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As a purely practical matter, trying to fix federal budget outlays by cutting indirect funds attached to NSF/NIH/DOE etc. grants is like telling a guy who is morbidly obese by 350lbs that you can lose weight quickly by shaving your head and trimming your fingernails really, really close.

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didgetmaster 5 days ago | parent [-]

And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick.

As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.

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chewbacha 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doge is lying through its teeth. They are costing the government more than they are saving and the biggest savings have been contracts that never existed in the first place. They also keep revising down their saving projections. Now it’s down to 150 billion from 4 trillion.

They are operating a coup and if you don’t see it you are lying to yourself.

	▲	noworriesnate 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> They are operating a coup Did they fire Congress? Did they fire Trump or Vance? Which elected officials have they fired? If they haven't fired elected officials, this is the very first coup of its kind in recorded history, so the burden on you is to explain exactly how this situation is a coup.

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sapphicsnail 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The point of the analogy is that cutting your hair does nothing to solve the actual issue of obesity. Some of the people in the comments are arguing that the money spent on research is very little and that it ends up bringing in more money for the government than the initial investment. It would be like looking at an investment someone made that had a great return and arguing that they could save money by not investing the money in the first place. They could be wasting money on other things but cutting a profitable investment is not going to save them money.