As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.

I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.

Then it should have been easy to cut only those grants instead of the "real science", right?

It's actually kind of a hard problem.

There are tens of thousands of grants. Some of them are classified as "medicine" and study things like hormones, some are classified as "computer science" or "mathematics" and study things like statistical bias. Which of these are the "real science" ones (e.g. HRT in older people with menopause or low-T) and which are the partisan-coded ones (e.g. gender HRT)?

Put aside whether or not you think the latter should be funded and suppose you're just trying to distinguish them to make sure the former continues to be. If you can't do it accurately then the current administration will do it anyway but with a machete instead of a scalpel. You'd need a large team of people who can tell the difference to go through them all and classify them. This is nominally the job of the thing referred to as the "deep state", but what do you do if you don't expect them to be non-partisan?

This is why strategies like "have partisans capture the administrators for our side" are a mistake.

Just do as DOGE/Musk: ctrl+f for "diversity" and deny all grants. Even if it had nothing to do with "woke", for instance diversity in bacteria cultures or whatever...

That's the machete. Now present a way to do it properly.

I'm curious why you think this would be an easy task. It strikes me as quite difficult! Separating scientific wheat from chaff requires a lot of effort and expertise.

As one famous example, Sokal intentionally made up funny bullshit and still fooled a ton of people!

I don't think it's an easy task in reality, but they were claiming there's "countless humanities graduate programs that do nothing but produce and spread left-wing propaganda" outnumbering the important grants and taking up all the funding, which should be a lot easier to audit for and cut a large portion of it without killing any "real science". Instead, we got a clumsy keyword search.

I'm sure I'll get heat for this, but I think a low-resolution first pass a la keyword search was actually an excellent call from a macro standpoint. It (1) clears out a good chunk of cruft, instantly, with little effort and (2) scares people away from doing further explicitly ideological work.

There are a surprising number of social scientists who engage in both good basic research and useless ideological bone-picking, and the low resolution pass effectively pushes them to focus on their real work.

Ah yes, nothing incentivises focus on "real work" like having to check that your abstract doesn't contain any words that trigger the administrations' censors after some ignorant edgelord's algorithm defunded your study of transgenic mice or black holes.

Luckily now the administration has great scientists like RFK Jr setting research priorities, no more useless ideological bone-picking is taking place

and esp. since DOGE was led by Musk, who has an appreciation of basic science. One'd think he'd exercise good judgement and caution when it comes to cutting funding for science research.

Research on weather and climate is now considered "woke". Anything can be labeled as partisan. Safer to stop funding all research, unless it can be shown to support what we already believe.

"R&D is a cost center" what an insightful take.

What a depressing view of the world.