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Could you point me to an articulation that explains why arbitrarily purging (mentioned by your parent post) has been necessary ( mentioned by you)?
That's going to be a big problem as very few insiders are going to be willing to rock the boat. Even if it's necessary.
Maybe you've got a good idea of how to solve this "good review requires experts, experts are very likely insiders, insiders are unlikely to rock the boat" problem. It would be wonderful if there was some solution, even if it was hard.
You're the one who has identified this as a problem, shouldn't you be the one to suggest an alternative?
It’s like a hoarders show where everyone is shocked (SHOCKED!) that things had gotten as bad as it is, the hoarder has lost the capability to determine what is valuable or necessary, so a third party with no attachment or sentiment comes in to clean house and throws out the good with the bad.
Having said that, this smells witch-hunty to me. The US can boast decades of excellence in medical and biological sciences, which in turn generates a massive windfall. Completely upending the architecture behind this dominance on the suspicion that a few hundred million bucks are less-than-optimally spent is a hell of a gambit, and even ignores all the higher-order effects that even that "spare change" bring about.
There may be problems with the system (show me one without), but it does work.
You understand that they're delaying the flu vaccine in a way that will kill 10,000 elderly people next year?
Delaying the flu vaccine? Ok that's bad, sure.
It's also a real goalpost move and also doesn't address the technical problem "insiders going to inside" I raised in answer to the parent's paraphrased "I can't understand this, why is this necessary?"
I don't know that doing things this way is strictly necessary. But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.
Q> Can you explain why the sledge hammer approach, removing funding for things wholesale and causing large amounts of destruction (both economic and health) is reasonable?
And your answer was
A> It looks like there is a problem with the current system, and changing something would be beneficial.
And, while I agree that the sentiment ("changing something would be beneficial") is fair... as an answer it falls squarely into "We should do something, this is something, so we should do this", which is categorically ridiculous. The way to approach these types of issues, where changing things can (and does) have real, significant impact on lots of people, is to come up with a plan and discuss what the impacts/tradeoffs are. It is _not_ to just do the first thing that comes to mind and then ignore the people who's lives your destroying.
If a plan to cut bureaucracy was somehow analyzed to find that we could save 5% of the US budget in exchange for 10,000 lives, reasonable people might consider otherwise. To take these changes against life-saving organizations without first analysis of consequences is pretty reckless.
ok but burning down a house with a family in it because of a hypothetical burglar usually isn't a good solution.
I don't agree with it but I understand it.
And even if it is true, you could carefully and surgically remove the rot, instead of chopping off whole limbs.
And even then, you can do it following the laws set by Congress, rather than by executive decree.
As a personal aside, the scientific/medical community (overlapping heavily with NIH) has not been able to 'surgically' prevent the advent of crazy child-mutilation and sterilization in the supposedly-enlightened West, so how do you expect average people that disagree with it to try approach it with civility? We've reached absolute peak madness, so of course debate and "surgical" type approaches are out of the window at this point. We must do better next time around.
Those aren't sincere people; they're living in an alternate reality warped by propaganda.
Of course I realize this is a deliberately created wedge issue precisely so those folks can claim the burden is on the rest of us to engage properly. And when we're exhausted by debunking bullshit they can claim we're being elitist and dismissive. Brilliant strategy that's taken our country to an illustrious and proud moment...
If we can't even get this dynamic right, and both sides have convoluted and elaborate ways to dismiss the other, then surely we can all agree that there will absolutely never be any reconciliation or meeting of the minds of the two groups? Leaving only forced indoctrination, silencing of opinions and plain separation of the two groups into physically different governments/countries.