Comment by rashkov
21 days ago
Zoom out and you’ll see that there is a broad attack against science institutions going on right now. RFK is just one aspect.
NIH funding down 60% compared with one year ago: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/report-us-scientists-...
UMass disbands its entering biomed graduate class over Trump funding chaos: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...
Not to mention the defunding of anything to do with climate change.
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It’s a big jump to assume competence in targeting half of all science funding. As you saw in my link above they eliminated an entire graduate class of biomedical researchers. That’s a few dozen lifetimes of research that won’t be done now, delaying breakthroughs
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.
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Zero effort was put into deciding what is wasteful. They just cancelled everything.
But that doesn't mean the administration is anti-science. It means they believe the situation is dire enough to justify drastic cuts. And that is a policy call regardless of your scientific beliefs.
In other words, one can reasonably take a position of “don’t publicly fund addressing an issue even if research supports it existing and even if that same individual espouses the conclusion of the research and might fund it privately”.
Call that what you want, but it is not a grand scheme to undermine science and replace it with fake propaganda.
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