And remember that all this is to give a tax cut to the rich.

I used to think it was all about money. As it turns out it's all about power. The rich will "pay any amount of money to avoid taxes" as long as their relative power and influence increases.

They are not changing this rate to cut taxes. They clearly actually believe that research budgets were being swindled. Were they? Your comment doesn’t address it. I have no idea.

Absolutely not. DOE faculties charge way more overhead for work that they perform for universities—-up to 100%. And DOE lab postdocs are almost 2X as well paid as comparable university postdocs. And their senior leadership in science are way way above GSA scale since they are formally not in the government but work for contractors like Battelle.

If sustained this policy This would put reciprocal contracts and collaborations between major DOE facilities and universities on total hold. Not a good thing if you think progress in science is even vaguely useful.

You’d think if they were being swindled someone in academia would have been pissed about it and sounded the alarm. These are smart people after all who fight tooth and nail for every dollar of grant money they are awarded. They don’t like paying indirect costs either. But it turns out, you kind of need a functioning research building in order to do research. Now admins at universities are trying to figure out how they can get the damn toilet paper paid for as a direct cost because that is actually where we are at with this stuff today.

The federal govt is estimated to be bankrupt in 10 years. If by "ideologue" you mean people who not only recognise this but are ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING to address the problem (for the first time ever) then yes you may be right.

By doing something, you mean cutting taxes and throwing away all the tax revenue they got from the IRS not sharing data with law enforcement, right?

No by doing something I mean finding massive levels of fraud, waste and abuse and stopping it.

None of those things are documented. No fraud has been brought to the courts by then as far as I know. None of the cuts were massive. Any published cuts so far are a rounding error of the total, some are disputed as savings at all. Meanwhile the debt is being extended even further. And that's before considering how many of the attempted cuts were illegal themselves.

What you mean by doing it isn't actually happening.

they cut a couple of billions out of 4% of the budget. the rest is just big random numbers that get revised down with every fact check.

First time ever? We had a budget surplus with hitting paying off the national debt in the 90’s. First thing Bush Jr did was giant tax cut for the rich which ended that.

Interest, military, and social security are the only things big enough to cut to fix the deficit much less pay down the debt.

The entire rest of the government could be free and we would still be screwed if we don’t make cuts where it counts.