The Trump administration’s move to end many forms of government-backed scientific research apparently includes freezing money for research projects that were already approved.
After proposing to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in its draft budget, the Trump administration, through the Department of Energy, has started withholding money for grants already approved by the agency, Politico reported Thursday, citing two unidentified sources.
The hold on the money for the grants began last week, Politico reported. During his run for the White House, President Donald Trump promised to target federal funding for agencies, like ARPA-E, that promote clean energy technologies.
Trump’s “America First: A Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” released March 16, eliminates all funding for ARPA-E and and a similar agency for vehicle technology “because the private sector is better positioned to finance disruptive energy research and development and to commercialize innovative technologies.”
Despite the claim, ARPA-E grants are generally directed towards early research efforts whose potential corporate returns might not be immediately clear; the public sector may, and does, later use those results as stepping-stones for potential commercialization of the new technologies developed.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Pragmatism on Torture Another 'Sorry Kind of Wisdom':
It's still unclear exactly how much the offices of the previous President and Vice President participated in the drafting of the four recently released memos on torture and the nine previously released memos that were crafted as guidelines on how the executive branch could evade the law. The level of their participation would certainly have been useful information to obtain. It would have been helpful to a potential prosecutor to know whether those who ultimately ordered torture against suspected terrorists were also engaged in devising definitions stating that the torture they would be ordering wasn't actually torture. If they were, and there is every good reason to believe so, it's not unlike having John Gotti walk free after helping to draft guidelines for laws on racketeering.
We have been led to believe by many who have engaged this debate over the past three months that President Obama was playing 3D chess while the rest of us played checkers. There was a process going on, we were told, and it would take time, but eventually, after the economic mess and the health care crisis and other matters of importance were dealt with, those who ordered torture would be brought to account. We should, we were told, chill out because Obama has "frakkin' got this."
Now we know that justice for those who ordered torture will consist of sipping chilled piña coladas, commanding stratospheric lecture fees and drawing big advances for their memoirs.
On
today’s Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin notes scientists are marching & Chaffetz is walking. Journos banging into walls trying to deal with Trump. Is China a bigger scandal than Russia? WTF with Carter Page? That BS about Susan Rice? WH directed cover for Trump’s moronic tweets!
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