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President Donald Trump and His Daughter Ivanka To Unveil a New Federal Computer Science Initiative With Major Tech Backers (recode.net)

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

From a report: President Donald Trump will issue a new directive Monday to supercharge the U.S. government's support for science, tech, engineering and mathematics, including coding education, three sources familiar with the White House's thinking told Recode. To start, Trump is set to sign a presidential memorandum at the White House later today that tasks the Department of Education to devote at least $200 million of its grant funds each year to so-called STEM fields, as the administration seeks to train workers for high-demand computer-science jobs of the future. And on Tuesday, Trump's daughter and advisor, Ivanka, is expected to head to Detroit, where she will join business leaders for an event unveiling a series of private-sector commitments -- from Amazon, Facebook, Google, GM, Quicken Loans and others -- meant to boost U.S. coding and computer-science classes and programs, the sources said.

10 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Companies want cheap workers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It doesn't matter if there are no American applicants or if there are hundreds of American applicants. As long as there is one person from India willing to do the work for 20k a year, they will pick that person.

    1. Re:Companies want cheap workers by losfromla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, because perhaps because they don't want to share a 1 bedroom apartment with 20 other males and would instead like to have a family and a decent standard of living. We cannot win in a race to the bottom. Nobody wins that, not even the damnable H1-B workers that are taking those underpaying jobs. They are destroying the very thing they came here for.

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  2. Oh yay by computational+super · · Score: 3, Insightful

    $200 million in government grants to fund offshore initiatives.

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    Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
  3. It's a trick. Get an axe. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As the article alludes to, most of these same tech companies just left the administration en mass after the 'very reluctant/weak/late condemnation of nazis' debacle.

    This is effectively taking proposals that have already been thrown at them, and using it as an excuse to get large amounts of money from these jilted companies, and 'manage' them at their whim.

    Here's what these companies should do: Create their OWN organization to manage any funds they want to use effectively, and just ignore the noises from this administration.

    Better than letting DeVos have any potential control over it.

  4. Re:It's a trick. Get an axe. by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm not sure why they're paying attention to the Administration at all. Nobody else is. Congress is basically acting as if the White House was vacant (which, in a metaphorical sense, it is)

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  5. Re:Weak Journalism by drew_kime · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What is even the point of releasing this kind of news if no one can even tell if it is an improvement on what we already do?

    The difference is now you know we're doing it. Did you know before this story came out how much we were spending on STEM? No? Well you do now. Winning bigly!

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    Nope, no sig
  6. Re:What's in it for him? by JackieBrown · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What a useless and incredibly vague question. What's in it for any president/politician? Money, public service, fame, patriotism, votes, bored, or a combination?

    It's bad enough reading articles with no proof accuse Trump of crazy conspiracies, but to imply without evening try to come up with a conspiracy or evil motive is just lazy.

  7. $200M isn't going to "supercharge" squat by enjar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My town has 9 schools (1 pre-K, 4 elementary, 2 middle, 1 high school). The tab to run the district for a year is ~$65M. This works out to about $11k/student, which is pretty near the national average for school expenditures. There are about 50 million students in public schools in the US. So $200M/50M = $4/student. For a classroom of 25 kids, that's $100. Maybe you can pick up an Arduino kit. For a district that spends $11K/yr on a student, $4 is a rounding error. If this was $2B that would be $40/student, which for a classroom would be $1000, which could actually be used for technology initiatives -- buying equipment, IT staff to manage the equipment, teaching materials, hiring teachers and the like.

  8. Re:It's a trick. Get an axe. by hey! · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, you have succinctly described the "new normal": people can't stop talking about stuff they aren't really paying attention to.

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  9. cuts $9.2B dollars, wants credit for $.2B increase by happyjack27 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    okay so let me get this straight, trump cuts 9.2 billion dollars from the DOE's budget, wants credit for $200M that he didn't even fund - he's just saying that of the money already allocated to grants, this much should go to STEM.

    Meanwhile, when obama was president, he proposed a 4 billion dollar inceare in DOE's budget to go specifically to CS education, but that didn't pass because of republicans.

    So the net score is: Obama +4 billion (blocked by republicans), Trump -9.2 billion (republicans love it).

    And he wants to sell this as him supporting STEM?!?