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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The overarching goal seems to be "Achieve more, more efficiently, with fewer resources".

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.

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There are, of course, not 20+ levels of management. The average fan-out in the federal government is 1:7 to 1:10, with ~2.5 million employees total.

That strongly implies 7-8 levels of hierarchy, on average.

What makes you think that is the actual goal rather than just what you are being told the goal is?

So cut 15 levels of management. Budget cuts to match. Carry on.

As long as they're not fucking up the NIH grantmaking process, I (ruthlessly) don't care, and am not going to allocate attention to it. But once they do start fucking up grants, they're throwing a monkeywrench in basically all American therapeutic research and basic science, which is a big problem, since one of the government's primary missions should be to set in motion whatever things will end human cancer.

My understanding is that study sections have been cancelled and that is a key part of the grant review process.

The impact of these travel restrictions is to cancel/delay grant review meetings, which could plausible "fuck up the NIH grantmaking process".

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.

Yes, I share the concern this article relates and hopefully saner (conservative) heads will prevail on the administration not to jank this up further. What I really want to do here is defang dumb debates about whether operational efficiency and headcount cuts inside NIH proper are disastrous. They may not be, so long as the grants keep happening.

I've only applied for NSF and NASA grants, but it's digital. Can't imagine NIH is too different.

Good to know. It looks like NIH dropped the fedexed physical copy requirement around when I left academia (https://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i14/NIH-Grants-Electronic.ht...). In fact now that I think of it, the R01 I submitted must have been digital-only, and that must have changed between 2003 and 2007.

> one of the government's primary missions should be to set in motion whatever things will end human cancer.

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.

Stargate is just a joint venture between a bunch of investors and big tech companies. If Biden had won, Biden would be the one announcing it. The amount of "Stargate" I factor into anything going on right now is zero.

>I (ruthlessly) don't care, and am not going to allocate attention to it

For someone not allocating attention to it, you’ve been commenting a lot of this thread and others of similar nature.

you don't get a karma like tptacek without doing a lot of commenting

>> As long as they're not fucking up the NIH grantmaking process

I'll be happy if they ban "gain of function" research entirely.

Someone very close to me had their study section next week cancelled with no further comms. They are already fucking up grants. Please everyone, educate yourselves on this; the sky actually is falling this time.

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