I think it’s ignorance and arrogance. The US seems to be on a path to lose technological and science leadership. The current leadership doesn’t seem to understand things that aren’t flashy. I wonder when they’ll dial back on food safety. I am sure RFK knows some vitamins that protect against salmonella
important to note: the US's food safety is already really bad. salmonella isn't a thing you have to worry about in first world countries. can't wait to see what plague demon spawns out of a food industry running amok after the FDA gets gutted.
> important to note: the US's food safety is already really bad. salmonella isn't a thing you have to worry about in first world countries.
There were 65,000 cases of salmonellosis in the EU in the most recent data I could find (2022). Thats a lower per capita rate than the US, but definitely not zero.
I agree that it’s not zero, but according to CDC, the US sees about 1.35 million cases per year in a population of about 346 million, which is about 390 cases per 100,000 people. Your figure for the EU over a population of 447 million in 2022 gives 14.5 cases per 100,000 people, or more than a factor of 26 less.
Being 26 times less worried about something translates, at least for most things, for me, to not being worried about it any more.
Salmonella and it causes are very regional in EU. Places like Finland have basically 0 cases of salmonella caused by domestic poultry products per year. If there salmonella is found from any chicken in the flock, the whole flock will be quarantined and generally fully slaughtered (meat & eggs must be pasteurized after the slaughter if they are sold). In 2023 0.1% of the tested flocks had salmonella.
"The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years," says Dianna Bourassa, an applied poultry microbiologist at Auburn University, "So that's not the issue."
I don't think he's considered a small gov conservative. He increased spending last time and has continued so far this term. His tariffs are one of the biggest expansions in gov interference in modern history. They are also attempting to significantly expand executive power beyond even 9/11 terrorism days.
> I really can't think of a non- nefarious justification for this
Tragedy of the commons - NVD and the CVE project havr been backlogged and facing funding issues for a couple years now, and most security vendors are either cagey about providing vulns in a timely manner (as it can reduce their own comparative advantage), or try upsell their own alternative risk prioritization scores.
Every company will gladly use NVD and CVE data, but no one wants to subsidize it and help a competitor, especially in an industry as competitive as cybersecurity.
Reduce government spending; since it's not actually a government organization (as far as I can tell, I never looked into it before), other organizations can fund it. How much goes into this organization a year anyway? I'm seeing a Mitre corporation that does lots of other stuff too that has a revenue of 2.2 billion a year.
Multi-trillion-dollar companies benefit from and contribute to this system, surely they can spare 0.01% of their revenue to this bit of critical infrastruture?
Yes, you can also run such a system based on donations. But I personally think that such a system is important enough to be paid for by the government. When you run on donations, there will always be conflicts of interest and the risk of running out of funds.
But yeah, Mitre being a private organization that was paid for by the government was a problem.
Yes, I'm sure corporations funding the CVE system would go wonderfully.
"It would be best if we don't see any severe CVEs for our products this quarter, if you want our funding next quarter."
I'll admit this is a bugbear of mine, but I think this is the reason "steelmanning" is counterproductive.
Steelmanning is a neologism that serves no purpose other than in-group signaling. There was already a perfectly acceptable term for the same concept, one with more nuance and a rich history: Charitability.
The major difference is that charitability is about treating your interlocutor with respect. Steelmanning is about using one's own intellect to make your interlocutor's argument better than them. Because charitability is based on a concept of mutual respect, if somebody clearly doesn't respect you one iota, then why would you be charitable? Steelmanning tries to divorce the person from the argument, and is ironically both arrogant and naive.
Threat intelligence firm Flashpoint noted in March 2024 it was aware of 100,000 vulnerabilities with no CVE number and consequently no inclusion in NVD. More worryingly, it said that 330 of these vulnerabilities (with no CVE number) had been exploited in the wild.. Since the start of 2024 there have been a total of 6,171 total CVE IDs with only 3,625 being enriched by NVD. That leaves a gap of 2,546 (42%!) IDs.
Despite all those private companies and various OSS projects being willing to contribute ideas, infrastructure and code, they have somehow failed to coalesce into a decentralized replacement for NVD, built on CC0 data and OSS tooling.
I tried to look over the history and I only see a funding increase, CISA cut $3.7 million at the end of 2023 for the next year and in response NIST reallocated extra funding to NVD: $8.5 million in 2024
A funding shortfall and strain isn't a funding cut. And from what I see there was a funding increase.
> According to NIST, while the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is processing incoming CVEs at the same rate as before the slowdown in spring and early summer 2024, a 32 percent jump in submissions last year means that the backlog continues to grow.
> CISA had previously been supporting the NIST NVD program with approximately $3.7 million per year in interagency funding, which they have discontinued
2024
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025
Assuming that's spread over both years it wasn't as big of an increase as I said, but is still an increase even inflation adjusted.
> 2025 article claims 30% increase in 2024 workload
Underfunding in the face of more workload isn't itself a funding cut.
> While NIST has since reallocated $8.5 million to NVD for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, this funding remains a fraction of the $300 million to $400 million estimated to be needed annually to fully restore capacity, with an additional $120 million to $150 million required to prevent further system “deterioration.”
Did NVD receive 300MM annual funding pre-2024? That would be a 98% funding cut.
For decades, the US could be counted upon to fund things with little immediate benefit but massive long-term positive externalities. I don't think its likely that the republican party will "go back to normal" post-Trump, so we can all kiss the long-term reputation building that American hegemony relied upon goodbye. Short of a great depression-esque political reset, I do not see things changing for the better.
Reduce spending. Steelmanning (not actually believing this): it probably cost a lot for what is essentially a database, and can be done cheaply by private sector (Google, Microsoft).
It's a dying empire, really nothing else to say. The USA led world order is over, we've voted ourselves out of it, and now need to learn how to deal with that.
Probably the thinking goes that someone in the international community will step in. CVE is in practice a global registry for all, thus "Why should the USA Department of Homeland Security pay for all the freeloaders".
Still shortsighted and stupid, but it's plausible this is intended as leverage to get someone else to pony up.
Why? This administration is not acting in good faith, you don't have to act as if they are. People and institutions doing that is part of how we got here in the first place.
They could attack the non-steelmanned version, but that just opens them up to having their own comments attacked. You quickly get derailed. (It's sometimes called "sealioning".)
They could propose alternatives, but that too is subject to sealioning. Real alternatives are always subject to tradeoffs, and the answer to "how about you do X instead of attacking me?" is always "no".
They could refrain from discussing it, but that just allows the offenses to continue.
So what often happens is that people persist in acting as if this were a sincere discussion, and hope that a majority will recognize the quality of your argument. It's a lousy plan but I don't have much else to suggest.
I still find it wild that so many people are trying to frame these decisions through a political lens. This is the actions of a foreign bad actor dismantling critical institutions from within, not "bad policy".
> I still find it wild that so many people are trying to frame these decisions through a political lens.
Why? The decisions are pretty well politically aligned with the ideology which detests the size and scope of the government (realistically, those aspects which the ideologues feel are not in their interest). What is unexpected is the swiftness and the brutality of action, but revolutions tend to be messy, and make no mistake, this is a revolution.
> This is the actions of a foreign bad actor
Now this sounds like a coping strategy: everything is so preposterous it couldn't possibly be homegrown. Foreign influence and underhanded actions are as old as human interactions, but IMO outright plants can't succeed without a massive economic and power asymmetry between the adversaries.
They are not. Trump is no libertarian or small government guy. The build the wall guy is the opposite of that. Even with stuff like social security he usually at least rhetorically claimed to be for more benifits (as long as it goes to "real Americans") and he is all for increasing police and military spending. And generally spending more on stuff that gives him money. Plus giant tax increases (tarrifs). He doesn't care much if government is dismembered as long as it owns the libs and gets rid of the public corruption prosecutors/others who might stand up to him
Trump's actions towards Putin are highly irrational. Maybe he's being blackmailed, maybe he's being bought, maybe he just has likes Putins style but there is a reason people suspect him despite it being unlikely in the general case.
> He doesn't care much if government is dismembered
This is exactly the process that conservatives take to privatise services into their own friends pockets. Destroy services until they're ineffective and use it as an excuse to privatise it.
There's no such thing as small government, only large sprawling private services that the government hands money to.
lol, coping strategy? I'm not American and have no reason to 'cope' with anything. There is enough evidence to make a strong allegation about Trump being a Russian asset.
The entire world seems to be able to 'cope' with that assessment.
Imagine being eaten alive by a cackling hyena that ambushed you and all the while being like "hmm what is the appropriate steelman here? why do I deserve this? why is this just?"
In reality this would never happen so all these people playing steelman are just detached/insulated.
I just don't see how it is universally so, frankly. As a general guideline sure but some discernment is necessary nothing is gained from steelmanning apartheid or the third reich or torture prisons or or you see my point I hope.
We're way past the point of policy disagreements the relevant question right now is how do you stop them. It's certainly not by reimagining your adversary's actions in the most charitable light.
Exploiting the need to invent a "logical" reason to do something illogical is the exact attack vector that the Gish Gallop uses to fuck over people.
Like you get that right? This administration does not discuss or debate, it shits out lies and laughs as people play make believe high school debate games, and give them infinitely more effort than they did.
There is no such thing as "effectively arguing" against a Gish Gallop, that's it's entire purpose.
You manage the system and not the CVEs themselves. The simplist thing would be a list of numbers that correspond to Google docs. The owner of the Google doc can share it with the needed parties and eventually set it as public.
You truly believe that the CVE database (and others like CWE) are only about assigning serial numbers to random reports, don't you? I see people underestimating and understanding the work of others in matters like this. Is that a trend now?
I saw this same behavior quite a while back. While I'm out of the CVE game these days, it seems that there is a forever rotating new group of people who simply don't and can never see the complexities on the process.
I think it's a testament to the previous stewardship that it appears so simple.
No I don't believe that, but it might as well operate like that. The extra stuff isn't truly needed and was being outsourced to the companies that own the products since it wasn't providing much value. Take a look at Daniel's blog posts about CVEs for curl for what happens when you let them handle it.
Grok becoming an artificial nepobaby running the entire CVE program with zero oversight sounds so fucking funny I don't even care, PLEASE god make this real holy shit I can't breathe at the thought
That's a good idea to raise during the budget time or with some warning ahead of time. But even discussing the cost of CVE program itself is likely a waste of time and money. When trying to deal with 2tn deficit, looking at things that historically got ~$5M is just a distraction. And the lack of it may cost even more given how many existing agreements/contracts rely on cve to be a thing - maybe just in gov lawyers having to rewrite things.
Selling bonds is not the same thing as a family budget being in the red. Either you know this and you're making this argument in bad faith, or you don't and, well...
Listen, I hate the debt, but we have an income problem, not a spending problem. The military looks like a waste, but it does more than build bombs i.e research etc.
The issue we have is that republican every chance they get since the 1970s have cut taxes. And then blamed democrats for causing the deficits. We don't need smaller governments. We need a reasonable tax system that taxes people. It can be progressive like it was before we decided rich people just need it easier than poor people.
Yes, I will pay more taxes sign me up, especially if they can finally fix the roads and fund research. The problem is my taxes as a middle-class person go up and rich people get a tax cut. It's stupid. I like water provided by government utilities, I like planes that don't crash into stuff because there are air traffic controllers. These things used to work because we paid for them. When you buy cheap you get cheap.
Yeah republicans claim to want to run the government like a business, but the first thing a business should do when they have a deficit is raise revenue! And especially in the case of the US government, the the only barriers to doing that are self-imposed.
Military also employs a bunch of people who otherwise would be poor. Also provides a gentrification path for a bunch of previously poor people extending throughout their lives.
I think people VASTLY overestimate the amount of graft in military procurement.
Lockheed only has a $100b market cap. Raytheon has $200b. General Dynamics $74b
The reality is that US defense spending pays American designers and American laborers high prices for their American effort. We pay basically the same prices for ammo and supplies and services as other countries.
When we pay $13 billion for an aircraft carrier, that's just what it costs to build a gigantic boat with nuclear reactors. The French paid $4 billion for their aircraft carrier, and a $12 billion Gerald R. Ford class is over twice as large as the Charles de Gaulle (40k tons vs 100k tons), and much much much more advanced.
Americans love to misunderstand the cost of military things. They will scream about the F35's $1.5 trillion "price tag", ignoring that the estimate is for 50 years of operations and maintenance as well as initial purchase. Actual purchase price is about $90 million a plane, which is reasonable. Which makes sense, since being not stupidly overpriced was a key point of the program. The operational cost is about $40k a flight hour, which is roughly the same as the F-14, another high tech superplane program.
This is an absolute pittance compared to the total budget. And considering the current administration wants a $4T tax cut they are not interested in trimming the deficit at all.
Yep, DOGE is a song and dance distraction. If they were serious about lowering the deficit they wouldn't have laid off ~12K IRS workers (whom show a 7x ROI per head.) They also wouldn't be asking to increase the military budget to $1 trillion per year. Trump has spent 1/3 of his days in office so far golfing; $30 million+ so far paid to Trump properties for the privilege of that. This is the biggest capture in US history and it's all out in the open.
