Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.
My job depends on NIH continuing to function, but it is not immediately clear that this particular decision follows other worrying trends discussed here previously. Removing K-awards for clinical trials (but not regular, cheaper study formats) might simply be a recognition that clinical trials are too expensive for the K-format and conducting underpowered clinical trials does not help anyone much.
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? I can understand (not saying I approve) targeted opposition to specific scientific claims to favor commercial interests (climate change denial to favor oil & gas, etc), but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run and directly hurt industries like pharma/etc?
A body of independent subject matter experts who command public respect is anathema to authoritarian governments. It's why authoritarian takeovers frequently start by targeting major universities.
Punishing apparent ideological enemies is a long standing mechanism for fascists and dictators - and scientists in the US qualify. It's an attempt to make people fear standing against them.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
> wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
I know this isn't HN type of a topic or a comment, but looking at US from outside, the theme looks to be explicitly destroying US hegemony and meritocracy...
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
... who are unfortunately backed by a large part of the US population who have elected them on exactly that promise, for various reasons. From fear of vaccines to having various other nations freeride on US research.
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
I'm surrounded by scientists, in my family, at my day job, and in my community, as I live in the shadow of a major research university. Support for the current administration in recent elections has fallen somewhere between slim and none. In fact I can't think of another identifiable group of people who have been more unanimous in their opposition.
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding? I’m not asking out of anger I genuinely don’t get it. Culture war issues like, idk, people becoming more brown by default in America, or a trans teenager participating in a game, they’re… they don’t seem as important as ensuring well funded science??
Many is a misnomer for “some.” The current administration won by a plurality, 49%, not even a majority. This was 32% of possible voters. Of people with a PhD, approximately 30% voted for Trump. Of Trump voters 1% had a PhD.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
They should be incentivizing researchers who have histories of publishing research that has been independently replicated. Way too much fraud going on that’s seeping into the real world.
Why would you bring up fraud in the midst of science research in the US being burned to the ground?
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
I'm going to call it malice. Either way the people running the government now are the avowed enemies of functioning institutions. No need to give these freaks the benefit of the doubt.
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
It's not the regulars at NIH. If anything they are pulling more unofficial overtime than ever before to try to compensate for what is coming from on top and what DOGE destroyed
From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste. But it’s also funny because it’s not something that can be achieved in a span of 4 years and without long term goals/objectives/process changes/changing the pipelines/etc.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
> At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.
They are not similar types of research. It's like asking why Knuth doesn't do systems research for a social network or advertising company.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
Why would you ever give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt after the past 10y? They’ve been more than clear about the fact they want to destroy federal and scientific institutions (other than ICE of course)
Derek Lowe sees darker motives in the program of cuts to Federal research grants in NIH and NFS. I don't know how to fix some of the problems with how and to whom grants are awarded, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater, deliberately, looks like the very bad kind of malice. (I think this article may have been referenced on HN.)
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-fu...
If I had been told a foreign adversary had broadly infiltrated our government at the highest levels, I would have a hard time differentiating between that and what is currently happening.
There is little need for a foreign adversary - the USA is incredibly anti-science for a supposed "first world" country. They are still debating teaching creationism, for decades now. Even in the doldrums of Europe, you don't have that kind of retarded stuff.
We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so.
And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
Presumably for the transition of biotech from the US to somewhere else. I don't know what kind of favor buys you the sabotage of an industry, but it must've been a good one.
Not a US citizen. From the outside it looks like the US administration simply does not care about advancing science and technology or care for their citizens or their future very much. It looks like it cares about furthering wealth and influence of the head of the in-group by means of fear mongering, scape goating and dismantling structures that threaten this agenda. And if there is a penny to save and a misinformation campaign to further then it makes sense why you would want to take out the voices of treason. But maybe I just misunderstand the whole situation.
As others have said, this is about deliberate reality-destruction.
Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.
Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]
Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.
Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.
My job depends on NIH continuing to function, but it is not immediately clear that this particular decision follows other worrying trends discussed here previously. Removing K-awards for clinical trials (but not regular, cheaper study formats) might simply be a recognition that clinical trials are too expensive for the K-format and conducting underpowered clinical trials does not help anyone much.
might simply be is exactly right, very unlikely… and knowing what you know and have seen since Jan of 2025 you know how slim that “might” is
Can anyone explain the reasoning behind it? I can understand (not saying I approve) targeted opposition to specific scientific claims to favor commercial interests (climate change denial to favor oil & gas, etc), but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run and directly hurt industries like pharma/etc?
To make it easier to push "alternative truths".
I think the plan might be to reinstate science in some form after they have grabbed full control of the country.
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A body of independent subject matter experts who command public respect is anathema to authoritarian governments. It's why authoritarian takeovers frequently start by targeting major universities.
Punishing apparent ideological enemies is a long standing mechanism for fascists and dictators - and scientists in the US qualify. It's an attempt to make people fear standing against them.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
> but wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive
It's not "a general anti-science movement", it's about tight control, everything else is unimportant.
> directly hurt industries like pharma/etc
Not a problem if tight control is in place.
> wouldn't a general anti-science movement make the country less competitive in the long run
Less competitive for tertiary industries like tech, pharma, etc. More competitive for lower-level industries like mining, resource extraction, low-tech and labor-intensive manufacturing, etc. The Administration represents the latter economic sectors. They want more people in factories and fewer people in offices.
Reality has a well known liberal bias.
For example, the Security of War recently had a well produced video saying we're going to do anyway with vaccine mandates for the military.
>Hegseth announced in late April that he was making the annual flu vaccine voluntary for service members "effective immediately." In a video posted to social media, Hegseth said requiring people to get vaccinated was "overly broad and not rational."
>By early May, all military departments had formally requested exemptions that allow them to keep requiring flu vaccinations for certain service members, and those exemptions were granted in early June, according to the congressional staffer. The exemptions typically apply to vulnerable populations like people who live in communal environments, healthcare workers and other categories, the staffer said
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-flu-vaccine-recruits-h...
See that pesky reality thing.
Trying to understand conservative thought is to go into a bizarre twilight zone where vaccines cause autism, do more harm than good, and at the same time our " adversaries" deliberately created illnesses which can be prevented by vaccines.
Then again, maybe the illnesses are designed to get more people vaccinated, in order to spread autism.
Behind it all.
Big Train of course.
I know this isn't HN type of a topic or a comment, but looking at US from outside, the theme looks to be explicitly destroying US hegemony and meritocracy...
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
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... who are unfortunately backed by a large part of the US population who have elected them on exactly that promise, for various reasons. From fear of vaccines to having various other nations freeride on US research.
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
The public overwhelmingly supports NIH-funded research. https://www.aacr.org/about-the-aacr/newsroom/news-releases/n...
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They're deliberately weakening the U.S. Treason.
Please understand that so many high IQ tech and science people support this, they voted and decided.
I'm surrounded by scientists, in my family, at my day job, and in my community, as I live in the shadow of a major research university. Support for the current administration in recent elections has fallen somewhere between slim and none. In fact I can't think of another identifiable group of people who have been more unanimous in their opposition.
On the other hand I can't defined "tech" people, but maybe someone else can. I don't lump "tech and science" together as a single group.
Disclosure: Scientist.
Why did many high IQ tech and science people vote for their own defunding? I’m not asking out of anger I genuinely don’t get it. Culture war issues like, idk, people becoming more brown by default in America, or a trans teenager participating in a game, they’re… they don’t seem as important as ensuring well funded science??
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Many is a misnomer for “some.” The current administration won by a plurality, 49%, not even a majority. This was 32% of possible voters. Of people with a PhD, approximately 30% voted for Trump. Of Trump voters 1% had a PhD.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
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They should be incentivizing researchers who have histories of publishing research that has been independently replicated. Way too much fraud going on that’s seeping into the real world.
Why would you bring up fraud in the midst of science research in the US being burned to the ground?
Fraud is not the reason it is happening. Even the people who are making the cuts in this case have clarified the purported reason and it has nothing to do with fraud.
There is a fixed (decreasing) budget for research.
What should be the balance between repeating things that have already been done, and expanding knowledge?
The fraud is the point with this administration.
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Frankly, this is a bit of an ignorant take.
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...
I'm going to call it malice. Either way the people running the government now are the avowed enemies of functioning institutions. No need to give these freaks the benefit of the doubt.
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
It's not the regulars at NIH. If anything they are pulling more unofficial overtime than ever before to try to compensate for what is coming from on top and what DOGE destroyed
From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste. But it’s also funny because it’s not something that can be achieved in a span of 4 years and without long term goals/objectives/process changes/changing the pipelines/etc.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
> At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.
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They are not similar types of research. It's like asking why Knuth doesn't do systems research for a social network or advertising company.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
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Why would you ever give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt after the past 10y? They’ve been more than clear about the fact they want to destroy federal and scientific institutions (other than ICE of course)
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is malice.
Derek Lowe sees darker motives in the program of cuts to Federal research grants in NIH and NFS. I don't know how to fix some of the problems with how and to whom grants are awarded, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater, deliberately, looks like the very bad kind of malice. (I think this article may have been referenced on HN.) https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-fu...
If I had been told a foreign adversary had broadly infiltrated our government at the highest levels, I would have a hard time differentiating between that and what is currently happening.
There is little need for a foreign adversary - the USA is incredibly anti-science for a supposed "first world" country. They are still debating teaching creationism, for decades now. Even in the doldrums of Europe, you don't have that kind of retarded stuff.
We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so.
And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
Presumably for the transition of biotech from the US to somewhere else. I don't know what kind of favor buys you the sabotage of an industry, but it must've been a good one.
Not a US citizen. From the outside it looks like the US administration simply does not care about advancing science and technology or care for their citizens or their future very much. It looks like it cares about furthering wealth and influence of the head of the in-group by means of fear mongering, scape goating and dismantling structures that threaten this agenda. And if there is a penny to save and a misinformation campaign to further then it makes sense why you would want to take out the voices of treason. But maybe I just misunderstand the whole situation.
It looks like that from inside the US too. At least, to a lot of us.
As others have said, this is about deliberate reality-destruction.
Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.
Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]
Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
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