This isn't about efficiency, it's about attacking science as a tool for evaluating truth. It's a way to discredit the authority of expertise and shape the course of research with selective funding and demonization.

This is a regularly done conservative tactic. Attack research because it’s frequently stupid sounding. But sometimes stupid sounding research leads to incredible things.

Sometimes you research the mating habits of red eyed tree frogs and you learn a lot for conservation efforts and stuff about the species. Conservatives love this because they can hand wave and go “who cares about this thing I personally don’t care about that most people aren’t personally impacted by”

But those science nerds sometimes do stuff like researching gila venom in the 70s which eventually led to ozempic now, one of the potential major treatments for t2 diabetes, a scourge of our morbidly obese modern society. This has gigantic positive implications for public health and financial benefits

The whole point is you can’t know until you’re done what will be groundbreaking

How much do we pay for politicians and their security to go golfing?

The Moon landing line is a pretty important thing to study, actually, since we know what the rehearsed line was: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Without that "a" it's a very silly line.

Armstrong for years claimed he said the line right and that it must've been garbled in the radio transmission, and in recent years has been vindicated as better signal:noise algorithms processed the recording and found the missing word. Researchers aren't blowing money to find out if Armstrong was a liar, they're using it to develop more sensitive receivers, better transmission protocols, and more advanced algorithms to parse signal out of noise, all of which have massive impacts in other domains. An algorithm that's better at parsing data out of noise in particular is going to be useful in loads of places like MRI machines where improving resolution will take billions in research but improving parsing is just updating the software.

Take that, already meager science budget! They will definitely be used to make society better.

We spend about 90 Billion dollars on corporate welfare each year.

90 Billion.

Yeah but let's focus on the rounding errors.

The Department of Government Efficiency is going to increase the efficacy of giving taxpayer money to the ultra wealthy.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4263280/#:~:text=Results%20showed%20that%20male%20quail,test%20(Coc%20%E2%86%92%20Sal).

Sunfish I can't find the actual study, it appears it was done in 1975, and was a big thing that congress at the time used as the examples of wasteful spending.

First 2 I can't really say the value or lack of value of. I mean they were studies on effects of dangerous substances on behavior. and yes of course like all studies you pick animals that you might be able to get the effects of. Obviously a lot of science is just randomly probing around looking for oddities that give you a hypothesis to try and refine later into something useful. Obviously addictive substances is an important topic to understand, and poking around randomly might actually give solutions that could be discovered IMO.

Now the last one is the only one I'd agree, isn't exactly super useful.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2033014/feds-blow-700k-to-find-out-what-really-happened-on-the-moon/

was done in 2016.

All that being said... lets also take a serious statement on cost here... a million dollars in 2016. That's like, 15 minutes of iraq war money.

Musk continues to demonstrate loud and clear that he is none of the things he claims to be.

It's like the two dumbest kids in your middle school were the only ones that ran for school elections and now they spout inane shit you have to ignore, except they control nukes.

Well, that was something that benefitted women, so it's clearly not efficient for any of the grey, white men in this committee

Anyone remember the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover?

"I don't know what this 'microservice' nonsense is, I'm gonna remove it"

"...Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system"

"Ur fired lol"

...Expect more of that.

just wait until they find out how much a bomb costs...

It's terrifying how easy it is to manipulate a population that's so biscously anti intellectual.

This is the dunning Kruger effect in real life. They're too stupid to understand science so they assume science doesn't make any sense.

I'm sure they would consider it a waste to "measure bubbles in antarctic sea ice" because they don't understand that's what climate models are based on and vindicated by. And even if they did understand it theyd still be against it.

It's tough because obviously as communists you have to try to maintain a belief everybody is deserving of basic dignity and respect but then you see somebody yell "don't you fucking tell me what to do" as they climb over the "do not enter, high voltage" sign of a substation.

It's a lot harder to maintain the belief that any loss of life is a tragedy when you have a guy in a klan robe saying it's their constitutional right to to wrap their lips around the exhaust pipe of a diesel truck specifically modified to cause as many emissions as humanly possible.

Studying fly development has led to cancer treatments targeting the sonic hedgehog pathway.

instead give it directly to Elon, he will know what to do with the extra money!

808 Billion for maintaining an army

Doesn't "DOGE" literally have a budget of nothing?

I never knew pregnancy tests had frogs in them. The sticks seem so small.

Wait until they hear how much military aviation spends on screws.

Science inherently involves the reproduction of work that’s already been done. That’s how the process ensures reproducibility. Talking about the efficiency of science makes very little sense because the savings bought by science are privatized, viewed like externalities.

Hey E-L-O-N , y'know what else the government spends an exorbitant amount of money on? Go on, take a guess.

Here's the tweet in question: https://xcancel.com/DOGE/status/1858540521096089876#m

Anyone know what studies it's referring to?

It also can't be understated how much private corporations benefit from technology this research yields. We spent $25 billion ($175 billion in today's money) on the Apollo programs alone, and NASA research has led to everything from cell phones and laptops to the rubber molding process used for sneakers. The DoD wasted a ton of money in the 80s on this new technology that involved getting computers to communicate with each other, and now we have the internet.

The government spends money in ways that could never be justified by cooperations, then the cooperations enrich themselves with that research and use the profits to lobby Congress for lower taxes and limited spending. It's absolutely infuriating.

I think many of these people would be perfectly happy for a woman to not have definitive knowledge about whether or not she's pregnant. I suspect there might be some overlap with the group that's trying to get rid of all contraception and abortion measures.

So less than 20 Hummers.