2025-05-10 02:07:38
President Trump’s budget proposes a significant rethink of federal rental assistance programs, consolidating a number of them — and cutting them by more than $26 billion — next fiscal year. Many experts previously told The New York Times that this could result in low-income Americans losing access to federal housing benefits.
Here is more from the NYT. If you are a YIMBY type, odds are you should favor this, since some of the subsidy gain likely would end up captured by landlords.
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2025-05-09 23:56:21
1. Rohit on working with LLMs.
2. Learning to reason for long-form story generation.
3. Anthropic looking to hire economic wisdom.
4. “We’re [Stripe] partnering with Ramp to launch stablecoin-backed cards, first in Latin America.”
6. AI Agatha Christie is teaching an online writing course (NYT). The family is on board.
7. Olivier Blanchard on convergence in macroeconomics. I read this all as “we still do not understand very much” perhaps more than he intended?
8. “The Trump administration has announced its intention to repeal the Biden administration’s AI Diffusion Rule.” Important.
10. Non-tariff barriers in the US-UK trade deal (Bloomberg). And one British perspective.
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2025-05-09 21:47:02
The National Science Foundation (NSF), already battered by White House directives and staff reductions, is plunging into deeper turmoil. According to sources who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight NSF directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced. The current directors and deputy directors will lose their titles and might be reassigned to other positions at the agency or elsewhere in the federal government.
The consolidation appears to be driven in part by President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the agency’s $9 billion budget by 55% for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October. NSF’s decision to abolish its divisions could also be part of a larger restructuring of the agency’s grantmaking process that involves adding a new layer of review. NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.
As soon as this evening, NSF is also expected to send layoff notices to an unspecified number of its 1700-member staff. The remaining staff and programs will be assigned to one of the eight smaller directorates. Staff will receive a memo on Friday “with details to be finalized by the end of the fiscal year,” sources tell Science. The agency is also expected to issue another round of notices tomorrow terminating grants that have already been awarded, sources say. In the past 3 weeks, the agency has pulled the plug on almost 1400 grants worth more than $1 billion.
Here is more information, this story is still developing…
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2025-05-09 14:31:52
I know many Democrats have been heartened by recent electoral wins by the Labor Party in Australia and the Liberal Party in Canada, both boosted by anti-Trump sentiment.
But Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese views Australia as an energy-producing country, and while they have taken measures to boost renewables deployment and electric cars, they’re not seeking to curb coal mining or exports. Similarly, Mark Carney went to Alberta to proclaim his desire to make Canada an “energy superpower” that would “recognize that we are home to an abundance of conventional — that means oil and gas — conventional and clean energy resources.” I think that part where he went off script and clarified that by conventional he meant oil and gas is important. The prepared text was sort of doing dog whistle moderation, but he wanted people to hear his message clearly: that, while his strongest interest is in facilitating clean energy deployment, he intends to keep selling the world oil and gas as long as oil and gas are useful.
Everybody knows you’re not winning in Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, or Alaska on a message of shutting down fossil fuels. But if you’re not winning those states, you don’t have a majority. Instead of the national party adopting a message that’s toxic in those states and then recruiting candidates who try to distance themselves from it, the solution is for the national party to adopt the same kind of messages that work for the center-left in Canada and Australia and Norway.
That is from (partially gated) Matt Yglesias.
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2025-05-09 12:33:10
That is the topic of my latest column for The Free Press. Excerpt, starting with the point that the New Right has an obsession with seizing political power:
There are two essential problems with yelling “Rule!”
The first is that your side will not win every election. It’s a reliable assumption that, on average, “the other side,” whoever that may be, is going to win half of the time.
If you build up executive power, or state power more generally, in the service of your ends, the chances are pretty high that those same powers someday will be used against you. Democrats are enraged at Trump’s use of executive orders and executive power more broadly, but that did not begin with Trump. Consider how Barack Obama seized the power to provide legal status to illegal immigrants, or how Joe Biden sought to extinguish all those student loans, without buy-in from Congress. The point is that Trump stepped into a system that had already been transformed, and he is now using it to his own ends.
Or to take another example: Many Democrats hate DOGE, but in fact it is a repurposed version of a 2014 President Obama creation, namely the United States Digital Service, which initially was designed to improve the IT capabilities of the federal government. Ask yourself which Trump initiatives someday will be repurposed in an analogous fashion.
If your fundamental beliefs are in individual liberty, responsibility, and toleration, the escalation of state power, across competing administrations, is unlikely to prove your friend over time.
The second problem is that rule by the political right is not necessarily better than rule by the political left, even if you have basic right-leaning sympathies, as I do on a large number of issues, especially in the economic realm. But even on economics, the Trump administration is bringing depredations, such as the very high proposed tariff rates, that we would not have seen under a typical Democratic administration. Circa May 2025, I feel less economically free than I did under the Biden administration.
Such problems are all the more true when a given side wins a series of successive political victories.
Power corrupts; the right is not immune to that truism. For instance, the Republican Party typically has been a vehicle for fiscal conservatives, at least on paper and in rhetoric. Yet under the Republican trifectas of both George W. Bush and the first Trump administration, both spending and debt rose dramatically. When you get to be the one spending the money, it is hard to exercise restraint.
I go on to argue that classical liberalism in fact does win a series of periodic transformative victories, even though at many historical moments it is relatively dormant in influence. It is the way to be a real winner.
Definitely recommended, of real importance.
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2025-05-09 07:51:50
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