Comment by pdar4123
1 day ago
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.
Kindly share more details
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 when scientists are hired because they know someone, or are part of some “group” rather than being the best choice. 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.
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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.
I've been wondering why they attack science outside of they think it is woke and liberal.
It makes no sense to cut off the hand that saves you even as a rich billionaire who wants to control people in a fascist society.
They don’t believe in competence because they’ve never experienced it. They think everything is narrative and spectacle.
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.
Everyone likes to think that their opponents are evil, highly intelligent, silently scheming types like the legendary Cardinal Richelieu.
In reality, mediocre thinkers with inflated egos and little understanding of long-term consequences are pulling the strings almost everywhere.
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.