The Blatant Reasons for the Destruction of NSF (and other federal science agencies)
update through March 13 2026, via Jeremy Berg
Trump recently announced the new roster of the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which includes plenty of tech billionaires (and just one academic scientist).
This really cements the reasons for the decimation of science in the US:
- The tech bros have decided that AI will do everything
- A pathetic white christian nationalist wants to destroy “woke” science and “woke” universities
- Deranged MAHA conspiracy theorists run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
Today's post will discuss the first bullet point, and conclude with a catastrophic prediction.
PCAST Appointees
“Know thyself.” (Delphic maxim, 5th or 6th century BC)
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates, 399 BC)
1. Marc Andreessen, net worth $1.9 billion. Co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Notable for announcing his own lack of introspection and his ignorance of history (“...and if you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective).”
Andreessen called for the dissolution of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in a private group chat leaked in July 2025:
Andreessen’s message to the group about subjecting the NSF to “the bureaucratic death penalty” alleged that the agency, a major funder of university science and tech labs, backed projects that led to online censorship of American citizens... The investor added: “Raze it to the ground and start over.”
This is despite the shocker that NSF funded the Mosaic browser, the precursor to Netscape. Andreessen was a student at the University of Illinois and worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in 1993. In fact, the NSF website states:
In 1994, NSF awarded a large grant to NCSA specifically for Mosaic development, enhancement and support. Marc Andreessen, a member of the team that developed Mosaic, would later help found Netscape Communications.
When Netscape went public in 1995, Andreessen received a windfall of $56 million in stock options. And now he wants to raze the federal funding system responsible for his fortune. Not surprisingly, he also declared his disdain for DEI, immigration, Stanford, and MIT. It's laughable that such an insanely wealthy man felt the need to air his white grievances (among friends). Referring to the rise of diversity policies, he said, “And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore.”
“His people” (low income white students from rural areas) also lost their diversity funding when DEI grants were cancelled.
2. Sergey Brin, net worth $235 billion. Co-founder of Google. Currently working on Gemini AI. Psilocybin microdoser. Has invested in longevity research (Calico), biopharma for brain disorders (MapLight), 3D spatial multiomics (Stellaromics), ibogaine for traumatic brain injury, substance abuse, and psychiatric conditions (Soneira), CO2 removal from ambient air (280 Earth), and large-scale offshore energy hubs (Copenhagen Energy Islands). His nonprofit, Catalyst4 Inc., has donated $50 million to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
Sure, Brin may be using Catalyst4 as a tax shelter for the $366 million of Tesla stock he dumped after a dispute with Elon Musk, but at least his investments are trying to help humanity, rather than kill us all.
3. Safra Catz, net worth $3.4 billion. Former CEO of Oracle. On the board of the Ellison media conglomerate Paramount Skydance. While on the board of Walt Disney Company, she threatened to fire the CEO if Strange World, an animated film featuring a gay teenager, was released. Initially donated to Marco Rubio in 2016, but has been a Trump supporter ever since. She lives in Florida. In a mansion in Isla Bahia, an exclusive gated waterfront community in Fort Lauderdale. That explains a lot.
Dell and his wife will donate $6.25 billion to Trump accounts🤮, a nebulous proto-IRA investment vehicle for kids. The Dell's contribution will supposedly provide $250 each to 25 million children who live in neighborhoods where the median family income is less than $150,000.
The funds in Trump Accounts must be invested in certain mutual funds or exchange-traded funds that track the S&P 500 or another index of primarily American equities.
Once the child turns 18, the account can be converted to a traditional IRA, where early withdrawals before age 59½ may be subject to a 10% penalty. And beware the kiddie tax! Consult your financial advisor!
I know, I know, this is far removed from NSF. Which is precisely the point. Trump doesn't care about science and technology. He only cares about money and glory (however false).
5. Jacob DeWitte, net worth $1.7 billion. Founded nuclear fission company Oklo with his wife, Caroline Cochran (who is also worth $1.7 billion, according to Forbes). Cochran has a masters in nuclear engineering from MIT, and DeWitte has a Ph.D. from the same program. Oklo received venture capital from Sam Altman (OpenAI), Peter Thiel (the Antichrist), Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook), and other billionaires. Climate change denier and Trump campaign mega-contributor Chris Wright served on Oklo's board until he was confirmed as Secretary of Energy.
In May 2025, Trump signed the executive order Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies. DeWitte was there to praise the dictator:
“We’re working on small, next generation reactors that take technology America invented, developed, and pioneered, and bringing it to the market after it sat on the shelves of history for about 40 years — and it’s because of the actions that you’re doing today that are going to help unleash that. Changing the permitting dynamics is going to help things move faster.”
Oklo has no revenue and $55 million in losses as of June 2025. They have no reliable source of HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium, also known as unobtainium) and no plan to open a plant any time soon. Meanwhile, potential demand from the overpromise of AI data centers (see Jensen Huang) may be waning. According to investment newsletter TheStreet, “Oklo remains a pre-revenue company, with valuation driven by execution milestones rather than financial results.”
6. Fred Ehrsam, net worth $2.6 billion. Co-founder of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange. The Trump family made billions from their own crypto-grift, which was condemned as “corruption on a breathtaking level” and “among the greatest US scandals ever.”
Ehrsham also poached eight employees from Neuralink and started Nudge, a start-up producing a consumer headset based on focused ultrasound. Whether it works as advertised will be an interesting topic for the future.
7. Larry Ellison, net worth $201 billion (he lost $46 billion so far this year). Founder of Oracle, where he was CEO from 1977 to 2014. Currently he's CTO and executive chair. Father of David Ellison, who owns a Trump-friendly media monopoly that censors unflattering coverage (e.g., Bari Weiss pulled the 60 Minutes episode on CECOT, the torture prison in El Salvador).
image via Mary Trump
Larry is a horrible person. In 2012 he purchased 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi, where he acts like a plantation owner:
...Ellison is a modern American king—incomprehensibly wealthy and powerful. Many residents both rent from him and work for him, and a provision in his residential leases states that if you’re terminated from a job with any of his companies, you can be kicked out of your home, too. Under Ellison, 30-day leases have become the norm for Lanai’s small businesses, as opposed to the five-year terms some were used to before.
Accused war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu vacationed there with his family in 2021. Ellison is a prosecution witness in Netanyahu's long-delayed corruption trial, yet he forced another billionaire to drop his own lawyer in favor of defending Bibi.
8. David Friedberg, net worth $1.2 billion. Founded The Climate Corporation (an agriculture tech company), which was sold to Monsanto for $1.1 billion. In 2016 he founded The Production Board, a holding company that invests in “technology businesses across life sciences, food and agriculture, and software.” He is a proponent of the Abundance Movement and its deregulation of environmental protections. He believes AI will usher in a utopian society where everyone has free time for family and leisure.
AI's positive outcomes are being underestimated
"Folks are underestimating and under realizing the benefits, at this stage, of what's going to come out of the AI revolution and how it's ultimately going to benefit people's availability of products, cost of goods, and access to things."
This is ridiculous, because we already have superabundance, but the billionaires refuse to share their wealth. As Gil Duran stated:
The problem with this fairy tale fantasy lie of Altman's [and others] is that we already have abundance. It's just not fairly distributed in the world. Most of it is going to a small percentage of people. And so if the people who are the profiteers of our current abundance aren't sharing it now, why the hell are they going to share it in the future?
Friedberg also co-hosts the manosphere-adjacent All-In podcast. Red-pilled and pro-MAGA:
No other show or podcast has paved the country’s path to founder mode so directly as All-In. On the heels of helping bankroll Trump’s campaign and hosting him on the pod, the Besties are becoming fixtures at the White House. Days prior to the summit, [David] Sacks and [Chamath] Palihapitiya dined there along with a coterie of Silicon Valley’s most powerful CEOs. Before Trump even took office, he appointed Sacks as the country’s “crypto and AI czar” to help shape federal policy on everything from digital money to machine intelligence.
9. Jensen Huang, net worth $165 billion. Founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, best known for its graphical processing units (GPUs), which are critical for AI. Huang received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford by attending night classes. His company has a market capitalization of over $4 trillion, accounting for 7-8% of the S&P 500 index.
Ed Zitron, the angriest tech critic, has written extensively about circular deals between NVIDIA, Oracle, OpenAI, and other behemoths. For instance, The AI Bubble's Impossible Promises:
NVIDIA invested money in a company [a special purpose vehicle] specifically built to buy chips from it, which then promptly handed the money back to NVIDIA along with a bunch of other money, and then whatever happened next is somebody else’s problem.
and The Hater's Guide To NVIDIA:
NVIDIA's Future Success Is Predicated On The Ability For Everybody To Keep Feeding It Tens Of Billions Of Dollars Every Quarter, Requiring Endless Debt, Space, and Actual AI Demand To Exist
...and the magnificent tome, The AI Industry Is Lying To You (a 37 minute read)
Speaking of which, here is Sam Altman musing that GPT-5 is already doing new science! (link to video)
This overly optimistic view has infiltrated federal agencies.
I'm listening in on the DOE Office of Science Advisory Committee meeting and the current speaker (sorry, did not catch their name) said that researchers are often limited in their resources and facilities, and that we could be investing more....and that the solution is AI. I'm going to explode.
— Karolina Heyduk (@kheyduk.bsky.social) March 27, 2026 at 11:04 AM
Heyduk went on to say,
"AI can't pay my grad students or postdocs. AI can't do our experiments, collect really any of our data, make our lab reagents, fix our broken machines as they age. ... Actually its pretty clear from this discussion they don't see a need for the types of scientist we're training in the lab. Automated labs can do it all."
[see outsourcing of scientific research below]
10. John Martintis, the only academic on the panel, is currently a Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara. He shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” In 2014 he moved from UCSB to Google AI Quantum, where his research group achieved quantum supremacy: they built a programmable superconducting processor that could sample a quantum circuit a million times in 200 seconds, which would take 10,000 years with a classical supercomputer (Nature, 2019).
But in 2020, a conflict in “management styles” led Martintis to resign from Google and return to UCSB. In an interview, Martinis explained how his singular focus [and complete control over his research group] led to tension:
To explain the tension, you should understand that my personal research style tends to be very intently focused. For example, with the quantum supremacy experiment, I focused on doing the experiment because I thought it would be a milestone and very challenging, but doable. I thought it would strongly focus the group on important problems. I think it was hard on people in the group to focus on quantum supremacy because it meant they couldn't work on other things they wanted to do, and most importantly, we could fail.
And then we learn that Martinis is a fan of Peter Thiel, the Antichrist who co-founded Palantir. 1
Martinis is a co-founder and CTO of Qolab, a quantum computing start-up that has raised at least $16 million in venture capital.
11. Bob Mumgaard, net worth unknown. Founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), which has raised $3 billion in venture capital from NVIDIA, Google, Mitsubishi, Morgan Stanley, etc. Mumgaard has an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering and a Ph.D. in Applied Plasma Physics, both from MIT. CFS is a spinoff of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center,2 which has received substantial federal funding.
When will fusion energy plants be fully operational? Estimates vary, depending on who you ask. Some experts say 2050, while Helion (backed by Sam Altman) projects it will provide power to OpenAI and Microsoft starting in 2028, which seems preposterous.
And how can we forget the bizarre merger of Trump's failing social media site (Truth Social) with another fusion energy company? Reminder: Trump Media & Technology Group has agreed to a more than $6 billion merger with fusion company TAE Technologies. Trump's shares increased from $400 million to about $1.6 billion. The level of corruption is unfathomable. And it goes without saying that the members of PCAST were chosen for their abilities to further enrich the Trump family.
12. Lisa Su, net worth 1.1 billion. President and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) since 2014. She has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where she was one of her supervisor's best students ever. In addition to many other awards, Su was the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021. She was also named to PCAST by Biden and is the only bipartisan choice. She and Martinis were praised by a former member of the panel.
13. Mark Zuckerberg, net worth $220 billion.3 Tries very hard to be a cool guy with the in-crowd, but it just never works. I recommend watching the Zuckerberg episode of This F*cking Guy on YouTube. Hysteria’s research is thorough, covering everything from nerd beginnings to failed products (like the entire Metaverse) to Facebook-fueled genocides to Republican political shenanigans (the Cambridge Analytica scandal) to his newfound embrace of masculinity.
Catastrophic Consequences
It's a slow march to the death of federal funding for basic research
in the US. "Innovation" and "dominance" are code words for enriching the
billionaires. American Dynamism represents a16z's push for privatization and for billions of dollars in military contracts,
paid for by your tax dollars (if you're in the bottom 90% or so).
Invest in visionary defense tech founders, not in education or
healthcare.
Make procurement of commercial items using commercial procedures the default for DOD acquisitions absent a documented need for a defense-specific system. America’s Founders are delivering superior commercial solutions at significantly lower cost. Those commercial solutions should be the default.
Compare this to basic science last. From Science magazine, 16 Mar 2026:
What’s happening to NSF now highlights how this year’s process differs. Last month, each account within the agency—NSF has six—received its own apportionment [limits on the dispersal of agency funds]. ... But NSF’s two biggest accounts—$7 billion for research and $1 billion for science education—came with footnotes that could lead to potentially devastating consequences for researchers.
Only 613 NSF grants have been awarded in the first half of FY2026 (Oct 1 2025 – Mar 31 2026), an 80% decrease from 2021 – 2024.
Meanwhile, the outsourcing of scientific research to AI has begun.
Genesis Mission to Accelerate AI for Scientific Discovery
Harnessing AI as a scientific tool will revolutionize the way scientific research is conducted.
- For example, AI technologies can generate models of protein structures and novel materials, design and analyze experiments, and aggregate and generate new data faster and more effectively. Research that once took years could now take weeks or months.
Generate new data. To replace bench work? To supersede all neuroimaging modalities? How, exactly, is that supposed to happen? At present, large language models (LLMs) are poor at answering expert level academic questions.
A consortium of researchers compiled a list of 2,500 challenging questions covering math, physics, biology, computer science, humanities, engineering, and chemistry (Nature, 2026). The authors called this Humanity's Last Exam (HLE). And the models they tested had very low accuracy.
Even if performance was adequate, this would not indicate that LLMs possess “artificial general intelligence” (as claimed by tech oligarchs everywhere) or even autonomous research capabilities (Nature, 2026):
High accuracy on HLE would demonstrate expert-level performance on closed-ended, verifiable questions and cutting-edge scientific knowledge, but it would not alone suggest autonomous research capabilities or artificial general intelligence. HLE tests structured academic problems rather than open-ended research or creative problem-solving abilities, making it a focused measure of technical knowledge and reasoning across a diverse range of subjects...
Introspection...
Footnotes
1 The interviewer, Paul Smith-Goodson, takes a sidebar to tell the reader that Martinis subscribes to the Peter Thiel definition of personality.
At this point, Professor Martinis asked me if I had read Peter Thiel's book, Zero to One. Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir. He explained that Peter Thiel defines personality styles as either a definite optimist or indefinite optimist. Professor Martinis considers himself to be a definite optimist. One quote from Thiel's book seems to mirror his thinking: “…a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.” I admitted that I started the book but failed to finish it.
2 As an aside, the director (Nuno Loureiro) was murdered by the Brown University shooter in a separate incident.
3 These amounts can vary wildly day by day (Zuckerberg is just under $200 $196 billion). Track the billionaires net worth in real time!
seen at No Kings on March 28, 2026
posted by The Neurocritic @ 4:05 PM
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