NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring
science.org
science.org
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.
At the meetings I attended the furious debate was whether we allowed a volunteer group cook food in our kitchen to feed homeless people. The interesting thing about this debate was that to make a decision, you had to have a position on what the coop was, Was it cheap housing for students, or was the cheap housing something that emerged from committing to a practice of cooperative behaviour?
Supporting the volunteers cooking in our kitchen came at a cost, many volunteers were homeless, some had mental health issues. I felt it was morally right to let them use our kitchen, And I know that for this I did get labeled by some as pursuing chaos as performative social justice points and to upset opponents, But from my perspective I sincerely believe it was the right thing to do.
When parallels like this are revealed, it really makes me wonder how the orange cult people and I ended up on such different paths, both as a response to dissatisfaction with the status quo, why have the stories they’ve been told resonated with them when they seem so inauthentic to me, and why is the more progressive ideology that seems reasonable to me so distasteful to them
Was this co-op perhaps Barrington Hall? I had good friends that lived there while at UCB. To my young eyes it was absolute anarchy.
True, but that is not their intention.
They perceive no value from "soft power" stuff like the NIH and to a large extent consider it to be (part of) the enemy.
And most of their voting base really doesn't understand a single thing about the NIH. I mean, truly: the average American doesn't know what that program even is. Other than occasionally getting roasted for funding some ridiculous-sounding project like studying depression in chickens or something.[1]
So the only real "win" here for the new ruling party is to burn it down and then brag that they saved "the American taxpayers" $XYZ billion dollars.
(Which will wind up directly in the hands of the rich via tax breaks, and by definition can't really benefit poor people because they already pay little tax)
----
[1] Most of the time these "ridiculous sounding" programs are actually pretty relevant and/or useful if you look into them.
Granted, I fear the folks in charge now DO know better and the side effects are intentional ... but I wonder if it would be possible to pick someone and get it reasonably right.
They want to get rid of any pandemic scaremongering too. Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1]. Hoetz who is a major figure in the vaccine research industry said that "starting January 21st we've got some big stuff coming down the pike starting with H5N1..." and after the Fauci pardon anything is possible.
The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
[1] https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1865026704504426860?t=hZnEk...
In a minority most likely. Not even close to alone.
> Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1].
No. He said we have big picture stuff coming down the pike starting January 21. Like a flu wide spread in birds already, that jumped species already, that could develop human to human transmission. He framed it clearly as a present danger the incoming administration would inherit. Even without the removed context about Kennedy's claims no vaccines are safe and effective and vaccines cause autism.
> The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
Whoever the radical left are, they don't decide about culling livestock. What agenda do you think was behind the culls driving up food prices before the election? And do you expect tariffs and deportations to lower food prices?
Fundamentally a civilized society cannot tolerate bureaucracies that act like they did during COVID. Fauci is gone now but unfortunately the NIH as an institution is deserving of any and all damage Trump does to them. Frankly if I were in his shoes I'd be going much further than mere freezes.
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).
I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.
> breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US
I didn't say or imply that. I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. I've traveled for work both paid and not, both with implicit and explicit frugality. I'm not seeing how a pause on paying for travel, as the norm quoted within the article, is an egregious practice, nor how it could break the NIH. Especially given it appears to be a norm when administrations turn over.
The way to look at it is like this: even if previous administrations froze travel for a bit (I don't recall that ever happening; a bigger impact was when the state or the federal government failed to pass a budget. That would break everything for weeks to months), the intent of the Trump administration is to harm the people they don't like. This freeze is only an opening move; we can expect to see far more dire and serious attempts at damaging our valuable public institutions (which fairly serve liberals and conservatives alike).
I appreciate you saying "people like me just don't know". It's rare that people will actually listen to the other side and admit they lacked perspective.
Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress, e.g. they set what specific diseases, etc. should be worked on. This represents more than half of all funding for academic scientific research in the USA.
> Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community?
Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town.
Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located.
When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live.
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring.
Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/distinguishing-real-...
That seems unnecessary at best.
They didn't say it was. Or did they edit?
Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?
Or, are you saying that Republicans hate cancer research, or...?
Yes, I believe thats a main driver for why this administration does not like the NIH
Which itself is amazing, considering that he was in charge while it happened.
Additionally there is undeniably a lot of waste, nepotism / back scratching, and completely ludicrous funded social “science”.
While what’s happening now may wind up bad, I have seen very little push from the establishment itself to do anything to restore public faith in the current system. Trump is the executioner, but the conviction was handed down before he came around.
@dang why is this flagged?
I'm not saying research fraud doesn't matter or isn't worth the stories written about it. I'm saying that people commenting on it generally don't have any sense of its scale, and fill in some very weird blanks about it.
There was decades of “but everyone is doing it!” in the system, so much so that fraudsters became presidents of Ivy League institutions. The reckoning has not come.
And that's not to speak of things like biotech which is full of photoshopped images of fluorescence and whatnot.
People are counting on readers not to know or take the time to learn how much research is happening, so that individual instances of the problem (in the United States) seem systemic.
* The post is a sample of papers across many fields
* It describes a method to determine whether widespread p-hacking is occurring in a field
* Widespread p-hacking in a field will lead to unreproducible results (because the results are an artifact of the data rather than reflecting any underlying cause)
* You said: The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator.
* The approach in the post uses a statistical method across many papers across many fields. It does not rely on the existence of some number of non-replicable results (in fact, one should expect some percentage of results to be non-replicable).
* Therefore, it doesn't rely on "the numerator" so to speak, but a sample of all papers in a field to characterize the field's replicability.
You're a smart guy. I follow your posts here and on Twitter. So I can only assume that either I've flipped some bozo bit or something in my communication style is abstruse. I don't understand why you're saying that p-hacking has nothing to do with the replication crisis (most would expect the two to be quite related), or that saying "the replication crisis is real" means I am claiming that individual papers exist that are non-replicable (which is fine, but not a replication crisis). In either case, we're clearly getting nothing out of talking to each other so I might as well leave off here.
Either way: people are responding to specific stories about fraudulent research, and my point is that the numerator of those stories is infinitesimal compared to the denominator of how many papers are published in these fields annually, by how many separately-funded R1 research teams.
I'm really not interested in being boxed into a debate about whether p-hacking matters, or scientific fraud exists. Fraud is bad! I'll just keep reiterating that the optimal level of fraud in a large system is almost never zero.
† That article is about a bunch of different fields, and I'm commenting only on a very specific subset of them; fuck do I know how well social science is operating right now
I've been trying to think about what you meant since you wrote this earlier in another comment, and I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around it so I think I'll just ask (if you'd be so kind to explain).
What makes some level of fraud more optimal than zero fraud?
Grinding all scientific research to a halt to "true up" the statistical reporting used for otherwise valid and important research results would be a very good example of an intervention that would (a) "reduce fraud" and (b) leave us all significantly worse off.
Whether it's mine processing, agriculture, bank lending, { insert domain } there are always a number of drags on profit ( fraud, equipment wear and tear, petty theft, holes in fences ) and generally always a threshold past which the cost of pursuit of perfection exceeds the decreasing marginal benefit.
That is to say, Zero is the optimal in an imaginary system, where cows are spherical and you can make all the assumptions you want.
Once you start working with real world systems with more and complex constraints, the simple story goes away, and perfection is not possible.
The phrasing challenges the reader to question the model with which they are using to define optimal.
"Conforming or limited to the simplest, nonfigurative, or most obvious meaning of a word or words. "
"Word for word; verbatim."
Taking the sentence in question verbatim would be "some fraud is optimal". The nuanced (non-literal) interpretation is what Thomas wrote.
It is very much a crisis and one that academia has no interest to solve.
In a sane world we'd start with figuring out what the mystery meat in the version of pytorch used for training is and work up from there. There is zero funding for building up the required infrastructure for doing actual science instead of whatever the fuck you call the current mess.
Basically anything on a more complex dataset than cifar is probably a statistical fluke because of hyper parameter tuning. To find this out you will need to spend three months building up all the bit rotten code that doesn't work from the paper. To draw the conclusion that everyone is full of shit you'll need to waste years of your life.
Instead, we're making astounding progress at a rate that no one really would have expected.
Learning to replicate papers is a skill. It's just a matter of practice. You'll get it if you try.
A lot of small to medium sized companies fighting for mind share also release one script deploy pipelines for their work, which are better than the academic releases.
It's western universities and big tech that releases at best bit rotten code and at worse no code what so ever.
It's hard to even name mediocre advances that come from anywhere else. As well as the entire hardware and software stack that we have.
You clearly have some sort of political agenda here and not a technical argument.
Transformers weren't scaled at google because it would eat their ad business. We could have had current level AI in 2020 if they'd been serious about it. They weren't and everyone who worked on it left when the gold rush started without having done anything meaningful in google.
Computer vision, which is the field I've been working on the past few months, is even worse.
Perverts in their basements are getting better than sota image recognition so their wifus have realistic vaginas, and writing tutorials which provide more working insights than any scientific paper.
This isn't a new thing. I dropped out of my PhD working on something similar to AlexNet in 2009 because everyone thought I should just use gradient boosted decision trees like everyone else at the time. I couldn't get $10,000 grant to buy a machine to run the training on.
It isn't just me. Yann LeCun's networks were running the postal service, but he couldn't get a paper published anywhere because it wasn't a hot area to publish in.
But, yeah. Tell me more about how great Western academia is.
The word “public” is key. You know, the overall population.
They were also vaccinated for other diseases. Join the military and you sign away a lot of your rights (arguably for some good benefits, but we'll see how the new VA head and others treat the veterans and current troops).
The war would be over long before that process concluded.
Or maybe the military can decide to order unapproved vaccines?
Science works. Amazingly well. We're making progress on cancer, on many disorders that used to kill or limit many people's lives.
Instead of actually looking at what science does for you constantly, every day, you prefer to attack people.
The result will be tragic. Realistically, your loved ones will die of heart disease or cancer. Sounds like a really smart move to not fund science that will save their lives. Much better to support Trump and save up for their funerals!
This is how you tear the government down and replace it with corrupt oligarchic interests
Larry Ellison said it on record if anyone doubts it. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."[1]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
What a dystopian hellscape we are approaching.
If you're waiting for American voters to wake up and demand good governance you'll be waiting a really long time.
I thought trump was bringing American jobs back? So far he's impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2 days, and hasn't even made a plan for how to get americans hired.
(yes, a miniscule piece of me is enjoying how fast the Schedenfreude came. But still, I do mostly want to focus on fixing the country over pointing fingers).
Watch. In the mid-terms there will be violence. Then possibly martial law. Then the end of our constitution.
Then Trump will have us all spying on each other to see who's loyal and people will just get murdered without consequence.
He will do everything in his power to become a dictator.
Eggs, Chicken, Beef, and Rent will either stay horrible or get worse and with so many Federal jobs being wiped out, unemployment will go up.
They needed to get past the mid-terms to do the most damage, but they are not heading in that direction.
And if he tries to use the military on U.S. citizens, we should expect a serious push back. Our military is drilled with "all enemies foreign and domestic".
Here's a simple, and bloodless one - when you lose, do the same thing that happened in 2020 - come up with a billion different lies - that you know are lies - about how the election was fraudulent - except this time, Congress and the VP will actually fail to certify the results, it'll go to SCOTUS, which will decide 6-3.
There are also bloodier alternatives.
The system only works when everyone believes that it works, and that they'll be punished for defecting. It's just been made very clear that there will be no punishments for treason.
This by its very nature necessitates a temporary freeze on all human resources activites pending reviews to see if any as they currently stand violate equal opportunity guarantees and other requirements based on objective factors.
Personally, and I say this as a minority (Japanese-American male), I 300% approve of all this. People must be hired based on their character and capability, not because they happened to be born with the right skin color or sexual organs.
The problem is what "qualified" means under Affirmative Action, DEI, et al..
As a Japanese-American, I've both first- and second-hand witnessed racism against Asians (and Whites) in favor of Blacks and Hispanics in the name of Affirmative Action. That is racism and discrimination in both ways and there have been court rulings prohibiting Affirmative Action, I in absolute terms cannot in good faith accept Affirmative Action.
The "D" in DEI stands for "Diversity", which in the majority of cases meant hiring people with stronger weighting placed on their race or nationality and sex. This again is very literally racism, sexism, and discrimination and completely unacceptable.
The "E" in DEI stands for "Equity", which in clearer terms means Equal Conclusions, not Equal Opportunities as indirectly declared in our Declaration of Independence (all men created equal with an unalienable right to pursuit of happiness). This is an affront to one of the very cornerstones of our country and the American Dream, which is completely unacceptable.
Lastly the "I" in DEI stands for "Inclusion", which would be fine were it not for the fact that the actual implementation has involved excluding peoples who do not subscribe to certain narratives. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in politics and specifically identity politics, where the Center and Right simply call me an American but the Left call me various labels. I very sincerely don't have time for that divisive bullshit.
As someone who loves and appreciates science and technology and all the wonders we can accomplish, I reiterate my 300% support for the absolute rescinding of equity-based hiring and other equity-based human resources programmes. As Martin Luther King once said, I too dream of a day when everyone will be judged by the quality of their character. I dream of a day when everyone will be judged by what they are capable of, not what they are born as.
I hope we're on the cusp of reversing course on all that so we can make MLK's dream a reality again.
Where did I say that?
DEI is ideology and hidden threats of retaliation under the guise of "equality". And because nothing can be explicit, or it's all hidden under feel-good language (exactly the kind you used in your post). It adds a layer of redirection about what's really going on, and it all gets put forth with everyone having the understanding (because of examples) that if they don't find "diverse enough qualified" candidates, then they are racist and will be punished.
Meanwhile, the language provides cover for blatant anti-white, anti-asian and anti-male discrimination:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/06/tech-industry-2020-anti-raci...
They even have specialized software that uses AI to determine race (profiling?): https://www.piratewires.com/p/gem-hr-software-dei
Or what about ESG that has a racial-quota point system that allows investors and people to discriminate against companies that don't conform? https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/10/30/racial-equity-aud...
This kind of stuff is just the tip of the iceberg, there is more: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/bloomberg-2023-gei/
What about the fact that several countries (Western) have explicit gender-based quotas enacted as law. E.g. Norway, Germany, France, India, and others.
Or what about countries that have actual race-based points systems to discriminate against minority (white) groups: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Economic_Empowerment And no, just because it's some obscure and obfuscated "points system" doesn't mean it isn't racial discrimination, profiling and retaliation against companies that don't conform.
How some places in the US have race-quotas for boards: https://pacificlegal.org/discriminatory-mandates-prevent-qua...
And there are so many more, it's right infront of our eyes:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/red-state-sues-tec...
So why don't we drop the pretense, ordinary people see what's really going on, and no amount of sugar-coating and "feel good" words will make the very real discrimination go away, and they won't be gaslight and have their concerns waved away because of "falling for right wing propaganda" and "please read up on what DEI truly is".
Perhaps for some it's viewed as a positive if these groups are underrepresented in terms of percentage of federal employees as long as their roles are filled by someone perceived to be more capable with stronger character (weird how frequently that's a white guy these days).
The treatment of HIV with AZT and other HAART drugs. AIDS is caused by "poppers" not HIV, duh!
Treatment of breast cancer and Myeloid Leukemia and with Herceptin and Imatinib. Fake cancers!
Vaccines for HPV and Corona viruses are useless, because horse de-wormers treat both! Also, they're not real because COVID and cervical cancer are harmless.
It's time to stop the insanity and realize that jade eggs in your bum are the real solution.
Other useless drugs funded by NIH: Depo-Provera, Taxol, L-DOPA, Propranolol, Tagamet, Embrel, Tamoxifen, Cyclosporin, Warfarin, Methotrexate, Hydrocortisone.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
Agencies start out with a mission, then turn into a business, and finally become a con job. Most agencies are deep into the corrupt territory at this point.
Hopefully they'll restore some semblance of order after the pound of flesh is theatrically exacted.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Unfortunately, given that he is now holding the highest office in the US, it's a well known fact that Donald Trump lies constantly both when in office³ and when campaigning⁴, and I lack all faith in his administration's supposed transparency.
1.https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over... 2.https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/07/16/coronavirus... 3. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/politics/fact-check-dale-top-... 4. https://www.salon.com/2024/11/09/six-big-lies-that-won-the-e...
So, you're saying the WHOLE map will be drawn with Sharpie? ;-)
HHS suspended their association with the Eco health Alliance, so I'm not sure what vector is of worry.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/breaking-hhs-formally-de...
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-fai...
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"Usual" but overly extreme. Seems to fit 2025.
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
s/NIH/DOD/
Feel sorry for those who didn’t vote for him. No sympathy for those who did.
What concerns me most about this, is the general attitude of entirely dehumanizing specific groups of people. That, I expect, is the crux that makes atrocities possible, and it is happening now.
And they are armed to the teeth.
Trump appears to have no stable ideals, he seems to be only interested in attention and appearing successful. He's previously tried unsuccessfully to launch into politics from the left, right, and center but eventually found traction with this new movement, so he doubled down and played the demagogue after a lifetime of being the epitome of the elite.
Ultimately there is a narrative that regular people are doing bad economically because of a few specific groups of people, and that this can be fixed by dehumanizing, terrorizing, and persecuting these people. They will need an all powerful leader not constrained by laws, opposing politics, or human rights to "solve the problem." Of course people think his actions are "aligned with getting America the best deal" or else they wouldn't want to help install him as dictator.
Trump seems to have gotten pretty far along this path already. He appointed his own sycophant supreme court that ruled him above the law and unprosecutable. He failed at trying to overthrow an election, but managed to get away scott free by intimidating people out of doing their jobs, and eventually pardoned everyone criminally convicted of participating. He was convicted of 34 felonies in a trial by jury, but received no sentence. Now he's experimented with simply announcing the 14th amendment of the US constitution invalid by executive order, and will see if he gets away with it- if so, I think that qualifies as being successfully installed as a dictator.
I’m not likely to change your mind on these things, so what I’ll say instead is to look at what he is actually doing geopolitically through the lens of a declining world, which is what we are about to be experiencing as literally every other port country in the world begins its population decline.
Perhaps one could be, but these people are not- their rhetoric about immigrants is based on hate and dehumanization, and the entire narrative that immigrants are harmful economically and culturally is a lie. Moreover, it is a red herring that causes people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling - so nobody will take actual steps towards solving any real problems- and those problems will continue to get worse as a result.
I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
> justice system and its targeting of Trump
He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything- even crimes he was found guilty of by a jury. I have experience with people like that in real life and can spot it from a mile away, and I think our society would be a much better place to live for everyone if more people could spot this, and had some awareness or "antibodies" against emotional manipulation in general.
Lastly, thank you for being able to disagree with me in a calm and respectful manner- that is a rare thing online nowadays.
Politics can definitely get heated. I have always thought that you can get far even with people you strongly disagree with by assuming the best of their motives. Thanks for engaging with me :)
Have you actually talked to anyone, because this reads like a bumper sticker.
I will speak for myself. I am an immigrant, and I can tell you that while I am nervous for relatively obvious reasons, I also recognize that the inflow of illegal immigration is ( was? ) too high ( even official stats for illegal crossings are crazy ) to not piss off existing population. Under normal circumstances, few would give a fuck about a kid overstaying on their school visa, but all that has been institutionalized and normalized to the point, that the population chose an extreme to correct it.
There is no hate. There is simply a cold, harsh calculation in most people's heads and goes something like this: is there enough resources to support my family? No? Then where are the resources going ( cuz I already pay enough in taxes )?
And most people, normal people, when faced with a choice of saving their family or some nameless crowd will choose their families.
>>> justice system and its targeting of Trump >> He has Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), and he cannot accept responsibility or fault for anything-
Both statements can be true at the same time. Both states and feds threw everything they could at him and effectively failed. The 34 felony count - a talking point that is being trotted out regularly - probably being the prime example of this.
For example, do you remember what type of felony it is and on what shaky grounds it was bumped into a felony? Do you remember the mugshot and misplaced glee it generated?
At that point, I was already talking about Democrats' inability to read the room; that the felon label ( even if it is successful ) will not be useful this election cycle, but no one was listening. More amusingly, it seems that a lot has closed their ears further ( even though there was a brief moment of introspection caused by the election result ) again. Only difference now is that the marching orders have changed from 'felon' to 'nazi'.
It is tiring and predictable.
<< I refuse to be like the Germans who said "davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "we knew nothing about that." I will not participate in dehumanizing, persecuting, or abusing other people, and I will do everything in my power to stop them.
Do what you will. Believe what you will. You seem to have already fallen into the 'he a nazi and nazi bad' camp and I have zero intent to change your mind at this point ( my conversations with people pre-election made it clear to me some of it is rather pointless ).
<< people to ignore all of the real reasons people are struggling
Maybe.. just maybe if you focused on that part, you could get people's attention. But hey, nazis!
Yes. A German Jewish newspaper published this.[1]
"We do not subscribe to the view that Herr Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have desired for so long, will enact the proposals circulating in the Angriff or the Völkischer Beobachter newspapers; they will not suddenly divest German Jews of their constitutional rights, lock them away in race ghettos, or subject them to the avaricious and murderous impulses of the mob. They not only cannot do this because many other crucial factors hold their powers in check, ranging from the Reich president to some of the political parties affiliated with them, but they also clearly do not want to go this route, for when one acts as a European world power, the whole atmosphere is more conducive to ethical reflection upon one’s better self than to revisiting one’s earlier oppositional role: operating as a European world power means that one seeks an enduring place in the harmonious exchange of peoples of culture. And beyond that, it is clear that the powers at Wilhelmstrasse no longer see demagogic appeals designed to heat up mass gatherings of the Volk as strictly necessary. The new Prussian Minister of the Interior [Hermann Göring] can perform a far greater service to the old comrades in arms and party friends by rejuvenating the huge, state civil service along National Socialist lines than by making open concessions to the brutal manifesta- tions of hatred of Jews."
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
This is not my (and presumably your) definition of "competent", which would be "able to run these institutions well", or something along those lines.
And since it seems there isn't any real accountability any more other than anything that is strictly legally imposed, anything that goes wrong in this process is just blamed on the democrats, deep state, or whatever. Or its simply denied that the problems exists in the first place.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.
It's compromise, carnage and collateral damage. Doing anything else is a better option 100% of the time.
Nobody's going to hear "we're seceding because we're sick of dying from lack of healthcare" and think "ooh, I wonder if it's secretly about slavery?"
That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.
Too few people pay for news these days. So the news aren't the product and we ended mis- and ill-informed.
If having an informed populace is required for democracy to work then it doesn't work. Especially when you ask the question, "informed about what"?
They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc.
This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution.
When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
> When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.
Really do not hate to point this out. Democrats are really responsible for a lot of this mess. Both Republics and Democrats really love to blame the other one but they're really just the Father and Mother and when the child is having problems, it's both of their faults.
Personally, I think it's gotten this way because of the whole first-past-the-post so if you have a belief like "far right" or "far left" then your best bet politically is to run underneath Republican or Democrat and push out the "moderates" in a primary as opposed to making a new political party that actually has your beliefs.
[1]: https://thenightly.com.au/politics/us-politics/what-is-a-tar...
I think it's actually the combination of FPTP and open (or at least broadly accessible) primaries. In Canada and UK, parties generally have much more control over their primaries, and party elites generally try to exercise that power to ensure that candidates don't upset the existing arrangements too much. Not even necessarily as a deliberate strategy, but when you have to work your way through the "smoke-filled rooms" as a candidate, that filters out the purists and favors those willing to compromise. US was also like that for a long time, and notably we didn't have this degree of polarization then.
But once primaries are wide open and the party no longer controls the candidates, it seems inevitable that more extreme candidates will win. They appeal to the more ideologically motivated voters who are generally more likely to show up and vote (especially so in the primaries), and so any candidate who wants to win there has to appeal to them first.
I think it started somewhere during the Reagan admin, going very slowly but steadily at first, but the wider the gap between the parties is, the faster the process goes, so it became really visible somewhere around Obama. The relevant rule changes wrt primaries and conventions date back to early 70s, though.
I agree that first past the post is a problem and this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but I think it's a myth that any of it has to do with the Democrats going "too far left." Call me when any Democratic Presidential candidate openly calls for dismantling American imperialism and scaling back the military, or criticizes capitalism and endorses nationalized healthcare, education and UBI, or doesn't kiss the ass of police or curry favor with Evangelical Christians, or has immigration policies that actually materially differ from those of Republicans.
You are a willing participant in the political system. You agree to live by the results of the election, even if you don’t personally agree with them.
You’re not personally responsible for the results, but you are a willing participant in the system that caused them.
I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.
The US is 2 crimes and a real estate scam in a trench coat. When I was younger, I indeed thought that maybe it had some legitimacy, but after having read quite a lot of the history of the millions that the government here has enslaved and murdered I no longer thing it's legitimate.
I understand that they have the guns and the power, but realistically I am not a willing participant in this system.
Leave the country. I did it.
> I didn't vote, for what it's worth. I don't think it's ethical to participate in that kind of thing.
That's your choice.
You have plenty of options. Get involved politically. Organize. Fund raise.
Plenty of opportunity to affect the outcome. But you'd rather just complain about it online.
I spent last night doing a shift till 4 in the morning at a warming center for folks who don't have houses, and I've spent the last several months working on taking an off grid chunk of property to a place where I can host full families of folks to "come and play music".
None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
How is immigrating to a new country "colonizing"? Are you suggesting Mexicans (for example) who come to the US are "colonizing" it?
> None of that makes the US government one bit more legitimate.
Of course not, why would it?
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases. Maybe that's not out right execution, but Trump definitely wants revenge.
Whereas executions have a small issue in that area.
>I fully expect Trump to ruin Biden's final years with investigations and court cases
I'm still 50/50 on if Trump makes it that far, physically. He's older than when Biden ran his administration and not exactly in the best health.
But I guess they did get Regean through his last years. Nothing's impossible.
We've crossed the Rubicon.
If we didn't have the DOJ and other institutions protecting Biden for the last several years it would be pretty easy to find out if he actually did sell influence (vs. Hunter deceiving the people he was making deals with) with just a couple of warrants and subpeonas.
I find it hilarious that everyone is scared of Trump when there was a concerted effort by the other side to use the justice system to stop him from ever running again.
Need I remind everyone of multi-year Russiagate investigation that was all made up? The misdemeanor charges that becomes felonies with massive fines? The media collusion to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story when the FBI knew at the time it was real?
It’s the pot calling the kettle black. It’s the thieves accusing everyone else of stealing.
"Russiagate" meanwhile found plenty of stuff[1].
[0]https://www.vox.com/2015/9/30/9423339/kevin-mccarthy-benghaz...
[1]https://www.acslaw.org/projects/the-presidential-investigati...
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-2022-midterm-elect...
Four years and immense government resources were wasted investigating the President calling him a "tool of the Russian government".
And the "plenty of stuff" found? "Undisclosed contacts" and "obstruction of the investigation".
What a massive flop.
I honestly don't get what you mean by this. Lets say all your comments about Biden, the FBI, laptops and whatever else are 100% true. How does that change if I should be worried about stuff Trump might do? To use a totally extreme example, if John Wayne Gacy went around talking all the shit in the world about Jeffrey Dahmer, does that somehow make Dahmer not a serial killer?
> He ran on “lock her up” in 2016 and never followed through.
So that proves he lies and makes promises he can't/won't/doesn't keep? Is that a positive trait in a politician? How are we supposed to determine when he is 'just joshing, bro' and actually is being truthful? And yes, I know Biden and the dems also make promises they don't keep, but again that doesn't excuse Trump from doing the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun...
They've been telling us exactly what they're going to do ... and we just let it happen.
this way the opposition is cleansed in a mini genocide as well as algorithmically in a decentralized manner so resistance can't form
the fourth reich is here :)
And this is likely also where the US are heading. The putsch will not be loud and with a bang like Syria, it will be slow as molasses but about as difficult to impossible to stop like a broken dam worth of water moving downstream.
I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.
I'll still stand by the point though: 23% is an unreasonable number to throw out.
The Democrats are terrible but somehow I doubt Kamala Harris would be doing this much damage two days in. I don't think people would be wondering whether Tim Walz actually did a Nazi salute at the inauguration. It can be the case that both parties are evil, and they are, but that America still chose the greater evil.
nevermind he never had a plan for any of the issues people voted for him on. A still vague plan on fixing inflation (spoilers: he cannot do as much to fix inflation as many think), still rough numbers on what these tarriffs are supposed to do. What else did conservatives think he was going to do... -----
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyg5jdgzy1o
‘You want to come to America? Earn it, like I did’
well he is indeed hastening the deportation... nevermind conservatives with undocumented workers only lose from this and don't want to pay americans minimum wage. Well done.
'He invokes fear in the rest of the world’
Yeah, I guess pissing off all our friends and getting cozy with China/Russia will invoke fear.
Hey, Maybe Trump is more honest than I thought. Of course, when it comes to making lives worse for the world.
No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.
But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.
The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.
The people who voted for this actively engaged and endorsed it. It strains credulity for them to claim ignorance.
Those who thought "nothing would change no matter what"... well nothing has changed I guess. I suppose Harris would have done mass deportation raids and cutting funding from science and healthcare at all, right?
Trump won with an overwhelming mandate. He is popular with a majority of the country.
The fact that nobody on HN seems to support Trump should tell you about who is on HN.
- won the popular vote by over 2M votes
- won by electoral college by 84 votes
That alone would be “a solid showing”.
But he also:
- carried the Republicans to maintain a majority in the House
- helped increased the margin of seats in the Senate to a majority
Many members of the Republican party had been against Trump. This election, most were pro-Trump. His popularity helped pull both houses.
And did this after the opposition tried every tactics possible to ruin him - a fake Russian dossier that was peddled unquestioningly by the media, a misdemeanor crime gets prosecuted as a felony in the hopes to bankrupt or disqualify him from running again.
Against those odds? That showing is remarkable. Oh and he was almost assassinated, twice.
Then add on top he increased Republican share in solid Blue states like NY and CA by double digits. He increased Republican votes with black and hispanic voters.
He basically increased every single voting group across the board.
In light of the challenges, the outcome is a clear showing that a significant percentage of the US voters support him and the people in his party that are aligned to him.
I'm not sure what else you'd need to show a clear mandate.
The assassination stuff is just not germane to a discussion about mandate nor your purported fake Russian dossier.
This came out shortly after the election about the House and Senate and Presidential election, the USA is just very divided, almost evenly. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/2024-election-5-take...
That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.
But then Trumpists never let the truth get in the way of their own mythmaking. They said they had an overwhelming mandate and the support of most Americans even in 2016 when literally millions more people voted for Hillary Clinton. Hell, they didn't even think they actually lost in 2020. I'm surprised they can square the cognitive dissonance of Trump being elected to a third term.
Irrelevant, we don't elect presidents by popular vote.
> That is not an overwhelming mandate, nor does it represent a majority of the country.
He won the Senate as well. Increased the majority in the House. Increased his votes in NY, CA. And among blacks and hispanic voters.
All while almost being assassinated (twice!) and having the mass media peddling lies against him for the last 8 years (Russiagate!). He wasn't like Obama who had the media backing him.
It absolutely is a mandate. It's a clear mandate because his Party has both houses and the Presidency!
How the details of the election process actually works is tangential to what kind of mandate they have.
If some bizarre election mechanism that a country followed meant that a party getting 1 vote more than the opposition gave it 100% of the power, that's how elections in that country would work, but that doesn't mean the winners would have a strong mandate from the electorate as a whole.
In Nazi Germany, Hitler made the argument that, well, since 33% of the voters (17% of the population) voted for him, far ahead of the runner-up (who only got 20% of the vote), and his party made up the majority of the ruling coalition (196 out of 267 out of a total 620 seats), he should have all the power.
The system certainly gave him power for all those reasons, but it's farcical to say that 17% of the population voting for him was an 'overwhelming' mandate for Germany to embark on their insane politics, and it's also farcical to say that +1% of the vote is a clear mandate. It's a mandate, but a slim one.
The system was also designed with a lot of checks and balances and social norms in places, but as it turns out, if you collude with what were supposed to be adversaries and break all the soft (and hard) rules, you can get a dramatically radical agenda implemented, disproportionate in its scale to the popular support you enjoy.
Did you not see the entire inauguration applaud and cheer him? Do you think they won't be heiling right back at him on the next rally?
The ones that wouldn't are bending themselves into pretzels to explain how it's just a weird autistic handwave.
They simply don't care about the details. And the ones that do think it's hilarious that he's owning the libs.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
There are BS loopholes we need to correct, but people who can't do the bare basics to reserve a morning to fill out a ballot fundamentally have themselves to blame.
However, turnout don't only affect the results, but future results.
Politicians look at votes to determine their future trajectory - those who don't turn out won't be seen at all, and would be treated as if they don't exist. After all, why hadn't the native indians got the vote until legislated, and why slaves too, until some compromise was reached?
So voting, regardless of your effect on outcome, is important. I only wish the vote was easier, as some people need to take time off work to vote, or have to trek far, or make arrangements which would be inconvenient. For example, making postal voting easier to get is a good starting point.
So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?
At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.
Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.
I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
civic duty should be emphasized in school more. It's not a 10 second exercise every 4 years. It's something to be vigilant about indefinitely, and forever. Any change to laws, or any votes, require scrutiny, rational thought on the choices, and personal maximization.
Unfortunately, people are too lazy, or too dumb, to do this, and choose to listen to someone else's recommendation on votes.
So democracy represents somewhat of an averaged choice of the population. As the population becomes dumber due to lack of good education or cadence, their choices become increasingly worse.
Authoritarian regimes don't have this problem. The average person in one don't get to make many, if any, choices. The elites make them all - and if the elites are more altruistic, the country generally do better than average.
If this is your position, you must conclude no American election is a strong signal of anything.
Furthermore, this is just bad stats. We received a massive sample of the population, that sample is not without bias, but at least is geographically distributed. Do you think if had a 100% sampling rate the result would be dramatically different?
I suspect that missing portion is going bias towards low information population and immigrants who have no interest in US election. Democracy is not about finding every adult with a pulse. You must build a coalition of citizens with a vested interest in their community to get on your program, and take physical action to indicate that support you.
It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem.
It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.
If anyone is curious, here are the Presidents since the 19th century who got at least 50% of the vote:
Biden
Obama (both terms)
Second Bush (second term)
First Bush
Reagan (both terms)
Carter
Nixon (second term)
Johnson
Eisenhower (both terms)
Second Roosevelt (all four terms)
Hoover
Coolidge
Harding
Taft
First Roosevelt
McKinley
You might think that Wilson at 41.8% must have lost the popular vote but actually he beat the person with the second highest popular vote total by over 14%. That was back when the US had more than two viable parties. The vote went 41.84% to Wilson (Democrat), 27.4% to Teddy Roosevelt (Progressive), 23.17% to the incumbent Taft (Republican), 5.99% to Debs (Socialist), and the rest to a few others.
Similar with Clinton's 43%. That was about 5% more than second place. That year Ross Perot running as an independent got 18.91%.
Same with Nixon. His 43.42% was the biggest slice of the popular vote, followed by Humphrey at 42.72%. George Wallace running for the American Independent party got 13.53%.
people are tragically funny these days I swear
I guess you could say less deficit was added during Trump's first term (excluding covid), than in Obama or Biden's first terms. Not sure that tells us anything useful though.
There hasn't been an actual deficit decrease since 2001 though.
https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...
May as well speed to the inevitably cyberpunk future. Shame I'm not getting that cool cyborg arm.
If the republicans are smart they won’t impose austerity but it won’t matter as whatever they do will have unintended consequences they can’t predict and it will likely tank them in the midterms and in 4 years.
But right now they are targeting the intellectual elite that actually run things/society. All because they can’t handle the truth.
Tech thinks they will be spared by focusing on their magic counting machines. Trump AI will fix everything.
Except where the culture is completely different, e.g. East Asia. But they have different problems.
Australia is definitely facing the same problems and the same emerging far-right populist anti-immigration narrative as a result. Though to be fair, Australia has always had a pretty strong authoritarian populist far-right anti-immigration thing going on.
The one that has totally surprised me is Germany. Seeing them go down that same road again is genuinely shocking.
Drink some water.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
Achieving change against current incentives with politically mindful measures I'd say is very time consuming and slow.
In regards to your point I agree that treating public services as companies that can't be running at a loss is been demonstrated to be bad, but there is a fine line between trying to make public services profitable VS trying to make them more efficient.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
This quote does not apply in a place where the actor has specifically promised to be malicious.
Now, you may not see their promises as malicious and that is your prerogative. But that quote isn’t applicable for a ton of people when it comes to Trump.
Either way, this seems like a political flip-flop, with the opposing party now putting on the tin hats. That's just the way it looks to me as an independent.
I never said you had to put on a tin foil hat to call someone malicious. I'm just saying that malicious people tend to do stupid things which have unintended consequences they didn't fully realize.
However, I am still able to put 2 and 2 together to see his behavior during COVID, his statements before this current elections, and the current decisions (especially regarding gender definitions) and understand what the goal of silencing the NIH (even temporarily) is.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_orders_in_...
Edit: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-executive-orders-proje...
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
But making that happen when there are 20+ levels of management between the guy doing the work and the guy making the rules seems impossible.
However, grant review can really be done remotely. And there are many other embedded inefficiencies in granting. For example, when my PI and I applied for an R01 (the basic individual investigator grant that is core to funding early investigators) we had to print a 500 page application which contained duplicate data, full CVs, pages and pages of boilerplate, and fedex it to NIH where it sits in a room with all the other applications (it's been 20 years; maybe this doesn't happen anymore?). The review committees instead get a digital copy and the grant meeting itself is really just a bunch of people sitting in a circle making yes/no decisions.
Have you seen the "Stargate" announcement?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYUoANr3cMo&t=646s
Thanks to "AI" and mRNA vaccines, it's gonna be fine. Probably best to cut all other funding and just funnel it into the data centers that will solve everything very beautifully, lives are at stake after all.
For someone not allocating attention to it, you’ve been commenting a lot of this thread and others of similar nature.
I'll be happy if they ban "gain of function" research entirely.
That strongly implies 7-8 levels of hierarchy, on average.
> Today, the scientist encountered one group of early-career researchers who were scheduled to attend and present at a distant conference next week—presentations that are now impossible.
What's the big deal? Present via Zoom. We should probably cancel all conference travel.