Now would be a fantastic time for governments worldwide to fund universities to hire folks away from the US.
When I was on the academic job market in 2018, I had offers in both the US and Canada. Ultimately, a combination of politics and grant funding led me to choose Canada. I saw how little disregard the Rs had for science funding, and how hard it already was to get grant funding in the US. I was worried that another R administration could slash research funding, but I never imagined it would be this bad.
Private companies already fund a ton of research in my area, but such funding usually comes with restrictions and demands that often conflict with the core goals of open academic research. So, NSF grants and the like are still crucial for funding basic scientific research that, while not immediately of commercial value (and thus not usually funded by private interests), often becomes commercially important years after being published.
My heart goes out to all of my colleagues and connections in the US who are likely going to be impacted by cuts in the next few years. It’s going to be a really brutal few years, and I hope our community can come out of this in one piece.
Indiscriminately hobbling your best institutions is like setting your middle-aged self up for recovery after falling off the workout wagon. I know because I'm an expert on falling off that wagon... One month off requires three or four months to just get back to the previous baseline. Three months off, and I need a year.
Hopefully enough of the culture of curiosity and open-minded inventiveness stays so that they have a fighting chance of making a comeback.
Otherwise, the US of A stands to experience net-brain-drain at a scale rivalling only India since Y2K to present day, and the former USSR after its heyday.
Lots of USAID-funded research in the US too - there are about a dozen labs researching food security that have been shut down at various US universities as part of the Feed the Future Initiative.
I would expect that this exactly what the people who voted for the current government wanted. I would like to learn more what they were researching, though.
Or prevent. One of the many reasons people are happy about the ending of funding of USAID and NED is because these groups were major weapons of regime change and political agitation around the world. This foments instability and conflict in other nations. And in these conflicts the people most hurt are just the 'normal' people in a country who couldn't care less about the geopolitics, one way or the other.
Foreign aid with no strings attached or ulterior motives could be a good thing, but it mostly doesn't exist. That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth. The powers that be want something in return for that money, and that something isn't just a warm fuzzy feeling from doing right.
> That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth.
I don't see that money being reallocated domestically to infrastructure, education, or welfare. The opposite in fact.
Also, what you're arguing seems paradoxical? Either these programs are selfishly serving the interests of the US, and the US is benefiting, or they are of no benefit to the US and are useless.
This is all setting aside the manner in which these funding cessations happened, what the other "many reasons" were exactly, and why those reasons were important to the one person responsible for those cessations (to the extent we can even explain what actually happened). The question of how is probably as important as why.
You're missing the third option - these are harmful to the US. A lot of our propaganda, efforts to overthrow other countries, and other such efforts regularly backfire to a spectacular degree. For instance do you know the history of Iran? In the 50s it was a relatively moderate and secular democracy. But they got into a conflict with the West over demanding a greater degree of control over their own oil reserves (which we were exploiting at the time).
This motivated the propaganda to drive civil instability which was eventually exploited into a successful coup. [1] We then replaced their democracy with a pro-western puppet monarchy. This obviously was not especially well liked by the citizenry. And then in 1979 they had their own real coup, revolution, or whatever you want to call it against our puppet. [2] And this is when the hardline Islamist government took control who not only had a strong dislike of the West, but also this paranoia that we were always conspiring against them.
If we simply treated them as a sovereign nation instead of a plaything to be exploited, there's basically no chance Iran would be this Islamic extremist sect today. They may well even have ended up having positive relations with the US. And this isn't an exception, but a constantly recurring theme. Al Qaeda came about from our backing Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to try to get one off on the USSR.
And now after years we finally successfully overthrew Assad to replace a secular dictator with a worldwide wanted terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, who we're now framing as a moderate extremist or whatever - even as he is genuinely actively carrying out acts far more egregious than even the most outrageous of our allegations against Assad. How do you think that relation's going to turn out over the next 20 years? It doesn't take a prophet to know the answer there.
It's all extremely myopic and destructive not only on a global level, but even a purely self interested one.
So this would be like disbanding Ford because VW was cheating on their diesel emissions.
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Look, making the government more efficient is a good idea. That's not what's being done. The government is being shrunk so it's not capable of doing thinks like ensuring people like Musk/Bezos actually pay the appropriate tax rate. Or ensuring that factories don't enmass dump their toxic waste into drinking water.
The cover story is efficiency; the easy way to tell this is the GSA itself has proposed (prior to Trump) ways to save over 55 billion and DOGE isn't doing them.
Regime change operations regularly utilized USAID and NED (which, in turn, was often itself funded by USAID) to foster social instability, back opposition forces, and just generally cause chaos. For one particularly absurd instance in more contemporary times, here [1] is USAID trying to cause civil unrest in Cuba and instead ultimately just creating a honey pot for the Cuban government. Note that article is ~11 years old - it's not just a justification for contemporary actions.
The scientific research community is torn asunder right now. I have never seen moods this bad. It is weird to see one of the US's greatest strengths thrown away for little gain.
Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.
Cutting off the future of science feels a lot like "saving money" by eliminating retirement savings. Sure, the money isn't going into the retirement account and now you can buy more beer, but it's just sacrificing far more future gains for a short term gain.
My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.
This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.
This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.
> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.
It might be time to exit the US.
"Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States."
It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit.
Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants.
A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks.
Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts.
Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement.
Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations.
Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.
I have never heard of a scientific conference with a $5000 prize. Was it a private fundraising conference? Perhaps it was private clinicians? Scientific research conferences are far more austere, but conferences for medical doctors are often like that (they do not usually get paid out of grants).
What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.
> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?
Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.
If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.
Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.
You say "political" as if expressing any hesitation whatsoever about how our limited taxpayer dollars are spent is some sort of insane delusion. Maybe think about how the average taxpayer trying to make ends meet would see this.
A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical
Why would I take any chance risking my wife's illustrious career on an internet forum? A career that supports maintenance and taxes on our historic mansion, multiple yearly vacations, our children's private school tuition, and our multiple monthly expensive restaurant meals? You surely must be joking!
Most universities do not contain sufficient capacity to host both the conference and the overnight stays of thousands of people. Even a major university would face significant disruption by hosting a conference, it is simply not built for it. Building venues at each university doesn’t make sense either because it doesn’t have 100% utilization.
Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.
Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.
Their point was fairly straightforward. Don't know why you are mischaracterizing it. They just said that it was weird that state driven budgets are used for splurging on a party, rather than using it purely for the "conference" part, i.e lunch+conference hall+utilities+special guest fees.
Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.
It is not the least bit established that state driven budgets are paying for this, that wasn't even in the comment. So making that assumption is not merited, much less telling me I should be taking it as evidence.
> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,
That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.
I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?
There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.
> I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to.
Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.
> Benefits of exchange of information
You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.
Agreed with others that not being willing to name any of these "many" events means it is likely nonsense and manipulative to bring up as it's impossible to shoot down. Likewise, name the cancer research institution who is not feeling the loss of NIH, NCI, VA, etc funding and collaborators.
Ironically, the one deceptive truth I can think of here is still worse than wrong. Big pharma does hold fancy events, including at conferences, as part of how they attract and fund drug trials. However, cutting basic cancer research and the people who do it means the only people who will be left are the big pharma party people that you seem to dislike.
As far as the institution it's very likely St. Judes. They took a ton of Trump money and have floors plastered with Trump family photos to play to their narcissism. St. Judes is also rolling in tons of private donations that most basic hard science would never ever receive. They are also extremely bad at data sharing and have a poor name in the pediatric cancer community for it, even though the amount of money they have collected makes it one of the better places to perform research. So it's likely that St. Judes is completely protected from all the cutoffs, but even if they got the same cutoffs the private money is highly insulating. But as I said, lots of other pediatric cancer researchers are able to live off of private donations in ways that others could only dream of, so any other similarly funded institution (which would be much smaller than St. Judes) would have similar protection. Private donations go to the areas where the donors care, rather than to the areas where the scientific community finds most promising. Nobody is going to get private donations to sequence the genome the first time or build the LHC.
That's because your wife works in medicine, not because she does science. The pharmaceutical industry spends enormous amounts of money to influence medical practicioners and researchers.
Actual academic conferences are very different. Budgets are much tighter than in medical conferences, or even in tech conferences. Academics usually have to adhere to the same rules and restrictions as government employees. For example, having wine and/or beer at the conference dinner sometimes depends on private sponsors, as government money cannot be used for alcoholic drinks.
Vague descriptions of wild partying and other "shameful" behavior at a taxpayer-funded scientific conference is a classic attack by conservatives aimed at discrediting, in this case, scientists.
Until you name the conference, I'm just going to label this as conservative bullshit.
Practically everything we take for granted today to be core, important science was considered science of questionable value if go back in time long enough.
I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this.
It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been
corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired.
The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff.
The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people.
People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them.
Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.
No, your description of doomer destruction is non-factual. She works in the blue state, Ivy-league affiliated research hospital that is supposedly on the chopping block. We are not observing child cancer funding being eliminated even in the lion's den of leftism
I think the academy is long overdue for a reckoning. The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.
The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system
> The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.
None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research.
Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue.
And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.
They've removed this [1] page from their site, but it's quite relevant. The main reason funding is being cut is for things related to DEI, gender, and so forth. And it seems this organization was heavily involved in such, which means they may have seen a significant reduction to their funding, even if nothing but funding related to these issues was scrapped.
Because most people have gotten sick of steelmanning the deliberate destruction of our country.
My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.
there is a mob mentality on HN where a certain group of people go burying dissenting opinion, because they can just downvote without posting a thoughtful response.
The insult about "worthwhile" research is a bit more negative than is usually tolerated on HN plus it is completely inaccurate as there has been zero assessment of worthwhile or not in these cuts.
This comment is an example why a reply should be required before allowing a downvote. HN members with the privilege to downvote seem to be simply burying anything that disagrees with their opinion bubble.
There were already several replies to this comment 20 minutes before you made your comment. There were no downvotes when I made my reply, and note that I can not downvote it because it was a reply to one of mine.
You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them.
We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.
>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.
But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.
It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed.
It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from).
Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda.
Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.
And I hope, oh how I hope, that the positions eliminated in the US are administrative positions. That researchers, teaching assistants, lab technicians will keep their jobs.
There are a lot of administrative staff at research universities whose jobs support... research. Is there bloat and are there too many managers/VPs? Probably somewhat, but the more of the grant administration work that gets pushed back down to PIs and research groups, the less time they have for research. They will also make many mistakes in both grant applications and how they spend the money, because the regulations are byzantine. That will jeopardize future funding and possibly get them penalized.
Yes, and similarly to increase the efficiency of our healthcare system, I suppose doctors should have to get good at also doing their own billing, janitorial, etc.
I've worked with a lot of brilliant people who know how to do the paperwork that they have to do, and then they do it. Don't believe me? Check out the paperwork that medical doctors have to do -- it's insane, and what these researchers are being asked to do (assuming it's admins who get laid off) is way less. Or how about software developers? We have to dot our i's and cross our t's all over the place -- design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, test writing, and lots of process, and then we get to maintain and debug our own code and sometimes even operate it.
If it goes down how I'm seeing it in other universities and government labs.. highly unlikely. A ratio like 1:1 or 2:1 is still horrible, and those are big numbers.
Likewise, it's miserable for the people who are left. Research efficiency is plummeting due to having to do nonsense work and the funding path being murky for the next few years. Firing support staff and stopping funding paths means researchers must spend even more time to get fewer grants accepted.
Full Title: Johns Hopkins University slashes 2,000 jobs after Trump administration grant cut
> ... 247 domestic U.S. workers for the academic institution and another 1,975 positions outside the U.S. in 44 countries.
> The job cuts impact the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and affiliated non-profit for international health, Jhpiego.
While "John Hopkins U" gets the clicks, it sounds like this is mostly about a non-profit doing international public health stuff.
Presumably a lot of the funds in the terminated grants were for running programs that had other direct costs beyond pure headcount…
That’s the thing that isn’t being reported well, IMHO: federal grants aren’t just gifts that the government gives universities, they are contracts for universities to perform services (conducting very specific research programs with well-specified deliverables, running very specific educational activities for carefully defined populations of learners, etc.).
Grants/contracts aren't necessarily just for one year and often the numbers are about obligations and not outlays.
I don't know which specific grants were cut but here's a random example[1] of one (which is probably(?) not involved). In this example it's over multiple decades with ~$253 obligated but (assuming site accuracy) only $53 million has been outlayed.
It would be nice if media reporting included detailed information though.
Salaries are rarely the biggest expense in lab science and it's easy for a bench scientist to spend more on reagents in a day then they will make. Then there is all the very pricy equipment that is necessary, the cost of disposal of waste, the fume hoods and other extremely expensive real estate....
The overhead on a software is basically zero dollars but it's very different for science.
And I'm aware that most of the salary (even if that would be 100% salary) will be spend and thus be good for the economy.
Nonetheless that money has to come from somewhere.
Now would be a fantastic time for governments worldwide to fund universities to hire folks away from the US.
When I was on the academic job market in 2018, I had offers in both the US and Canada. Ultimately, a combination of politics and grant funding led me to choose Canada. I saw how little disregard the Rs had for science funding, and how hard it already was to get grant funding in the US. I was worried that another R administration could slash research funding, but I never imagined it would be this bad.
Private companies already fund a ton of research in my area, but such funding usually comes with restrictions and demands that often conflict with the core goals of open academic research. So, NSF grants and the like are still crucial for funding basic scientific research that, while not immediately of commercial value (and thus not usually funded by private interests), often becomes commercially important years after being published.
My heart goes out to all of my colleagues and connections in the US who are likely going to be impacted by cuts in the next few years. It’s going to be a really brutal few years, and I hope our community can come out of this in one piece.
Indiscriminately hobbling your best institutions is like setting your middle-aged self up for recovery after falling off the workout wagon. I know because I'm an expert on falling off that wagon... One month off requires three or four months to just get back to the previous baseline. Three months off, and I need a year.
Hopefully enough of the culture of curiosity and open-minded inventiveness stays so that they have a fighting chance of making a comeback.
Otherwise, the US of A stands to experience net-brain-drain at a scale rivalling only India since Y2K to present day, and the former USSR after its heyday.
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I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade. Congrats again to everyone who voted for this.
Lots of USAID-funded research in the US too - there are about a dozen labs researching food security that have been shut down at various US universities as part of the Feed the Future Initiative.
Here's one: https://ipmnewsroom.org/trump-administration-makes-cancellat...
> I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade.
And how many it used to prevent for comparatively little cost:
https://oig.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/0-000-25-0...
I would expect that this exactly what the people who voted for the current government wanted. I would like to learn more what they were researching, though.
And pandemics.
Sadly, most of them don't care what happens to foreigners. Even more sadly, some of those same people are hoping for those deaths.
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Or prevent. One of the many reasons people are happy about the ending of funding of USAID and NED is because these groups were major weapons of regime change and political agitation around the world. This foments instability and conflict in other nations. And in these conflicts the people most hurt are just the 'normal' people in a country who couldn't care less about the geopolitics, one way or the other.
Foreign aid with no strings attached or ulterior motives could be a good thing, but it mostly doesn't exist. That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth. The powers that be want something in return for that money, and that something isn't just a warm fuzzy feeling from doing right.
> That's tens of billions of dollars you could be spending on your own infrastructure, education, welfare, and so forth.
I don't see that money being reallocated domestically to infrastructure, education, or welfare. The opposite in fact.
Also, what you're arguing seems paradoxical? Either these programs are selfishly serving the interests of the US, and the US is benefiting, or they are of no benefit to the US and are useless.
This is all setting aside the manner in which these funding cessations happened, what the other "many reasons" were exactly, and why those reasons were important to the one person responsible for those cessations (to the extent we can even explain what actually happened). The question of how is probably as important as why.
You're missing the third option - these are harmful to the US. A lot of our propaganda, efforts to overthrow other countries, and other such efforts regularly backfire to a spectacular degree. For instance do you know the history of Iran? In the 50s it was a relatively moderate and secular democracy. But they got into a conflict with the West over demanding a greater degree of control over their own oil reserves (which we were exploiting at the time).
This motivated the propaganda to drive civil instability which was eventually exploited into a successful coup. [1] We then replaced their democracy with a pro-western puppet monarchy. This obviously was not especially well liked by the citizenry. And then in 1979 they had their own real coup, revolution, or whatever you want to call it against our puppet. [2] And this is when the hardline Islamist government took control who not only had a strong dislike of the West, but also this paranoia that we were always conspiring against them.
If we simply treated them as a sovereign nation instead of a plaything to be exploited, there's basically no chance Iran would be this Islamic extremist sect today. They may well even have ended up having positive relations with the US. And this isn't an exception, but a constantly recurring theme. Al Qaeda came about from our backing Islamic extremists in Afghanistan to try to get one off on the USSR.
And now after years we finally successfully overthrew Assad to replace a secular dictator with a worldwide wanted terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, who we're now framing as a moderate extremist or whatever - even as he is genuinely actively carrying out acts far more egregious than even the most outrageous of our allegations against Assad. How do you think that relation's going to turn out over the next 20 years? It doesn't take a prophet to know the answer there.
It's all extremely myopic and destructive not only on a global level, but even a purely self interested one.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_revolution
That was the CIA not USAID.
So this would be like disbanding Ford because VW was cheating on their diesel emissions.
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Look, making the government more efficient is a good idea. That's not what's being done. The government is being shrunk so it's not capable of doing thinks like ensuring people like Musk/Bezos actually pay the appropriate tax rate. Or ensuring that factories don't enmass dump their toxic waste into drinking water.
The cover story is efficiency; the easy way to tell this is the GSA itself has proposed (prior to Trump) ways to save over 55 billion and DOGE isn't doing them.
Regime change operations regularly utilized USAID and NED (which, in turn, was often itself funded by USAID) to foster social instability, back opposition forces, and just generally cause chaos. For one particularly absurd instance in more contemporary times, here [1] is USAID trying to cause civil unrest in Cuba and instead ultimately just creating a honey pot for the Cuban government. Note that article is ~11 years old - it's not just a justification for contemporary actions.
[1] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other... (archive: https://archive.is/IQl36)
Russia will die anyway.
The scientific research community is torn asunder right now. I have never seen moods this bad. It is weird to see one of the US's greatest strengths thrown away for little gain.
Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.
Cutting off the future of science feels a lot like "saving money" by eliminating retirement savings. Sure, the money isn't going into the retirement account and now you can buy more beer, but it's just sacrificing far more future gains for a short term gain.
Foolish at best, and traitorous at worst.
My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.
This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.
This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.
> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.
It might be time to exit the US.
"Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States."
https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-co...
There is no gain, only loss
There's plenty of gain: $4.5 trillion in reduced taxes.
Not for you, of course. But for other people. You should be happy for them. Maybe they'll trickle some down on you.
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It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit.
Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants.
A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks.
Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts.
Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement.
Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...
Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations.
Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.
I have never heard of a scientific conference with a $5000 prize. Was it a private fundraising conference? Perhaps it was private clinicians? Scientific research conferences are far more austere, but conferences for medical doctors are often like that (they do not usually get paid out of grants).
What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.
> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?
Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.
If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.
Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.
You say "political" as if expressing any hesitation whatsoever about how our limited taxpayer dollars are spent is some sort of insane delusion. Maybe think about how the average taxpayer trying to make ends meet would see this.
A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical
You still didn’t name the conference
Why would I take any chance risking my wife's illustrious career on an internet forum? A career that supports maintenance and taxes on our historic mansion, multiple yearly vacations, our children's private school tuition, and our multiple monthly expensive restaurant meals? You surely must be joking!
Most universities do not contain sufficient capacity to host both the conference and the overnight stays of thousands of people. Even a major university would face significant disruption by hosting a conference, it is simply not built for it. Building venues at each university doesn’t make sense either because it doesn’t have 100% utilization.
Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.
Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.
Their point was fairly straightforward. Don't know why you are mischaracterizing it. They just said that it was weird that state driven budgets are used for splurging on a party, rather than using it purely for the "conference" part, i.e lunch+conference hall+utilities+special guest fees.
Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.
It is not the least bit established that state driven budgets are paying for this, that wasn't even in the comment. So making that assumption is not merited, much less telling me I should be taking it as evidence.
> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,
That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.
I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?
There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.
> I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to.
Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.
> Benefits of exchange of information
You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.
Agreed with others that not being willing to name any of these "many" events means it is likely nonsense and manipulative to bring up as it's impossible to shoot down. Likewise, name the cancer research institution who is not feeling the loss of NIH, NCI, VA, etc funding and collaborators.
Ironically, the one deceptive truth I can think of here is still worse than wrong. Big pharma does hold fancy events, including at conferences, as part of how they attract and fund drug trials. However, cutting basic cancer research and the people who do it means the only people who will be left are the big pharma party people that you seem to dislike.
As far as the institution it's very likely St. Judes. They took a ton of Trump money and have floors plastered with Trump family photos to play to their narcissism. St. Judes is also rolling in tons of private donations that most basic hard science would never ever receive. They are also extremely bad at data sharing and have a poor name in the pediatric cancer community for it, even though the amount of money they have collected makes it one of the better places to perform research. So it's likely that St. Judes is completely protected from all the cutoffs, but even if they got the same cutoffs the private money is highly insulating. But as I said, lots of other pediatric cancer researchers are able to live off of private donations in ways that others could only dream of, so any other similarly funded institution (which would be much smaller than St. Judes) would have similar protection. Private donations go to the areas where the donors care, rather than to the areas where the scientific community finds most promising. Nobody is going to get private donations to sequence the genome the first time or build the LHC.
That's because your wife works in medicine, not because she does science. The pharmaceutical industry spends enormous amounts of money to influence medical practicioners and researchers.
Actual academic conferences are very different. Budgets are much tighter than in medical conferences, or even in tech conferences. Academics usually have to adhere to the same rules and restrictions as government employees. For example, having wine and/or beer at the conference dinner sometimes depends on private sponsors, as government money cannot be used for alcoholic drinks.
I work in science, and it is definitely not normal. Doesn't sound like state funded. Likeky private/industrial sponsorship
Vague descriptions of wild partying and other "shameful" behavior at a taxpayer-funded scientific conference is a classic attack by conservatives aimed at discrediting, in this case, scientists.
Until you name the conference, I'm just going to label this as conservative bullshit.
Practically everything we take for granted today to be core, important science was considered science of questionable value if go back in time long enough.
Having read this guy's other comments, he's definitely a liar engaging in bad faith. Don't waste your time on him
Your example is anecdotal and does not present the whole picture.
Same but different.
I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this.
It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired.
The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff.
The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people.
People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them.
Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.
No, your description of doomer destruction is non-factual. She works in the blue state, Ivy-league affiliated research hospital that is supposedly on the chopping block. We are not observing child cancer funding being eliminated even in the lion's den of leftism
> even in the lion's den of leftism
Interesting choice of words but it throws all the rest of your assessment into doubt.
Especially your idea that your wife's research is worthy and then all the rest is less worthy.
I think the academy is long overdue for a reckoning. The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.
The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system
> The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.
None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research.
Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue.
And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.
Is your wife's research overdue for reckoning or nah?
no biases detected
Ah yes, the questionable value of checks notes reducing child and maternal mortality and providing HIV/AIDs treatment.
(That seems to be the primary mission of Jhpiego, where 90% of the layoffs occurred)
They've removed this [1] page from their site, but it's quite relevant. The main reason funding is being cut is for things related to DEI, gender, and so forth. And it seems this organization was heavily involved in such, which means they may have seen a significant reduction to their funding, even if nothing but funding related to these issues was scrapped.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
So everything not pediatric cancer research is of questionable value?
Of value to who exactly? Trump and Musk? RFK Jr?
mRNA vaccines seem pretty valuable to me, for example. They did to the Nobel committee.
Why is this person's comment being downvotted?
Because it's almost guaranteed to be a lie and they refuse to provide basic information that would clear it up.
Because most people have gotten sick of steelmanning the deliberate destruction of our country.
My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.
there is a mob mentality on HN where a certain group of people go burying dissenting opinion, because they can just downvote without posting a thoughtful response.
The insult about "worthwhile" research is a bit more negative than is usually tolerated on HN plus it is completely inaccurate as there has been zero assessment of worthwhile or not in these cuts.
This comment is an example why a reply should be required before allowing a downvote. HN members with the privilege to downvote seem to be simply burying anything that disagrees with their opinion bubble.
There were already several replies to this comment 20 minutes before you made your comment. There were no downvotes when I made my reply, and note that I can not downvote it because it was a reply to one of mine.
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No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.
You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them.
Also, there are things like this: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...
This is a lost class. Do it for 4 years and you have a lost generation.
Plenty of PhD offers have been rescinded, and stipend cut.
We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.
That is an incredibly short sighted view of the world.
>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.
But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.
> The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.
Why are you spewing inaccurate propaganda talking points if propaganda is bad?
Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?
It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed.
It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from).
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...
This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?
Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda.
Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.
> This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?
Is it hard science?
And I hope, oh how I hope, that the positions eliminated in the US are administrative positions. That researchers, teaching assistants, lab technicians will keep their jobs.
There are a lot of administrative staff at research universities whose jobs support... research. Is there bloat and are there too many managers/VPs? Probably somewhat, but the more of the grant administration work that gets pushed back down to PIs and research groups, the less time they have for research. They will also make many mistakes in both grant applications and how they spend the money, because the regulations are byzantine. That will jeopardize future funding and possibly get them penalized.
Tough. Researchers will have to get good at it.
Yes, and similarly to increase the efficiency of our healthcare system, I suppose doctors should have to get good at also doing their own billing, janitorial, etc.
Brilliant people should be unencumbered by admin tasks. Rare minds should be supported for the benefit of all.
I've worked with a lot of brilliant people who know how to do the paperwork that they have to do, and then they do it. Don't believe me? Check out the paperwork that medical doctors have to do -- it's insane, and what these researchers are being asked to do (assuming it's admins who get laid off) is way less. Or how about software developers? We have to dot our i's and cross our t's all over the place -- design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, test writing, and lots of process, and then we get to maintain and debug our own code and sometimes even operate it.
That's the hope, but that's never how things go. Of course researchers and research will be tremendously affected, and that's a shame.
If it goes down how I'm seeing it in other universities and government labs.. highly unlikely. A ratio like 1:1 or 2:1 is still horrible, and those are big numbers.
Likewise, it's miserable for the people who are left. Research efficiency is plummeting due to having to do nonsense work and the funding path being murky for the next few years. Firing support staff and stopping funding paths means researchers must spend even more time to get fewer grants accepted.
The cuts in funding directly and immediately cut researchers doing lab work and the funds for all the reagents and experiments.
Teaching assistants are different, those are paid by the university so classes will continue. Only the science gets cut.
The US government has opened the top of the body politic's skull and it's hacking out chunks of the soft matter inside.
They can always protest! Oh wait they will be stripped of their rights, thrown to jail and / or get deported.
Full Title: Johns Hopkins University slashes 2,000 jobs after Trump administration grant cut
> ... 247 domestic U.S. workers for the academic institution and another 1,975 positions outside the U.S. in 44 countries.
> The job cuts impact the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and affiliated non-profit for international health, Jhpiego.
While "John Hopkins U" gets the clicks, it sounds like this is mostly about a non-profit doing international public health stuff.
That's $400k a worker, or over $3M per worker in the US.
Not sure that adds up...
Presumably a lot of the funds in the terminated grants were for running programs that had other direct costs beyond pure headcount…
That’s the thing that isn’t being reported well, IMHO: federal grants aren’t just gifts that the government gives universities, they are contracts for universities to perform services (conducting very specific research programs with well-specified deliverables, running very specific educational activities for carefully defined populations of learners, etc.).
Grants/contracts aren't necessarily just for one year and often the numbers are about obligations and not outlays.
I don't know which specific grants were cut but here's a random example[1] of one (which is probably(?) not involved). In this example it's over multiple decades with ~$253 obligated but (assuming site accuracy) only $53 million has been outlayed.
It would be nice if media reporting included detailed information though.
[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_UM1AI068632_7529
Salaries are rarely the biggest expense in lab science and it's easy for a bench scientist to spend more on reagents in a day then they will make. Then there is all the very pricy equipment that is necessary, the cost of disposal of waste, the fume hoods and other extremely expensive real estate....
The overhead on a software is basically zero dollars but it's very different for science.
Indirect costs and non-payroll costs (equipment, travel, etc)
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$800.000.000 / 2000 Positons = $400.000 / Position
Wow. Even with expenses apart from income, that is a lot of money. Most companies I receive job offers from do not make so much _revenue_ per person.
I not a fan of DT and EM, but boy... there seems to be an unsustainable spending issue in the US.
Actual salary is a fraction of that number. Science is expensive.
So are other necessary expenses.
And I'm aware that most of the salary (even if that would be 100% salary) will be spend and thus be good for the economy. Nonetheless that money has to come from somewhere.