“A new Northwestern study analyzing public records maintained by the U.S. Government Publishing Office and Congressional Budget Office over a 40-year period showed that federal science and research accounts received more funding when Republicans controlled the U.S. House of Representatives and the presidency, as opposed to their Democratic counterparts.”
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-republicans-fund-science-democrats.html

Yet you have this:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-donation-agency.html

My guess is that the study includes technology–and the study goes back awhile.
John Culberson’s support for Europa, Bush 41’s SEI…maybe that skewed things…but

“The current administration’s posture towards science and science funding is a pretty stark departure from prior funding commitments by Republicans to science, according to our research,” Furnas said. “By illuminating these dynamics, this paper offers a foundation for more effective science advocacy and policy design. It underscores the importance of framing science funding as a bipartisan priority that advances shared societal goals, while also calling for vigilance to protect science from political interference.”

A large project gets into trouble, and the payroll for that project must be reduced to pay for outside help (or the government customer has slowed the work in order to “save” its own budget). Management gets rid of the lowest performers, and most of them are able to find work on other projects within the company.

Then the project gets into more trouble, and the mediocre workers have to be removed, but most other positions in the company are already filled, so many of these workers go out the door.

Then the project gets cancelled, but there are hardly any open positions left inside the company, so most of the best workers go out the door.

Repeat on the next project that gets into trouble.

I was quite familiar with the IBM of the 70s and 80s from the customer side. Like Bell Labs and Xerox, their R&D was first rate, but the suits of that era didn’t understand any of it and it was always people who left those places and went out on their own who made money on the stuff while the big guys were still scratching their heads.

Thanks for backing my thesis with a concrete example.

Jeff Wright,

A lot more of the 60s-era “go-getters” seemed to want to be suits at extant firms than to start their own. The idea of entrepreneurship being normative for go-getters didn’t really take hold until the 70s and 80s. It continues.

I don’t trust people who smile inappropriately.

In rockets, I want size and reusability. As Einstein famously said, “A thing should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

We are always going to have solids – for ICBMs and tactical missiles. For space launch, not so much. Reusability is the future of space launch. SRBs are antithetical to reusability. There is no future for solids larger than an ICBM’s first stage.

During these corporate programs, there was a common understanding within the bowels of the bureaucracies with which I was most familiar. As the end date approached, whereby employees were required to have notified their respective management of their intentions, and such information spread, a commonly understood sad – but hilarious, “theme” emerged.

It became widely understood that qualified employees who chose to take IBM’s offer should have the offer rescinded! Qualified employees who chose NOT to take it should be terminated! IBM was seemingly most-often shedding its valued employees while retaining the reason for the programs in the first place!

I refuse to let anyone under 40 work on my car. I can tell when a serpentine is about to go by sound. A brat at Express Oil Change thought the noise was from my car being old.

Companies may not be as fast to dump feel-good policies as needed..

I am the polar opposite of someone who wears rose colored glasses….folks that do—I wonder about:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/optimists-are-alike-but-pessimists-are-unique-bran-scan-study-suggests/

I don’t trust folks who smile too much.

In rockets—I want size and simplicity.

We are always going to have solids—so that recent test has NorGrum on noticed. I don’t like Boeing, but reckon it is easier to get just four hydrolox to work one bloody time than to teach water towers to flip like Nadia Comaneci.

Nepotism, to the extent it is still a problem, seems to be much more of a problem at well-established – too well-established – companies such as the Motorola you reference. Add all of the legacy aerospace contractors to that list as well. These are also the sorts of places where idiot managements, long-used to licking the boots of politicians, were more than willing to embrace DEI for brownie points in certain quarters regardless of the destruction it wreaked within their own organizations. Now that embrace of DEI no longer garners favor in DC, these same weathervanes are proving just as willing to dump DEI overnight.

These are not, in general, problems that plague start-ups. Most start-up founders are barely old enough to have wives, never mind adult children of dubious capability to inflict on their workforces. There is also, in recent times, far less of an expectation that any of a founder’s offspring will eventually “take over the firm.” That’s one more dysfunctional aspect of 20th-century smokestack industrial culture that seems all but gone in these modern, more authentically competitive, times.

The fact that you still seem to think this is a consequential thing is probably just part and parcel of your tendency to view everything through invincibly 1960s-colored lenses.

Usually DEI and the sons of management both make good folks throw up their hands and walk out.

The things I’ve heard over a Motorola…