> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants. If talk acceptance departs from that norm, it would be for some reason that makes it overshoot and have more females than is proportionate. In no case would you expect 98% and 79% in your scenario, or 50% in general, unless they rigged it that way.
I’m not sure why you would think the “top N” of any given field would be men. There aren’t more men than women overall, and men aren’t inherently any smarter or more talented. If you’ve only ever worked in tech, though, maybe you have a skewed perspective.
Some traits are more variable in men. So there are more men at the top and bottom of the distribution. But not enough to explain 80% men in a field as large as computer science.[1]
I wish you recognized the confirmation bias in your logic.
Men & women are socialized to compete in very different arenas & women are generally socialized not to compete with men.
None of that is proof that men are smarter or more talented. Men's intelligence may be more jagged than women's, but even if so, that doesn't mean 'better'.
It would mean that men & women's intelligence complements each other.
> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants.
Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and the data usually has shifts over time which strongly suggest that it’s either an issue with data collection or learned behavior (e.g. the famed engineer gender gap showing very different results in former communist countries where girls were socially encouraged to strive for those jobs).
Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board.
Lastly, even if there was a proven biological link between gender and peak performance, we haven’t established that Pycon talk slots only go to the top 1% performers on such a narrow metric. I don’t think even the angriest internet dudes try to make that claim, and once you’re saying something isn’t Olympic Games-level elite you’re saying there are a ton of women who perform just as well as the median man giving a conference talk.
> Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board
CS/EE as a field is about 80% male, depending on the year
When the pipeline is that thin, it’s hard to get an equal outcome at the professional level
I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.
i have no take on this comment, but i like the model in this paper for considering whether it could be possible or appropriate wrt different levels of vetting:
In the GP’s view, it’s the top N% of the applicant pool, so a more diverse applicant pool leads to more diverse talks.
Talk selection is blind (per GP), so the increasing % of female-led talks is evidence for the GP viewpoint. If the Parent view were correct, the same 98% male talks would be selected because they are “objectively better” than the lower-quality female-led talks that are bulking up the applicant pool.
I have not verified the claim about talk selection being blinded. A source (or contradicting source) would be welcome.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
I'm a huge opponent of DEI programs. Bend the statistics as you wish, DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. Moreover, I disagree with the statement that diverse communities are better. I work in a very international company and I've noticed that people tend to cluster in groups of similar cultural background because that makes communication much easier.
I have personally been in a situation where I was denied educational opportunities because of my sex. I think that wasn't okay.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
That's a very software engineer kind of analysis. And a very capitalist one as well. As much as the PSF has a specific goal of improving Python for everyone, human beings should all have a goal of making the world a better place for everyone. Shortest path to narrow outcome is not a recipe for a better world. Increasing equity, prosperity and opportunity for people who may have been shut out in the past is a benefit unto itself. And in terms of who is in of an leg up, the fact is that there are already loads of programs available in the developed world, including the US, that bolster people with specific material deficiency (ie poverty). DEI is specifically meant to overcome prejudice since protections have been lacking for so long.
> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
There's no St. Jude's Non-Cancer Cancer Research because that would be fucking stupid. Similarly, there is no "coding for white guys". Well, there is, we just call that the entire industry.
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).
It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there.
But I don't see colors or genders like that.
Is this one of those “what about white guys?” complaints, or am I misreading? Because the implied qualification for “subset of people” is “underrepresented”. Any political/cultural undertones are on you.
I'm sorry but you're on some bullshit here. Women are half the population but majorly unrepresented in the tech industry because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems or things like having a child having an adverse and outsized impact on women's careers. There are plenty of smart women, the problem is the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out. Having programs that encourage women to get into tech is good because we want the people building our technology to have more diverse views than just well off men from the suburbs. We build better products when more people are involved, period. Stop picking fights with people trying to improve the abysmal representation problems in this industry, it makes you look like an anti-social freak.
What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "?
They presumably didn’t write an entire literature survey in an HN comment because the CS pipeline problem has been written about so much in the past that it’s reasonable to assume basic familiarity:
I mean there's reams of women in tech or academia who talk about this shit. "I left my PhD program because I was constantly belittled and harassed by my advisor and labmates" "I left my position for a different company because I kept getting passed over for promotion after I had kids" "I switched majors from CS in college because most of my classmates were men who made me uncomfortable" "I was bullied in high school by boys because they thought I didn't get accepted into school based on merit". These are all stories I've heard and there are many of them. Go ask some women in your workplace and I'd bet money they've heard stories like this from other women they know or have experienced it themselves. I'm a man and I'm tired of hearing the contrarian denials regarding these problems from my peers in the industry. Maybe every woman I know in the industry experiencing sexism at some point in their education or career is too anecdotal for you I guess.
I'm sure there's studies in labor and education stats to show some quantitative evidence of this stuff but I'm not going to waste my time proving the obvious to you.
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
> 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."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to:
A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need"
B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine.
C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
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. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened.
From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
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.
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
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.
> 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.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
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”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
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.
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.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> 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.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
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.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." -- Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?
Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
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.
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
> 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.
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
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.
> "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."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
> The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14.
This might be the bigger story.
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python.
> That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
> I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it
It is definitely a complicated problem but governments tend to but good funding agencies for work that uplifts the broader society and creates the foundation for new markets. That's the idea behind science funding anyways. New science might not create a trillion dollar business directly but it sure lays the funding for new multi billion dollar companies and companies to skyrocket from 500bn to 5T market caps...
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
> I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.
It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
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.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
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.
The government can certainly add restrictions to the use of the grant money, but applying that broadly over any actions the grantee performs during that time is overreach. I wonder about the legality of that condition.
Funny how all these DEI proponents never reach out to poor people working manual labor jobs..
If you want "inclusion", include those who you normally exclude instead of including those who you actually want more because they're "culturally compatible".
Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
That’s by design. The Republican Party explicitly desires an America that’s white, male, straight, and complacent. Everyone else just ruins the picture.
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.
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
I'm going to say something here that might get me in trouble but I don't really care, this is awful. I've been a programming language developer for over a decade at this point, but I've been programming since I was 6, which was at this point 34 years ago.
In all that time, I've met a lot of people in the tech world, very many of them have been queer, gay, autistic, and/or trans. But there's no community where I've found a greater concentration of LGBTQ people, especially trans people, than in the compilers / pldev community. There's a reason the icon for the Rust discord is the Rust logo superimposed on the LGBTQ flag -- programming languages is disproportionately a field where LGBTQ people gravitate and contribute. I don't know why, but them's the facts.
That means no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, no matter what groups you identify with, LGBTQ people are a driving force in building the tech you use to do your job, to stay connected with your family, to fulfill your creativity and passions, or to even save your life.
And none of them are putting gates on who may or may not use the tech they build. All we are saying is "don't hate us, don't discriminate against us." And yet that's too much for some people.
All this anti-dei nonsense is shooting ourselves in face and the foot. It's counterproductive when we (the communities on on HN) can't get access to vital funding. You think we couldn't have nice things before? Well here we are now, even the PSF is poorer because of this rampant hatred.
Right here, this is why HN as community can't not be political. It's not a tenable proposition anymore. For everyone who downvotes politics stories because they just want to have fun talking about cool tech, it didn't matter one bit that didn't want to engage with politics -- politics has nevertheless engaged with you.
Where we go now I don't know, but what I do know is LGBTQ folx are going to keep building programming languages, this won't stop them. My reaction is that as much as the federal government wants to make America a dangerous place for LGBTQ people, programming language communities should make their space even safer. So sorry everyone who doesn't want to mix woke with their tech, it's not going to get any better for you now that the federal government is anti-trans as a policy. If we're going to be driven into the closet, we're just going to respond by making even more programming languages thank you very much. And our communities will be LGBTQ safe spaces because it's the only place we've got left.
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
The purpose of that flag it to make a statement about your genitals in the context of a technology forum to which they are irrelevant. Your "existence" does not require you to constantly advertise a personal characteristic.
I'm not sure whom you're trying to convince with this stuff about the flag declaring it's a safe place to exist or whatever. You people have been saying the same thing for ten years. Nobody believes you. It's why Trump won.
> So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away
Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough. The era of state support for this stuff is coming to an end, and the dominance of the ideology that these flags represent cannot last without the state putting its thumb on the scale.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
The field is dominated by autistic people, really. Autistic people are often also kinda weird with their sexuality, many times ace, also many times autigender. We are all under that flag, and so even if we may not agree with everything it stands for, we each understand what it means to be excluded for being who we are.
Personally I'm not gay or trans but... let's just say if they were rounding up people for being queer, as people are wont to do, they'd find plenty of reasons to scoop me up. Just being ace is enough for people to get weird about you in some spaces. In LGBTQ spaces it's not really a question.
> Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people?
Oh it's balanced out. There's a whooooole other wing of the PL sphere: the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
Biden's DEI wave was much more Maoist than Trump 2.0. Not saying this is great either, but stuff like land acknowledgements, "overthrowing the oppressors", etc. sure look a lot like stuff seen in Mao's cultural revolution.
This thread is hilarious. Many independents turned into Never-Trumpers on the first day when he launched the coin scheme and could perfectly see what would happen.
The PSF gets the memo in October 2025 (but still has the same sponsors as the Trump ballroom). Everyone is supposed to laud them for their wisdom and insight and all other opinions are deleted.
Just one thread with these arrogant, incompetent, censorious people and their followers makes you want to vote Vance in 2028 again.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm 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."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
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.
Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
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!
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.
It seems like a number of the "DEI is anti-merit discrimination" messages in this thread are overlooking how DEI work usually works.
A relevant tweet from 2016 (https://x.com/jessicamckellar/status/737299461563502595):
> Hello from your @PyCon Diversity Chair. % PyCon talks by women: (2011: 1%), (2012: 7%), (2013: 15%), (2014/15: 33%), (2016: 40%). #pycon2016
Increased diversity in communities usually comes from active outreach work. PyCon's talk selection process starts blinded.
If 300 people submit talks and 294 are men, then 98% of talks will likely be from men.
If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.
Outreach to encourage folks to apply/join/run/etc. can make a big difference in the makeup of applicants and the makeup of the end results. Bucking the trend even during just one year can start a snowball effect that moves the needle further in future years.
The world doesn't run on merit. Who you know, whether you've been invited in to the club, and whether you feel you belong all affect where you end up. So unusually homogenous communities (which feel hard for outsiders to break into) can arise even without deliberate discrimination.
Organizations like the PSF could choose to say "let's avoid outreach work and simply accept the status quo forever", but I would much rather see the Python community become more diverse and welcoming over time.
This is how DEI should work, and probably does in some, or maybe many, cases.
In other cases, it boiled down to "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates", metrics for DEI hiring that turn into goals, and e-mails stating "only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups".
I expect that I'll get accused of making this up, which is why the latter is an exact quote shown on page 28 in this court case: https://www.scribd.com/document/372802863/18-CIV-00442-ARNE-...
I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.
That's a lot of whites for a roofing company.
Seems like a lawsuit right there... is this happened I sure hope that there was a lawsuit! Or at least HR implementing new hiring practices company wide afterwards...
Who's going to start a lawsuit and get blacklisted? HR is normally pushing for this.
No one is brave enough to start such lawsuits. Likelihood of winning too low, first mover disadvantage at play.
> "this quarter, we only have headcount for 'diverse' candidates",
Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to. It's as bad as allowing sexual harassment.
Linking the term DEI to illegal hiring practices is like linking having a male manager to sexual harassment. The entire point of DEI was to eliminate illegal biases.
> Such a statement from those with hiring authority is highly illegal. Any HR department that would let this message be delivered, either explicitly or implicitly, would open the company to massive lawsuits, such as the one you linked to.
You’re correct about the law, and the EEOC interpretation has been consistent for decades: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/section-15-race-and-color.... But in practice, in many though not all places, “DEI” became a vehicle for double standards, quotas, and other illegal hiring practices.
I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... When they got into corporate America, including law firms, they brought those ideas with them. But even though pre-SFFA law authorized race-based affirmative action in universities, it was never legal for hiring.
So you had this situation where not only did the big corporations engage in illegal hiring practices. But their law firms advising them were themselves engaged in illegal hiring practices. They all opened themselves up to major liability.
> I suspect what happened is that a generation of professionals went through university systems where racial preferences were practiced openly
I feel like you're ignoring that racial preferences were practiced openly for the entirety of the existence of the university systems in the US. It's just that for almost all of time, the preference was for "white non-Jews" (where "white" was historically malleable: Benjamin Franklin wrote a somewhat famous screed about how Germans and Swedes weren't white, they were inferior, and they were "darken[ing America]'s people"
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned that and it was awhile before the discrimination was rebooted to run in the opposite direction.
So in other words, it went on for a few centuries like I said.
Correct. Then we made it illegal, but universities started doing it in the other direction. That’s the timeframe relevant to my point, which is about the people who made the illegal hiring decisions in 2020. They went to universities in the 21st century, not in 1945.
I don't think that's quite fair, as in many cases there were federal regulations that pressured industries into behavior that was discriminatory to one group in order to favor others. In fact there was an accumulation of contradictory laws and regulations over 15+ years. In many cases regulations were set that had financial repercussions if hiring practices that were considered illegal weren't followed. There is a respectful interpretation of one of the conservative concerns during the election in that the accumulation of regulations made it impossible to conduct business legally and compliant with regulations in some industries.
Personally I'm very much for the goals of DEI and very much against some of the means that were being taken to reach those goals. It's an extremely difficult and complex problem.
I can't help but wonder if the movement had just focused on inclusion and primarily where there is leverage towards future prosperity if there wouldn't have been such a backlash and the efforts would have been enduring and compounding.
Slipping that "equity" in there is a trap to confuse responsibility with privilege and cause a lot of trouble that is extremely hard to work through. It's the justification for representation-driven hiring and selection (affirmative action), and equity based hiring practices that were both federally mandated AND constitutionally illegal at the same time.
I can't help but suspect it's something like satisfaction, where if you pursue it directly it's fleeting and destructive but if you focus on the inputs you get more of it and it's enduring.
Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.
It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.
Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.
That's like saying "the Crusaders weren't real Christians because real Christianity is peaceful"
See also: No True Scotsman Fallacy
No, that's not at all the case, the crusaders were acting under the blessing of the church. It still may not be "real" Christianity, but it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law. I was at two companies promoting DEI that were explicit about non-discrimination and had extensive training on it to prevent the illegal actions linked in that lawsuit.
There's no "this is DEI this is not DEI" but any halfway sane and truthful assessment would focus on what the proponents claimed, said, and propagated as their intentions. Just as the Christians of the time were intending to do with the crusades.
Calling this a "no true Scotsman fallacy" is just attempting to misapply a logical fallacy to avoid looking at the issue truthfully and honestly.
> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law
I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.
What are your sources?
The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...
Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'
I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.
I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.
Your point is well taken. Not everyone was violating the law. But meanwhile Microsoft was setting explicit numeric targets on hiring employees from particular racial groups: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wells-fargo-microsoft-diversity....
Companies were also demanding race-conscious staffing practices at the law firms they used: https://www.wsj.com/business/law-firm-clients-demand-more-bl.... Microsoft offered financial bonuses to law firms for promoting lawyers from specific racial groups: https://today.westlaw.com/Document/If3eb4570033e11eb8e48d387....
Sure, but you’re god deciding who goes to hell.
Illegal stuff happens all the time in the workplace and very frequently goes unreported, underreported, or otherwise results in nothing.
Using claims that something is illegal to discredit an argument is extremely dubious.
> unusually homogenous communities
Which can be socioeconomic rather than racial..
It’s hard to break into the club of people who know CEOs or have parents or relatives who are VPs of major companies and can provide access for startups by people they know, for example.
Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants. If talk acceptance departs from that norm, it would be for some reason that makes it overshoot and have more females than is proportionate. In no case would you expect 98% and 79% in your scenario, or 50% in general, unless they rigged it that way.
I’m not sure why you would think the “top N” of any given field would be men. There aren’t more men than women overall, and men aren’t inherently any smarter or more talented. If you’ve only ever worked in tech, though, maybe you have a skewed perspective.
Some traits are more variable in men. So there are more men at the top and bottom of the distribution. But not enough to explain 80% men in a field as large as computer science.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
Men are inherently smarter and more talented.
Like, the best at basically every field is majority male. Open the horse’s mouth and count its teeth.
(And as I mentioned, where it isn’t majority male, it’s majority female. Not some balance of social factors that magically cancel out to 50%.)
I wish you recognized the confirmation bias in your logic.
Men & women are socialized to compete in very different arenas & women are generally socialized not to compete with men.
None of that is proof that men are smarter or more talented. Men's intelligence may be more jagged than women's, but even if so, that doesn't mean 'better'.
It would mean that men & women's intelligence complements each other.
> Almost always when you take the top N of something, there is a higher proportion of males than the general set of participants.
Try to support this with data and you run into some real messy analysis: in a few cases where testosterone matters such as sports or hand grip strength, this is true and there’s a well-understood biological explanation for it. In most other cases, however, there isn’t a known mechanism and the data usually has shifts over time which strongly suggest that it’s either an issue with data collection or learned behavior (e.g. the famed engineer gender gap showing very different results in former communist countries where girls were socially encouraged to strive for those jobs).
Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board.
Lastly, even if there was a proven biological link between gender and peak performance, we haven’t established that Pycon talk slots only go to the top 1% performers on such a narrow metric. I don’t think even the angriest internet dudes try to make that claim, and once you’re saying something isn’t Olympic Games-level elite you’re saying there are a ton of women who perform just as well as the median man giving a conference talk.
> Programming is a complex intellectual activity so it’s pretty clear that not only is there not a simple biological factor but there isn’t even a single test which would allow for there to be one. People have a wide range of skills used to find success in different areas and even if some of the low-level cognitive skills that have been speculated about such as ability to rotate 3-D shapes turned out to have a genetic component, that would be shown with something like a gender bias in people writing simulation or game engines rather than across the board
CS/EE as a field is about 80% male, depending on the year
When the pipeline is that thin, it’s hard to get an equal outcome at the professional level
I definitely agree it’s a problem. I haven’t seen any evidence supporting the idea that it’s innate rather than social in origin. Human neuroplasticity is our species’ big defining trait so it seems far more likely that we have a complex mix of feedback loops based on socialization.
i have no take on this comment, but i like the model in this paper for considering whether it could be possible or appropriate wrt different levels of vetting:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.03533
Misunderstanding the GP. Possibly deliberately?
In the parent’s view, the top N% is fixed.
In the GP’s view, it’s the top N% of the applicant pool, so a more diverse applicant pool leads to more diverse talks.
Talk selection is blind (per GP), so the increasing % of female-led talks is evidence for the GP viewpoint. If the Parent view were correct, the same 98% male talks would be selected because they are “objectively better” than the lower-quality female-led talks that are bulking up the applicant pool.
I have not verified the claim about talk selection being blinded. A source (or contradicting source) would be welcome.
th asserts “If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.”
I didn’t misunderstand. That is simply nonsense.
Disparate treatment on the basis of protected and usually immutable characteristics, is literally illegal, all the sort of mental gymnastics do not matter, that's literally what the law is.
Encouraging specific people to submit applications is not illegal. Even based on those characteristics.
No that is also illegal. You can not target advertisements based on protected characteristics.
> the Justice Department secured a settlement agreement with Meta (formerly Facebook) in February 2025, alleging that Meta’s ad delivery system used machine-learning algorithms relying on Fair Housing Act (FHA)-protected characteristics such as race, national origin, and sex to determine who saw housing ads
It would take a lengthy essay to explain all the ways you've misunderstood how the law works in the United States, but in summary FHA rules only apply to FHA cases,
Furthermore, you seem to be conflating different meanings of the word "advertisement" where the one you've chosen to support your point is a broad meaning that would seem to make Barbie commercials that feature only girls illegal (which is obviously not the case).
Securement of a settlement proves literally nothing.
I'm a huge opponent of DEI programs. Bend the statistics as you wish, DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination. Moreover, I disagree with the statement that diverse communities are better. I work in a very international company and I've noticed that people tend to cluster in groups of similar cultural background because that makes communication much easier.
I have personally been in a situation where I was denied educational opportunities because of my sex. I think that wasn't okay.
> DEI is at its heart a type of discrimination. You might argue that the end justifies the means, but if intermediate step is that a person gets different treatment depending on their sex or skin colour, then it is discrimination.
The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present. It isn't as though we live in a discrimination-free world and then DEI arrived on the scene and suddenly started creating discrimination. Rather, the opposite is true. There is rampant discrimination on the basis of race, gender and other characteristics across society. DEI is an attempt to fix that. Like all human endeavours, it is not perfect, and some organizations did it better than others.
You state that you were in a situation where you were denied opportunities due to your sex. This experience is entirely commonplace for women, particularly women who are in male-dominated fields. You say what happened to you wasn't okay, so I have to assume you also believe it isn't okay that it happens to women every day. You don't think DEI is the solution - so what solution do you propose?
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F...
So shouldn't there be more DEI rectifying anti-male discrimination now?
> The purpose of DEI is to rectify the discrimination that is already present.
But what's the mechanism for how it can ever actually do that? Suppose there was discrimination that meant some women who "should" rightfully have done CS degrees instead did something else (and I don't think anyone's ever actually shown this without making an arbitrary assumption that any difference in the number of applicants must be due to discrimination, but let's put that aside for the moment). So now you have a number of women with less CS experience than they rightfully "should" have. If you lower the bar for women to give conference talks, or get promoted in the workplace, to compensate for this lesser experience, you're not actually filling that experience deficit, you just get a number of women who've been promoted above their experience level. That doesn't fix past discrimination, it makes it worse.
The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination. The problem is that it has not been shown that all observed differences are the result of discrimination as opposed to preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors not related to discrimination but which are reasonable bases for the difference. There are many cases where differences have been shown exist for reasons other than discrimination. The blanket approach of DEI essentially is a move back to medieval policies which afford certain groups special legal privileges.
We should be removing special privileges that can cause discrimination and not creating more, because a new special privilege can never reverse but will only compound the negative social effects of them.
DEI is not standardized. Organizations can seek various outcomes using various means. Redacting the names of job applicants, so as to eliminate discrimination based on gender and ethnicity, is an example of DEI that does not afford special privileges to any group at all. It simply removes the special, unearned privileges from certain groups.
I agree that not every unequal outcome is the result of discrimination. But we have plentiful examples of major inequities that are not explicable by “preference, ability, or other uncontrollable factors”. In 2021, the median Black household in the US had $27k in net worth compared to $250k for White households [1]. What uncontrollable factor accounts for this? It is not a preference, that’s for sure!
DEI is an attempt to try and address this inequity. If you’re not in favour of it, then what is your proposed solution? Would you support reparations, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has advocated? [2] This is my biggest issue with opponents of DEI: they don’t seem to have any ideas for what to do. They seem to prefer the status quo, which just so happens to benefit them.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
2: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
“The purpose of DEI is to enforce what is idealized as the equal outcome, assuming that all observed differences are the result of discrimination“
I don’t think a single proponent of DEI has ever said this, and it is telling to me that you are misinterpreting it with such a politicized slant. Maybe you need to think about reading some other opinion pieces on this from a much broader spectrum of perspectives?
I’ve been through many DEI programs while I worked in non profits in Upstate NY. The core focus of those programs was often to bring awareness to historical discrimination, and attempt to create environments in organizations where that does not reoccur.
I’m sure the approach differs across the spectrum but to me it was a good faith attempt at righting historical wrongs and attempting to avoid the historical discrimination.
Did you read the comment you're replying to? It's talking about the DEI selection process being blind and instead focusing on outreach to get a more diverse input. You wouldn't be denied anything due to your sex under a system like that. It has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
Randomized studies show that men now face more hiring discrimination than women do: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375863746_Men_Now_F...
Doesn't that imply there should be more DEI helping men than helping women at this point?
If most DEI is helping women, perhaps the DEI itself is subject to systemic bias?
This seems like a disingenuous link to me. It's not a research paper, it's weakly sourced (and many citations are to non-academic outlets such as Quillette. And the author is highly incestuous, linking to her own casual articles (not academic, peer-reviewed papers) as evidence for her secondary claims. At one point, her "proof" that anti-male bias is accumulating is a City Journal article by John Tierney, who is employed by the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. In this article he makes such bold claims as
"Women aren’t discriminated against in twenty-first-century America"
"“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.”" <-- you actually do hear about toxic femininity all the time, it's just packaged up with slick marketing terms like "tradwife"
"Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”?"
Well, "femsplaining" has historically just called "being a bitch," and "believe all men" seems to be the default position of most people considering how rarely sexual assault victims are, historically, taken seriously.
(Also, not for nothing, the slogan he's alluding to is "believe women" not "believe all women." And the thrust of the catchphrase is not that we should automatically believe every claim out of a woman's mouth, but that we should believe rather than dismiss-by-default women when they say something. So, on the matter of getting basic facts about the subject matter correct, he's already getting off on the wrong foot, being propagandistically wrong here.
I'm actually shocked at how terrible your link is. I really had a higher opinion of HN users (although lately it's felt like all anyone wants to talk about is AI slop).
I recommend you read things more closely before linking them. Your reputation is at stake.
"The world doesn't run on merit. " Critical systems do.
Reaching out only to members of certain groups rather than others is still invidious discrimination. When based on characteristics like race, sex or national origin it is probably illegal, although I am not a lawyer.
In high school, I ran a robotics team that did lots of STEM outreach. We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
I think we played an important role in the community. In our mission we stated we wanted to help bring "equity to STEM education."
In 2025, according to the current admin's stance on "DEI," my robotics team would not be able to receive grants without risk of being sued. It's plainly obvious the line is not drawn at restraining "overly progressive policies" - it's just arbitrarily placed so the govt can pick and choose the winners based on allegiance.
It's a shame that folks with a strong moral fiber are now punished for wanting to help their communities.
Around 2019, Guido official stated that he would not longer mentor any white male, and that there was enough white males around that any white male who wanted to learn developing python would have to do it on their own. The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then, but now seem to have relaxed a bit.
Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity. It always bring push back, which usually escalate hostilities and bring more polarization.
I would like to imagine than in the place of DEI or anti-DEI, we will instead see a push for programs that look to the individual and their need for support. Needing mentors and support is not born out of gender or skin color, nor faith or sexual orientation. Its born from human need to improve oneself and those around us. That is a program that deserve government grants, and I wish there was governments that would support that in 2025 political climate.
I noted today in local Swedish news that one of the largest STEM university in Sweden found that they have now reached their gender equallity goals for technical programs, and is looking to change the diversity program towards other demographics that has been overlooked and gotten worse over the years in term of gender equallity, like for students in biology and chemistry. Time will tell what the people with strong moral fiber will do, as there seems to be a lot of resistance among those who previous was supported by that diversity program.
>>> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender, will never be a stable system for equity.
It's a remarkably stable system for inequity.
That's a very software engineer kind of analysis. And a very capitalist one as well. As much as the PSF has a specific goal of improving Python for everyone, human beings should all have a goal of making the world a better place for everyone. Shortest path to narrow outcome is not a recipe for a better world. Increasing equity, prosperity and opportunity for people who may have been shut out in the past is a benefit unto itself. And in terms of who is in of an leg up, the fact is that there are already loads of programs available in the developed world, including the US, that bolster people with specific material deficiency (ie poverty). DEI is specifically meant to overcome prejudice since protections have been lacking for so long.
> The community in general seemed to follow the same policy back then
Our definitions of the community in general must differ. This was not what I saw.
> Reducing complex individuals into two bits of information, skin and gender
This is a straw man. Skin and gender were not the only factors he considered. And he considered gender because of patterns of failure when other mentors mentored women.
I appreciate your efforts to support community and people
Cronyism is back on the menu.
You state no details.. but things like "girls who code" sound discriminatory. What about outreach to people who can't learn to code for example because they're not wealthy enough?
Note that they said:
> We went to community centers, after school programs, and worked with other similar orgs like "girls who code."
This sounds like a fairly broad based outreach program. The inclusion of an organization that supports girls is just one of the avenues they used. There is nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I feel like founding an organization called Men In Science & Engineering Research, simply because the acronym (MISER) would be a fitting parody for those who promote blind equality (i.e. the type of equality that hoards the riches of science for men).
I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
> but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly?
I can see how it might seem weird to an alien who knew what men and women were, but had no context for the existing state and history of society.
I can't see how it would seem weird to anyone else, however.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM, STEM graduates have been majority female for decades.
Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
You've never heard of programs to encourage men to be nurses or teachers? I certainly have.
Here's what I found after a quick search. If you're interested I'm sure you could research and find more information.
https://www.arizonacollege.edu/blog/men-wanted-new-efforts-t...
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
https://www.belmont.edu/stories/articles/2025/men-in-educati...
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
So we shouldn’t focus on helping a subset of people because doing so is discriminatory to everyone else?
Interesting how you always pick a "subset of people" which are politically/culturally compatible..
Some people are disadvantaged and some are not.
There's no St. Jude's Non-Cancer Cancer Research because that would be fucking stupid. Similarly, there is no "coding for white guys". Well, there is, we just call that the entire industry.
Source: I am a white man living in America.
I don't want "coding for white guys", if I could decide, I'd want for example "coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America" (I live in Poland so it's not directly about me).
It seems you're also making a false assumption that since "white guys" make the majority of the industry that means all kinds of "white guys" are properly represented there. But I don't see colors or genders like that.
It’s very frustrating when non-residents or citizens have such strong opinions on US policy like this.
We do have those programs ("coding for people who work manual labor jobs living in rural America") already and we have for quite a long time.
Is this one of those “what about white guys?” complaints, or am I misreading? Because the implied qualification for “subset of people” is “underrepresented”. Any political/cultural undertones are on you.
Yes. They've got several other comments in this same thread honestly curious why there aren't outreach programs for "conservatives."
As if any of the tech companies would have had even a fraction of their success if they were ran like a Truth Social forum...
You're calling an entire gender "compatible" with what, exactly?
I'm sorry but you're on some bullshit here. Women are half the population but majorly unrepresented in the tech industry because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems or things like having a child having an adverse and outsized impact on women's careers. There are plenty of smart women, the problem is the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out. Having programs that encourage women to get into tech is good because we want the people building our technology to have more diverse views than just well off men from the suburbs. We build better products when more people are involved, period. Stop picking fights with people trying to improve the abysmal representation problems in this industry, it makes you look like an anti-social freak.
> we want the people building our technology to have more diverse views than just well off men from the suburbs
is this actually true? i think we tend to move people into the suburbs and demand they act like a well off man from the suburbs.
What is your evidence for this: "... because of structural problems that push them out, be that systemic misogyny in our educational systems ..." , "the toxicity present in the industry that pushes them out ... "?
What alternative reasons have you explored?
They presumably didn’t write an entire literature survey in an HN comment because the CS pipeline problem has been written about so much in the past that it’s reasonable to assume basic familiarity:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/punch-cards-pipel...
I mean there's reams of women in tech or academia who talk about this shit. "I left my PhD program because I was constantly belittled and harassed by my advisor and labmates" "I left my position for a different company because I kept getting passed over for promotion after I had kids" "I switched majors from CS in college because most of my classmates were men who made me uncomfortable" "I was bullied in high school by boys because they thought I didn't get accepted into school based on merit". These are all stories I've heard and there are many of them. Go ask some women in your workplace and I'd bet money they've heard stories like this from other women they know or have experienced it themselves. I'm a man and I'm tired of hearing the contrarian denials regarding these problems from my peers in the industry. Maybe every woman I know in the industry experiencing sexism at some point in their education or career is too anecdotal for you I guess.
I'm sure there's studies in labor and education stats to show some quantitative evidence of this stuff but I'm not going to waste my time proving the obvious to you.
Well... if you're getting a grant to help group X (which is in need), and you're not helping group Y (that is also in need), that should be all right (one organization probably can't do everything). But there maybe ought to be someone else getting a grant to help group Y.
I believe you are always allowed to create a club "boys who code" if that's something you are interested in.
If you want to use any public spaces (libraries, community centers, parks) then no, you can't. Virtually every state has a prohibition on the use of public spaces that specifically prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex or gender
If you wanted to leverage the "private club" exemption per Roberts v Jaycees, then you would be disqualified from using public spaces as well, which -- my wife established a "girls who code" organization and it benefited greatly from the use of both public and lent private spaces, but she could not have done without the ability to use both as it would have been extremely cost prohibitive (and it wasn't in any way profitable anyway)
So what about the girl scouts, is that also discriminatory?
Yes, there was an entire supreme court case about that 30 years ago, a lawsuit against the Boy Scouts I might add.
That was against the boy scouts but the reverse lawsuit hasn't been filed against the girl scouts to my knowledge.
That said, law in the US and one’s opinions on what constitutes discrimination are different things.
On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
On the other hand, the federal government has gone after law firms that are not actually in violation of law and forced settlements due to their DEI programs, so you can't actually trust that you won't be hassled. Additionally, that you won't at minimum have the money clawed back, even if the claims are meritless, as the administration has done on Congressionally appropriated funds repeatedly as part of DOGE efforts.
The text is:
> 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."
There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.
(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)
its just that human beings aren't writing things using type safe memory checked languages, but i'll just say that they're trying to concatenate and distill a series of supreme court decisions into public policy.
It basically boils down to: A) Disparate Treatment is always in every case unlawful for any reason except "legitimate business need" B) "legitimate business need" is no longer including "diversity equity and inclusion", but preferencing Female Gynocologists is still going to be fine. C) "Disparate impact" claims are no longer valid, unless remedy a concrete discriminatory practice.
The best and brightest are not working on these matters.They put out work product with misspellings, misstatements, outright lies, and ChatGPT hallucinations. We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional. Maybe if you’re sued, the mistake gets you off the hook in front of a judge, but you should expect to be hassled no matter what the actual text says.
> We have to assume any mistakes are unintentional.
I assume they are intentional. The whole point is to make society less integrity based and more pay to play based. If you’re sufficiently influential, then it’s a mistake that is forgiven. If you aren’t, then you suffer the consequences.
It’s how it works in low trust societies. You haggle for everything, from produce to traffic tickets to building permits to criminal charges. Everything.
Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.
If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.
As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.
An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.
Could the foundation take the money and sit on it in bonds or some other safe instrument? Call it an "endowment"?
$1.5M at 4% is nice.
But I suppose the "proposal" means these funds come with a distribution plan attached?
Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.
In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.
> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.
This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.
I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.
This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.
They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.
> On the one hand, the plain text of the language is not against DEI practices in general -- only DEI practices that are "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."
EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.
Sure, but the executive order is not a law.
The executive order is direction to executive branch officials, including the ones who are responsible for applying the cancellation and clawback terms in the agreement at issue, as to how they are to perform their duties.
It is certainly relevsant to evaluating whether or not it is worthwhile to apply for the grant. That sufficient litigation might reverse an application of the policy in the EO that the agreement text clearly highlights the intent to enforce as inconsistent with the underlying law isn’t worth much unless the cost of expected litigation would be dwarfed by the size of the contract award, and for a $1.5 million grant application, that’s...not very much litigation.
You say that confidently like that's an obstacle to executive power in 2025.
The opinion of the current administration is that DEI is illegal, the language is intentionally implying that DEI is illegal discrimination, because that is the view they are trying to advance. Grants are even being terminated for being related to any sort of diversity topic.
Grants are terminated based on keyword matches.
they'd have to be extra careful with cpython, it's got a lot of include
The conjunction used is "or". It could mean either.
My reading in context is different: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08...
That's a different, non-governmental website?
That was labor lawyers interpreting a governmental memorandum about the same issue substantially or precisely.
Reality: the trump admin has shown that the law doesn't matter in the short term. If they think it's "DEI" they'll find a way to yank funding/make an example out of an organization agreeing to this. Even if they're legally in the wrong.
Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.
If it’s not “DEI” then it’s “waste fraud and abuse”. And if it’s not that then it’s “terrorism” or “treason”.
“Anti-semitism” if it involves colleges in any way, don’t forget that!
Who, in 2025, is still giving the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the rule of law?
As I’ve said in the past: they need the benefit of the doubt on everything; they deserve the benefit of the doubt on nothing.
A non-trivial amount of people in this thread, sadly. Many of which are leaving comments like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727967
Roughly half of the country, give or take.
Roughly 40% supports Trump, but they are often quite loud about putting other things above the rule of law.
Not sure why you think roughly 50% give him the benefit of the doubt on dedication to the rule of law.
From Democratic analyst David Shor back in March ( https://archive.is/kbwom ) : "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]." So, not that it brings me any joy to say it but it would seem more like 55%?
If anyone has any polling data to the contrary, I'd love to see it.
*Roughly 40% of the country, give or take. Don't be complacent.
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. "
The sad irony is that the staff understood it perfectly, the organizations were not legitimate 501c groups (since at the time we had enforceable rules around political activity by nonprofit groups) but through extremely bad faith investigations where Congressional republicans literally forbade the IRS from reporting on their barring of climate and ‘progressive’ groups when investigating the ‘scandal’ so that even today people mischaracterize it as an example of IRS political targeting.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/154584-ig-audit-of-irs-ac...
The Trump administration is definitively coming after 501c3s. I run a nonprofit and all the movement around us has been preparing for this since these laws were first announced. Ironcically, the laws to investigate nonprofits were first proposed under the Biden administration to attack the Palestine movement, and like most things in the Palestine movement, they were quickly turned against the rest of the country.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-trump-administration-is-comi...
I don't think that's a good summary of what happened. From your wiki link
> In 2013, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), under the Obama administration, revealed that it had selected political groups applying for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal probe ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Conservatives claimed that they were specifically targeted by the IRS, but an exhaustive report released by the Treasury Department's Inspector General in 2017 found that from 2004 to 2013, the IRS used both conservative and liberal keywords to choose targets for further scrutiny.
> The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration's audit found (page 14): "For the 296 potential political cases we reviewed, as of December 17, 2012, 108 applications had been approved, 28 were withdrawn by the applicant, none had been denied, and 160 cases were open from 206 to 1,138 calendar days (some crossing two election cycles)."[11] Bloomberg News reported on May 14, 2013, "None of the Republican groups have said their applications were rejected."
The IRS took some stupid shortcuts by trying to look at keywords (including those linked to liberal causes) for more scrutiny of if they met the criteria of a non profit. There's no evidence this was done based on partisanship and it did not cause any groups to be rejected
It could be revoked if they are found to engage in illegal discrimination-Solidified by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1983 case Bob Jones University v. United States. based on public comments made by board members, such evidence seems replete.
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.
Here's some evidence that he is, again, badmouthing the PSF without a good reason: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-psfs-2024-annual-im...
Surely you mean "they are badmouthing". Enough to be expelled from the PSF.
Some official report from the PSF does not invalidate decades long observations. I see increasingly that programmers rely on PDFs from foundations and official statements from bureaucrats rather than look at the source code.
I'm not taking a stance, I just want to point out that the previous grant system (the "dei" one) could very easily and justifiably be seen as "imposing onerous political terms" on funding as well. You could say the pendulum motion has too large an amplitude.
Prior to the current administration there's been a ratcheting up of political influence / social engineering on science grants as well. The last DoE Office of Science grant I applied to had a DEI requirement that was also used during screening. My preference would all this political influence be dialed down.
Seems you comment agrees with the parent.
Is the restriction on grantees not violating federal law a new one, or has it been around for ages?
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.
> 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.
It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway. I don't mean this negatively: they're broad but still subject matter experts, parachuting in new people would be administrative malpractice, and they know just as much what conclusions can and can't be drawn from an analysis plan.
> It's also the same program officers stewarding grant administration after administration, anyway.
Historically, yes; as well as firing leadership and moving decisions usually made further down the chain up to the new leadership, this administration has also fired a lot of the existing grant reviewers in most of the big health an science grant-issuing agencies (and probably smaller ones, too, but those would have made fewer headlines) as part of the political purges of, well, a lot of the federal civil service earlier this year.
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”
It's worth pointing out that this profile has been around for three months and already has enough karma to have access to the "flag" and "vouch" tools.
Even on HN, we're still human and hungry for controversy.
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.
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.
The "rule against surplusage": Where one reading of a statute would make one or more parts of the statute redundant and another reading would avoid the redundancy, the other reading is preferred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
Grant agreements are not statutes but contracts, and canons of statutory interpretation do not apply to contracts.
Perhaps a better source (but IANAL):
"Judges frequently invoke anti-redundancy principles in the interpretation of legal language, whether it appears in classic private-law documents such as contracts or classic public law-documents such as constitutions and statutes."
Redundancy: When Law Repeats Itself, John M. Golden (2016)
> 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.
> If it's inoperative then it shouldn't be in the language of the grant.
It’s not inoperative. A contract requirement that is redundant with a legal requirement still has separate effect (that is explicit here since this clause is a basis for both cancelling an award that has already been made and clawing back funds that have already been disbursed, separate from any penalties for the violation of the law itself.)
> In the real world, no one would _ever_ sign a contract with this sort of poison pill on it.
If by “this kind” you just mean “incorporating existing legal obligations separately as contract obligations with contractual consequences”, every government contract has multiple such clauses and has for decades.
If by “this kind” you mean more narrowly incorporating the specific anti-DEI provisions and partisan propaganda about DEI inside the clause also incorporating existing legal requirements, I’m pretty sure you will find that most federal contracts that have had their language drafted in the last few months have something like that because of agency implementations of EO 14151. How many people are signinf them...well, I would say look at whoever is still getting federal money, but given the shutdown that’s harder to see...
> 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.
You say, paraphrasing, "It's harder to prove that a DEI program violates Federal anti-discrimination laws than it is to simply terminate a grant to an undesirable grantee."
Ok. Suppose that's true. The government can terminate grants that don't include that language equally as easily -- and, indeed, I just found that there are multiple current cases against the government for doing exactly that: health grants [1], solar grants [2], education grants [3].
Is your point is that the inclusion of this inoperative language makes it easier than it already is for the government to cancel grants and to defend against the subsequent lawsuits until the plaintiffs are pressured into compliance from lack of funding?
[1]https://coag.gov/press-releases/weiser-sues-hhs-kennedy-publ... [2]https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/state-c... [3]https://www.k12dive.com/news/state-lawsuit-Education-Departm...
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.
The "poison pill" terms are not at all a new thing. They have existed for a long time, and were one of the main drivers of the highly aggressive "guilty until proven innocent" cancel culture within academia, where a PhD gets accused non-credibly, is blackballed from NSF funding, exiled from academia, and years later it's discovered they were innocent of the charges.
Good for them for putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe.
Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
> Also, this is a golden opportunity for multi-billion dollar tech companies to also do the same and match or double the grant money in support of PSF! Google, AWS, Microsoft, anyone?
Doing so publicly would undermine the public efforts of the same big tech firms to curry favor from the Trump Administration to secure public contracts, regulatory favors, etc. (including the very public scrapping of their own DEI programs), so I wouldn’t expect it or any other positive public involvement from them that would be connected to this. They’ve already chosen a side in this fight.
> They’ve already chosen a side in this fight
Yes they have, this is a time of choosing. So seeing which side tech companies have chosen, tech employees can now also choose accordingly.
To everyone here who spent the last decade making $400k+options at these tech firms that are now funding this fascist administration, we see you. You are making a choice as to which side you are on.
Remember doing and saying nothing is a choice.
I’m not American, nor I’ve ever lived there. But I’m not sure what an average Google/Meta employee is supposed to do? Reality is, this is what an average US citizen wants. It’s not like the government was chosen without the support of majority or something.
The government was chosen with the majority, yes. That does not mean that the majority should have its way with everything, nor does it mean that everyone, even those who voted in favor at that time agree and approve of current behavior. I mean, why even hold another election if the majority voted for the current administration? Oh wait...
He got 47%, which is not a majority of the vote. Also, many people decided to just abstain. He got something like 30% of eligible voters to vote for him.
If those tech companies make a habit of funding "pro-DEI" organizations, their contracts with the US government could be jeoparized.
There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.
It is literally quid pro quo right now. you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
But PSF doing this and not playing the game is really awesome. I just hope they can fund themselves through other means.
EU should be stepping up more with funding for projects like this as a replacement for US tech. Major secure reliable funding for open source projects that EU infrastructure can be built on would only increase our independence.
They don't have to play the game. It would lead to less profits, sure. But we're talking about companies already sitting on tens of billions of unused cash.
> I don't blame them as such.
I do! Have you read Timothy Snyder yet? He warns that most of the dictator's power is granted willingly. That's what this is, so to the extent you believe they are blameless, their acquiescence is in real terms making it so much worse:
With great power comes great responsibility. Yet somehow we've created a society in America where power comes with no responsibility at all except to enrich one's self and shareholders. Zero responsibility to the Constitution and to the country which gave them the necessary workforce, marketplace, rule of law, military, courts, patent protection, police, schools, universities, research funding, land, roads, shipping lanes, trade deals, political stability, etc. to come to fruition. Once you're rich enough, apparently it's fine to cast all our institutions into the sea, because if not you might have a rough quarter, or maybe you won't get that merger approved. It's just playing the game, who can blame them?Meanwhile, just to be clear about the game being played, food stamps are set to expire for 40 million people this week, and healthcare premiums are set to double in just a few months. I don't believe tech corporations have any plans to help Americans with their food and healthcare needs, despite being keen to chip in for the ballroom gilding.
> you have to play the game and I don't blame them as such.
Not to Godwin the thread, but that is exactly what the executives at IBM thought about their European subsidiary Dehomag in the 1930s. Soon they were custom building machines that organized the logistics of the Holocaust.
They got away with it and kept all the profits and were exempted at Nuremberg, for the same reason as all the rocket scientists: America needed the tech.
Kind of like how we're building surveillance software and social media analytics. The future is starting to look like being hung with your social media posts and hunted using everyone's Ring cameras.
Good points. And I'd say that also falls into the "put the money where the mouth is" category. We know where both of those things are for them, so we don't have to have any illusions or fantasies.
Also, Apple, and T-Mobile.
I thought Germany still frowned on policies like Trump’s, though I suppose demolishing the White House was on its todo list at some point in the past.
Sorry, I think they're probably all out of funds after chipping in for Trump's new royal ballroom.
Somebody probably really wanted a spot in the new bunker beneath the ballroom.
I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And there is a 100.0% chance they'll just claw it back eventually anyway.)
It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.
> putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration
Pretty much every "negotiation" with the Trump administration seems to work that way: An iterated prisoner's-dilemma, where any cooperation from you just means they'll betray you even harder next time...
Take a look at MIT's response to the administration regarding the University Compact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_for_Academic_Excellenc...). You can see that MIT has an excellent understanding on how to reply. AFAICT the administration did not reply furiously (if I missed their reply, I woudl appreciate a link to it).
I can also predict the next step here: UT Austin is likely to agree to the compact and will be given a huge monetary award (although I don't think it's a foregone conclusion- they didn't reply within the deadline which suggests that they are working behind the scenes on an agreement).
I have—fortunately—very little personal experience with being extorted by corrupt officials, but I'd wager another facet is to try to ensure all communication is public and recorded.
This forces them to cloak their real demands in something deniable, and that means you can play naive and act like the subtext was never seen.
> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!
> I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.
Kudos to Simon and the rest of the board. Accepting that money would be more than a strategic mistake, it'd be an existential danger to the PSF itself.
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
The date is at the top of the letter and in the url...
September 2025.
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
From what I've seen in large tech companies, if they bother to do anything at all, you get a token "open source fund" which is then divvied up between different projects, often according to employee feedback. However the money is peanuts so it's clear that this is not a long term support strategy but just a way to placate the employees and say that "We PROUDLY support Open Source!" etc.
Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.
Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.
> 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.
Ok? But that wasn't the OP's argument. Did you reply to the wrong thread?
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
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.
> "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."
How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
I ask, because being in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws would be a problem whether or not you took the money.
> How does the legalese parse here? Does "violation of Federal anti-descrimination laws" apply to the whole thing or just the "discriminatory equity ideology" portion of the statement?
“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).
If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:
“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)
In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:
"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”
That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.
But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.
Honestly who knows, i wouldn't even trust a lawyer's advice, this administration has shown itself to not be a plain dealer or trustworthy, and willing to weaponize whatever they want to punish whoever they think needs punishing. Past experience of what should be legally enforceable or not does not seem very reliable at present.
I'd assume it parses however the US government wants it to parse.
Lawyers wouldn't have as much job security if commas didn't matter some of the time
This administration is working very hard to make all lawyers redundant. The law doesn't really matter if the court is at the beck and call of the President.
It kind of doesn’t matter, parsing legalese is for when there’s an active rule of law. We are in a time when POTUS can watch an ad he didn’t like, and raise taxes on everyone in the country over night just because he’s pissed off. Do you think it really matters what the actual words say? They are there as a stand-in for the king’s intentions, which may change with some $$$. It’s not as a serious legal contract. PSF might be just fine taking the grant and giving half to Trump personally, but who knows?
Yeah, HN tends toward treating law as less dependent on human application than it is under normal circumstances; with the current practice drifting away from normal circumstances towards “Quod rex vult, lex fit”, that mode of analysis becomes far more dangerously misleading.
It parses however the Trump administration wants it to parse in any particular context on any particular day. Their legal moves have been a shit-show of incompetence and callous disregard for the law.
At the end of the day it’s about making sure any attempt to help, acknowledge, or in any way highlight marginalized groups is branded as discriminating against the administration’s preferred (usually but not always their own) demographic. The nuances don’t really matter to them, the goal is to make sure that happens every time. If you’re talking about the wrong group in a way they deem “bad,” they will ruin your life.
After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.
More details on the underlying project that the grant would have funded: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
And for those who want to fund the security of one of the few remaining independent foundation-led package ecosystems:
https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/
How many trillions of dollars depend on Python?
Yes, I mean trillion. Those market caps didn't skyrocket on nothing. A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. Even with more complicated backends a Python layer is usually available, and used. A whole lot of other stuff depends on Python too, but the AI part is obvious.
This is the weird part about our (global![0]) economics that I just don't get. We'll run billions of dollars in the red for a decade or more to get a startup going yet we can't give a million to these backbones? Just because they're open source? It's insane! If we looked at projects like this as a company we'd call their product extremely successful and they'd be able to charge out the wazoo for it. So the main difference is what? That it's open source? That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix. In the very least I want those devs paid enough that they don't get enticed by some large government entity trying to sneak in backdoors or bugs.
[0] it's not just the US, nor is it just capitalist countries. You can point me at grants but let's get honest, $5m is crazy low for their importance. They're providing more than 1000x that value in return.
[side note] I do know big companies often contribute and will put a handful of people on payroll to develop, bug hunt, etc. But even if we include that I'm pretty sure the point still stands. I'm open to being wrong though, I don't know the actual numbers
[P.S.S] seems to parallel our willingness to fund science. Similarly people will cry "but what is the value" from a smartphone communicating over the Internet, with the monetary value practically hitting them in the face.
> A lot of ML systems run on Python. A lot of ML systems are first implemented in Python. > That by being open source it doesn't deserve money? I think this is a flaw we probably need to fix.
Independent of how one feels about the current US administration, I do not think, as a non-American, that a particular government should foot the bill for it, but in reality I know that no company will do it in good will either.
I've been thinking a lot in terms of financing, but the current system of grants, where some agency tied with the executive body will approve or reject something, is fundamentally broken, as we can see.
In those cases of critical infrastructure, I think it's worth some kind of minimum 1:1 deductible of pre-tax programs where the foundations can apply, and then they could have their financing without being at the whims of some branch of the executive.
But my point is that a project like this is global. I want the US putting money in. We're the richest and benefiting the most. But I also want other countries putting money in. They should have a vested interest too.
I think an interesting mechanism might be to use agencies like the NSA. We know their red teams but what about the blue? I'd love for the blue teams to get more funding and have a goal to find and patch exploits, rather than capitalize on them. Obviously should have a firewall between the teams. But this should be true for any country. It might just be some starting point as it could be a better argument for the people that don't already understand the extreme importance of these types of open source projects.
Typically these projects run as nonprofit foundations. They're already getting tax benefits. Though I think we can recognize that this isn't enough and isn't remotely approaching the value.It's definitely not an easy problem. Like what do you do? Tax big companies (idk, an extra 0.1%?), audit to determine dependencies, distribute those taxes accordingly? In theory this should be simple and could even be automated, but I'm sure in the cat and mouse game the complexity would increase incredibly fast.
But hey, it shouldn't just be America. Different countries can try different ideas
Reading this you would think the US is the only country in the world. Why can’t any other country - one that’s more politically or ideologically aligned - fund the PSF? It seems odd the gripes about the US government and its ideologies as if there’s no other options.
(Not an American.)
It's a US-based organization discussing funding from the US government. Why would you expect a different focus in an article about that funding?
It's a good point that this is a US-based organization, but I don't think the parent is looking for a different focus from this post. Rather, they're asking that given Python's international influence why aren't organizations from more countries (or the countries themselves) contributing? My gut feeling is that it's because the PSF isn't looking outside the US for those sponsors. Here's their sponsor list btw:
https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/
I would hope another funding source with no interest in this kind of legalistic politics emerges. Conditionality like this is going to be much more common for another 3 years at least.
Turning down money is the easiest thing in the world, if you have the fortitude. I think a lot of organisations don't.
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/
I wonder if we need a GPL v4 that revokes itself if the end user violates other people’s human rights.
That way, this sort of situation would result in the revocation of the python license, instead of the grant proposal.
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.
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.
DEI has become such a contentious term that we should consider retiring it, in my opinion.
This is what happens when people who take things seriously take seriously things said by people who don’t take things seriously.
Under discussed is that it should not takes months of work to apply for scientific funding.
Grant writing and the gigantic infrastructure for checking that the researchers are doing exactly what you've approved is an enormous burden on progress.
Bummer about the funding (and for a small org, almost more importantly the wasted application work), but all around an excellent decision. And a good reference for non-profit backbone.
Time to amp up my Xmas donation.
Bold and right decision!
That's what we like to hear! Read to the end and donate!
Six million is peanuts for guiding probably the most popular language on the planet these days
I mean is OSS effective despite the funding problem, or if we gave every maintainer a million quid, would they all stop making tough decisions ?
I suspect that it’s the organisations that define the decision quality - but that’s just a hunch.
Great job from PSF ! Taking the stand rather them submitting themselves to dictatorial/thought-policing terms.
Funny how all these DEI proponents never reach out to poor people working manual labor jobs..
If you want "inclusion", include those who you normally exclude instead of including those who you actually want more because they're "culturally compatible".
Of course. DEI is for "community" members from the right families to get jobs through PyCon networks regardless of qualifications.
The leadership is generally white affluent virtue signaling male. A PSF fellow was canceled for pointing exactly that out (at the same time as Tim Peters was canceled).
So it is understandable why they want to preserve DEI but do not go after other economic or corruption or foreign policy failures of this administration --- after all, they have to preserve the same corporate sponsors who also sponsor Trump.
pypi put out a survey a while back that was full of bs questions about dei fluff. the lack of subject matter made me really question the competence of the project staff.
This hurts two things at once: people and security.
Anti-DEI clauses push out under-represented contributors, and the lost funding delays protections millions rely on.
Shame on the decision-makers who made that tradeoff.
That’s by design. The Republican Party explicitly desires an America that’s white, male, straight, and complacent. Everyone else just ruins the picture.
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.
>> "Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities."
Given this, I could easily see work supporting the creation of less biased models being used as an attack vector. They made the right call.
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.
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.
I'm going to say something here that might get me in trouble but I don't really care, this is awful. I've been a programming language developer for over a decade at this point, but I've been programming since I was 6, which was at this point 34 years ago.
In all that time, I've met a lot of people in the tech world, very many of them have been queer, gay, autistic, and/or trans. But there's no community where I've found a greater concentration of LGBTQ people, especially trans people, than in the compilers / pldev community. There's a reason the icon for the Rust discord is the Rust logo superimposed on the LGBTQ flag -- programming languages is disproportionately a field where LGBTQ people gravitate and contribute. I don't know why, but them's the facts.
That means no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, no matter what groups you identify with, LGBTQ people are a driving force in building the tech you use to do your job, to stay connected with your family, to fulfill your creativity and passions, or to even save your life.
And none of them are putting gates on who may or may not use the tech they build. All we are saying is "don't hate us, don't discriminate against us." And yet that's too much for some people.
All this anti-dei nonsense is shooting ourselves in face and the foot. It's counterproductive when we (the communities on on HN) can't get access to vital funding. You think we couldn't have nice things before? Well here we are now, even the PSF is poorer because of this rampant hatred.
Right here, this is why HN as community can't not be political. It's not a tenable proposition anymore. For everyone who downvotes politics stories because they just want to have fun talking about cool tech, it didn't matter one bit that didn't want to engage with politics -- politics has nevertheless engaged with you.
Where we go now I don't know, but what I do know is LGBTQ folx are going to keep building programming languages, this won't stop them. My reaction is that as much as the federal government wants to make America a dangerous place for LGBTQ people, programming language communities should make their space even safer. So sorry everyone who doesn't want to mix woke with their tech, it's not going to get any better for you now that the federal government is anti-trans as a policy. If we're going to be driven into the closet, we're just going to respond by making even more programming languages thank you very much. And our communities will be LGBTQ safe spaces because it's the only place we've got left.
Do you understand, intellectually, that quite a few of your colleagues find gestures like juxtaposing the Rust logo and the LGBTQ* flag off-putting and resent being unable articulate our discomfort while all your specious complaints get addressed instantly?
We don't bear you any ill will. We just don't want your sexuality shoved in our faces. I've been hearing claims of the necessity of doing so for over a decade. It wasn't true back then and it's not true now.
There is no law of nature requiring that technology communities become platforms for celebrating certain personal identities. That's an absurd claim.
Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you understand. For over a decade, we've just wanted to be left alone. You have refused.
We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone.
Let me put it this way: computing as a field, and programming languages in particular would not be where they are today without the hard work and dedication of LGBTQ people in particular. I mean, we have to look no further than Alan Turing to understand this at a visceral level. In his tradition, LGBTQ people flock toward this field.
The reason the flag is in the Rust discord logo isn't because people are throwing their sexuality in your face. They put that flag up as a signal that the community is safe for other like-minded people. The flag stays up because the people who built the community want it up and keep it up. So the logo isn't juxtaposed with the LGBTQ flag -- juxtaposition implies contrast. Rust is intrinsically LGBTQ because it's built by LGBTQ people. That's the essence of community and languages if anything are communities.
This is what happens when someone's mere existence in public life is considered dangerous or "your sexuality being shoved in our faces" -- they stay inside, they find community in secret places where few people go, and they put up signs to signal to others similarly situated that they are welcome.
So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away.
The purpose of that flag it to make a statement about your genitals in the context of a technology forum to which they are irrelevant. Your "existence" does not require you to constantly advertise a personal characteristic.
I'm not sure whom you're trying to convince with this stuff about the flag declaring it's a safe place to exist or whatever. You people have been saying the same thing for ten years. Nobody believes you. It's why Trump won.
> So of course we're not gonna take the flag down, it's up for a reason! Won't come down until that reason it's up goes away
Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough. The era of state support for this stuff is coming to an end, and the dominance of the ideology that these flags represent cannot last without the state putting its thumb on the scale.
Waving a flag is protected speech under the 1st amendment.
> Don't trouble yourselves with removing the flag. We will be removing it for you soon enough.
tf is this nonsense
It's a variant of what Alan Turing heard before they chemically castrated him. Same shit, different century.
I mean pls also attracts a TON of rad trad Catholics. It turns out being unable to follow social cues makes you more amenable to following niche fields as well as a bit esoteric in your philosophers and lifestyle. I count myself as one of these as well lol.
That being said, this is also problematic. Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people? I mean, you will correctly point out that the average person wouldn't fit in.
Well welcome to the club..
The field is dominated by autistic people, really. Autistic people are often also kinda weird with their sexuality, many times ace, also many times autigender. We are all under that flag, and so even if we may not agree with everything it stands for, we each understand what it means to be excluded for being who we are.
Personally I'm not gay or trans but... let's just say if they were rounding up people for being queer, as people are wont to do, they'd find plenty of reasons to scoop me up. Just being ace is enough for people to get weird about you in some spaces. In LGBTQ spaces it's not really a question.
> Because if the field is dominated by queer people as you point out, then shouldn't you try to balance it out and add straight cis people?
Oh it's balanced out. There's a whooooole other wing of the PL sphere: the Curtis Yarvin / dark enlightenment nexus is big enough and really weird, but also not a topic for HN (not because it's political but because it's stupidly gross and dark).
Good game. Trump 2.0’s Maoism is becoming boring.
Biden's DEI wave was much more Maoist than Trump 2.0. Not saying this is great either, but stuff like land acknowledgements, "overthrowing the oppressors", etc. sure look a lot like stuff seen in Mao's cultural revolution.
This thread is hilarious. Many independents turned into Never-Trumpers on the first day when he launched the coin scheme and could perfectly see what would happen.
The PSF gets the memo in October 2025 (but still has the same sponsors as the Trump ballroom). Everyone is supposed to laud them for their wisdom and insight and all other opinions are deleted.
Just one thread with these arrogant, incompetent, censorious people and their followers makes you want to vote Vance in 2028 again.
Now that's what a backbone looks like.
[stub for offtopicness / flamewarness / guideline-breakingness]
(this is a rough cut - I know there are other posts left in the thread that arguably belong here, but this time I'm in a bit of a rush)
(please, everyone, you can make substantive points thoughtfully but do so within the guardrails at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - avoid the generic-indignant-flamey-snarky-namecalley-hardcore-battley sectors of internet discourse - we're trying for something different here and we need everyone to help with that)
Choosing to advocate your personal political beliefs over the interests of your organization should be grounds for dismissal.
Exactly why they had to do this: the PSF mission statement is “to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.” Letting a minority of Americans limit them to the subset of people they consider politically correct wouldn’t be in keeping with that mission.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about non-discimination and diversity. They won't take the grant money because they want to drive a politicized agenda, to the detriment of the Python community as a whole.
Speaking of politicized agendas, I note that you are asserting without evidence that they have a secret motive other than the one states while also assuming that the administration’s interpretation of the relevant contract language will be fair and aboveboard despite the observed evidence.
If I'm reading that right, it looks like "do not and will not ... operate any programs... in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws"
Did your lawyer say otherwise? Interested to understand
> We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm 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."
> Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.
The current administration has taken, shall we say, a broad approach to what they consider "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", this clause is suddenly interpreted very differently than in past administrations despite the laws in question not changing.
Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.
Then the brave thing is you accept the grant and let them take it to court. Get a court ruling against them, which in our common law system establishes case law
The administration can try to press charges, but they don’t control the courts
The core sentence has an OR clause, which means if any of the 2 conditions happens (DEI promotion; violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws), then they're in violation. Their stated mission is directly in contradiction with the first part. Even if it wasn't, I'd probably vote in the same direction, given the (let's call it) volatility we are seeing with capricious interpretation of executive privilege.
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.
Thanks for posting this. I just made a donation to the PSF.
Welcome to government funding. This is par for course. It's not just dei or anti dei. If you want to take government funding, you have to not read the fine print and swallow hard.
Confused about this decision. Why not take the money and then do only DEI activities that don't break the law?
Because that wouldn't allow them to use the PSF as a front for their political activism.
Some predictions on how the current admin is going to probably retaliate for the PSF withdrawing their proposal:
* IRS audit into the PSF's 501c3 status
* if the PSF has received federal funds in the past, they'll probably be targeted by the DOJ's "Civil Rights Fraud Initiative"
* pressure on corporate sponsors, especially those that are federal contractors
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.
Note that many universities still have DEI offices. I believe that they are interpreting as described here: https://www.governmentcontractorcomplianceupdate.com/2025/08.... So as long as they can show that they are not doing any of those, they seem to believe that they will be okay.