While it brings some relief to the staff involved, I can imagine the consequences in turnover and dropped efficiency will still hit NSF, and with it, all academic institutions.
It takes a huge amount of time and expertise to write a grant, which then funds students and researchers, and all of that requires long timelines of planning with low tolerance of unnecessary uncertainty.
Most grants get rejected, because of limited resources, and a ranking (one hopes) on merit, feasibility, and benefit to society, and that's ok, because it's a competitive public resource.
But if that rejection is because the staff is terrified, has left, or is burnt out due to overload and morale, then DT has achieved his aim of crippling academia in the US, irrespective of a court order.
The 'greed above all' motive ends up hurting itself, long term, because universities train STEM graduates, which are then hired by industry without those companies paying for the training.
Yes, companies do research, but with completely different (closed) objectives, with few exceptions research does not escape research labs, nor is it decoupled from obvious gamification to boost next quarter gains.
The more capacity for public research you kill, the more you push universities in becoming diploma factories, and the more the value of that diploma degrades.
Amazing really, how much foundational damage you can do with one idiotic executive order.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
