The White House Office of Budget and Management is planning massive changes to the way federal grants are handed out, making it so that government funding can only be spent on programs that are “aligned with administration policies and priorities.”

If passed, the new rules would also allow President Trump’s political appointees to supersede federal agencies’ merit-based decisions in order to ensure the grants “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” There is also a portion of the proposal that bans the use of “theories of disparate-impact liability”—a legal concept that helps determine when a policy is disproportionately discriminatory.

Experts argue that the change would give Trump’s political appointees, most of whom are not experts, undue control over what kind of research gets funded.

“This touches all parts of American life,” Veterans Administration psychiatrist Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan told the Los Angeles Times in an article published Friday. “Control of how all of the federal grants and programs are funded will fall under a small group of highly partisan individuals who would have very few limits on how they spend these billions of taxpayer dollars.… If there’s a specific age range that is at higher risk for suicide, and we want to figure out, well, what’s going on with people that are aged 14 to 19 … we can’t do that under the wording in this rule.”

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    16 days ago

    NOFX’s “The Decline” came out in 1999, already at least 30 years into the US decline.

    The people who cannot see we’re in decline have been ignoring it for five decades now. They won’t suddenly go “Oh shit, we’re a failing nation.”

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
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      16 days ago

      Honestly I think there’s a threshold where even the deliberately ignorant ones cannot ignore it anymore. Not sure about 1999, but nowadays that threshold is certainly reached. Just a few minutes ago I saw an anti-ICE report on FOX.

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the danger, the threat is over.

      • Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz
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        16 days ago

        Fox News is still mostly right-wing propaganda, even if they position themselves as being ‘moderate’ in comparison to propaganda mills like Newsmax.

      • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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        15 days ago

        Fox occasionally posts correct, factual, things so they can point to those as a justification that they’re not just right wing propaganda.

  • Captainvaqina@sh.itjust.works
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    16 days ago

    Vought deserves to be exterminated from planet earth.

    And of course by Vought, I mean the evil corporation depicted in Amazon’s hit series “The Boys.”