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Comment by rUsHeYaFuBu | Hacker News Reader

> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.

Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.

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Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.

Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.

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I don't know if they are more competent now. There are just fewer people willing to push back, and few to no guardrails in place for when the leader doesn't adhere to the usual governmental and ethical norms.

I guess it depends on what you mean with "competent". In essence their pitch is that government is bad, so from that sense "competent" means "able to burn these institutions down". From that perspective these people do seem more "competent" in various ways: there is less chaos, a better sense on how to use the legal means, more focus. Trump may be a unfocused bumbling fool, but the Project 2025 people aren't.

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.

This was the sense in which I was using the word "competent", thanks for clarifying. What I meant was now they are better able to realize their destructive vision, but insofar as I can tell its mostly the same vision as it ever was.

The position they've taken is that they want to shift cancer funding from treatment to prevention. I have no idea whether this makes any sense or if it will actually happen but that is the current messaging.

There is no prevention strategy that will prevent all cancers. Even people with the most healthy lifestyle can get a cancer. That's why you have to do both.

Just to give one example: the majority of men will get prostate cancer if they live long enough (~70% of men over 80). It's just that other things tend to kill people before the cancer.

Wouldn't that require... conducting research on cancer prevention?

Democrats need to put these messages out hard. If they win the 2026 election we might even have a chance at putting a brake on Trump's idiocy. (I know, I know, trust Democrats to shoot their own foot in the most crucial moments, but one can hope...)

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