Trump's NIH axed research grants even after a judge blocked the cuts
propublica.org
propublica.org
The flip side is that in other areas their powers are much more limited. Revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status? That’ll filter through the courts and years from now Harvard might actually have to make a tax payment (I expect they won’t.)
From a societal perspective, however, we’re in deep shit. There’s an excellent chance that you or a loved one will die from a potentially curable disease (cancer, dementia) because the research and clinical trials that should be bringing us those drugs are all being murdered. We should be reacting to this the same way we respond when someone shoots up a school or hospital. A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding to industry funding, but she is one of the lucky ones.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but we, as in the USA, don't do anything (besides offering the standard Thoughts And Prayers™) when someone shoots up a school.
The lesson is clear. Fight your way in to get your kids or die trying. No one is coming to help.
GP is being downvoted because it's a hyperbolic strawman.
We are: feeling horrible, knowing this is the only country where this happens, and also resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it.
This last election was mostly decided by the people who didn’t vote. The apathetic, the cynics and so on.
Isn't this the counterargument? Why should the US disproportionately pay for world-benefiting research instead of Europe or China?
The answer, of course, is that other governments do also fund some research, but each government decides how much they want to spend and on what. Which applies as much to each individual state as it does to the federal government.
> California already bears a large burden and that's on top of subsidizing other states through federal taxes.
It sounds like you're arguing that cutting federal programs would benefit California, because then they would have that money to appropriate as they choose for themselves.
What a loaded question. Could it possibly be that the US does so because it disproportionately benefits from said research?
States would need to increase taxes to fund more research, which would cause some of the wealthiest residents to flee to low-tax states. This would result in the pro-research states losing tax revenue and eventually cutting their research funding. The decline in research funding would result in the U.S. experiencing brain drain similar to what has been experienced in red states[1] for decades.
Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The people who actually pay most of the taxes aren't the billionaires (both because there aren't that many of them and because they already engage in sophisticated tax avoidance), they're the likes of senior partners at law firms, cardiologists, successful small business owners, etc. But these people are not only not going to move to Wyoming for lower taxes, because they can't operate the businesses that them that amount of money there, a lot of the reason Wyoming has lower taxes is because they're large net recipients of federal funds. If they had to fund their own stuff that would make it more attractive to live in the states that are currently doing the funding.
Moreover, research funding has always been a small proportion of government spending, e.g. the NIH is ~0.7% of the federal budget. This does not require a large change in tax revenues to move somewhere else.
> Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The first search result from your link is an article saying that isn't actually happening:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/tenure/20...
This can work, but only in an alternate universe where the federal government doesn't get nearly all the tax income. If we abolished federal tax and increased state taxes proportionally, this would totally work. But not the world as it exists today.
(I'm not a saint, a friend of mine goes out to protest against the ongoing genocide every week, I sit around and do nothing...).
We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.
Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.
People under eastern europe 'communist' dictators didn't have any of that. Just whisper in the shadows, and then suddenly Ceaușescu is swiss cheese, because there was literally no other option than to reject the whole system dominating them rather than exhausting their energies squabbling on twitter.
It's worse than that. It's possible to have a democracy where some of the options are better, e.g. switch to score voting so there can be arbitrarily many parties and candidates instead of major party insiders filtering out every decent candidate before you get to the election.
But the party insiders want that control, so they set up a narrative where every problem is caused by the other team, instead of the problem being caused by there only being two teams.
If you use a cardinal voting system (note: not ranked-choice voting), there are more than two viable candidates, and then putting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the ballet only causes them both to lose because they're both undesirable candidates and less undesirable candidates would score higher with the voters than either of them. And then you don't get Donald Trump. (Or Kamala Harris.)
Under the existing system, a three way race between Trump, Harris and Marco Rubio causes Harris to win because Trump and Rubio split the Republican vote. So the Republicans, in order to prevent this, only run one candidate. When that candidate is Trump and the Democrats choose Harris, oops.
Score voting is the thing they use in the Olympics. Voters rate every candidate on a scale of 1 to 10, highest average wins. Now if you add Rubio to the ballot, it only affects Trump's chances to the extent that Rubio could score higher than Trump. So there are no more primaries, every party just runs all their candidates in the general election.
Meanwhile Rubio will score higher than Trump among Democrats and not much if at all lower among Republicans, so Rubio defeats Trump. And if you put some Democrat the likes of Jared Polis on a general election ballot, he plausibly scores higher than Harris. If you had to flip a coin between Jared Polis and Marco Rubio, how is that not better than it being Harris and Trump?
Without detracting from your explanation about score voting, I would hope that Jared Polis will recalibrate his judgement about other people's medical opinions prior to running for president [1]:
> He has supported Donald Trump's decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the secretary of Health and Human Services.[114]
You had a choice between Trump again and not Trump. You can't keep blaming others for your choices.
As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.
One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.
Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.
Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.
Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.
No. E.g. quite many monarchies have been reformed without revolutions.
Going further back in the history, some feudal monarchies were actually not absolutist in the sense the king had to manage various factions of landowners, clergy, etc (so-called Estates) or even share power with them. So it all depended on the relative power of the monarch and others in the society.
They don't have much power due to _many, many revolutions_; they may not generally get called that, but the wars leading up to the Magna Carta, and later the English Civil War, were clearly revolutions against the monarchy, and successfully limited its power.
Going from non-absolute to purely ceremonial or non-existent is easier, but generally breaking the power of the monarch in the first place does require some sort of revolution.
Jail time (and now deportation) has been a risk for protesting for quite a while in the US. I can see why someone that doesn’t live here would see America’s longstanding reputation of being a cool place to protest in and assume that that is still the case, but that is outdated information. Heck, quite a few Americans insist that is still the case, but the ones that insist that there is no risk are mostly folks that “protest” through tweets
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/08/columbia-university-protest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/2/ucla-students-arrest...
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
So, in this case, it is actually _not_; you have a blueprint. Quite a few democratic countries have gone down the personality-cult-authoritarianism rabbit hole in the last few decades; Russia, Turkey, Hungary would be obvious developed-world examples. Some have pulled back from the brink (arguably Poland, for instance).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
"excellent chance that you or a loved one will die from a potentially curable disease (cancer, dementia) because the research and clinical trials that should be bringing us those drugs are all being murdered."
Why is this an excellent chance?
Seems like the bare minimum fear to me.
If we defund that research, that means a lot more people will die. We won't know how many, because we never invented the stuff that would have saved them.
Also, maybe research dollars should emphasize prevention.
We don't need to completely burn it all down to make the situation worse. Well, the situation is worse so...
> Also, maybe research dollars should emphasize prevention.
If you don't know what you're talking about it's best to keep quite.
We already know how to prevent cancer. Don't smoke, don't drink, don't eat red meat, don't eat processed meats. That covers 99% of the top two categories of carcinogens. And then exercise or something.
The biggest hurdle to prevention isn't medicine, it's culture and anthropology.
About half of deaths in the US are due to cancer or heart disease, for a start, and this will absolutely hit research into both.
Also, maybe research dollars should emphasize prevention.
It's just wild to me that people aren't simply arrested when this kind of thing occurs. It's not Trump's money. It's not Republican money. He has a narrowly defined role and anything outside of that is illegal.
It's not exactly surprising, though, given half the government is run by the weakest and most deranged major political party in American history. The simple fact that the GOP has been steamrolled by this guy is the best evidence of the fact that since the 1970s they've been on a steep downward slide to become a party completely devoid of political talent, governing philosophy, or spine.
Even if this gang of dipshits were trying to do good, they don't have the capacity to be able to understand complex situations and make accurate and nuanced choices. An example of this situation being RFK Jr.
Normal people need to be screaming this from the hills. A healthy country in a competitive world cannot be run by grifters and morons. There's no "both sides" here.
Believing that any of this will result in a precedent for any future democrats means you haven't been paying attention.
Only democrats have to follow the rules. Republicans voters support them even through blatantly unconstitutional acts like "take the guns first, due process second" and forcing schools to display christian symbols. Republican voters do not give a shit that Trump's family has taken billions of American dollars. Trump voters don't even care that they paid Steve Bannon millions to build a wall he never intended to build, and still voted for a Trump admin with Steve Bannon!
These people believe anything is acceptable to topple the democrats because the democrats forced desegregation onto the southern states.
I’m arguing a Democrats who fights with the tools they’ve been given will be popular. Like, want to cancel student loans? Fuck process. Just declare them cancelled and shred the loan records before anyone can get to court.
This is a stupid endgame. But the system doesn’t work if one side constrains itself by rules the other doesn’t follow, because that means only one side will ever affect policy.
Why do you believe that? They're not defunding research in these areas.
> A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding
The administration's argument is that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, i.e. Congress has the power to prevent the executive from doing something by not funding it, but not the power to force the executive to do something just by appropriating money for it.
But the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research, so what's stopping them from issuing the cancer research grants to other institutions? Nothing, right?
Are you sure about that?
This administration's HHS Secretary has deep doubts about the efficacy of the scientific method, which underpins all of medical research in general and cancer research in particular. It seem more likely to me that the money impounded from cancer research will instead be redirected to organizations that use non-scientific methods to study the effects of nutritional supplements, water flouridation, and non-ionizing 5G radiation.
https://www.stopbreastcancer.org/national-breast-cancer-coal...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in...
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-a...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cance...
They’re ignoring the law. What the Congress appropriated, what contracts the U.S. has signed, what courts say is irrelevant to these folks.
But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
No. USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted [1].
[1] https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...
USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.
> Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted
Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other.
It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.
That’s not completely accurate.
https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/interviews/usaid-sponsor...
Established in 1961, USAID is used to fund various projects including clinical trials for vaccines and therapeutics in lower-middle-income countries, as well as elsewhere worldwide. The organisation has been used to find research into human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, among other diseases and research efforts. The sudden pull of funding has meant trials have been suspended until trial sponsors seek alternative methods of funding to restart studies.
If this is happening, what organization are they relocating funding to?
Presumably the motivation is some combination of “slash funding so we can give tax cuts” and “kill the Universities as an independent center of smart people who oppose us” but the actual effect is someone you love will die when they could have lived. It’s fucked.
they cut tons of money that Congress had appropriated; USAID is just one example of many
so yes, it's illegal and Congress could call them on it, but the GOP won't.
the Admin is also counting on the allocation changing with the next budget, coming up, at which point it is "no longer allocated"
If you mean that the administration is not defunding cancer research more than it is defunding other medical research, then you might be right. If you mean that the administration is keeping cancer funding the same while defunding other medical research areas, then you are probably wrong [1]:
> Separately, on Feb. 7, 2025, the NIH issued new guidance on indirect costs for grants. Published late on a Friday, the guidance capped such costs to 15% of the amount of the grants. According to a congressional research paper, "indirect costs represent expenses that are not specific to a research project and that maintain the infrastructure and administrative support for federally funded research." Effective the following Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, this cost cap would apply to all new grants, and also to all existing grants.
Tangentially, the administration is cutting employees at the National Cancer Institute [2]:
> Among the cuts on Friday were around 50 employees at the NIH's National Cancer Institute, or NCI. They had worked in the institute's Office of Communications and Public Liaison overseeing programs like the Cancer Information Service, which provides answers to doctors and patients about cancer, and updates to databases summarizing cancer information for healthcare providers.
...
> While several communications offices at the NIH's institutes had been gutted during an initial round of layoffs on April 1, NCI's team was spared. Around 150 staff at NCI had been laid off last month, two people said. The institute's contracting and training staff were eliminated, and there were deep cuts to its human resources team.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/trump-nih-cancer-rese...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-lays-off-hundreds-more-staf...
You know, the stuff they claim to be really worried about.
Similar to the abortion policy; see the Pulitzer winning article https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-wins-pulitzer-... . Sure, it might kill some women, but they're never going to pay attention to that.
Previously: communists / abortion
George Bush II: terrorists / LGBTQ+ / abortion
Trump: immigrants / LGBTQ+ / educators / liberals / terrorists / gangs / etc
Namely, blow out the deficit to fund tax cuts and engage in massive grift.
People have already made up their minds and it's inherently politicized, so if the research is funded by Republicans then it will be a study designed to emphasize the risks and harms and if it's funded by Democrats the opposite. Which means it's a waste of money to study because the outcome is decided by the political inclinations of the party that initially funded it, whereas the purpose of actual research is to study a question whose answer isn't known from the outset.
While i’m sure there would be some additional data/value from an additional study, it’s not like any of this stuff is new or novel in any way.
I’m not sure how or if that agrees with or contradicts your comment, or same with whatever political BS is going on, but this stuff is pretty well understood at this point.
I am not a transphobe but how in the world is that obvious?
Please don’t lie about what the Republicans are doing. They have no desire to help Americans. Their goal is to destroy things that serve the public so that their billionaire masters can capture these services and charge Americans 10x what it used to cost them (their taxes).
I simply stated what the NIH director has publicly said. (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/jay-bhattachar...)
RE: they'are increasing spending. - can you provide some evidence?
RE: their goal is to destroy things that serve the public... - you must be a genius to see through their goals. Has it occured to you that maybe they simply reflect that desire of the people you disagree with.
They can demonize them as an enemy while doing horrible but harder to understand things like hollowing out election oversight.
Leader is democratically elected so I guess yes.
…but the three branches of government system has clearly collapsed
Strongmen in (initially) parlimentary systems did the same thing Trump is doing. Expand executive power, reduce the legislative branch to a rubberstamping function and stack the courts with yesmen.
When there are majority governments, there is essentially no difference between executive and legislative power.
You're needlessly conflating the topic of stability and democracy, which muddles the discussion. Autocrats have come into power by championing "stability" at the expense of democracy since time immemorial. This is texbook by now.
Italy and Israel also manage relatively stable minority parliaments! It's not impossible, but for some reason, the common-law countries seem to struggle with it. Autocrats often do champion stability (Putin/Xi) or change (Pinochet/Castro), but so do many democratic leaders (like prime ministers in Canada/UK).
- in parliamentary systems, minister posts are assigned to elected representatives. There is no prime minister that can just gift their buddies a ministerial post if they weren't elected into parliament.
- most parliaments have an upper and lower house, and prime ministers usually only control the lower.
- the prime minister itself is not directly elected into that post, which means they have no greater authority than any other member of parliament save for the authority granted by their peers. That puts a big damper on many dictatorial aspirations.
If you get elected and then dismantle the democracy, then you no longer have a democracy.
The founders knew that people are, by and large, dumb. And they accounted for that with the representative system that we have.
He proved he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, so that someone could be whatever government employee tries to go after him (already evidenced using the purse strings and lawyers of the government rather than a bullet).
And congressional reps have seen others lose elections for going after Trump. The root problem is the voters, and that’s a tough one to fix.
A lot of people are completely fed up with "more of the same", so they voted for the clown or didn't bother to show up.
Don't blame the voters when they were never given a real choice.
There's no two parties.
> The root problem is the voters
The root problem is that we do not have an actual opposition party. The so-called Democrats are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide. The Republicans are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide.
I hope the so-called Democratic party completely implodes so we can, possibly, get a left-of-center party that will actually do things that the so-called Democrats only provide lip-service to, and that, only when the so-called Democrats are guaranteed to be unable to enact such legislation due to not having majorities needed.
I'd prefer that people withholding their votes from either lesser or greater evil right-wing corporate/oligarch, genocidal monster parties would instead vote 3rd party/independent, but I would not fault anyone for not voting for the so-called Democrats or Republicans.
As to blame for the current situation, remember, it was the so-called Democrats who did everything they could to make Trump the Republican presidential candidate, as they thought they would have a better chance against him with their extremely unpopular candidate, Clinton. And, that the so-called Democrats would rather lose elections than allow a non-corporate/oligarch controlled genocidal monster to be elected-- see how they treated Sanders.
* 'so-called' Democrats because they repeatedly engage in voter suppression during primaries to ensure their chosen right-wing pro-corporate/oligarch candidate will win. And, they repeatedly sue to remove from state ballots any candidates running on the left whether Greens, Peace and Freedom, or independent. In the last election, the Greens spent half of their campaign funds fighting these lawsuits so they could maintain ballot access. It was also the so-called Democrats with the Republicans who barred access to presidential debates of candidates who would challenge their right-wing, pro-corporate/oligarch, genocidal positions.
I'll add that the system itself is also very broken.
A better system would give you more than two realistic choices in an election and it wouldn't give all power to one side.
> Trump's NIH Axed Research Grants Even After a Judge Blocked the Cuts, Internal Records Show