The NIH is being slashed and burned, not "reformed"

One can only hope for a blue tsunami for the midterms, though I'm not getting my hopes up.

Democrats need a super-majority to swing either the House or Senate.

Sure, but the whole idea of representative democracy (a Republic[1]) is supposed to be that Congress and other elected members of government are supposed to be immune from the trappings of mob rule.

In other words, the excuse you are making is that people voted for the government to start doing borderline illegal or at the very least highly misguided and self-destrctive things that are against the interest of their constituents, and that because the people want those dumbass destructive things the government should comply with those wishes.

That logic only goes so far when we consider the context of the very same government that also denies the people things that are far more popular.

For example, 62% of Americans are in favor of universal healthcare, but we aren't getting that.

82% of Americans are in favor of paid maternity leave.

And yet, our lawmakers have not delivered to the American people those demands.

But here we all are implying that 51% of the country deciding they want to dismantle the US executive branch is enough public support to just go ahead and do so with impunity.

The 2024 Trump presidency is, believe it or not, already a historically unpopular administration by the objective polling numbers. Why should they get to dismantle the government with such a weak mandate?

Frankly, it's bullshit.

[1] This is coincidentally the excuse that every Republican I've ever met including my Fox News Dad makes for the electoral college and gerrymandered congressional districts amplifying rural MAGA votes so that states with majority Democrat constituents are ruled by Republican statehouses and so that Trump and Bush got to win presidential elections without winning the popular vote.

Let's not forget that the house is artificially capped [1]. It should have a much larger membership. The senate already biases towards land over people. And more and more the house does as well.

[1] https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/Th...

It's not terribly interesting. There have always been two strains of thought for the Democrats in the US. Once has been that we must move the whole country in the right direction kicking and screaming - this has been the ideology that has been in ascendency since Kennedy. The other that we must be allowed to be as progressive as possible without interference from the Federal government. That's not been in vouge since the end of the new deal.

I'm completely in the second camp and would move back to the US if it were possible to get it adopted at the national level.

What works for a country the size of a New York neighbourhood doesn't work for a country the size of a continent.

California has half the population of Germany and twice the GPD.

We can't pretend the US is some dinky country in Europe that can be ruled the same way.

The problem is that the president can direct funding to primary a congressman. There are ways to make that harder to do, but they have to try

Oh, so Congress makes law and the President sees that the law is faithfully executed?

We should definitely amend the Constitution to include that.

There are inklings of a change there. You can see it in things like proposing to prevent women from traveling to another state to get an abortion, or forcing states to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement. I expect we will see more of that if it helps them get to their desired policy goals.

So, Trump in 2016, not 2024, was actually the lowest (negative, in fact) margin for a winning candidate since 2000 (and was actually lower—more negative—than 2000’s also-negative margin.)

Indeed. And yet with certain previous presidents we've been told that because the margin of victory is so slim, they're already a lame duck. But here, it's a mandate.

You seem to be fixated on a vote system that we do not use.

Out of curiosity, how many weeks/months of late vote counting did that take? At the time the election was called, and for at least a couple weeks after iirc, he was ahead.

IMHO it's kind of meaningless to count the popular vote as it's not a popular election, which influences the results. Why vote in Texas or California? You already know who will win. Will that balance each other out? Unclear.

That said, I do agree with the broader point that a narrow victory shouldn't give full control of the complete (federal) government, especially considering how they're going about things. But fixing that requires serious changes to the democratic system and good luck with that.

You're being a little deceptive here, by summing votes for all candidates combined as "against".

What really matters is Trump v Harris, and Trump won that both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.

I don’t recall “we’re gonna kill science research, cancer research, we’re gonna make a million poor children die of AIDS and tuberculosis” in any campaign ads.

He repeatedly stated he knew nothing about Project 2025. So arguably he's not following through on his campaign promises. Some of his voters I'm sure saw through his bullshit, but many were conned.

It's a far stretch to say that this is what the majority of his voters wanted. Certainly many Republican voters have seemed very upset about this stupid blitzkrieg dismantling of core services.

I disagree. In particular, the complete disrespect with which he and Elon are going about "cutting costs" and the way he's handling Ukraine would likely have lost him the election were they known beforehand.

When did Trump pledge to destroy the NIH? He did also specficially disavow Project 2025 and is now enacting a whole bunch of it.

You can tell who never bothered to watch a single Trump rally or campaign event by the fact that they’ll LARP being a deceived supporter.

He did not. In fact he promised the opposite.

Do I think anyone not drinking the koolade could see this coming? Sure. But that wasn’t the question, the question is what could be done. There are exactly two things, only one of which is legal, which is impeachment.

We’re already looking at a likely President Vance if the DNC keeps pushing identity BS. No need to rush it.

> I mean, if you re-elect the guy that tried to forcibly stay in power last time, I'm not sure what else to say...

You're arguing what you think would happen if Trump was elected.

OP is saying something different. He's saying the among the people who voted for Trump, some believed something else would happen and they might feel defrauded.

There are plenty of examples of people who wanted to vote conservative but "didn't have time to do the research" and now they're about to be caught up in the billionaire looting of the government. Low information voters, people busy with their jobs, lots of ads and propaganda.. and voila.

That said, both the Dems and the GOP are there doing the bidding of lobbyists and the wealthy... if we had an actual populist party in the US we wouldn't have ended up here. At least, not so quickly.

Just want to add: plenty of Dems voters also don’t get what they voted for.

Have you seen some of these GOP town hall videos?

Project 2025 isn't even ideologically consistent because it's written by a grab bag of heritage affiliated authors.

They really aren’t. Lots of contempt of court happening by the executive branch.

The path we went down starting with Lincoln and the imperial presidency has finally fully manifested.

The mechanism seems to rest on the principle of separation of powers - Congress is empowered both to write the laws, and to remove presidents. That means that there can't be a major misalignment between Congress and the executive, because if Congress thinks the president is really out of line they can boot him.

It is quite a sophisticated set-up, really. You'd think in principle that the courts would decide when the presidency isn't following the law, but the actual power to punish the president lives in the legislature and it makes much more sense when examined in terms of what incentives exist.

Senate could impeach Trump or other members of the administration, but that requires a two third majority so good luck with that. Note that impeachment is specifically excluded from the presidential pardon.

But other than that, yeah, the strategy seems to be "who is going to stop us?" It remains to be seen how far he can push things before a critical majority of Republican senators will balk. For all their talk about "muh constitution" over the last few decades, they sure seem quick to abandon some constitutional basics when it's convenient. And even if he gets impeached by some unlikely set of circumstances, it remains to be seen if he actually steps down.

For one thing, the Supreme Court are the ones that ruled that the president has some form of immunity in the first place, and it wouldn't be that unprecedented for them to rein that in a bit if it comes to them again; see the follow-up to Bruen in Rahimi where basically all of them other than Thomas seemed to want to walk back their previous ruling a bit. Although it's hard for me to imagine how they could have been surprised at all about the aftermath of their ruling in Bruen, it does sometimes seem to me like some of the more "moderate" conservative justices forget that they're playing with live ammo (if you'll pardon the pun) and not just debating abstract principles. I don't pretend to have any sort of confidence in what they'd actually do if presented with another case against Trump, but I don't think it would be _that_ surprising if they decided to try to find some technicality where they can claim he still has immunity for most things but for some reason it wouldn't apply to the current issue under question. I'm also not going to claim with any sort of confidence that ruling against him would be effective at reining him in, since there already seems to be a large contingent of his supporters eager for him to just flat out ignore court rulings that have much less personal stakes for him.

The other remedy that still technically merits a mention even if it's somewhat implausible to happen any time soon is that Congress does still have the power to impeach and remove the president. I don't see it as super likely that Republicans would turn against him at this point, since pretty much all of the internal opposition has been driven out of the party over the past decade, but I'm guessing that it also would have been almost unthinkable for Nixon to go from winning every state other than Massachusetts in 1972 to losing so much support in 1974 that his own party told him that he might as well resign rather than have more than half of his own party's senators vote with the Democrats to remove him from office[0]. Even though I think the people who voted for Trump tend to be much more passionate in their support for him, and the norms for what behavior is considered "acceptable" as a politician have expanded dramatically (not in small part from Trump himself), I think there's still an argument to be made that Trump isn't as popular as Nixon was at this point in second term, and it's at least theoretically possible to imagine a scenario where his support eroded to the point that he lost enough support to continue with what he's doing. Even if his supporters aren't ever going to turn against him, there aren't nearly as many of them that there were for Nixon, so maybe the most likely of the unlikely scenarios for this would be a large enough Democrat majority getting elected during the midterms that they (possibly along with some of the few remaining moderate Republicans in the Senate) could remove him. (This would of course still leave Vance as president, assuming he didn't also get impeached and convicted, so he could pardon Trump, but that still removes him from power for at least couple of years, and Vance being a relatively recent convert to Trumpism doesn't seem like he'd be able to command nearly as much loyalty as Trump himself has).

As for what could actually cause something like this to take place, I have to wonder if the most likely scenario would literally be another pandemic. Not only does the previous one have a reasonable claim to being what caused him to lose in 2020, a lot of the policies he's currently enacting seem like they'd backfire spectacularly in the face of another pandemic (e.g. cutting vaccine mandates in schools, appointing Kennedy as HHS secretary when him being antivax is probably the most well known thing about him, and the recent flirting with cutting Medicaid in order to pay for the tax cuts...)

[0]: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Ri...:

> During the late afternoon of August 7, Senators Goldwater and Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office and told him his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Scott told reporters afterward that they did not pressure Nixon to resign, but simply told the president that "the situation is very gloomy on Capitol Hill." Rhodes told the president he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House. By Majority Leader O'Neill's estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to vote against the obstruction-of-justice article. Goldwater and Scott told the president that not only were there enough votes in the Senate to convict him, but that no more than 15 or so senators were willing to vote for acquittal. Goldwater later wrote that as a result of the meeting, Nixon "knew beyond any doubt that one way or another his presidency was finished." That night, Nixon finalized his decision to leave office.

If the military upholds their oath to the Constitution, we should never have a dictatorship.

> Everyone was perfectly fine with the President doing whatever he wanted a couple months ago.

Everyone was fine with the president doing whatever he wanted a couple of months ago because he didn't abuse his power like the new guy is. When you have someone with self control and the best interests of the country in mind, you don't actually need to reign in presidential power like you suggest, and we just haven't had a Trump in the presidency enough to call a constitutional convention.

> At some point one party needs reign in the presidency while they have it. Democrats chose not to, then ran a losing campaign with a candidate voters did not nominate.

This is impossible given the threshold for a constitutional convention. 2/3rd for proposal and 3/4th for ratification, we are just way too divided for that unless Trump messes up really really bad and we actually survive as the same country to pick up the pieces. The supreme court is the only other body that could interpret the law to restrict executive power, but it is stacked with Trump appointees who have new interpretations of unrestricted executive power, so we shouldn't expect much from them.

I appreciate the facts in our current outrage and misinformation economy.

The fact that the budget is being reduced after it has been negotiated means a cut. And you obviously have no facts to back up your claim that this money was used for "adminstration expenses"

> The NIH is simply requiring that at least 85% of the grant value goes to the actual grant recipients, rather than being siphoned off by the university for administration expenses.

That's not how any of this work. All of that money was already going to necessary expenditures, and "administrative expenses" is a crucial part of that.

What happened in these places to arrive at numbers like 69%, was a very thorough audit. The purpose of the audit is to allow the government to determine they are supposed to fund, and it's being bundled into an overhead number because its allows universities to take advantage of economies of scale, freeing researchers to do actual grant research.

But because our current leaders can't understand that, what's going to happen is all of the overhead costs (which again, are efficient) are going to be replaced with direct billing, which is highly inefficient. All of the money we save through sharing resources will now be siloed and duplicated needlessly. Instead of doing grant research, grant recipients will spend more time just doing compliance work instead of actual research.

Look at it this way:

A Harvard researcher asks the government for $100. They allocate an additional $69 on top of that for the university to spend on rent, utilities, legal, publishing, lab facilities, lab personnel, library services, tech support, etc. So the total grant is $169.

If the indirect rate is 0.15, the researcher isn't going to ask for $100 anymore, they're going to ask for at least $154, putting to total grant back to $169. But they're going to ask for more than this because they've lost the economy of scale of the old system. So now they have to pay for direct costs they never had to before - a 20% bump is not unreasonable.

So what just happened? The researcher only needed $100 to do their research. But now because government introduced inefficiencies into the system, the total grant goes up, and the real overhead rate is 100% instead of 69%.

By trying to save money you've actually cost everyone to have to spend more money, meaning total research is going to go down because total research spend isn't going to go up. Such efficient.

You do realize that many of these actions have been deemed illegal by the courts, right?

> forgotten about manners

Why are you complaining about manners? Why not just say "I like that!" or "I agree with that!" and then get on with the rest of an argument? See where this is going?

> - forgotten about the logical fallacies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

This isn't your high school debate club. But just to humor you, you are engaging in "fallacy fallacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

When there are things like laws that say "Inspectors general can only be fired after 30 days notice to Congress, and for-cause, which reason must be provided to Congress" it's not exactly a leap to say it's illegal when a president summarily fires a whole bunch of them effective immediately for vague reasons with no notice to Congress. For example.

[EDIT] Bluntly, if you think that was some kind of slanted or out-there take, you aren't paying nearly enough attention.

Realistically, that won’t matter. He can’t be reelected, so he’s free to do as he likes, irrespective of public opinion.

"Only" 58% oppose the pardons according to [1]. I mean, it's a majority, but it's not what I'd call "wildly unpopular". It was always going to be opposed by a vast majority of Democrat voters, so relatively few Republican voters oppose it. I find it rather concerning.

Back in the day much was said about Bush's "historically low" approval ratings too. It was somewhat satisfying to see, but in the end it didn't really seem to matter much. He still got re-elected.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-starts-new-term-with-...

> His polling is historically poor for a month into a president's term

You can hate the guy all you like, but this is 100% false.

FDR was more extreme than Trump so far. For instance consider banning private ownership of gold by executive order.

Mind you, Trump could still declare himself dictator. But based on what's happened so far? FDR was more extreme.

Now you're living in real fantasyland!

Seriously, I agree with you, but I don't know how to solve that problem either. The DNC is just completely bereft of good ideas and at this point seems about as useless as the Mitt Romney-era Republican party was.

I think it's parliamentary syndrome. In Canada MPs aren't allowed to tweet anything at all until it's approved by the leaders office. Instead of unique individual persons representing constituents there's effectively 1 dictator with a hundred faces. Same issue for the democrats where everyone has to be sanded down to fit the mold.

Americans don't actually understand how the government works either. We pretend there's an election but in reality it's already happened. The majority of districts are 'safe' so whoever wins the primary in a safe district automatically wins the election. The person who wins the primary is almost always the person the party endorses. In practice the party endorsement is the election. The endorsement process is controlled by party insiders so the net effect is that they pick the government, not the voters.

Dean Phillips could have been their easy ticket to a victory, but they decided to make the worst possible choices. This is simply a result of hubris and incompetence.

What is the role of congress, if its enumerated powers do not imply that any of those things should actually happen...? Honest question. Are you honestly saying that there's an implied 100% veto available to the executive for anything done by congress?

the Take Care clause of Article II would like to have a word with you. The President has a positive duty to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress. if Congress passes a law funding something, the President must faithfully make it so.

> I read the parent as saying that a plurality of voters voted to circumvent the constitution and dismantle the republic, and therefore, a resulting despotism would just be democracy in action, so to speak.

From an outsider's point of view, that was not the people voted for.

When repeatedly pressed on Project 2025, Trump distanced from it and reassured the American people those were just vicious rumors to denigrate him. The campaign was centered on how Biden was old and senile and responsible for every problem ranging from egg prices to Trump's retreat from Afghanistan. Trump's promises were that inflation would be eliminated, jobs would be created, and minority rights would cease to be a part of the US government agenda.

What the Trump administration is implementing bears no resemblance to his program, and looks like a complete dismantlement of the United States of America, including a complete rejection of it's core values.

I wouldn’t call Kamala extreme per se. The extreme position is the doubling down on positions that don’t resonate with the electorate and labeling the opposition racist or traitorous instead of working to find common ground. One example of an extreme position dichotomy would be the choice between an unnecessarily porous border without transparency and mass deportation when the people would likely all agree on a steady stream of legal citizenship applications coming through the front door. Another instance might be that Americans would likely be largely in favor of trans rights if they weren’t bundled with allowing professional male combat athletes to unfairly dominate female participants. I think Americans crave common sense and it is nowhere to be found.

You have to be smart about it. Don't make it the debate topic. You know how Trump disclaimed any knowledge of Project 2025 and after he became president, started executing on its vision? That's how you downplay a topic even though it is important to you.

Understood. Honestly it makes sense. He promised his base something and he delivered in his first term, and he is going about it the same way this term. His base has good reasons to approve.

I read it’s still at 47.9%. The US is filled with terrible people who cheer him on.

Im sure there is fat to be cut but the indirect model eliminates the need to spend so much effort accounting for the 5 minutes this grad student used this piece of shared equipment, 20 minutes that post doc used this equipment. Have you ever had to account for number of sheets of paper printed on a shared printer? Total waste of time when considering the cost of accounting and time of these expensive workers. Indirects are an imperfect solution to a real efficiency problem. I really think the solution is to identify “abusers of the commons”and hold them accountable

Harvard can pay for the indirect costs at issue with a fraction of the money its $53B endowment earns.

> Do you think there should be a permanent bureaucracy that is totally unaffected by elections?

I don't think you have a good grasp on what is happening, both in form and extent. You're making it sound like the Trump administration is refreshing bureaucrats, where in reality it's completely dismantling the whole federal state while imposing a totalitarian agenda. It's destroying public health services, education services, security services, even R&D. To top things off, the Trump administration caused irreversible damage to decades-old alliances, if they aren't destroyed already, which where at the core of US's global hegemony.

You're talking about bureaucracy as if the only impact this has is some pencil pushers losing a job. It's not. It's the death by suicide of the United States as an ideal, and a global leader. The Trump admin leaves behind a huge power vacuum that will inevitably be filled by another party, and odds are it ain't pushing freedom nor peace.