Some of these changes, if continued and expanded, will likely have long-term negative effects on the US's position in science. I have my issues with NIH but to fix NIH requires subtlety. This seems more designed to "punish those liberal researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_one%27s_nose_to_sp...
This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.
As the token Trump supporter on HN, let me give you what I think's going on. I think they are doing an ideological purge. They want to get rid of anyone promoting transgender science. I think RJK JR. wants to get rid of anyone he thinks is against his MAHA agenda.
They want to get rid of any pandemic scaremongering too. Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1]. Hoetz who is a major figure in the vaccine research industry said that "starting January 21st we've got some big stuff coming down the pike starting with H5N1..." and after the Fauci pardon anything is possible.
The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
NIH staff openly conspired against both the public and the President last time Trump was in charge in many different ways. What Fauci and his grantees did wasn't subtle, so the fixes aren't going to be subtle either: the NIH needs either to be abandoned entirely or it needs a massive purge and culture change.
Fundamentally a civilized society cannot tolerate bureaucracies that act like they did during COVID. Fauci is gone now but unfortunately the NIH as an institution is deserving of any and all damage Trump does to them. Frankly if I were in his shoes I'd be going much further than mere freezes.
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
> Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH's Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
My guess is what happening is influenced by and patterned after the Musk's Twitter initial period - getting rid of what Musk didn't like from the start, review and cuts/layoffs of what didn't pass the review.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
The government grows like a cancer as it has no mechanism like bankruptcy to remove dead wood.
Agencies start out with a mission, then turn into a business, and finally become a con job. Most agencies are deep into the corrupt territory at this point.
Sounds like it's happening in at least some other parts of the government, too. This order seems to have paused disbursement of even some already-committed funding:
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
My issue is more with the CDC. Are there state institutions that can take up the slack locally? Asking for a friend with kids who wants to move to a place with a lower risk of getting measles
Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
> Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Free speech, states rights, government accountability, any serious sense of libertarianism and so on are all with the caveat of “if I like it” as far as the current Republican Party is concerned.
If you've worked as a scientist, why not gather evidence before jumping to conclusions? For example, you could inquire of the administration why they did this. They're actually putting in quite an effort at transparency.
> "The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in."
Calm down, guys. It's transitional, and it's not unusual.
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
FWIW, I was around (i.e. working on NIH funded grants) for the last transition, and I don't remember this happening. I agree and hope that it might not be an ominous sign, but I don't think it's the norm. We're being asked to pull out of not only conferences, but even out of cross-organizational Zoom chats that involve certain institutions. Where I work, the people who've been doing this longer than me are not saying "relax everybody, this is fine," they seem to be freaking out a little bit too.
>But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
It's scary to think that Trump seems to actually believe right wing media's black and white propaganda. The end point of this kind of anti-intellectual, anti-urban movement is something like Pol Pot's killing fields.
The USSR wasn't doomed by communism per se. it was doomed by prioritising ideology and politics over any other considerations. The US is now in the same doom-spiral.
> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
I don't know what role NIH played in the Covid response, but if they carry some responsibility for the previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will then it seems fair that the new administration should hold them to account.
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.
Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
I just listened to an NPR newscast where they were clutching at their pearls and then whispered “this is common when a new administration comes in” and then went right back to screeching. Not looking forward to 4 years of this.
For anyone that's been in corp/BigCo land for some time, this is the typical corp reboot playbook.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
Having worked in big corporations and been married to and friends with a number of NIH folks, I can assure you that the government has 10x the openness of even the most transparent corporation, has a bunch of people trying to maximize the return on all expenditures related to their research, fanatical abilities to repair and reuse equipment for new things, and a base line of people who have consciously dedicated to service for the country rather than maximizing their personal prestige and wealth.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
While I agree with the sentiment that continual evaluation of how any organization operates is a good thing, there is an extensive corpus of studies on the fallacies of treating the management of public services like private business.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
Why do most people in this thread assume this move intends to politicalize the NIH? I don't think the administration thoroughly thought out the consequences of this decision, but that's a typical government move. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hard to attribute it to stupidity and lack of planning when almost every executive order signed by Trump during his first days back in office are straight out of Project 2025.
As others have said, his actions are all straight from the project 2025 playbook. Go read page 284, it's very explicit about them viewing it as politicized and wanting to fix that (read actually politicize it):
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
I agree with you about this. I think it's worth calling out where the shoulder of the highway ends and the cliff begins, now that the guardrails have been (if temporarily) removed, but I'm optimistic that nobody is crazy enough to totally jam up the NIH given its importance to our economy and national security.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This quote does not apply in a place where the actor has specifically promised to be malicious.
Now, you may not see their promises as malicious and that is your prerogative. But that quote isn’t applicable for a ton of people when it comes to Trump.
The travel part makes sense to me: as HN is pro-remote-work they should understand that these researchers can simply make their presentations via tele-attendance. The rest of the "refrain from releasing anything until a Presidential appointee can look at it first" seems very commissar-like. The HHS screwed the pooch on COVID, making a lot of nonsensical claims that ruined the reputation of public health in the population's eyes. I still don't like the idea of the Commissar reviewing every paper on bird-flu (our newest epidemic) but I can see the motivation.
The actual presentations are usually the least important part of a conference. Most conferences would be better if you could cancel 80% of the program but still convince the same people to attend (and their employers to pay). Then there would be more time for informal discussions and ad hoc work, which often lead to new ideas and new collaborations.
Tele-attendance basically does not work for science conferences, as 99% of the value is from ad hoc in person discussions. When I attend science conferences I attend few if any of the talks, and instead network to form collaborations for future projects.
In medical research there is an awful lot of tissue, blood and other samples that go into the NIH's work. They run numerous labs and biobanks and a part of what they do is transit samples and the personal and sometimes equipment to various labs across the country.
Some of these changes, if continued and expanded, will likely have long-term negative effects on the US's position in science. I have my issues with NIH but to fix NIH requires subtlety. This seems more designed to "punish those liberal researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_one%27s_nose_to_sp...
This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.
This is what happens when you let a horse in the hospital. It wrecks stuff
As the token Trump supporter on HN, let me give you what I think's going on. I think they are doing an ideological purge. They want to get rid of anyone promoting transgender science. I think RJK JR. wants to get rid of anyone he thinks is against his MAHA agenda.
They want to get rid of any pandemic scaremongering too. Peter Hoetz said that Bird Flu will start once the trump administration takes office for example.[1]. Hoetz who is a major figure in the vaccine research industry said that "starting January 21st we've got some big stuff coming down the pike starting with H5N1..." and after the Fauci pardon anything is possible.
The bird flu outbreak had been behind a lot of food inflation. I wouldn't put it past people on the radical left who want to hurt the Trump administration to hype the bird flu pandemic to drive up food prices through mass culling of livestock.
[1] https://x.com/TaraBull808/status/1865026704504426860?t=hZnEk...
NIH staff openly conspired against both the public and the President last time Trump was in charge in many different ways. What Fauci and his grantees did wasn't subtle, so the fixes aren't going to be subtle either: the NIH needs either to be abandoned entirely or it needs a massive purge and culture change.
Fundamentally a civilized society cannot tolerate bureaucracies that act like they did during COVID. Fauci is gone now but unfortunately the NIH as an institution is deserving of any and all damage Trump does to them. Frankly if I were in his shoes I'd be going much further than mere freezes.
174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l...
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring.
Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
Here's a really excellent piece on the guts of how NIH's processes work:
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/distinguishing-real-...
> Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH's Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
That seems unnecessary at best.
None of this is necessary, that's the point.
My guess is what happening is influenced by and patterned after the Musk's Twitter initial period - getting rid of what Musk didn't like from the start, review and cuts/layoffs of what didn't pass the review.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
The government grows like a cancer as it has no mechanism like bankruptcy to remove dead wood.
Agencies start out with a mission, then turn into a business, and finally become a con job. Most agencies are deep into the corrupt territory at this point.
I assume the NIH was singled out as some sort of vengeance for the CV19 response?
Hopefully they'll restore some semblance of order after the pound of flesh is theatrically exacted.
Sounds like it's happening in at least some other parts of the government, too. This order seems to have paused disbursement of even some already-committed funding:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
My issue is more with the CDC. Are there state institutions that can take up the slack locally? Asking for a friend with kids who wants to move to a place with a lower risk of getting measles
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Pretty sure a bunch of statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear or not be updated. Maybe they won't even get to be collected. It's a lot easier to lie if you prevent scientists and health care professionals from undercutting you with inconvenient truths.
As someone who has worked in public health and epidemiology, this kind of open ended restriction is extremely concerning.
Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports, and that the constitution provides for in the first amendment.
>statistics that might be used to argue against Republican talking points are going to disappear
So, you're saying the WHOLE map will be drawn with Sharpie? ;-)
> Also appears to undercut the whole free speech thing that President Trump supposedly supports
Saying he supports "free speech" and actually doing it are two different things. In reality he supports speech that supports his preferred narrative of reality and opposes speech that doesn't.
Free speech, states rights, government accountability, any serious sense of libertarianism and so on are all with the caveat of “if I like it” as far as the current Republican Party is concerned.
If you've worked as a scientist, why not gather evidence before jumping to conclusions? For example, you could inquire of the administration why they did this. They're actually putting in quite an effort at transparency.
Kinda telling the NIH to mask up
HHS suspended their association with the Eco health Alliance, so I'm not sure what vector is of worry.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/breaking-hhs-formally-de...
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-says-grantee-fai...
I am waiting to see what will happen with NASA, NSF... Obviously it's less important than health, but still thousands of people, lives.
if musk et al cannot fill all the positions they have open with people leaving NIH, be sure NASA is certainly next.
> "The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in."
Calm down, guys. It's transitional, and it's not unusual.
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
FWIW, I was around (i.e. working on NIH funded grants) for the last transition, and I don't remember this happening. I agree and hope that it might not be an ominous sign, but I don't think it's the norm. We're being asked to pull out of not only conferences, but even out of cross-organizational Zoom chats that involve certain institutions. Where I work, the people who've been doing this longer than me are not saying "relax everybody, this is fine," they seem to be freaking out a little bit too.
>But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"Usual" but overly extreme. Seems to fit 2025.
Page 284 of Project 2025:
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
I can fix it:
:)Likely many folks who depend on funding from NIH voted for Trump.
Feel sorry for those who didn’t vote for him. No sympathy for those who did.
Can you be more specific -- who are you thinking of?
It's scary to think that Trump seems to actually believe right wing media's black and white propaganda. The end point of this kind of anti-intellectual, anti-urban movement is something like Pol Pot's killing fields.
Doesn't it seem a tiny wee bit like a hyperbole?
The USSR wasn't doomed by communism per se. it was doomed by prioritising ideology and politics over any other considerations. The US is now in the same doom-spiral.
> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
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I don't know what role NIH played in the Covid response, but if they carry some responsibility for the previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will then it seems fair that the new administration should hold them to account.
This seems more like a coup in developing countries as time goes by.
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.
Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
Except it's not a coup and it's not a developing country but ok.
Drink some water.
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Read the whole article.
I just listened to an NPR newscast where they were clutching at their pearls and then whispered “this is common when a new administration comes in” and then went right back to screeching. Not looking forward to 4 years of this.
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For anyone that's been in corp/BigCo land for some time, this is the typical corp reboot playbook.
Pause all hiring, freeze travel and other casual expenditures, relook at all major initiatives/projects/programs, etc.
Definitely something (IMHO) worth doing every 5-7 years in any environment. Can't imagine what it will uncover in government where I'm guessing it hasn't happened in much longer in most cases.
Having worked in big corporations and been married to and friends with a number of NIH folks, I can assure you that the government has 10x the openness of even the most transparent corporation, has a bunch of people trying to maximize the return on all expenditures related to their research, fanatical abilities to repair and reuse equipment for new things, and a base line of people who have consciously dedicated to service for the country rather than maximizing their personal prestige and wealth.
Their budgets are debated in TV. Imagine that in a big corp. it is simply false to say this organized attack on research is anything than a spasm of anti-science ideology.
While I agree with the sentiment that continual evaluation of how any organization operates is a good thing, there is an extensive corpus of studies on the fallacies of treating the management of public services like private business.
There is a good reason why there isn’t much (successful) precedent around this type of thing being done before.
Agree with pausing hiring and causal expenditures. Why block external communication? What does that do
Why do most people in this thread assume this move intends to politicalize the NIH? I don't think the administration thoroughly thought out the consequences of this decision, but that's a typical government move. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Because they've all been openly talking about taking revenge on NIH for the COVID lockdowns and support for transgender healthcare for a while now?
Hard to attribute it to stupidity and lack of planning when almost every executive order signed by Trump during his first days back in office are straight out of Project 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_executive_orders_in_...
Edit: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-executive-orders-proje...
As others have said, his actions are all straight from the project 2025 playbook. Go read page 284, it's very explicit about them viewing it as politicized and wanting to fix that (read actually politicize it):
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
I agree with you about this. I think it's worth calling out where the shoulder of the highway ends and the cliff begins, now that the guardrails have been (if temporarily) removed, but I'm optimistic that nobody is crazy enough to totally jam up the NIH given its importance to our economy and national security.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
This quote does not apply in a place where the actor has specifically promised to be malicious.
Now, you may not see their promises as malicious and that is your prerogative. But that quote isn’t applicable for a ton of people when it comes to Trump.
The overarching goal seems to be "Achieve more, more efficiently, with fewer resources".
But making that happen when there are 20+ levels of management between the guy doing the work and the guy making the rules seems impossible.
There are, of course, not 20+ levels of management. The average fan-out in the federal government is 1:7 to 1:10, with ~2.5 million employees total.
That strongly implies 7-8 levels of hierarchy, on average.
What makes you think that is the actual goal rather than just what you are being told the goal is?
So cut 15 levels of management. Budget cuts to match. Carry on.
The travel part makes sense to me: as HN is pro-remote-work they should understand that these researchers can simply make their presentations via tele-attendance. The rest of the "refrain from releasing anything until a Presidential appointee can look at it first" seems very commissar-like. The HHS screwed the pooch on COVID, making a lot of nonsensical claims that ruined the reputation of public health in the population's eyes. I still don't like the idea of the Commissar reviewing every paper on bird-flu (our newest epidemic) but I can see the motivation.
The actual presentations are usually the least important part of a conference. Most conferences would be better if you could cancel 80% of the program but still convince the same people to attend (and their employers to pay). Then there would be more time for informal discussions and ad hoc work, which often lead to new ideas and new collaborations.
Tele-attendance basically does not work for science conferences, as 99% of the value is from ad hoc in person discussions. When I attend science conferences I attend few if any of the talks, and instead network to form collaborations for future projects.
In medical research there is an awful lot of tissue, blood and other samples that go into the NIH's work. They run numerous labs and biobanks and a part of what they do is transit samples and the personal and sometimes equipment to various labs across the country.
What nonsensical claims did the HHS make about COVID?