Out of His League and Clueless: NIH Staffers Speak Out on Director Bhattacharya | Hacker News Reader

Out of His League and Clueless: NIH Staffers Speak Out on Director Bhattacharya

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46 pointsSubiculumCode13 comments

> “He claims that we're not canceling grants, and yet we have whole slates of grants (per grants management) that we have to cancel…He's claiming not to be responsible for the illegal RIFs, but as far as I can tell, has done nothing to help bring RIFed employees back.”

It’s hard to imagine how the firings can be legal if the head of the agency didn’t participate.

At least in one court case another agency head said they “did not know” who ordered firings at their agency.

… because he was not head of the agency when the RIF was instituted.

I have some visibility into what goes on at different science institutions in the US.

I sense a lot of fear. But the curious thing to see is how people just try to keep calm and carry on as if nothing was happening otherwise, while the government is killing the best parts of American science.

Who would have thought it was that easy to turn the 'land of the free ' around.

The „land of the free“ was always about being free to do something not about being free of being harmed by something.

In close living societies that favors those with money and power.

Reread my comment. The point is that people being intimidated and clinging to hope while the things they believe in are being taken away from them is what happens in authoritarian regimes, not in a country of free spirited people.

You can see a combination of "keep calm and carry on" denial and outright attempts to hide what's happening right here in the form of the flagging that this post got.

Good journalism would ask the funny question "how can the newly appointed guy be responsible for the state of an organization, grown over decades?"

Incompetent bureaucracy is an expression of the competency of those working it. That's rarely the temporarily assigned political figurehead, assigned to that organization

Rarely? Citation needed. But in this case the issue is not incompetent bureaucracy, it's incompetence put in charge to actually affect change, and be the exact opposite of a figurehead.

One part of the government apparently wants to simply destroy all institutions involved in scientific research. The other half wants to promote their pet ideas, no matter how unscientific they are.

They're coming for the vaccines now, it's still cloaked in scientific-sounding language, but in the end they will make vaccines less available and potentially even completely prevent access. This doesn't have to be direct, the current strategy seems to be to demand unreasonable and unscientific levels and types of evidence to recommend them or even making them available.

Vaccines are the first target, I strongly doubt they're the only one.

“We fired people that did what you said you want to do” is straight out of corporate America's idiotic playbook.

interesting

I think incompetence comes when personal loyalty to Trump is the most important requirement.

It also helps that he can use any of these folks as fall guys, they’re not smart enough to realize it …

Reminds me of the attorney who signed the paperwork declaring that they checked Trumps home and he didn’t have any secret documents. Ambition got the better of them and Trump could discard them as needed.

> I think incompetence comes when personal loyalty to Trump is the most important requirement.

It is the only requirement. Loyalty to the party and not a hint of anything suggesting shared views with any of its opponents.

The "defense of the West" narrative has become entirely laughable. The only places left to defend are parts of Europe, Taiwan and Japan, and maybe Korea at a stretch. And those now need to defend against the US, which has become a bigger threat than Russia.

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