are addressing a significant deficiency in this article -- it doesn't mention what has been meaningfully accomplished by the Minerva Initiative in 17 years, given that the program had a fairly discrete set of objectives. Did they prevent any terrorist attacks? Did they forestall any destabilizing uprisings in significant countries? Did they develop a real and actionable understanding of radicalization or similar movements?
This is not to say that those accomplishments don't exist (I wouldn't know, I'd never heard of the program before), but it's extraordinarily lazy writing by a supposedly-premier science publication for these not to be identified and highlighted, if they exist.
Edit: clarity.
That's not the program's goal.
>> The Minerva Research Initiative supports social science research aimed at improving our basic understanding of security, broadly defined. [...] The goal is to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S. [0]
The emphasis here is on background, that should then better inform regional DoD strategy, that will then... well, 'not screw up things like Iraq' seems a fair summary.
For the amounts, this seems like an excellent use of DoD money. Throwing military hardware and soldier time/lives away in pursuit of doomed to fail goals is expensive and often counterproductive.
Fight smarter, not harder.
[0] https://minerva.defense.gov/
Soo.. any of these had any real applications by the Pentagon? Or then why is the Pentagon using their budget to fund general research? It could be perfectly valid research, but that's not their job.
You might want to look up DARPA for reasons why the DoD funds general research.
No clear value to some of these projects. What did we get out of it, in specifics? Many of the projects in the article feel like something that could be learned from other places. Like this:
> Renard Sexton, a researcher at Emory University who’s studying whether Taiwan’s recent defense reforms help deter an attack from China, has also been told his project is terminated.
The answer is “no”. It’s obvious. China has made it clear as well. It doesn’t need this researcher to figure out.
Then there’s this part…
> Jettisoning the entire … initiative, whose yearly cost is that of a single F-16, [would be] about the most cost-ineffective measure that DoD and the nation could implement
These people are lazy with money that isn’t theirs. A single F16 is still a lot of money, to almost anyone. Why don’t they ever make clear the exact return on these investments?
It is great you can quickly judge the value of a 5 year research project.
I don't mean to be flippant but if it is social sciences almost anyone can judge the value quickly.
These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse. I think that trying to find and exploit loopholes in the constitution breaks the spirit of the document and is traitorous to our form of government. But they don't care for our form of government, they want to undermine it because without government it increases billionaire's "freedom".
The Minerva Research initiative was created by Bush’s defense secretary: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/25482/chapter/3.
> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists
Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.
EDIT: Corrected which administration.
"in 2008" means during the Bush administration. The fact that Gates was selected as Obama's defense secretary as a bipartisan pick later means very little.
Good point. Corrected.
> Obama’s defense secretary
Obama wasn’t president in 2008, not sure why you are mentioning him.
They aren’t the first. Obama: I’ve got a phone, and I’ve got a pen.
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
You're not actually responding to the comment by immediately drawing a comparison and saying nothing else. It's a lazy way of making comments.
On quick glance, the article you're citing doesn't support the equivalence of cutting already awarded funding as the current American executive is doing now. It talks about calling meetings.
The article doesn't demonstrate Obama stealing Congress's power of the purse. Can you show me an example?
I'm quibbling with implications of "there's nothing new, they're both the same".
In the article he can sign an executive order to make college more affordable, but this is using Congress's budget allocation, and powers provided for the department of education though is it not?
Trump is literally dismantling departments approved by Congress, and using the budget in completely different areas as far as I can tell. He's not simply redirecting what X department should be doing, as compared to Obama.
Can you expand on this?
I agreed with you until the last bit. I don’t think there’s a uniform “they” with a stable set of goals. All of the heritage foundation, Vance, Trump, Elon, congress, the Christian nationalists, etc I’m certain have different and probably often conflicting goals… that also shift constantly depending on the context.
It's foolishness to think many millions of voters don't also agree with these cuts. They don't value these programs.
In some respects, I agree. But they aren’t touching much that voters do care about and that’s where the overwhelming majority of spending comes from. Every valid path to actually reducing debt pisses off most of the electorate. It’s “chasing” a noble goal with political theater. What’s happening now is a path to privatization of large swaths of current govt.
With the vastness of the political spectrum and volume of voters, one can find "millions" of voters that support cuts to almost any program.
That's what representation in Congress is for, and why the Constitution specifies that Congress holds the power of the purse, not the president, and especially not an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest.
the purse is quite litteraly drawing a hard vacume its so empty. the power to suck money from the future at an ever increasing rate was never put to any proper scruteny, and hopefully, the experiment will now end, through the process of defunding anything and everything that is of zero practical and imediate utility.
And even on the other end of the political spectrum you'll find individuals and groups using loopholes or trying to use tactics/interpretations that suit their goals. This isn't something new. Pretty much any of these EOs have similar past ones that are either forgotten or were largely ignored because they happened one at a time. The scope and rate of change is just much higher now than in any memorable past (eg wouldn't count internment camps etc as they are too far past).
>These people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse.
I mean, until someone stops them, and as long as they get away with it, they did.
The really interesting part is what if the agencies were a product of a prior loophole? We seem to be several generations deep in tenuous interpretations, using loopholes to counteract other loopholes. For example, if the executive branch is tasked with carrying out the law, how can we have independent agencies not subject to the executive power in Article 2 Section 1? How do we ignore the 10th amendment on the tenuous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause? It's all a game.
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> billed by the Pentagon as “Social science for a safer world"
Yeah, that's a no from me dawg.
Why?
(1) I am wary that the Pentagon aims to make the world safer, at least in the sense of the word that most regular people share, (2) I particularly dislike the Pentagon meddling in secret social science undertakings to pursue those goals, (3) even if the Pentagon's efforts were benign, I believe there are better places and ways for those pursuits to be undertaken.
> (2) I particularly dislike the Pentagon meddling in secret social science undertakings to pursue those goals
All of the research in question was public.
Ah, so your problem is the Pentagon, not the social sciences, right?
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Yet another shallow dismissal of an entire branch of science, brought to you by random internet guy!
If social science has explanatory and predictive power hedge funds would have figured out how to monetize that and would be hiring social scientists.
By that argument dentistry is fake.
Large parts of dentistry are fake. There is no evidence regular cleanings do anything.
There’s plenty that is monetizable that hedge funds choose not to because they’re after a quick buck, and some things—rightfully—take time.
In other words, what hedge funds do or do not monetize has little predictive power over anything meaningful.
36.5 trillion in total national debt
Increasing by 1 trillion every 100 days
Thats by 10 billion per day
Thats 417 million per hour
Thats 6.9 million per minute
They need to cut more of this kind of stuff, not less.
Way more.
Maybe stop giving tax cuts to rich people instead of downgrading the USA to a regional power?
The rich are... rich.
They can move at any time, anywhere.
There will always be a country that will receive them with open arms.
Income redistribution will never happen.
Many of the countries they might want to move to have higher tax rates than the US. And, until recently, the US probably had the most significant global clout to back their business ventures with.
You’re assuming that if the US tried a serious wealth distribution tax hike, a country like China, India, South Korea, Japan, you name it, would not immediately offer sweetheart deals. The UK is currently learning this the hard way relative to the US with talent fleeing.
ahoka wrote:
> Maybe stop giving tax cuts to rich people
Nor did I write anything about "significant tax hikes".
How do you get from these comments to significant tax hikes? Not giving tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans and not increasing our deficit further is not the same thing as a significant tax hike. If you cannot distinguish these two things, I don't know how any productive conversation could ever be had here.
And if billionaires choose to leave the US to avoid these non tax-hikes, that's their choice. But most countries they'd presently opt for do tax higher than the US does.
With this attitude you should probably pack up the US and call it a day.
1. Inequality has been constantly decreasing for most of the 20th century, worldwide.
2. Income redistribution has happened multiple times throughout history, and you can argue about the process and also about the results but it has happened repeatedly (French Revolution, Communist Revolution in Russia and all associated revolutions and coups, etc, etc).
The French revolution was a complete mess that ended in a tyranny (Napoleon).
The Communist revolution initiated a sequence of events that make communism the #1 cause of death ever. From purges, to famine, wars...
Deng Xiaoping's communism is a completely different thing.
> The French revolution was a complete mess that ended in a tyranny (Napoleon).
Umm... I see that you were schooled in the Anglo-American tradition (classical Conservative, I guess Edmund Burke?).
Let me expand on that... the French Revolution was a mess, like any revolution, that's true.
A mess that:
- shattered MANY legal abuses (primarily stemming from divine right, feudalism, etc) in a lot of Europe, in about 3 major shocks (the initial one which led to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, then 1848, then slowly to the abolition of any feudal remains around 1918)
- greatly expanded personal and collective freedoms in Europe, freedoms that weren't abolished even by the "tyranny"
- served as a model for a better society for many oppressed countries and regions in Europe (I come from one, Romania)
And it did not end in a tyranny. It went through mass executions, lead to an absolutist regime, back to a monarchy, then back to a democracy, then back to a monarchy, and then finally back to a democracy, for good. All of that was started and made possible by the French Revolution.
> The Communist revolution initiated a sequence of events that make communism the #1 cause of death ever. From purges, to famine, wars...
That's only if you look at global Communism like a single phenomenon and you consider say, monarchy, as a set of disjointed ideologies. Communism also brought great equality in countries that were some of the most unequal and abusive on the planet, it greatly accelerated women's rights to the point to this day, Eastern Europe (for example) has more equal political representation and more women in STEM than Western Europe.
You could argue that fear of Communism also led the West to adopt policies such as high taxes on high earners, that led to more equality during the post war era. Look at what's happening now when Communism is basically gone for good. The US is falling back into a Gilded Era.
I don’t think that citing the Russian revolution is the best argument you have. That wealth redistribution attempt took 30 million lives. That’s probably one of the best arguments why we should absolutely not kill the golden geese.
It would be nice if you would read that paragraph again :-)
Yeah. DOGE might make sense if you're trying to cut the deficit. Tax cuts make no sense in that context.
Raise taxes on rich people, rich people leave the country or invest offshore; or put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again.
What is $1 billion to destroy a political career over $10 billion in taxes?
They aren’t leaving the country easily: not paying taxes would mean selling their properties, relocating their businesses, and renouncing their citizenship. Most of the alternatives have higher tax rates, fewer economic options, or both – and they lose significant benefits like preferential access to the U.S. government. Anyone who wanted to pay 0% could already become a citizen of Anguilla, Barbados, etc. but the fact that most haven’t suggests that there is more to the decision than sorting by tax rate and picking the lowest.
> put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again.
That’s what happened in 2024 and we are facing rising inflation and a severe recession in the middle of a constitutional crisis. It’s unclear to me why anyone would think that the people who orchestrated that should be catered to.
So because they can fuck us so hard, we should let them keep fucking us.
What an odd argument.
This is a great argument for why we should find ways, as a society, to prevent people from reaching such a level of ultra-wealth in the first place.
Or accept, and recognize, that things kind of go both ways:
The rich can be exploitative of the poor relative to themselves and heavily motivated by greed;
But it can be equally true that the poor hate the rich with motivations based on greed and envy themselves. Poor people, ironically, can be extremely greedy, more greedy than many wealthy people - they aren’t incompatible.
I’m not taking sides on this one.
I agree that it goes both ways, in the sense that I support UBI. As I think there is a level of wealth that society has an interest in preventing anyone being above, I also think there is a level of poverty that society has an interest in preventing anyone being below.
That’s just FUD. Do you see Bezos leaving the country for Argentina? Yeah, me neither. What’s the alternative you’re proposing? Just accept our new billionaire overlords?
Ask why the billionaire overlords are a problem first.
Is it because they subvert the will of the people, and subvert what is good? If so, I agree, they must be stopped.
Is it just the principle of the thing, how dare they be so rich, when so many people aren’t? If so, that’s envy, and cannot be accepted.
The former; by amassing that much money, they gain the ability to both exploit the system to their personal gain, and shape it to their personal preferences, which grow ever less aligned with those of the general population. We're on our way to a techno-feudalism right now.
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Don't worry, this debt will keep increasing, and will likely accelerate in the coming years.
Maybe the public will just not know the numbers anymore.
Either way, I am not from the US, so I read these threads for my own amusement. I am fine with what is happen over there, in a way I wouldn't be in my country of residence :)
You could cut all of it and it wouldn’t solve the problems you listed. It would just create new ones by closing off a major valve to the country’s R&D pipeline. Assuming you believe R&D is a worthwhile investment, what non-government alternatives would you propose for funding it?
Maybe it has a lot to do with Trump's tax cut to the rich. Unsurprisingly, they didn't work as expected, reports the Financial Times:
https://youtu.be/AdwFchjz2e8?si=6fjZv6NWe6Q-VItN
"for unclassified research"
with public funds?
Yes - this isn’t some new or controversial phenomenon, DoD has funded all kinds of academic research for a long time through organizations like the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, etc.
The article says one of the programs that was cut studied how drug cartels operate, organize, and recruit, which seems quite in line with global security and US priorities on fighting narcotics trafficking
How many other programs were studying the same subject? That's what we don't know. Insiders have reported for decades about redundant research, programs, etc.
Redundancy in research is necessary. It's a good thing.
But then you dont cut with non insiders. You instead reward the reporting of bogus science and corruption bx handling a reward grant worth half the cut grand to the reporter. Make experts clean the house, instead of idiots tearing the house down , becsuse they can not tell apart a load bearing beam from drywall .
That question is a general problem with anything secret. Or rather, potential problem, because "can this research be reproduced?" is also a useful question, which means random replication of such work is genuinely desirable.
In any case, this specific program wasn't one of the secret ones.
This is not the way to come to know.
Regardless, much of this was known already if you would just look. The idea that Elon is discovering anything other than for himself, to say the least of being in a position to decide what to do about what is "found", is laughable. They can't even tell the difference between millions and billions of dollars, or who is vital to nuclear safety.
It's like Chesterton's fence, but where the fence turns out to be vital, where you could find out what the fence is for by just asking the farmer, and where the person tearing down the fence knows nothing about fences or farming, and happens to run an animal and wildlife control company.
Hopefully some!
Guess where the internet came from.
What funds should government research (classified or otherwise), use?
Tariffs.
So, you’re advocating for taxes just shifted in source? Basically instead of income tax, sales tax?
I'm not advocating. I just answered the question.
Tariffs are just taxes on poor people. Everything becomes more expensive. You want to spend $3 on a plastic spatula at Target? Well now that costs $7.
Maybe things are artificially less expensive because of the exploitation of critically poor people (slaves in China)?
Maybe the thing that costs $7 is really $7 because humane labor requires it; makes it economical.
If that was your goal, you’d need to use a mechanism which actually targets it such as a tariff based on reliable audits of factory conditions. A tariff applied to a country does nothing to improve working conditions until prices rise above the alternatives, and then businesses are going to pick the next cheapest option.
None of this is speculative or something we need to study ancient history to understand, either. When Trump enacted tariffs during his first term prices for American consumers went up 10-30%, tens of thousands of American jobs were lost due to rising prices on intermediate goods and retaliatory tariffs, and manufacturing shifted to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh where working conditions are not notably better. If you want to improve working conditions, you have to make that the best business choice.
Nobody in America cares about the slaves in China, or Vietnam. They only care whether their spatula costs $3 or $7.
I'm a bit confused, why are tariffs better?
I didn't say better.
Well, to clarify at least one core aspect, tariffs can't cover the gap.
I think the estimate was income taxes in the US represented a few trillion dollars while estimated tariff revenue was a few hundreds of billions. Leaving a gap of... a few trillion dollars.
Would you prefer all of the research was classified and nonpublic?
Or public and unclassified?
Something tells me wheel survive with a smaller budget for social science studies.
we’ll spend it oil company subsidies and tax cuts so it’ll be even more money well spent :)