Johns Hopkins University slashes 2k jobs | Hacker News Reader

Johns Hopkins University slashes 2k jobs

reuters.com

101 pointsKnuthIsGod89 comments

Now would be a fantastic time for governments worldwide to fund universities to hire folks away from the US.

When I was on the academic job market in 2018, I had offers in both the US and Canada. Ultimately, a combination of politics and grant funding led me to choose Canada. I saw how little disregard the Rs had for science funding, and how hard it already was to get grant funding in the US. I was worried that another R administration could slash research funding, but I never imagined it would be this bad.

Private companies already fund a ton of research in my area, but such funding usually comes with restrictions and demands that often conflict with the core goals of open academic research. So, NSF grants and the like are still crucial for funding basic scientific research that, while not immediately of commercial value (and thus not usually funded by private interests), often becomes commercially important years after being published.

My heart goes out to all of my colleagues and connections in the US who are likely going to be impacted by cuts in the next few years. It’s going to be a really brutal few years, and I hope our community can come out of this in one piece.

Indiscriminately hobbling your best institutions is like setting your middle-aged self up for recovery after falling off the workout wagon. I know because I'm an expert on falling off that wagon... One month off requires three or four months to just get back to the previous baseline. Three months off, and I need a year.

Hopefully enough of the culture of curiosity and open-minded inventiveness stays so that they have a fighting chance of making a comeback.

Otherwise, the US of A stands to experience net-brain-drain at a scale rivalling only India since Y2K to present day, and the former USSR after its heyday.

I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade. Congrats again to everyone who voted for this.

Sadly, most of them don't care what happens to foreigners. Even more sadly, some of those same people are hoping for those deaths.

And pandemics.

Lots of USAID-funded research in the US too - there are about a dozen labs researching food security that have been shut down at various US universities as part of the Feed the Future Initiative.

Here's one: https://ipmnewsroom.org/trump-administration-makes-cancellat...

I would expect that this exactly what the people who voted for the current government wanted. I would like to learn more what they were researching, though.

> I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade.

And how many it used to prevent for comparatively little cost:

https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...

Or prevent. One of the many reasons people are happy about the ending of funding of USAID and NED is because these groups were major weapons of regime change and political agitation around the world. This foments instability and conflict in other nations. And in these conflicts the people most hurt are just the 'normal' people in a country who couldn't care less about the geopolitics, one way or the other.

Foreign aid with no strings attached or ulterior motives could be a good thing, but it mostly doesn't exist. That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth. The powers that be want something in return for that money, and that something isn't just a warm fuzzy feeling from doing right.

Russia will die anyway.

> That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth.

I don't see that money being reallocated domestically to infrastructure, education, or welfare. The opposite in fact.

Also, what you're arguing seems paradoxical? Either these programs are selfishly serving the interests of the US, and the US is benefiting, or they are of no benefit to the US and are useless.

This is all setting aside the manner in which these funding cessations happened, what the other "many reasons" were exactly, and why those reasons were important to the one person responsible for those cessations (to the extent we can even explain what actually happened). The question of how is probably as important as why.

You're missing the third option - these are harmful to the US. A lot of our propaganda, efforts to overthrow other countries, and other such efforts regularly backfire to a spectacular degree. For instance do you know the history of Iran? In the 50s it was a relatively moderate and secular democracy. But they got into a conflict with the West over demanding a greater degree of control over their own oil reserves (which we were exploiting at the time).

This motivated the propaganda to drive civil instability which was eventually exploited into a successful coup. [1] We then replaced their democracy with a pro-western puppet monarchy. This obviously was not especially well liked by the citizenry. And then in 1979 they had their own real coup, revolution, or whatever you want to call it against our puppet. [2] And this is when the hardline Islamist government took control who not only had a strong dislike of the West, but also this paranoia that we were always conspiring against them.

If we simply treated them as a sovereign nation instead of a plaything to be exploited, there's basically no chance Iran would be this Islamic extremist sect today. They may well even have ended up having positive relations with the US. And this isn't an exception, but a constantly recurring theme. Al Qaeda came about from our backing Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to try to get one off on the USSR.

And now after years we finally successfully overthrew Assad to replace a secular dictator with a worldwide wanted terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, who we're now framing as a moderate extremist or whatever - even as he is genuinely actively carrying out acts far more egregious than even the most outrageous of our allegations against Assad. How do you think that relation's going to turn out over the next 20 years? It doesn't take a prophet to know the answer there.

It's all extremely myopic and destructive not only on a global level, but even a purely self interested one.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_revolution

That was the CIA not USAID.

So this would be like disbanding Ford because VW was cheating on their diesel emissions.

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Look, making the government more efficient is a good idea. That's not what's being done. The government is being shrunk so it's not capable of doing thinks like ensuring people like Musk/Bezos actually pay the appropriate tax rate. Or ensuring that factories don't enmass dump their toxic waste into drinking water.

The cover story is efficiency; the easy way to tell this is the GSA itself has proposed (prior to Trump) ways to save over 55 billion and DOGE isn't doing them.

Regime change operations regularly utilized USAID and NED (which, in turn, was often itself funded by USAID) to foster social instability, back opposition forces, and just generally cause chaos. For one particularly absurd instance in more contemporary times, here [1] is USAID trying to cause civil unrest in Cuba and instead ultimately just creating a honey pot for the Cuban government. Note that article is ~11 years old - it's not just a justification for contemporary actions.

[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... (archive: https://archive.is/IQl36)

The scientific research community is torn asunder right now. I have never seen moods this bad. It is weird to see one of the US's greatest strengths thrown away for little gain.

Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.

Cutting off the future of science feels a lot like "saving money" by eliminating retirement savings. Sure, the money isn't going into the retirement account and now you can buy more beer, but it's just sacrificing far more future gains for a short term gain.

Foolish at best, and traitorous at worst.

My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.

This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.

> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.

It might be time to exit the US.

"Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States."

https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-co...

This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.

There is no gain, only loss

There's plenty of gain: $4.5 trillion in reduced taxes.

Not for you, of course. But for other people. You should be happy for them. Maybe they'll trickle some down on you.

>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.

But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.

Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?

It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed.

It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from).

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...

This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?

Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda.

Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.

> This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?

Is it hard science?

> The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.

Why are you spewing inaccurate propaganda talking points if propaganda is bad?

No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.

You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them.

Also, there are things like this: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...

This is a lost class. Do it for 4 years and you have a lost generation.

Plenty of PhD offers have been rescinded, and stipend cut.

We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.

That is an incredibly short sighted view of the world.

And I hope, oh how I hope, that the positions eliminated in the US are administrative positions. That researchers, teaching assistants, lab technicians will keep their jobs.

That's the hope, but that's never how things go. Of course researchers and research will be tremendously affected, and that's a shame.

There are a lot of administrative staff at research universities whose jobs support... research. Is there bloat and are there too many managers/VPs? Probably somewhat, but the more of the grant administration work that gets pushed back down to PIs and research groups, the less time they have for research. They will also make many mistakes in both grant applications and how they spend the money, because the regulations are byzantine. That will jeopardize future funding and possibly get them penalized.

Tough. Researchers will have to get good at it.

Yes, and similarly to increase the efficiency of our healthcare system, I suppose doctors should have to get good at also doing their own billing, janitorial, etc.

Brilliant people should be unencumbered by admin tasks. Rare minds should be supported for the benefit of all.

I've worked with a lot of brilliant people who know how to do the paperwork that they have to do, and then they do it. Don't believe me? Check out the paperwork that medical doctors have to do -- it's insane, and what these researchers are being asked to do (assuming it's admins who get laid off) is way less. Or how about software developers? We have to dot our i's and cross our t's all over the place -- design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, test writing, and lots of process, and then we get to maintain and debug our own code and sometimes even operate it.

The fact you don't think they do this shows that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Good Lord.

The cuts in funding directly and immediately cut researchers doing lab work and the funds for all the reagents and experiments.

Teaching assistants are different, those are paid by the university so classes will continue. Only the science gets cut.

If it goes down how I'm seeing it in other universities and government labs.. highly unlikely. A ratio like 1:1 or 2:1 is still horrible, and those are big numbers.

Likewise, it's miserable for the people who are left. Research efficiency is plummeting due to having to do nonsense work and the funding path being murky for the next few years. Firing support staff and stopping funding paths means researchers must spend even more time to get fewer grants accepted.

The US government has opened the top of the body politic's skull and it's hacking out chunks of the soft matter inside.

Full Title: Johns Hopkins University slashes 2,000 jobs after Trump administration grant cut

> ... 247 domestic U.S. workers for the academic institution and another 1,975 positions outside the U.S. in 44 countries.

> The job cuts impact the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and affiliated non-profit for international health, Jhpiego.

While "John Hopkins U" gets the clicks, it sounds like this is mostly about a non-profit doing international public health stuff.

That's $400k a worker, or over $3M per worker in the US.

Not sure that adds up...

Presumably a lot of the funds in the terminated grants were for running programs that had other direct costs beyond pure headcount…

That’s the thing that isn’t being reported well, IMHO: federal grants aren’t just gifts that the government gives universities, they are contracts for universities to perform services (conducting very specific research programs with well-specified deliverables, running very specific educational activities for carefully defined populations of learners, etc.).

Indirect costs and non-payroll costs (equipment, travel, etc)

Grants/contracts aren't necessarily just for one year and often the numbers are about obligations and not outlays.

I don't know which specific grants were cut but here's a random example[1] of one (which is probably(?) not involved). In this example it's over multiple decades with ~$253 obligated but (assuming site accuracy) only $53 million has been outlayed.

It would be nice if media reporting included detailed information though.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_UM1AI068632_7529

Salaries are rarely the biggest expense in lab science and it's easy for a bench scientist to spend more on reagents in a day then they will make. Then there is all the very pricy equipment that is necessary, the cost of disposal of waste, the fume hoods and other extremely expensive real estate....

The overhead on a software is basically zero dollars but it's very different for science.

They can always protest! Oh wait they will be stripped of their rights, thrown to jail and / or get deported.

$800.000.000 / 2000 Positons = $400.000 / Position

Wow. Even with expenses apart from income, that is a lot of money. Most companies I receive job offers from do not make so much _revenue_ per person.

I not a fan of DT and EM, but boy... there seems to be an unsustainable spending issue in the US.

Actual salary is a fraction of that number. Science is expensive.

So are other necessary expenses.

And I'm aware that most of the salary (even if that would be 100% salary) will be spend and thus be good for the economy. Nonetheless that money has to come from somewhere.

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