What’s the alternative if you believe we can’t sustain the funding? Who is competent enough to decide whether “a whole class” of biomedical researchers are worth spending public money on or not? These aren’t easy questions with happy answers.

And if I am tuned in at all enough to take a guess at the impetus, it would be “why are we giving exorbitant grants to academic institutions where 90% of the money goes to support their administrative process instead of actually fund grad students doing research?” And the message from the government might be “cut the fat” and the response from the academic institution is either “no” and the students are collateral, or it’s “yes” and the college, not the gov’t, decided the specific grad program wasn’t valuable or important enough to retain.