I don't know which specific grants were cut but here's a random example[1] of one (which is probably(?) not involved). In this example it's over multiple decades with ~$253 obligated but (assuming site accuracy) only $53 million has been outlayed.
It would be nice if media reporting included detailed information though.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_UM1AI068632_7529"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Johns Hopkins University slashes 2k jobs"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/johns-hopkins-university-slashes-2000-jobs-after-trump-administration-grant-cut-2025-03-13/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Brybry","story_43359417"],"author":"Brybry","comment_text":"Grants/contracts aren't necessarily just for one year and often the numbers are about obligations and not outlays.
I don't know which specific grants were cut but here's a random example[1] of one (which is probably(?) not involved). In this example it's over multiple decades with ~$253 obligated but (assuming site accuracy) only $53 million has been outlayed.
It would be nice if media reporting included detailed information though.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_UM1AI068632_7529","created_at":"2025-03-14T05:41:00Z","created_at_i":1741930860,"objectID":"43359910","parent_id":43359662,"story_id":43359417,"story_title":"Johns Hopkins University slashes 2k jobs","story_url":"https://www.reuters.com/world/us/johns-hopkins-university-slashes-2000-jobs-after-trump-administration-grant-cut-2025-03-13/","updated_at":"2025-03-16T20:05:12Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"FireBeyond"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"Given that education funding dwarfs foreign aid and is affected, it would seem inaccurate to label it as "generally foreign aid".
The other point is just because a contract or award is on usaspending.gov doesn't mean the funds are flowing - that was my point, my partner's school has many awards that previously they could draw from at will, and receive money overnight. They've attempted to draw from many of them now, and the funds just ... aren't being transferred.
That was part of the furore, "we have agreements and obligations in place and you're just refusing to fund them", it's not about the existence of the awards in the first place."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/upshot/doge-musk-trump-errors.html"}},"_tags":["comment","author_FireBeyond","story_43138238"],"author":"FireBeyond","comment_text":"Given that education funding dwarfs foreign aid and is affected, it would seem inaccurate to label it as "generally foreign aid".
The other point is just because a contract or award is on usaspending.gov doesn't mean the funds are flowing - that was my point, my partner's school has many awards that previously they could draw from at will, and receive money overnight. They've attempted to draw from many of them now, and the funds just ... aren't being transferred.
That was part of the furore, "we have agreements and obligations in place and you're just refusing to fund them", it's not about the existence of the awards in the first place.","created_at":"2025-02-23T19:18:05Z","created_at_i":1740338285,"objectID":"43152209","parent_id":43146025,"story_id":43138238,"story_title":"DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes","story_url":"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/21/upshot/doge-musk-trump-errors.html","updated_at":"2025-02-25T18:51:19Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Amezarak"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"I weakly support single-payer because it would at least hopefully save me from spending hours dealing with the vagaries of medical provider billing and free people from worrying about health insurance when job-searching, but I don't see much reason to believe it would lower prices in America.
There's some kind of horrific cost disease going on in America. Sure, the insurance doesn't help, but it's not the main problem. The cash price - with a discount - for me to get the five-minute opinion of a nurse practitioner is $125-$150. Self-insured companies are paying 20k+ in premiums for an employee's family health insurance plan.
This is reflected in the fact that a lot of hospital systems in the US are already publicly owned! Taxpayers in much of the US are already paying directly to built facilities and pay doctors and nurses for anything their billing doesn't cover. (Not even counting the VA system.) 64 million Americans are on Medicaid, about 20% of the population; [1] 18% of Americans are on Medicare. [2] (There's some overlap, so those aren't strictly additive.) More Americans than Canadians are already the beneficiaries of public health care! And Medicare/Medicaid is already the one of the biggest US government expenditures. [3] Whatever natural incentives are in place are already there. It may be the case that specific government policies are partly responsible for hamstringing cost-cutting, but I see no reason to believe those policies and worse ones wouldn't perpetuate themselves.
There's a lot of factors driving the crazy costs in the US. Unfortunately, I don't see a reason to believe single payer would do anything but mildly slow the rise, unless combined with a lot of very unpopular policies.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicaid-facts-and-...\n[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200962/percentage-of-ame...\n[3] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend..."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"List price for stitches at Stanford Health Care: $93K"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://twitter.com/grahamwalker/status/1413964824770342912"}},"_tags":["comment","author_Amezarak","story_27800502"],"author":"Amezarak","children":[27801537],"comment_text":"I weakly support single-payer because it would at least hopefully save me from spending hours dealing with the vagaries of medical provider billing and free people from worrying about health insurance when job-searching, but I don't see much reason to believe it would lower prices in America.
There's some kind of horrific cost disease going on in America. Sure, the insurance doesn't help, but it's not the main problem. The cash price - with a discount - for me to get the five-minute opinion of a nurse practitioner is $125-$150. Self-insured companies are paying 20k+ in premiums for an employee's family health insurance plan.
This is reflected in the fact that a lot of hospital systems in the US are already publicly owned! Taxpayers in much of the US are already paying directly to built facilities and pay doctors and nurses for anything their billing doesn't cover. (Not even counting the VA system.) 64 million Americans are on Medicaid, about 20% of the population; [1] 18% of Americans are on Medicare. [2] (There's some overlap, so those aren't strictly additive.) More Americans than Canadians are already the beneficiaries of public health care! And Medicare/Medicaid is already the one of the biggest US government expenditures. [3] Whatever natural incentives are in place are already there. It may be the case that specific government policies are partly responsible for hamstringing cost-cutting, but I see no reason to believe those policies and worse ones wouldn't perpetuate themselves.
There's a lot of factors driving the crazy costs in the US. Unfortunately, I don't see a reason to believe single payer would do anything but mildly slow the rise, unless combined with a lot of very unpopular policies.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicaid-facts-and-...\n[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200962/percentage-of-ame...\n[3] https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/spend...","created_at":"2021-07-11T15:18:21Z","created_at_i":1626016701,"objectID":"27801484","parent_id":27801060,"story_id":27800502,"story_title":"List price for stitches at Stanford Health Care: $93K","story_url":"https://twitter.com/grahamwalker/status/1413964824770342912","updated_at":"2024-09-20T08:53:21Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"armchairhacker"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"I do wonder if Elon has some ulterior, smarter motive, and his antics are just for show.
Like for instance, convincing people to move to Mastodon (a decentralized service) so that it becomes mainstream and censorship becomes harder.
Also that, words are cheap, so what Elon is doing isn't catapulting his net worth and reputation that much. The concrete actions he took (50% layoffs, Twitter Blue, suspending journalists but then unsuspending them) aren't too unhinged.
That being said, it's common to form long-winded conspiracies around the obvious truth. Extreme wealth, extreme recognition, and an army of yes-men have a really strong influence, maybe Elon is becoming insane."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097"}},"_tags":["comment","author_armchairhacker","story_34045423"],"author":"armchairhacker","comment_text":"I do wonder if Elon has some ulterior, smarter motive, and his antics are just for show.
Like for instance, convincing people to move to Mastodon (a decentralized service) so that it becomes mainstream and censorship becomes harder.
Also that, words are cheap, so what Elon is doing isn't catapulting his net worth and reputation that much. The concrete actions he took (50% layoffs, Twitter Blue, suspending journalists but then unsuspending them) aren't too unhinged.
That being said, it's common to form long-winded conspiracies around the obvious truth. Extreme wealth, extreme recognition, and an army of yes-men have a really strong influence, maybe Elon is becoming insane.","created_at":"2022-12-19T00:43:23Z","created_at_i":1671410603,"objectID":"34046563","parent_id":34045423,"story_id":34045423,"story_title":"Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll","story_url":"https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097","updated_at":"2024-09-20T12:51:10Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"dmurray"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"It's an important distinction because it prevents the defence of "oh it's just an old law, there are lots of old laws on the books that everyone knows aren't relevant, they can't be tidied up for political reasons".
It was suspended for the last 15 years! Surely it was easier to leave it suspended and unsuspending it is a conscious choice."},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://www.dw.com/en/german-men-need-military-permit-for-extended-stays-abroad/a-76662677"}},"_tags":["comment","author_dmurray","story_47639976"],"author":"dmurray","children":[47642184],"comment_text":"It's an important distinction because it prevents the defence of "oh it's just an old law, there are lots of old laws on the books that everyone knows aren't relevant, they can't be tidied up for political reasons".
It was suspended for the last 15 years! Surely it was easier to leave it suspended and unsuspending it is a conscious choice.","created_at":"2026-04-04T16:51:08Z","created_at_i":1775321468,"objectID":"47640793","parent_id":47640527,"story_id":47639976,"story_title":"German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad","story_url":"https://www.dw.com/en/german-men-need-military-permit-for-extended-stays-abroad/a-76662677","updated_at":"2026-04-04T20:34:43Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"kragen"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"it's possible i'm just wrong about some of these things because of lack of experience with async rust, but i'm not convinced by any of your examples
> - Cancellation (and the corollary, the ability to externally control, suspend, or time out arbitrary sets of computations at yield points).
i'm not convinced by this one; i'd need to see more details, but my intuition is that it's just an efficiency hack, and i'll explain why
in a shared-nothing system like erlang (or pre-threading unix) you really can externally control, suspend, or time out arbitrary sets of computations. if you have to wait for a yield point, you only sort of can; a task stuck in an infinite loop that therefore never yields will not get a chance to be canceled. moreover, if a task is holding a lock when it yields, that could be either because its own correctness depends on some shared mutable data structure staying consistent, or because it currently has such a structure in a temporarily inconsistent state that it needs to restore to consistency
in the second case, how do you cancel it? you need to somehow restore the consistency, and nobody outside the task has the information required, and if it just releases the lock and exits instead of continuing, the next task that depends on the inconsistent structure will probably crash. so you can't cancel it at the next yield; you have to wait until the task yields without any locks held. and similar remarks apply for suspension, except that the potential problem is not crashing but a deadly embrace, a particularly pernicious kind of deadly embrace because it's hard to tell who was responsible for unsuspending the task
but let's suppose that being able to sometimes cancel, suspend, or time out a computation is a useful feature. we must ask, then, when is it useful? if a task is computing a result that is no longer needed (perhaps the user has already been shown a 'timed out' error, for example) what is the harm of allowing it to continue as long as it wants? it depends on the task, of course, but it had better not be crucial to correctness, for two reasons. one is that, as explained above, the cancelation might have to be delayed for an arbitrarily long time so that the task can suspend while not holding any locks. the other is slightly more subtle: if the task's correctness depends on it getting canceled early enough, then its correctness is dependent on the other task that kills it getting scheduled early enough, which is generally not something that can be guaranteed
consequently, i believe the only case where task cancelation can be useful in a shared-memory system like this is when it's just an efficiency hack and doesn't actually affect the system's semantics
but maybe there's something i don't understand about this (my ignorance of async rust is truly vast) so please let me know. git repository urls containing purported counterexamples would be especially welcome
> - Ergonomic (rather than just performant) heterogenous multiplex-waits. Doing that in non-future-oriented systems isn't just potentially slow, it's fiddly and a breeding ground for bugs in many languages, including Rust.
it's possible i'm not understanding what you mean; can you explain with code? it sounds like the kind of thing you could put into a library function in a system using multithreading; you can solve it without reconsidering your entire programming paradigm
> - The ability to outsource the geometry of concurrency and parallelism to an async runtime rather than spending brain and editor cycles deciding things like e.g. how many handler vs. acceptor threads you're going to manage, and whether executors will launch/stop lazily or eagerly.
this one is purely an efficiency hack; in a threaded system you can spawn a new handler thread for each request which terminates when the request is done. maintaining a thread pool is itself purely an efficiency hack
> I think you mean "in parallel" here; the whole meta-system is concurrent, but data races re-emerge in Tokio (or rather, impose sizedness/pinnedness restrictions on data in async contexts in Tokio) where they aren't in JS because Tokio can run in true threaded parallel.
i don't think so. what looks like 'concurrency' at one level of abstraction can look like 'parallelism' at another, but if by 'parallelism' we mean running multiple streams of instructions at physically the same time, no, you can totally get data races in a multithreaded system that is running on an in-order single-processor system and therefore has no parallelism at all, and this was common until 20 years ago. even if the processor is bit-serial, it makes no difference"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Let futures be futures"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://without.boats/blog/let-futures-be-futures/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_kragen","story_39242962"],"author":"kragen","children":[39256644],"comment_text":"it's possible i'm just wrong about some of these things because of lack of experience with async rust, but i'm not convinced by any of your examples
> - Cancellation (and the corollary, the ability to externally control, suspend, or time out arbitrary sets of computations at yield points).
i'm not convinced by this one; i'd need to see more details, but my intuition is that it's just an efficiency hack, and i'll explain why
in a shared-nothing system like erlang (or pre-threading unix) you really can externally control, suspend, or time out arbitrary sets of computations. if you have to wait for a yield point, you only sort of can; a task stuck in an infinite loop that therefore never yields will not get a chance to be canceled. moreover, if a task is holding a lock when it yields, that could be either because its own correctness depends on some shared mutable data structure staying consistent, or because it currently has such a structure in a temporarily inconsistent state that it needs to restore to consistency
in the second case, how do you cancel it? you need to somehow restore the consistency, and nobody outside the task has the information required, and if it just releases the lock and exits instead of continuing, the next task that depends on the inconsistent structure will probably crash. so you can't cancel it at the next yield; you have to wait until the task yields without any locks held. and similar remarks apply for suspension, except that the potential problem is not crashing but a deadly embrace, a particularly pernicious kind of deadly embrace because it's hard to tell who was responsible for unsuspending the task
but let's suppose that being able to sometimes cancel, suspend, or time out a computation is a useful feature. we must ask, then, when is it useful? if a task is computing a result that is no longer needed (perhaps the user has already been shown a 'timed out' error, for example) what is the harm of allowing it to continue as long as it wants? it depends on the task, of course, but it had better not be crucial to correctness, for two reasons. one is that, as explained above, the cancelation might have to be delayed for an arbitrarily long time so that the task can suspend while not holding any locks. the other is slightly more subtle: if the task's correctness depends on it getting canceled early enough, then its correctness is dependent on the other task that kills it getting scheduled early enough, which is generally not something that can be guaranteed
consequently, i believe the only case where task cancelation can be useful in a shared-memory system like this is when it's just an efficiency hack and doesn't actually affect the system's semantics
but maybe there's something i don't understand about this (my ignorance of async rust is truly vast) so please let me know. git repository urls containing purported counterexamples would be especially welcome
> - Ergonomic (rather than just performant) heterogenous multiplex-waits. Doing that in non-future-oriented systems isn't just potentially slow, it's fiddly and a breeding ground for bugs in many languages, including Rust.
it's possible i'm not understanding what you mean; can you explain with code? it sounds like the kind of thing you could put into a library function in a system using multithreading; you can solve it without reconsidering your entire programming paradigm
> - The ability to outsource the geometry of concurrency and parallelism to an async runtime rather than spending brain and editor cycles deciding things like e.g. how many handler vs. acceptor threads you're going to manage, and whether executors will launch/stop lazily or eagerly.
this one is purely an efficiency hack; in a threaded system you can spawn a new handler thread for each request which terminates when the request is done. maintaining a thread pool is itself purely an efficiency hack
> I think you mean "in parallel" here; the whole meta-system is concurrent, but data races re-emerge in Tokio (or rather, impose sizedness/pinnedness restrictions on data in async contexts in Tokio) where they aren't in JS because Tokio can run in true threaded parallel.
i don't think so. what looks like 'concurrency' at one level of abstraction can look like 'parallelism' at another, but if by 'parallelism' we mean running multiple streams of instructions at physically the same time, no, you can totally get data races in a multithreaded system that is running on an in-order single-processor system and therefore has no parallelism at all, and this was common until 20 years ago. even if the processor is bit-serial, it makes no difference","created_at":"2024-02-04T05:34:38Z","created_at_i":1707024878,"objectID":"39247876","parent_id":39247030,"story_id":39242962,"story_title":"Let futures be futures","story_url":"https://without.boats/blog/let-futures-be-futures/","updated_at":"2024-09-20T16:17:15Z"},{"_highlightResult":{"author":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"tptacek"},"comment_text":{"fullyHighlighted":false,"matchLevel":"full","matchedWords":["usaspending","agent"],"value":"I'm sure this is as important to computer science as the article claims, but not having even read the paper I can say pretty confidently that it isn't going to have much of an impact on computer security. Even if it became far easier to generate true random numbers, it wouldn't change (a) how we generate randomness at a systems level or (b) what goes wrong with randomness.
Our problem with cryptography is not the quality of random numbers. We are fine at generating unpredictable, decorrelated bits for keys, nonces, and IVs. Soundly designed systems aren't attacked through the quality of their entropy inputs\u2020.
The problem we have with randomness and entropy is logistical. So long as our CSPRNGs need initial, secret entropy sources of any kind, there will be a distinction between the insecure state of the system before it is initialized and the (permanent) secure state of the system after it's been initialized. And so long as we continue building software on general purpose operating systems, there will be events (forking, unsuspending, unpickling, resuming VMs, cloning VMs) that violate our assumptions about which state we're in.
Secure randomness isn't a computational or cryptographic problem (or at least, the cryptographic part of the problem has long been thoroughly solved). It's a systems programming problem. It's back in the un-fun realm of "all software has bugs and all bugs are potential security problems".
It's for that reason that the big problem in cryptography right now isn't "generate better random", but instead "factor out as much as possible our dependence on randomness". Deterministic DSA and EdDSA are examples of this trend, as are SIV and Nonce-Misuse Resistant AEADs.
\u2020 (unsound systems frequently are, but that just makes my point for me)"},"story_title":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"Academics Make Theoretical Breakthrough in Random Number Generation"},"story_url":{"matchLevel":"none","matchedWords":[],"value":"https://threatpost.com/academics-make-theoretical-breakthrough-in-random-number-generation/118150/"}},"_tags":["comment","author_tptacek","story_11719543"],"author":"tptacek","comment_text":"I'm sure this is as important to computer science as the article claims, but not having even read the paper I can say pretty confidently that it isn't going to have much of an impact on computer security. Even if it became far easier to generate true random numbers, it wouldn't change (a) how we generate randomness at a systems level or (b) what goes wrong with randomness.
Our problem with cryptography is not the quality of random numbers. We are fine at generating unpredictable, decorrelated bits for keys, nonces, and IVs. Soundly designed systems aren't attacked through the quality of their entropy inputs\u2020.
The problem we have with randomness and entropy is logistical. So long as our CSPRNGs need initial, secret entropy sources of any kind, there will be a distinction between the insecure state of the system before it is initialized and the (permanent) secure state of the system after it's been initialized. And so long as we continue building software on general purpose operating systems, there will be events (forking, unsuspending, unpickling, resuming VMs, cloning VMs) that violate our assumptions about which state we're in.
Secure randomness isn't a computational or cryptographic problem (or at least, the cryptographic part of the problem has long been thoroughly solved). It's a systems programming problem. It's back in the un-fun realm of "all software has bugs and all bugs are potential security problems".
It's for that reason that the big problem in cryptography right now isn't "generate better random", but instead "factor out as much as possible our dependence on randomness". Deterministic DSA and EdDSA are examples of this trend, as are SIV and Nonce-Misuse Resistant AEADs.
\u2020 (unsound systems frequently are, but that just makes my point for me)","created_at":"2016-05-18T15:12:00Z","created_at_i":1463584320,"objectID":"11722504","parent_id":11719543,"story_id":11719543,"story_title":"Academics Make Theoretical Breakthrough in Random Number Generation","story_url":"https://threatpost.com/academics-make-theoretical-breakthrough-in-random-number-generation/118150/","updated_at":"2026-05-19T12:04:27Z"}],"hitsPerPage":10,"nbHits":7,"nbPages":1,"page":0,"params":"query=USAspending+agent&hitsPerPage=10&advancedSyntax=true&analyticsTags=backend","processingTimeMS":14,"processingTimingsMS":{"_request":{"queue":5,"roundTrip":15},"afterFetch":{"format":{"highlighting":1,"total":1},"merge":{"mergeLoop":{"prepareNextHit":1,"total":1},"total":2},"total":2},"fetch":{"query":9,"scanning":1,"total":11},"total":14},"query":"USAspending agent","serverTimeMS":20}