I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
PSF money does not really go into development. Some inner circle members have been sponsored to do maintenance work, but Python would be largely the same with zero donations.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
That's a bad idea. Grant fraud is illegal. It'd be easy to use AI to find simple euphemism treadmills, and also to check if the published papers aren't related to the grant that funded them.
This will eventually escalate to large scale prosecutions of academics. And, they will lose, because they are very openly boasting about how they are ignoring the law and even court orders. It was recently discovered that one college had claimed they'd shut down their DEI office but had actually just moved it to a restricted area. This kind of blatant lying is biting the hand that feeds them and will have severe consequences.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
If you believe those things, you should think long and hard about what that means to make
that your creed and why those concepts are so important to this administration to value, and why they seek to make those ideas defacto illegal.
If you believe those things, you should think long and hard about what it means to live by them when you live upon soil that was stolen and conquested from its original inhabitants.
This isn’t about an administration trying to correct “reverse racism” or innocently trying to reform legitimately unfair affirmative action programs.
No, this is an administration that is copy/pasting the Nazi playbook and, as we speak right now, is literally sending a military force upon on its own people. It is a factual, verified, witnessed truth that this military force is conducting warrantless detentions and deportations which have not just included undocumented immigrants (who still have constitutional rights and are not committing a criminal offense by existing in this country), but also US citizens.
The last video I watched of an ICE interaction was of a masked anonymous agent harassing a random person in a Walmart parking lot asking her where she was born, quite literally doing the “papers, please” routine that we used to assume was a Stalinist Soviet Union routine that could never reach our shores, and he was doing so solely because she was brown and spoke Spanish. This was one video of many others infractions by this gestapo force.
No, this isn’t some kind of legitimate operation to root out gangs and criminals like my Fox News parents have insisted to me many times - and even if it was, I am not so sure a gang of masked federal agents working for an authoritarian executive branch who take their cases to a court that is also under the control of the executive branch is an upgrade over our “gang-infested” status quo.
Yes, it’s important we make a stand right now and refuse to aid this fascist regime, and refuse to capitulate to their insane and unconstitutional demands.
> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
To paraphrase:
```
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together).
```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men.
There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews.
That one change helped shift the dial from almost entirely male speaker lineups to a much more balanced speaker lineup. As a result, we get a much broader range of talks.
There is nothing "immoral, hate based, and anti-truth" about efforts like this.
>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews
Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
Making a process blind to the person applying is a common DEI tool. Orchestra auditions are the famous one that I know about off the top of my head. Some links I googled and skimmed for rough quality, not vetted for serious study and may only be a starting point:
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI
... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)
if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
That seems unlikely to be true. The Python community is too large to have a single standardized talk proposal process.
Let's quickly check. EuroPython says nothing about a blind approval programme but does mention how they deliberately select talks to increase diversity: https://ep2025.europython.eu/selection/
PyCon US 2020 had a whole section of their website devoted to diversity. It specifically says that people should recommend them "appropriate" speakers and they are trying to create a "diverse speaker roster". This is the opposite of what you're claiming. https://us.pycon.org/2020/about/diversity/
It seems very unlikely hiding names would add more female speakers. In other very similar contexts that move always results in more white men being selected, not fewer. And in such cases the DEI proponents who advocated for it suddenly decide that identifying information shouldn't be hidden after all.
An embarrassing example of that was ElectronConf. They decided conferences had lots of male speakers because of unconscious sexism by conference organizers, so they hid all the names during the review phase. When the final slate was revealed, 100% of the selected talks would be by men so they just canceled the entire conference. They rather burned everything to the ground than admit their ideology was flawed.
This reveals their anti-male, anti-white agenda: hiding names is presented as an obviously good idea until they discover there was indeed discrimination, but by feminists. And then suddenly meritocratic selection isn't a good idea anymore.
This sort of thing is why DEI is immoral. It is always and everywhere anti-man and anti-western.
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.
I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status.
Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
> Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Are we reading the same thing? You are quoting something that says that the PSF's standard DEI policies are a violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the PSF does not agree with, and likely no court would ever agree with.
Compliance with law is always mandatory, but by signing a contract that misstates the law and in fact endorses a particular and incorrect interperation of the law, means that actually litigating the law correctly lately in the courts is harder.
Further, by carrying out the PSF's existing policies, the PSF is carrying ou their principles, rather than your derisive and inaccurate characterization of that as mere "optics."
> I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness,
If you were actually for those things, you'd be for what the PSF does! That's what they do! Instead you are supporting the oppression of those things with your comment.
On the ending of “DEI” (itself an eviscerated approach to addressing the minimal demands to address over two centuries of american slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal violence, anti-trans, anti-queer violence) as targeted death making. The list of the scientific establishment’s participation, complicity, neglect is long. Some programs called immediately to mind include:
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
This is called getting high on your own supply. It was never any of those things, but lies like the ones you are spreading were perpetuated to push back against the idea of equal fairness for all.
As proof that you are spreading further lies, one only has to look at the long string of court filings that shows that the administrations' policies fighting DEI are outright racism, words that are coming from conservative judges appointed long ago that operate based on truth rather than whatever misinformation cult has taken over so much of politics these days. Here's just one of many many many instances of blatant racism being perpetrated through Trump's politicization of science funding.
> ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities—The Reagan-appointed judge ordered the NIH to restore funds for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western country.
I'm white and not discriminated against in my Western-adjacent country (Czech Republic) and think most of Europe is the same.
I see race-based politics as primarily a US thing: both the militant "diversity advocates" and the white supremacists. From my point of view over the ocean they are quite similar: putting importance of skin colour over other things.
As a white American, this feels insulting to all those around me. Diversity is what made the US so great. White people are just one tone of the human palette.
They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
We can debate whether doing this rights historical wrongs but we can't pretend it is not racist to treat different people of different skin colors differently.
> They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
"Racism" means the oppression of one group because of race.
In an historically racist society (writing this in New Zealand) righting those historical wrongs involves some treating "...one group different from others based on race."
It is bad enough here, and it continues here explicitly by the current government (indigenous people just lost a bunch of property rights because they were indigenous, blatant, official, statutory racism), but according to people I respect in the USA it is considerably worse there.
"ACT New Zealand party, a junior partner in the governing centre-right coalition government, last week unveiled the bill, which it had promised during last year’s election, arguing that those rights should also apply to non-Indigenous citizens."
How does grant others the same rights turn into racism. Shouldn't everyone have those rights including groups that are bigger minorites in New Zealand like blacks of Indians from India?
When we single out groups for special treatment we exclude others who might need it more but who's voices are softer.
It might be worse in the US compared to New Zealand but compared to most of the rest of the world: Middle East, India, Africa, Europe, Russia, China, Korea the US is the least racist place but also has the biggest anti-racism industry which makes their voiced louder.
I am talking of the Foreshore and Seabed Act (under a different name) that overturned settled case law and disapropriated IWI claims for property rights.
Māori have their property rights confiscated regularly. About every twenty or thirty years there is another round
That said the racism here is mild compared to reports from the USA
When you become what you are fighting against you become the problem.
If the issue is not using a person's race to make blanket judgements against them then using someone's race to to counterbalance historical is equally as wrong.
The message you are telling everyone is you should use someone's race to judge them. The people in power changes but the racism never goes away.
You end up with foolish ideas like reparations where the people demanding money are a product of a union between a slave and slave owner where half of you should pay the other half.
Or quota systems that exclude minorities because they aren't the right race.
The racism you want to keep needs to be let go. You can't say racism is bad but then use it to enrich yourself.
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws.
It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
If you think treating people differently based on race is fine, you ARE a racist. If you think treating people differently based on sex is fine, you ARE a sexist. My dude.
That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).
However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.
For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.
People ARE treated differently based on race and gender. For example, women are severely underrepresented in the tech industry.
You can either look into why that is and attempt to address underlying issues, or you can pretend people are sexist for doing something that doesn't directly benefit you.
The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio of 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
If they picked any of the conferences based on the gender of the attendees, then they were pretty obviously discriminating based on a protected characteristic and should face legal ramifications for it.
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.
You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
> at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion
The terms are pretty clear to me - "don't operate any programs that advance or promote DEI". Why does a non-profit dedicated to a programming language need to host panels about diversity and inclusion (aka "morally correct" discrimination)? You say it like it's some inevitability because the people in question just can't help themselves (which, honestly, might be true...)
If they want to do it anyway, they are free to do so, as America is a free country, but they are not entitled to government funding (read: tax money) to pay for these programs. The taxpayers explicitly voted for this. Framing their withdrawal from the grant proposal as some grand moral stance against the big bad orange man is, quite frankly, cringe-worthy.
Edit: I tried to reply to the comment below, but can't because I'm now shadowbanned. That's what I get for not perpetuating the political echochamber here on orange reddit, I guess.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio is 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
I'm not sure that the USA has ever been in such a low standing with the rest of the 'democratic world' in the last 100 years. That's not saying the rest of the world has their stuff together, but it seems that fundamentally un-American ethos is the new nationalist American one that a 1/3 of the country wants.
What's happening guys?
This isn't good for the PSF, but if these "poison pill" terms are a pattern that applies to all NSF and (presumably) other government research funding, the entire state of modern scientific research is at risk.
Regardless of how you, as an individual, might feel about "DEI," imposing onerous political terms on scientific grants harms everyone in the long term.
The direction of political winds shift over time. An organization like the PSF cannot assume an open-ended liability like that. DEI today, but what tomorrow? As we have seen, political leadership in the US has shown itself to be unreliable, pernicious, and vindictive.
US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.
I wonder, how likely do you think there would be a retaliatory threat of revoking PSF’s nonprofit status for a perceived snub in rejecting the offer?
The IRS has withheld 501(c) status from the president’s perceived adversaries before[0]. But I haven’t heard of 501(c) status being revoked.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
"The FBI stated it found no evidence of "enemy hunting" of the kind that had been suspected, but that the investigation did reveal the IRS to be a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules that IRS personnel did not fully understand. "
Also, I don't get that an Organization such as the PSF operates at a $5 million dollar budget which quite arguably provides Billions or even Trillions in revenue across the Tech sector.
This is an unfortunate state of all open source. The entire economic model is broken, but PSF is one of the better operationalized groups out there.
Not to completely change the topic, but to add context, the Ruby Central drama that has unfolded over the past few weeks originally began as a brainstorm to raise ~$250k in annual funds.
PSF money does not really go into development. Some inner circle members have been sponsored to do maintenance work, but Python would be largely the same with zero donations.
Pretty bold statement with no evidence.
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)
It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
That's a bad idea. Grant fraud is illegal. It'd be easy to use AI to find simple euphemism treadmills, and also to check if the published papers aren't related to the grant that funded them.
This will eventually escalate to large scale prosecutions of academics. And, they will lose, because they are very openly boasting about how they are ignoring the law and even court orders. It was recently discovered that one college had claimed they'd shut down their DEI office but had actually just moved it to a restricted area. This kind of blatant lying is biting the hand that feeds them and will have severe consequences.
Its not fraud. The grant proposal accurately describes the research occurring, and people evaluating the grant will have no misconception about what they are funding. The problem is that political appointees have been applying dumb keyword searches which block research that has nothing to do with the issues they object to. Like using privilege in the computer security sense. Or bias in the statistical sense, unrelated to political leaning.
Take a look at the comments left by that profile. I don’t think that they would be able to understand what you are saying here, all they see is red.
A partial recent comment “qcnguy” made: “DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology. Requiring the PSF to dump DEI if they want the money is good for everyone, because DEI is bad for people”
[flagged]
> The entire point is to create misconceptions in the people evaluating the grant. That is grant fraud.
No and no. It was just explicitly and intricately explained to you how that's not true, and you didn't even engage with the explanation.
The censors are filtering words not on the meaning of the words but based on the existence of other meanings of words. It's blatantly horrific behavior, in violation of any basic code of ethics or morals.
No fraud is being described in these comments by the grant applicants. However, among those trying to perpetrate political correctness on the a non-political process, unethical behavior abounds.
> Undoubtably their searches have also been finding lots of research that is related to what they object to. You can't use the existence of mistakes to claim that deceiving the government therefore isn't fraud. That's not how the law works.
First, having political objections to some types of research and imposing that sort of political filter is highly unethical in these scientific positions. Second, because they sometimes execute this political censorship successfully does not justify the inaccurate political censorship.
Nobody supporting anything like this has a leg to stand on about laws or legality or anything relating to the rule of law. The Trump administration is acting completely lawlessly, ignores court orders, and has zero regard for the constitution.
The requirements the GP is describing are to avoid using certain words. It's not fraudulent to describe the same work without using the banned words.
That's definitely not the requirement! The requirement is to avoid doing certain kinds of "research" that the government disagrees is valid research to fund, characterized by the principles underlying it.
They may have started by using certain keywords to find examples of such grants to terminate, but the requirement itself has nothing to do with words and everything to do with the intentions.
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.
I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
I know someone whose grant was cancelled for studying genetic diversity in animal populations.
I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
If you believe those things, you should think long and hard about what that means to make that your creed and why those concepts are so important to this administration to value, and why they seek to make those ideas defacto illegal.
If you believe those things, you should think long and hard about what it means to live by them when you live upon soil that was stolen and conquested from its original inhabitants.
This isn’t about an administration trying to correct “reverse racism” or innocently trying to reform legitimately unfair affirmative action programs.
No, this is an administration that is copy/pasting the Nazi playbook and, as we speak right now, is literally sending a military force upon on its own people. It is a factual, verified, witnessed truth that this military force is conducting warrantless detentions and deportations which have not just included undocumented immigrants (who still have constitutional rights and are not committing a criminal offense by existing in this country), but also US citizens.
The last video I watched of an ICE interaction was of a masked anonymous agent harassing a random person in a Walmart parking lot asking her where she was born, quite literally doing the “papers, please” routine that we used to assume was a Stalinist Soviet Union routine that could never reach our shores, and he was doing so solely because she was brown and spoke Spanish. This was one video of many others infractions by this gestapo force.
No, this isn’t some kind of legitimate operation to root out gangs and criminals like my Fox News parents have insisted to me many times - and even if it was, I am not so sure a gang of masked federal agents working for an authoritarian executive branch who take their cases to a court that is also under the control of the executive branch is an upgrade over our “gang-infested” status quo.
Yes, it’s important we make a stand right now and refuse to aid this fascist regime, and refuse to capitulate to their insane and unconstitutional demands.
> I am going to add my own stronger language than yours: if you don’t feel positively about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you are sending a message that you instead support homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else. That's not "pro homogeneity" - only someone whose perspective is entirely warped by this one factor would think that way.
> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
This is mystical thinking. We can establish systems for hiring based on capability.
The issue is more complex.
If groups of people are disadvantaged from birth and then throughout their life, it's unlikely they will be the best at anything.
But you could imagine that the person with the best potential was part of that group.
In effect, an unjust society that doesn't allow fair equal opportunities from birth and throughout life is sub-optimal at yielding the best candidates for any given role, as it artificially restricts the pool.
The other complexity is the inherent bias in the assessment process. How people assess who is best qualified has tons of bias. Again, that means the selection is sub-optimal at finding the actually best candidate.
It becomes hard to talk of meritocracy when most people's performance derive from circumstances like birth, wealth, connections. Someone else might have performed even better had they'd been given the same circumstances.
Finally, you have the problem of not maximizing everyone's potential even if they're not going to be the best.
Obviously we can't have the best at every job. Only one company will have the real best at any given role. Most jobs will be done by the average performer. That's a mathematical truth.
Thus raising the average has tremendous lift in raising quality of work accross the board.
In order to raise the average, you have to give everyone what they need to max out their potential, even if one's potential is lower. That might mean some need more than others, disabled people are a good example, they'll need lots of compensating equipment and what not to maximize their potential and raise their overall effect to society.
To me, those are the basis problems that people were trying to solve. Obviously, a lot of the solutions to these became performative dances, but I think the problem statement aligns well with what you have too.
The idea being that the person right now that we seem best qualified is truly the best isn't true unless we achieve a better system at maximizing people's potential.
Thus true meritocracy demands accepting diversity, equity, inclusion and fair equal opportunities.
Without it, you're only circumstancially demonstrably the best, and you never know if you truly are the better one.
This complex discussion does exist, you’re right.
At the same time, this complex discussion is not what the present administration is engaging in.
At best they are using it as a cover story.
Would you still be the best person for your current role if you'd been excluded from your education and training/previous roles based on your ethnicity/sex?
Definitely not, if I'd not had the relevant education, training, or experience. But we have a giant, expensive state and corporate apparatus to correct this, but it's not based on this actual experience. It's based on demographics. Making it incredibly inaccurate.
>It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
No human being has ever objectively evaluated a candidate on their "merits" and ignored their ethnicity, sex, etc.
That's not how the human brain can work.
That does not mean I support the "if you aren't with us, you're against us" ideology, but this absurdist belief that the majority of humans do a good job of avoiding prejudice has never ever been supported by reality.
If that were true, American race based slavery would not have been controversial, it would have been utterly undoable. It was possible because it is trivial for the human brain to dehumanize others. It's an integral part of our brain that was used for generations to maintain social alignment. It doesn't go away just because we banned slavery.
Human biases are so bad, most of the point of science is to stop trusting human reasoning at all.
We have to triple blind studies with medicine, because despite everyone involved being fairly educated in the domain, they will still fuck up data with their biases. Doctors will accidentally fuck up a drug trial because they are human. They don't want to, because they know that would be a huge waste of resources and time and human labor, but they do because the brain doesn't care what you think you want. It isn't constructed to.
And I'm not talking bias as some political bullshit. I'm talking bias as in, human beings will reliably make the same statistical mistakes because our brains overfit a few data points all the damn time, and only attempt to even fit data points after we've already made up our mind.
Statisticians will still experience gambling fallacies.
> It excludes the many, many more people
Are these people actually attested? In my experience, virtually everyone I've ever seen make a strong argument against "DEI" ended up having some... unsavory attitudes more generally. Scratch hard in discussion or check post histories[1] and you end up at some variant of white nationalism or men's rights, almost every time.
Basically no one goes to bat for "wanting the best people in a role". People get political when they feel aggrieved. "DEI mania" is always a response to "I think this is going to hurt people like me".
[1] Edit: I did. And... well...
men's right? I'm shuddering in my chair. Next you tell me they volunteer for a homeless shelter too.
> This "if you're not for us you're against us" is a very broken way of thinking.
This is the paradox of tolerance is invoked.
The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
If you are “with that” then yes, you are against us.
This is not to say that I am intending to be hostile and unwelcoming to those who have been deceived by this regime. Germany had to go through the deprogramming process at the end of World War II. They didn’t just throw every single ordinary person who ever supported the Nazi party in jail or socially shun them for life, they went through a healing process.
> The people in the present administration have been blowing white supremacist and pro-violence dog whistles for over a decade now.
I think this is in itself a huge problem. You've been told this, repeatedly, for 10 years, which explains why so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US. Why do you still believe dogwhistles to be a bigger problem than actual violence?
I haven’t been told this, I have witnessed it as a primary source. I watched Trump tell cops that they should rough up suspects. I watched Trump tell the January 6 crowd that they need to fight like hell or they’ll lose this country. I watched Trumpers erect gallows for Mike Pence. I watched Trump tell the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by like they were his personal goon squad. I watched Trump say that second amendment people could help stop his opposition.
This “violence on the left” that you speak of, I haven’t personally seen a whole lot of it.
No Kings was the largest protest in American history and not a single person was arrested for any protest infraction in New York City. The NYPD publicly announced it.
How many people wearing Joe Biden hats breached the capitol? Is there any left-wing violence in the past few decades of America that you would call more extreme than breaking into the capitol building?
"so much of the political violence (and celebration thereof) is on the left in the US"
Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, right-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of left-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the right commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the left together, then you can't complain when the right gets lumped together).
To paraphrase: ``` Biiiiiiiig citation needed. By every available metric, left-wing terror attacks dominate the political violence numbers in the US. I don't know what fantasy world you've been living in, but frankly it sounds pretty sweet to me.
And mass violence is a worse problem than targeted violence. Whether or not you think they deserved it, the notable cases of right-wing violence in the last year have been individual targets. When the left commits violence, they roll up to a synagogue and gun down everyone inside. Or a gay nightclub. Or they slam a couple planes into buildings (yeah, if you're going to lump the right together, then you can't complain when the left gets lumped together). ```
Both he and you are empty talkers who simply insult the other side without any basis.
Isn't the opposite of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion by de Morgan law homogeneity or inequity or exclusion?
I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.
I am going to going even further than you and suggest if you are an American do not support America First, that means you instead support America Last.
If you believe that, you should think about what other countries and groups support those kinds of things, and what kind of company supporting terrorist groups puts you in.
No, there isn't a legitimate reason not to want America First.
Yes, it's important we call out anyone and stand against people who want to tear down America and fully pursue all applicable laws that apply to this destructive behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
Pretty sure it was an attempt at satire or reductio ad absurdem.
I'm not sure it was
It was the exact same political absurdist talking point, just swapping "DEI" for "America First". Come on.
America first I assume now means “South America First” in regard to financially bailing out Argentina in exchange for political favors.
Yes, better than getting nothing in return for those billions by giving them out to warlords in Africa for luxury cars and airplanes... I mean "aid"
lol, there are so many impeachment-worthy scandals it is hard to keep track of. I completely forgot about the free airplane.
Nixon is rolling in his grave with envy. He has to resign over a parking ticket by comparison.
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> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
Much of the DEI work stems from people looking around a decade or so ago at tech conferences, and noticing that they were almost entirely comprised of men.
There's way too much to address in a single comment, so I'll share one specific thing the Python community has done over the past ten+ years that's made a world of difference: The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews.
That one change helped shift the dial from almost entirely male speaker lineups to a much more balanced speaker lineup. As a result, we get a much broader range of talks.
There is nothing "immoral, hate based, and anti-truth" about efforts like this.
>> The talk proposal process has been standardized so identifying information is hidden in the first round of reviews
Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI. The people opposing DEI [claim to] want qualifications to matter and race/gender/whatever issues not to.
Making a process blind to the person applying is a common DEI tool. Orchestra auditions are the famous one that I know about off the top of my head. Some links I googled and skimmed for rough quality, not vetted for serious study and may only be a starting point:
2013: https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac...
> Making the talk proposal process blind seems more like meritocracy than DEI
... I mean, that's because they're the same thing, presuming that you use the literal definition of 'meritocracy'. Now, 'meritocracy' is sometimes used to mean "only hire straight white guys who went to one of about four universities", but that it is being used as a euphemism, not in its literal meaning (however, these days it is so often used in that euphemistic sense that it has become honestly pretty pointless as a term.)
True meritocracy and true DEI are the same thing.
if you were to poll this very forum, you would find out that it is too almost entirely comprised of (biological) men. shall we apply the DEI principles here and give female posters +100 free karma on every comment/submission?
This is called a strawman argument and is functionally worthless for this discusson
That seems unlikely to be true. The Python community is too large to have a single standardized talk proposal process.
Let's quickly check. EuroPython says nothing about a blind approval programme but does mention how they deliberately select talks to increase diversity: https://ep2025.europython.eu/selection/
PyCon US 2020 had a whole section of their website devoted to diversity. It specifically says that people should recommend them "appropriate" speakers and they are trying to create a "diverse speaker roster". This is the opposite of what you're claiming. https://us.pycon.org/2020/about/diversity/
It seems very unlikely hiding names would add more female speakers. In other very similar contexts that move always results in more white men being selected, not fewer. And in such cases the DEI proponents who advocated for it suddenly decide that identifying information shouldn't be hidden after all.
An embarrassing example of that was ElectronConf. They decided conferences had lots of male speakers because of unconscious sexism by conference organizers, so they hid all the names during the review phase. When the final slate was revealed, 100% of the selected talks would be by men so they just canceled the entire conference. They rather burned everything to the ground than admit their ideology was flawed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
This reveals their anti-male, anti-white agenda: hiding names is presented as an obviously good idea until they discover there was indeed discrimination, but by feminists. And then suddenly meritocratic selection isn't a good idea anymore.
This sort of thing is why DEI is immoral. It is always and everywhere anti-man and anti-western.
Do you have any suggestions for how the PSF could fulfill its mission of being more inclusive in a non-immoral way?
PSF made their own choice based on their own politics and optics. Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
DEI was weaponized in the USA, where in quite a few instances, people couldn't get promoted or hired because of their race (typically white or asian). It was about preferential treatment, where you would get hired because of your race, and not merit.
I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness, and I don't think we should exclude people based on the color of their skin or their socioeconomic status. Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
PSF is just being stupid (or pragmatic) about it.
> Note that requirements had nothing against diversity or fairness. It was fairly specific: "discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Are we reading the same thing? You are quoting something that says that the PSF's standard DEI policies are a violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the PSF does not agree with, and likely no court would ever agree with.
Compliance with law is always mandatory, but by signing a contract that misstates the law and in fact endorses a particular and incorrect interperation of the law, means that actually litigating the law correctly lately in the courts is harder.
Further, by carrying out the PSF's existing policies, the PSF is carrying ou their principles, rather than your derisive and inaccurate characterization of that as mere "optics."
> I am all for diversity, I am all for fairness,
If you were actually for those things, you'd be for what the PSF does! That's what they do! Instead you are supporting the oppression of those things with your comment.
> Yet, that is exactly what DEI did, and I have seen it firsthand many, many times.
Maybe I'm just exceptionally talented but as a white man I've never lost an opportunity because of DEI.
On the ending of “DEI” (itself an eviscerated approach to addressing the minimal demands to address over two centuries of american slavery, indigenous genocide, patriarchal violence, anti-trans, anti-queer violence) as targeted death making. The list of the scientific establishment’s participation, complicity, neglect is long. Some programs called immediately to mind include:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/543.html
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-shocking-hazards-of-lo...
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/education-and-awaren...
https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/infant-health-and-mortality-a...
> DEI is an immoral, hate based and anti-truth ideology.
This is called getting high on your own supply. It was never any of those things, but lies like the ones you are spreading were perpetuated to push back against the idea of equal fairness for all.
As proof that you are spreading further lies, one only has to look at the long string of court filings that shows that the administrations' policies fighting DEI are outright racism, words that are coming from conservative judges appointed long ago that operate based on truth rather than whatever misinformation cult has taken over so much of politics these days. Here's just one of many many many instances of blatant racism being perpetrated through Trump's politicization of science funding.
> ‘My duty is to call it out’: Judge accuses Trump administration of discrimination against minorities—The Reagan-appointed judge ordered the NIH to restore funds for research related to racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/16/judge-rebuke-trump-...
The requirement that grantees not violate existing laws is common in Federal grants. Taking umbrage with the DEI coloration on this entirely reasonable and standard requirement is absurd. There could be a long laundry list of such clauses that all have equally zero weight ("don't promote illegal drug trafficking", "don't promote illegal insider trading", ...).
If it has zero weight, why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it? I would guess it's much easier to enforce a particular interpretation of the law via a grant agreement than having to argue it in court.
> Why would the grant agreement specifically highlight it?
I would humbly suggest that it mentions this particular example because the NSF administrator serves under the pleasure of the Executive and they have been tasked to demonstrate that they are following the orders of the Executive branch.
However, the inclusion of this specific example confers no higher priority than any other possible example. It has no weight; it is inoperative.
If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant. Full stop.
The language itself also overly broad. The stipulation from the grant didn't just cover activities funded by the grant itself. In the very language quoted on the PSF blog, they needed to affirm that as an organization they "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI." Read that again. The language expressly states that they cannot operate ANY programs that advance or promote DEI during the term of the award. So if a PSF member volunteers with PyLadies, would that count as "advanc[ing] or promot[ing] DEI?"
In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it. If something like this was found buried in a contract I was evaluating with my lawyer, we'd immediately redline it as overly broad and overbearing.
> It has no weight; it is inoperative.
You are claiming that if the PSF took the grant and the NSF, or the president, decided the PSF was promoting DEI they would not be able to claw back funds?
OK, I accept that as a possible reason why it might be written there even if it has no weight. But it still seems very likely that it's easier to terminate a grant - and harder for the PSF to argue against that - than to actually prosecute DEI work and prove in court that it's illegal.
It would be very good for the PSF if it can get grant money without DEI things. Before you needed to have them to get much of a look-in.
Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.
This seems very un-American. The government dictating how you run your business ?
> “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
I applaud them for taking a stand, it seems to be more and more rare these days.
Anti-DEI forces, once in power, turn out not to favor putative “diversity of opinion” after all.
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> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western country.
I'm white and not discriminated against in my Western-adjacent country (Czech Republic) and think most of Europe is the same.
I see race-based politics as primarily a US thing: both the militant "diversity advocates" and the white supremacists. From my point of view over the ocean they are quite similar: putting importance of skin colour over other things.
As a white American, this feels insulting to all those around me. Diversity is what made the US so great. White people are just one tone of the human palette.
pro-skin-diversity is a real weird way to say "against racism."
They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
We can debate whether doing this rights historical wrongs but we can't pretend it is not racist to treat different people of different skin colors differently.
> They are for racism. Treat one group different from others based on race.
"Racism" means the oppression of one group because of race.
In an historically racist society (writing this in New Zealand) righting those historical wrongs involves some treating "...one group different from others based on race."
It is bad enough here, and it continues here explicitly by the current government (indigenous people just lost a bunch of property rights because they were indigenous, blatant, official, statutory racism), but according to people I respect in the USA it is considerably worse there.
Are you talking about:
"ACT New Zealand party, a junior partner in the governing centre-right coalition government, last week unveiled the bill, which it had promised during last year’s election, arguing that those rights should also apply to non-Indigenous citizens."
How does grant others the same rights turn into racism. Shouldn't everyone have those rights including groups that are bigger minorites in New Zealand like blacks of Indians from India?
When we single out groups for special treatment we exclude others who might need it more but who's voices are softer.
It might be worse in the US compared to New Zealand but compared to most of the rest of the world: Middle East, India, Africa, Europe, Russia, China, Korea the US is the least racist place but also has the biggest anti-racism industry which makes their voiced louder.
No
I am talking of the Foreshore and Seabed Act (under a different name) that overturned settled case law and disapropriated IWI claims for property rights.
Māori have their property rights confiscated regularly. About every twenty or thirty years there is another round
That said the racism here is mild compared to reports from the USA
We don't have to pretend it's not racist when it's factually not racist.
And there's not really a debate about whether it rights historic wrong. There is a debate about whether righting historic wrongs is even possible.
The debate is whether we can/should counterbalance existing wrongs in society.
And I have hard time taking anyone seriously who says we shouldn't.
When you become what you are fighting against you become the problem.
If the issue is not using a person's race to make blanket judgements against them then using someone's race to to counterbalance historical is equally as wrong.
The message you are telling everyone is you should use someone's race to judge them. The people in power changes but the racism never goes away.
You end up with foolish ideas like reparations where the people demanding money are a product of a union between a slave and slave owner where half of you should pay the other half.
Or quota systems that exclude minorities because they aren't the right race.
The racism you want to keep needs to be let go. You can't say racism is bad but then use it to enrich yourself.
> Playing nice seemed to not work for White people because they are systemically discriminated against in almost every Western and non-Western countr
What utter ignorance of the prevailing social conditions in the West
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Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
No one takes them to jail; companies and organizations can run however they want, unless they break laws. It doesn't mean that the government that runs and wins on an anti-DEI agenda should give them money.
> Is that even legal to add such an arbitrary and opinionated reason to a government grant?
On the surface, it is simply a requirement that the grantee comply with existing non-discrimination laws coupled with a completely fictional example of a potential violation (“discriminatory equity ideology”) provided as an example that happens to have an initialism collision with a real thing. This is legal and (but for the propaganda example) routine.
But... the text viewed in isolation is not the issue.
Agreed. And it is... quite revealing that many people in these comments are so insistent to view the text in isolation.
> discriminatory equity ideology
Isn't that when you let your mates buy into your corrupt private investment vehicles for cheap?
I have no idea what point you think you're making, but this happens all the time. Do you really think you should be obligated to let strangers buy into your private business?
Ah yeah you're right. What they actually mean is that DEI is when you build so many equity preference multiples into your term sheets the employee option pool becomes entirely worthless.
And do really think they think that?
I understand what you're driving at but at this stage of the game it's quite American.
> Is that even legal to
Does it matter for the Trump administration what is legal and what isn't?
> "[yadda yadda yadda] in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
Should not be a new or surprising statement at all in this type of thing, let alone a question of if it's un-American.
Federal money always has lots of strings attached. The specific rules differ by the specific funding vehicle. The main vehicle is the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR); you can review their rule here:
https://www.acquisition.gov/far/part-52
This is basically the US Federal Government’s standard Master Services Agreement (MSA).
I think people defend anti discrimination or are against it depending on how the anti discrimination policy discriminates discrimination.
We always discriminate. We have to. But only some discrimination is allowed and some are not allowed. The difference is what kind of discrimination people feel is fair and unfair.
I agree that humans discriminate inherently, although I would argue that what differentiates us is whether we struggle against that impulse.
On some level, the idea that we all discriminate has the potential to help us move beyond the "racist/not-racist" dichotomy. (I prefer the formulation "we all discriminate" over the dubious alternative "we're all racist".) But I'm not sure it will ever achieve mass acceptance, because it activates the human impulse to self-justify.
I dream that one day someone will come up with version of this idea that is universally acceptable.
Could you clarify that you're suggesting that "it's un-American" for the government to require that the grantee not violate any of its anti-discrimination laws?
> The government dictating how you run your business ?
Yes, these terms are usually called "laws", you might've heard of them.
The fascist language is a no-op because it optimizes to: "don't violate federal laws" which presumably is reasonable.
I would imagine it is much easier to enforce as part of a grant agreement that organisations have signed. Especially if the law is either not really a law (yet), or it might be invalidated by a court on free speech grounds. There's probably a reason someone wrote it into the grant agreement, and that they're declaring DEI stands for something other than the familiar Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Federal funding of research is un-American.
> Federal funding of research is un-American.
Federal funding of research created the Internet that you are posting this idiocy on.
Before you attack the last poster, he does have a point. Federal funding of powers that belong to states is unamerican.
I agree. The gvt should not care if DEI is used, or if someone is gay or transgender m
Oh really? So what pro-DEI requirements did the federal funding for that grant require?
The "in violation of Federal Law" is crucial. You can argue it's only there to cover the admin's ass, but Federal Law (the actual statues) already prohibits any favoritism or discrimination on the basis of skin color etc.
The prior admin made it so that their chosen DEI programs fit "Federal Law". This admin has done a complete 180. Courts haven't tested any of this yet. It's all a hammer being wielded by the side in power.
1.5M is a laughably small number compared to the value that financial institutions extract from just having PyPi available. I know my company, not financial but still large, has containers hitting it every day. How do we get these groups to fork over even just a small amount?
The PSF and several other organizations that provide public package registries wrote an open letter [1] announcing a joint effort to make this situation more sustainable. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
[1]: https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n...
Thanks! I want to bring this up as a discussion point when I get the chance at work.
I can't find a date on this letter - is it recent?
Get your company to take the Pledge: https://opensourcepledge.com/
It says "September 23, 2025" right at the top.
The website hides the date on mobile
I'm rather baffled at the spike in HN folks missing obvious dates. You're not the first..
I wonder if they're mobile. Here the URL is truncated and over on openssf.org/blog they don't show the date unless you switch over to desktop view.
I'm on mobile and missed it. My bad for the spam.
The website hides the date on mobile
The date is at the top of the letter and in the url...
September 2025.
> These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
(Emphasis mine)
I'm curious if any lawyer folks could weigh in as to whether this language means that the entire sentence requires the mentioned programs to be "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws." If so, one might argue that a "DEI program" was not in violation of a Federal anti-discrimination law.
Obviously no one would want to have to go to court and this likely would be an unacceptable risk.
Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.
I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.
I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.
Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...
> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.
And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.
Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants:
https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...
But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.
If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
> I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
The Executive branch can make any claim it wants, but the Judiciary branch has the authority to decide what a reviewable claim means.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
For some context on the scale of this grant, the PSF took in only $1M in "Contributions, Membership Dues, & Grants" in 2024: https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/
God, it is so humiliating to be an American these days. :(
Great job from PSF ! Taking the stand rather them submitting themselves to dictatorial/thought-policing terms.
Read to the end. Ways to financially support this important work can be found there.
Step One: get them to a better payment processor than PayPal! I waded through it, but that's a high friction funnel.
I made a donation. Props to the PSF for standing up.
Thanks for posting this. I just made a donation to the PSF.
That's what we like to hear! Read to the end and donate!
Regardless of how you feel about the specific issues here, it’s a good example of why public policy works best when it targets one issue at a time.
If you want to buy cyber security, just do that. Linking cybersecurity payments to social issues reduces how much cybersecurity you can get. Sometimes you can find win-win-win scenarios. There are values that are worth enforcing as a baseline. But you always pay a price somewhere.
Anyway, I signed up to be a PSF member.
Donated, and happy to.
It's shocking how fast this administration has gotten institutions to abandon their beliefs, and ones that don't should be rewarded.
"discriminatory equity ideology"
Truly Orwellian! What have those USAnian fools been thinking? A caricature of bullying ignoramuses
Good. Don't give fascism an inch.
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Makes me wonder what strings were attached to that Allen AI NSF grant. I noticed that they were suddenly using more hawkish language around China.
Now that's what a backbone looks like.
I think people are overlooking the most important part:
- Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.
They're saying the terms give the Trump administration what's essentially a "kill the PSF" button. Which they may want to use for any number of arbitrary reasons. Maybe the PSF runs a conference with a trans speaker, or someone has to be ousted for being openly racist. If it gets the attention of right wing media that's the end.
The "just comply with the law" people are being extremely naive. There can be no assumption of good faith here.
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If you read
> support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers
as a racist statement, you need to step back and re-evaluate things.
If you think treating people differently based on race is fine, you ARE a racist. If you think treating people differently based on sex is fine, you ARE a sexist. My dude.
That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).
However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.
For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.
People ARE treated differently based on race and gender. For example, women are severely underrepresented in the tech industry.
You can either look into why that is and attempt to address underlying issues, or you can pretend people are sexist for doing something that doesn't directly benefit you.
The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.
Equity vs. Equality. Google it, “my dude”.
I do think a lot of these people who claim reverse racism just have no idea what the word “equity” even means.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio of 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
If they picked any of the conferences based on the gender of the attendees, then they were pretty obviously discriminating based on a protected characteristic and should face legal ramifications for it.
So unintentional discrimination is ok, but intentionally counterbalancing (even extremely tepidly) is very bad?
“I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.”
Kevin McCarthy, former GOP House leader and Speak of the House.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/30/mccarthy-...
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Thanks dad, I missed you
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You either think DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others, or that the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better.
If you're in the former group just man up and say it, don't waste our time with the equivocating, "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
Uh, what?
There's no contradiction, or even tension, between these three positions:
1. "DEI is about taking jobs from white people and giving them to undeserving others"
2. "the deserving are spread across different races and genders etc. and we should capture that better"
3. "so the government just doesn't want people to discriminate and that's a problem???"
so what exactly are you trying to say?
How is there not a contradiction between 1 and 2? If 1 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are undeserving. If 2 is true then the jobs are offered to non-white candidates who are deserving.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. It's obviously possible for the extremely weak claim made by statement 2 to be true (i.e. for some non-zero number of "deserving" nonwhites to exist and for existing hiring to not be a perfect meritocracy) in the same universe where the sort of programs typically labelled "DEI" tend to have anti-meritocratic effects. You seem to be suggesting that if competent nonwhites exist, then anything labelled DEI will automatically have the effect of causing orgs to hire more competent people, but... why? There's zero reason that should logically follow.
So, all these clauses where changed back in Feb/ March. They definitely had to agree to the amendments on their grants, and they still had funding until October 1st. So, I feel like this is revisionist history because they would have been notified way before today to renew thier grant.
So they signed the amendments and spent the money...
> In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI.
> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.
It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.
- - -
Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted
> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams
Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed
thats not true....
https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?indexName=awardfull&...
All of those are marked as "PURCHASE ORDER", I don't think the PSF applies for those. I don't think they are what one would consider funding
Grants are at the bottom.
The grants to the 'University of Georgia Research Foundation'?
rip... You are right. Sorry. I exported it into excel and just looked at the column... interesting they have the same UEI?
It's not a renewal, it's their first application for government funding, and they turned it down without accepting the terms. This is all quite clear in the blog post.
DEI programs are fundamentally racist. You don't fix racism with more racism.
How do you fix racism?
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> do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
So basically, the PSF wants to discriminate, the government doesn't want them to do so, and that's a problem? Am I reading this correctly?
No you are not reading this correctly, but I suspect that was willful
> No you are not reading this correctly
Okay, so can you help me interpret that correctly, then? What other conclusion should I draw from this?
You're free to disagree with anyone here, but playing stupid is only a waste of time. It's not a difficult topic to understand both sides of, regardless of where you come down.
"Or" means at least one of multiple alternatives. Alteratives contrast with each other, they differ. Of course, the original author could be repeating the same thing for emphasis, but more likely they are saying two different things. Since the second thing is discrimination, the first thing, "DEI", must necessarily not be discrimination. If they merely wanted you to not discriminate, they could have just said "follows federal anti discrimination laws" which are quite stringent.
They are saying the same thing twice. They repeat themselves specifically because certain groups hold a strong belief that "discrimination" only goes one-way, and have effectively twisted the meaning of the word in their minds.
The explicit mention of DEI is a way of saying "yes, that means ALL kinds of discrimination, including the kinds you may believe are morally correct".
That may be what they mean, but it is a sufficiently dubious interpretation that one can't reasonably use it to obtain the funding unless clarification is provided by the administration.
No, the PSF doesn't want to expose its finances to special risk from the Trump Administration’s attempts to paint inclusion as discrimination as a pretext for exerting control that the law itself does not justify over institutions receiving federal funding, finding the risk:reward ratio unjustified for a $1.5M grant. (Note that the actual term purports to prohibit only what the law already prohibits, which is a clue that a naive reading cannot reveal their motive, since under a naive reading they would be equally risk for the behavior that would violate the terms whether or not ot agrees to them or received the grant. So you have to look beyond the agreement to the context of the behavior of the Trump Administration in regards to the issue addressed in the terms and federal funding.)
Oh come on.
The language means that if PSF at any point, maybe years from now, at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion, the NSF can force them to pay the money back, even though it's already spent. That's not "wanting to discriminate", it's a free ticket for a rogue government to bully the PSF without a good argument, if it ever sees fit.
Even if I were an angry right wing DEI-hater I wouldn't accept the grant under these terms. If the government can just grab it back whatever under vague accusations, the money is just a liability.
Small correction: the restriction would only affect the PSF for the 2 years the grant runs. That's still more than bad enough when 'diverse' is in the mission statement, and of course they might well apply for other grants, but in principle it can't be applied 'at any point'.
Appreciate it. I still wouldn't take the risk tbh, not with the current administration's terrible track record on stuff like this.
Anyone that signs something like this either can't read or hired lawyers that can't read.
> at some conference or wherever maybe somehow supports or hosts a panel about diversity and inclusion
The terms are pretty clear to me - "don't operate any programs that advance or promote DEI". Why does a non-profit dedicated to a programming language need to host panels about diversity and inclusion (aka "morally correct" discrimination)? You say it like it's some inevitability because the people in question just can't help themselves (which, honestly, might be true...)
If they want to do it anyway, they are free to do so, as America is a free country, but they are not entitled to government funding (read: tax money) to pay for these programs. The taxpayers explicitly voted for this. Framing their withdrawal from the grant proposal as some grand moral stance against the big bad orange man is, quite frankly, cringe-worthy.
Edit: I tried to reply to the comment below, but can't because I'm now shadowbanned. That's what I get for not perpetuating the political echochamber here on orange reddit, I guess.
If psf wants supports ten conferences and 9 of them have a typical gender ratio is 7:3 (males:females) and so they support 1 conference with a gender ratio of 3:7, then I think they're in violation of these terms.
Was PSF acting in a discriminatory manner by supporting the tenth conference?
A point made deep in a comment thread by user "rck" below deserves to be a top-level comment - the clawback clause explicitly applies ONLY to violations of existing law:
> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.
So there's no plausible way that agreeing to these terms would have contractually bound PSF in any way that they were not already bound by statute. Completely silly ideological posturing to turn down the money.
And if someone at the NSF decides to terminate the grant & 'recover all funds', does the dispute over the contract involve the same burden of proof and rights to appeal as a federal discrimation case?
Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.
The burden of proof is "on the balance of probabilities" in both cases as far as I know, and there's no limit in principle on how high a breach of contract case can be appealed.
Of course it has an effect, but that effect is giving the NSF the ability to sue over a grantee's alleged breaches of discrimination law, instead of that being limited to parties discriminated against and the EEOCs.
Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant? PSF's decision is based on the government's demonstrated track record of what they consider to be "illegal DEI", not what the law actually says. Grant cancellations have been primarily based on a list of banned words (https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...), and of course nobody involved with any of the thousands of cancelled grants has been charged with breaking a law, because they haven't broken any.
Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...
Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":
- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials
- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge
- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs
- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management
- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning
- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration
- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation
When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.
> Why was the clause included if it's completely redundant?
It's not and I didn't suggest it was. It gives the NSF itself the ability to litigate discrimination by grantees (in order to claw back its funds) instead of only the people discriminated against and the EEOC being able to do that. That's a real effect! But it doesn't impose any new obligations whatsoever on PSF - just changes the recourse mechanism if PSF violates legal obligations they already had.
> When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal
As far as I know this has not happened in any of the cases you mention and _could_ not happen. Yes, grants have been cancelled for dumb reasons, but nothing has been clawed back. Right? What would the mechanism for clawing back the money without a lawsuit even be?
I don't know if they've attempted to claw back any NSF grants yet, but they have done this with EPA grants. There was no lawsuit, they just ordered banks to freeze the funds and the banks complied: https://www.eenews.net/articles/epa-green-bank-recipients-lo...
Hmm. That'd be pretty nasty to be on the receiving end of (and may well have been an outrageous abuse of executive power), but still, an administrative freeze is temporary and is not in itself a clawback. Even if it was a certainty this would happen to PSF, it would still be worth it for $1.5 million!
It was not temporary. The victims spent substantial amounts of money suing and still lost: https://www.eenews.net/articles/appeals-court-says-epa-can-r.... Technically litigation is ongoing but there is no reason to believe they will succeed.