緊急事態発生：国立科学委員会の役員解任
I could be recording.
Test.
I'm gonna get a little loud for a second.
I'm gonna get loud near my microphone.
Turn that down just a bit.
Just a hair. There we go.
Now I'm talking kind of normal volume.
Relatively close to the thing.
Trying not to crush my surge protector.
Okay.
What are we doing?
Remind me what we're calling it when I save thisfile later.
Which I haven't done.
Yeah.
Entire NSF board.
So what's the...
From the nature article that I had up
and the science one,
there's actually two more people included in thecount
for the science article.
Yes, it seems like it.
I've seen 22 elsewhere as well.
Interesting.
I don't know if
there's a different head counting system
or what.
But I think the numbers
are far less important here than...
I am super curious
if it's because this happened on the 24th ofApril.
See, that's the thing.
I'd love a list, right?
Wait, who are...
Let me see.
Members of national board?
National science board?
National science board.
Board members NSF.
National is made up of 25 members.
Yeah.
Son of a bitch.
Can we get our numbers right?
So does that mean that one person survived?
Maybe, yeah.
Oh, you know, that makes sense.
I read it somewhere that
it's comprised of board members
and one director.
they kind of
work independently as well.
So like...
And that's by design.
So the directors don't get to decide
anything on their own.
Okay, got it.
Let me just note that the actual number
of faces on this page
right now is 22.
Okay.
So we can talk about this in the...
We can talk about this.
Maybe a couple of them died halfway through.
Who knows?
I see a lot of, you know,
crinkly old white guys.
If I edit this one,
I promise I won't pull this part
of the recording in.
All right.
Okay, let's start.
Let's start this one.
This will be a little emergency.
What's the word for this?
Emergency bulletin?
Whatever, anyway.
Yeah, whatever.
Okay, so let's try.
3, 2, 1.
Wait, why was there
so much delay?
Can we do it again?
Yeah, we can just do it again.
We'll just do a second one.
Let's do another one.
I'm gonna try to go
right as you sort of say
three.
Do it like you normally do
and it's fine usually.
Just now there was like
three seconds delay.
All right, cool.
So, 3, 2, 1.
Hello, Len.
Hello, Asami.
Well, I guess this is
kind of a new format
where we're kind of responding
to a very timely fashion.
Yeah, 100%.
This is gonna definitely ruin
the order of posts that go out, actually.
And I think I would say
it's worth ruining it
because this is kind of a big
shocker of news
for American science
which, you know,
thank you, everyone
for my degree, Len's degree.
We all benefited from it.
But I think
the very system that
helped us get our PhD
is the entire people got fired.
Am I correct in thinking that?
Yeah, I mean,
well, the important people
at the sort of top of the science
food chain, from what I understand,
right, you know, we're jumping in
on this pretty hard, at the NSF,
the National Science Foundation,
on what's called the National Science Board
is supposed to, you know,
keep an eye on everything,
you know, have some idea
of, like, what's going on in the science,
where the money goes,
maybe what's important, right,
cross-disciplinary, cross-field people,
industry, universities,
you know, like...
Yeah, they're all gone.
Yeah, they got fired, every one of them.
So...
Yes, every one of them got fired
overnight, and we
don't know what that means
to the United States
science yet.
But this is us just, like,
reacting,
first impression,
what the fuck is going on
kind of episode.
And any laughter you hear is just
from trauma response.
It's not because it's funny, right?
It's because it's horribly funny.
Yes.
NSFの役割と予算規模
Fair warning that we will try
to be factual, but we are also...
Like, I understand
that this is a very
developing news.
It's hot off the press.
Not everything has been disclosed.
I don't think
any of the people who got fired
know what's going on, so, you know,
take it as a grain of salt.
This is our take on reaction videos
that all the TikTok kids are doing.
Aww, we're as hip
as TikTok kids now.
We wish, we wish.
Anywho,
just to sort of, like,
maybe paint an idea
of, like, how
important and how
enormous of an impact
this decision is.
Yes, please.
Right.
So let's pull out some numbers here.
I am pulling
the numbers off of this
science article
that
NSF, it has statutory
authority to oversee the action
of the $9 billion NSF
funding.
That's a hell of a lot of money,
right? And basically,
these people are the ones who decide
where does this $9 billion
go to, like, what sort of
research areas do they
want to focus on, fund,
who do they want to fund, who
should get the money,
precious, you know,
blood, sweat and tears, American taxpayer
dollars
to advance science
and, you know,
until not too long ago, I would say
America was pretty
in a frontier of this whole thing,
enterprise of science.
Yeah, I would agree.
And the money, the sheer
amount of money that American
NSF
and American Science
National Board have been
able to pour into
this entire
industry of scientific research,
it's just uncomparable
compared to, like,
to any other single
nation, really. I'm pretty sure,
not that I've done research, pretty sure
America is the single biggest
single nation to
fund research
at this scale.
It's huge, right? I mean, I would
imagine the one that might be runner-up
if not in competition
at this moment is probably China.
Yeah.
Okay, fair enough, fair enough.
Like, I don't know the
numbers, but regardless, the scale
that the NSF is
working with, the U.S. was working with
is enormous, right?
過去の予算削減と委員会の独立性
And this
resultant action
is going to be a
huge blow that is not
a huge surprise. Going off
of the same article, there's reminders
that only, I think, a year ago,
Trump was proposing to cut
over 50% of the NSF
budget. So, like,
this is not the first
action towards
the NSF.It's certainly not the
first. And they had already
lost more than 30% of its
staff since January 2025.
And I
have an inkling that I was one of those
30%, given what
happened to my funding.
Yes, exactly. Yeah, the
staff and those being funded by the NSF
had a huge loss
as a result of these cuts.
And, you know,
the board still existed,
which is the 20-so-odd people
who were supposed to be overseeing
a lot of this.
Right, who are the experts
who, you know, have a say
in what America should invest
in for the future of science.
And interestingly, they
are, like, they each
serve six-year tenure,
which is decidedly longer
than the four-year
presidential term, which is
kind of the whole point, right?
It's the design of it.
They understand that
scientific
invention, discovery
don't follow
the election cycle.
I mean, how hard is it
to understand that? Don't know.
But so how this board is designed
is that everyone gets
a staggered six-year tenure.
So it really
ensures the continuity
of the vision of these board members,
right? So it's not just, like,
half the people gets, you know,
thrown out every couple years.
It's, like, it's really
designed to maintain the continuity
across, like, in a span of
decades, right?
And that's
sort of the right kind of
timeline to think about, right?
Timescale to think about
when you're thinking about
invention that changes the world,
quite frankly.
And, like,
yeah, like, that sounds like a good design.
It is a good design.
The whole point is that no single
administration can
have any say to that, or
it has independently operated
for 76 years.
It's got history as well.
Yeah, it's got a huge history.
解雇の衝撃と前例
And to wipe them all off
is just...
I don't know if I can describe this
adequately, like, how
much of a blow
it is to
the entire world's
scientific endeavor
and for the humanity
at large.
I...I mean,
I don't think that I can put it in scale,
right?I'm with you in terms of
wondering.I mean,
because it's so immediate right now
and because it's so...
It's also
not necessarily
clear what the
actual result will be.
Right, like, we don't know
what he's planning to do, like,
okay, so, like, you fired everyone
off.Are you gonna
replace all the two of them
with your favorites?
Or are you going to
reduce the number
to, like, ten?
And, like, kind of keep going?
And so far...
I guess so far what I think
we've seen, and I could be
a little off on this, but
I am looking both at the science article
and I'm looking at what I can see of
the nature article at the moment,
which points out how
the sort of firing
of committees, right, is also not new
within the NSF,
the federal science advisors.
They,
quote, fired all 17
members of the advisory committee
on immunization practices.
This was about vaccine-related policies.
Um, eliminated
14 advisory committees at the NSF
just in general.
Um, and then
also there was an order issued
which eliminated several other
committees, including one on long COVID,
to supposedly reduce government spending
and, quote, promote
American freedom and innovation, end quote.
Uh, this,
this
didn't seem to fill any spaces, right?
It was under this sense of
budget procurement
of which, by the way,
for anyone listening,
you're probably aware,
nothing is being saved when you're spending
multiples of a national budget
on bombing another country.
Um,
but, like,
you know, uh, so,
but you have this, right?
So I don't know if these members
are gone
in, like, the permanent sense.
I don't know if they're to be replaced
at all, depending on what this administration
seems to think is a reasonable thing
to do.
Um, and the reason I have
some of this hesitation is because,
at least in the science article that you found,
uh, news report on this,
the
email, at least the quoted bits
of the email sent
are just
on behalf of President Donald J. Trump,
I am writing to inform you that your position
as a member of the National Science Board
is terminated, effective immediately.
Thank you for your service.
Now, if this is just an excerpt,
if there's, like, longer, like, more
official terminology in there or something,
might be something different.
But this also reads a lot
like the nonsensical emails
that Musk sent out
when he was doing his doge nonsense.
I was, I was just thinking about that.
The very email that I personally received,
uh,
also had the same kind of wording
of, uh,
effective immediately,
like, no room for
appeal, no room
for, like, you know, negotiations
or any...
Presented no room for appeal, right?
Like, very much,
this is my, this is my decision,
it's all in my power, you have no say goodbye,
right? That's the vibe.
Right, right. And, and
it's, that's why it felt like
almost like a fake email, because, you know,
what do you mean you're gonna freeze,
you know, billions of dollars,
uh,
and what do you mean
you're gonna fire somebody
effective immediately
with zero review,
zero, like, you know, process
where, of, like, warning
system, anything like it.
I, mind you,
I got my, this
terminated effective immediately
the letter one month
after we successfully
renewed the grant.
Right, yes, I remember, because
it was just so insane,
it was, I mean, all of this
is insane, because what's happening
is a complete abuse of
any type of power that exists
in this space, and the
entire act
of wielding what, what one
thinks is authority here,
uh, simply to
make decisions without
repercussion, without consideration
for the contextual ramifications, or
where something has already been agreed
there's no respect for the
re-upping, right, for the
agreement that is made in order to do
this, uh, that's not
there, no respect for the people that are
involved, it's a
power move on power move
on power move, and
I really hope that everybody
科学と政治の分離の重要性
is as sick of this as we are, but
right, and like, sort of
it's, it's also
power move, yes, but it's a
political power move, which
they carefully designed so that
these institutions of
national budget system,
right, like NSF, National
Science Board, that
they made sure that
they are independent
operation, separate from
the political agenda
of whatever administration
that might be at the time,
because
somebody clever at first decided
and knew that
science should exist outside
of
political influence
that may or flip-flop
here and there, political system
just moves in a different timescale
than the science timescale,
and we cannot
be, you know, dancing around
to appease the, you know,
whatever current administration
is, which is exactly what we're doing
right now, and
and the repercussion of it
is like, yes, I can use
my imagination to think how terrible
that might be, but it is well
beyond my imagination,
the actual
repercussion, the consequence
of
this type of intervention
toscience,
you know, the whole point
of scientific endeavor is that
it's not influenced by the
political weather of the day,
it is not influenced by the
trend of the day,
the whole point of basic research
is that it's not trendy,
it does not, like, belong
to this fast-moving world,
and
that's what
applied sciences are for, and
they have decided, NSF
have funded both basic and
applied research, right?
And these people who just got fired
were the ones
who decided how much of what goes
into what type of projects,
and
this is just, like,
decades of progress potentially
lost on this
one single decision by
an extremely
shortsighted administration,
and
it just, like, it makes me
so sad, because, yes,
I might have come to
US by an accident,
but many of us
fall in love in science
and dream about
doing research in places
like US where
job security, money, all of these
things might be
significantly better than our
home countries, and people
leave a lot of things behind
todo science
in environments
like what US used to be,
and it's
so sad
that this is
clearly no longer the case,
失われた進歩と将来への懸念
and nobody
understands that this isn't
just a Trump issue, it's like
this impact
is going to be
lasting well beyond
his administration, well beyond
his death, honestly, and
you don't just fix this
you have
shattered a system
that, like, there are broken parts about thissystem,
but using
the excuse that there are broken parts
to shatter parts of the system
that are functioning
well enough to continue making
progress is just a way
for you to excuse ignorant,
bad, aggressive
and violent behavior.
Yeah, and this is just,
like, they are truly
strangling their own neck
by doing this.
It makes me so sad to think
that how much
discovery, how many
new inventions, innovations
are just going to be, boop,
lost because
this stupid-ass guy decided,
eh, I don't want this anymore.
Yeah,
it'll just, it's going to show up
elsewhere, right? I mean, I did
actually, yeah,
I did find that I think
there was a suggested next meeting
for this committee,
this board,
on the 5th of May,
and there was a note about a report
possibly coming out
that would cede scientific ground to China,
like, noting that that was sort of
what was happening, right, that the
sort of forecast was
we're sort of not in
the sort of lead for public funding of science,
so this is in relation to that.
And,
look,
there's a bunch of political things
built within this pace, but
this could have been,
even if I want to think about it this way,
two of, like, the
largest centers of, you know,
scientific development and research
both funding
their, like, you know, universities
and industries well to better
develop things, maybe in a hopefully
more holistic fashion,
but instead,
it's going to be one.
Like, and it's
not going to be the U.S., not until it
recovers from this.
Yeah.
So...
So, you know, no solutions
from us tonight.
We're just sad
and grieving and...
It's just, yeah,
no, I feel like I'm repeating myself,
but seriously,
it's like,
it's managed to hold up this way
for 76 years.
Look at how much ground they were able
to lay down
over this past 76 years.
Like, literally,
they gave money to things like GPS,
the entirety of Internet,
like, you know,
everything that we use every day today.
Yeah.
In some shape or form came
from these NSF fundings
and National Science Board at large.
There's something
key about that which is
probably requires a little bit of digging
and, you know, having some
resource on how this functions, right?
But that connection you just said
is also very much lost.
It gets diluted regularly as things
become more normalized and built within society.
Even I don't think about it, right?
I don't consciously think about this connection
until it's brought up
and then you realize,
well, yeah, actually, right?
This stuff came from a place of funding
through those systems.
It didn't just appear, right?
Like, yes, a lot of it also came
from defense-related projects and contracts.
But these were
in need of that system, right?
You don't get that just by people
wandering around, you know,
smashing stuff together.
This takes time, effort,
energy structure, planning,
you know, acceptance
and buffer for failure.
Like, just,
it gets really annoying that
they had a good thing going on,
arguably
one of the best
unique selling points of America
and just
gone in one
little email
that probably, you know, some
AI generative bot wrote
as well.
Or they just copy and pasted it from Musk's email.
現実と風刺の境界線
Yeah, copy and pasted from my previous ones.
Yeah, exactly.
Because it's not like this text is new, right?
But,
not but.
Sad day
for American science.
RIP.
Sadness that I hope
turns into rage.
Because this
doesn't deserve to just
sort of sit there.
And it doesn't even, I'm hoping, right?
This was, I think, two days ago
was the earliest news report
I could find on it.
And I think the date one of them said
was like the 24th even,
so it might have been four days ago.
I'd love, I'd love
if there was an immediate backlash
to a degree that caused
sort of a withdrawal.
Because, I mean, there have been
growing unrest
around a lot of the things this administration
is doing.
You know, even within
the cohort of this administration.
And so
it would be great to see a sort of
repercussion, but the damage will have been done
to an extent, right? And there was apparentlyalready
tensions that existed within there.
And this stuff that is just
from left field
but also seems to follow a pattern
is
how do I put this?
It's so
I'm going to, yeah, hold on.
Satire. We know satire, right?
Like when you make fun of a thing
in the sort of extreme sense
and it's kind of real and it's, you know,
it's kind of not, but like, you know,
we're pointing out how ridiculous it is.
If anybody knows what like
the news outlet The Onion is,
this is a big satire on, you know,
like political, not just political,
but like news and
and that
sort of satire, right?
There's a variety
of satire forms here.
The Simpsons, right?
You know, South Park, right?
Like visual ones, animations.
The problem we're running into,
at least from my understanding,
is that the satire
is too slow.
So when they
go to make
like a commentary about
what's happening and they pick
the absurd version to say,
you know, this is the absurd version.
Of course they wouldn't do that.
It takes like a week
and then it's been done.
Or like they get
beaten to it before it shows up
on air or gets released
as like an article.
And so the sort of
separation between what would have been
satire and reality now
is broken in a sense.
It's like you were watching
what we would have at first
thought, you know, I read a headline
like all
20-something, 22,
right, however many members
of the National Science Board
have been fired, you know?
And it's like I expect the next line to be
each has been given, you know,
a vacation to the Bahamas
and, you know, like
and then the president went on his yacht
and golfed into the sea or something, right?
And like two out of three things there
are probably true.
You know, like
that's like, you know, the people that got
fired, it might be more like, yep, they sent
him a firing email, you know, Musk promised
him some money and then he kept it in his bankaccount
and
then
Trump went golfing.
And that's today.
That's today's news and it's like
I'm sorry, this should be a joke.
This should be a joke.
Yeah, yeah, no,
and too many things that should be
a joke are not jokes
these days.
And
yeah, but
リスナーへの呼びかけ
we don't have conclusions.
No, we don't.
We're bringing this to your attention
so that you can be aware of it.
Yeah, and once I'm done
being sad, I should get angry
like you said.
Yeah, don't worry, I'll be here.
I'm already, I went right through I think
to anger, so I'll keep that running.
Hopefully everyone else who's listening
is able to
experience it and maybe take this as a sign
to just be aware
of what's happening above and around
you in your system.
Try not to treat it as just
sort of an outside source
that is never going to affect you because
sometimes turns out
those sources are definitely able to
affect you in some way.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks.
I hope none of you enjoyed this.
I hope that you all feel better informed, though.
Yeah.
Oh, well.
Bye-bye.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening and find us
on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E
S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
