Please remember that science is under attack in the United States - new proposals would gut the nih even beyond the horror that is ongoing. As a scientist I am horrified and I truly hope that we don’t abandon the usas historically strong investment in the future.
1. Trump has been trying to cut Science budgers by larger percentages for a while now. Congress has not let them.
2. NIH funding notice of awards has slowed to a crawl since Trump did not get his wish to cut Science funding.
3. Putting scientific funding under political control, instructing them to ignore the reviews conducted by peer scientists.
4. Have practically made international collaborations on grants impossible. An expert in Canada or Europe that would be great? Pretty much, too bad.
5. Pushing policies that make grants cancelable at any moment without need to have a justified reason, including potentially for exercising free speech, disagreeing with Administration doctrine, etc, or because you're ugly. This and the funding uncertainty makes planning difficult...just like business, stability/predictability matters.
6. Pushing policies that prevent funds to help cover costs of dissemination, including conference costs.
> 100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts
I doubt "10s of millions of Americans" can describe the core functions of the NIH
> when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
How do you think new appointees and hires in the NIH/HHS are selected? Political loyalty seems to be a better predictor than scientific impact or output.
> Also not interested in funding anything not research related, including various “offices” that have nothing to do with supporting research. Lots of things to like about these cuts.
The cuts and changes are dramatically impacting research support. Grant money is not being disbursed at the same rate since the new review changes began. You can more plainly characterize the changes as harmful to research in general than focused on removing whatever specific things you don't like.
You know so little about this, ad it is terribly frustrating to me. Scientists have been made out to be villains, when, on the whole, these are some the hardest working, most motivated people you will ever encounter.
I know just as much as you do about this, if not more - so it's terribly frustrating to me. I have been a scientist in a time where lots of political nonsense from the left didn't interfere with good science. Scientists are mostly NOT villains, though some use their positions to espouse various progressive nonsense that have nothing to do with good science.
They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.
The political right is obsessed with minimizing Type II error. They feel it's better to miss good research results than to have the wrong people performing the research or chasing the wrong ideas to start with (a false negative) and the further to the right they are on the spectrum, the more important minimizing the wrong people and ideas becomes. This leads to less discovery and successes because more research gets falsely rejected at the funding level.
The political left, of course, is the opposite and obsesses over Type I error. Accepting the wrong people and ideas is less important than getting good results. This leads to things like Lysenkoism, but also tends to reject less successful research, given the other checks and balances built into a healthy system.
If the first point of comparison you reach for is the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century, that would suggest that the American political left has not in fact, in recent times, been interfering with science to the same extent as the Trump administration currently.
Yes, I know. That is one of several reasons why what Communists did in the Soviet Union in the 1950s isn't particularly relevant to what Democrats have (or haven't) been doing in the past decade or two.
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of grants gave this issue, and the cuts have meanwhile being very wide, without any sort of intelligent approach (I know ppl doing stuff like material science at nasa that now have nothing to do because they cut costs of various inputs, while the very expensive lab equipment is sitting there now unused)
Can you cite any stats or studies that show that this is happening in any substantial amounts? This seems to be one of those "it just makes common sense" when the underlying data is ignored or assumed.
>100% support (10s of millions of Americans do) many of these cuts when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice.
Prove it. Prove this happens at a large scale. This is just nonsense talking points.
This should go without saying, but the person you're replying to obviously wants you to prove instances of scientists receiving grant money because they know someone or are part of a group. They are not asking you to prove the support of the people.
It's called the 2024 election. People have listened to so much propaganda aimed at destroying the anyone with credibility that can challenge whichever "truth" the propagandist chooses to push.
Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's "propaganda". The fact you say things like this show people that they should constantly be questioning the science.
I'm sure the average person was completely fed up with the federal grant process for medical issues and it was a driving force in their voting decision. Excellent proof.
Could you explain how much the US spends on its science budget compared to peers? It would help us really understand how much he's cutting it and harming our science base if we knew the numbers. For example if we're spending 50% less than EU or Canada.
> Kindly share more details (about your claim that science is under attack in the United States)
Is of public knowledge that the National Science Foundation and funds for thousands of scientific projects were gutted by DOGE in 2025.
Each one of the research lines cut needed typically 10 years to grow, so Trump and GOP had destroyed an incredible amount of years of research just on 2025, with consequences probably extending into 2035 or so. Without any visible benefit for Americans, that had still seen their debt sky-rocketing while their taxes are spent in pools and sinks.
Trump has also assured to engrave into the brains of the whole scientific community that US is now an hostile place for students and researchers. The whole planet had seen the main universities attacked by Trump (with Harvard resisting, and Columbia losing their pride), the foreign students targeted by ICE and the department of Education eviscerated
Also the thousands of workers in USAID and Health and Human Services fired for fun. Without mentioning the DOGE mess done at the national nuclear safety administration with 400 essential workers fired and then asked to return to the job ASAP, please, please.
It pleases their voters. All the MAGAs I know think scientists are scammers, funded by Bill Gates, brewing up "fake" viruses to reduce the population and insert nanobots to track their movements.
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
