291–300 of 340 posts
if they were honestly trying to improve things, the cuts would be phased in over a few funding cycles at a minimum. it's hard to see surprise cuts as anything more than willful vandalism and a gift to global competitors. time to donate time and money to their opposition. one month in and they've already proven themselves a failure.
Can somebody help me understand: say I have a research grant and my cap on how much university can take for its operations is 15%. Does it mean that from my 85% I can not buy/rent necessary equipment/facilities previously provided by university anymore?
For instance Texas medical schools/institutions would previously take as much as half the money in a US grant from the researcher and use it for whatever they wish. I believe Trump's measures are intended to cut back on such situations.
I'm fairly certain the institutions will find a way around Trump's measures, given time. It's a cat-and-mouse game.
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Many actions the administration has taken are illegal. Not sure if those related to NIH are, but if they’ve been firing people, odds are good, since they’ve been doing that wrong most of the time it seems like. Congress could change the laws, but they haven’t. Lots of this junk is simply against the law. The courts are moving relatively fast, as such things go, but it takes time. Congress is supposed to control spend…
To be clear, the article headline is deceptive clickbait. NIH budgets aren't being cut. The NIH is simply requiring that at least 85% of the grant value goes to the actual grant recipients, rather than being siphoned off by the university for administration expenses. At most universities this change has no impact, since they weren't taking more than 15% to begin with. This change mainly impacts Harvard and similar, a…
That's not how any of this work. All of that money was already going to necessary expenditures, and "administrative expenses" is a crucial part of that.
What happened in these places to arrive at numbers like 69%, was a very thorough audit. The purpose of the audit is to allow the government to determine they are supposed to fund, and it's being bundled into an overhead number because its allows universities to take advantage of economies of scale, freeing researchers to do actual grant research.
But because our current leaders can't understand that, what's going to happen is all of the overhead costs (which again, are efficient) are going to be replaced with direct billing, which is highly inefficient. All of the money we save through sharing resources will now be siloed and duplicated needlessly. Instead of doing grant research, grant recipients will spend more time just doing compliance work instead of actual research.
Look at it this way:
A Harvard researcher asks the government for $100. They allocate an additional $69 on top of that for the university to spend on rent, utilities, legal, publishing, lab facilities, lab personnel, library services, tech support, etc. So the total grant is $169.
If the indirect rate is 0.15, the researcher isn't going to ask for $100 anymore, they're going to ask for at least $154, putting to total grant back to $169. But they're going to ask for more than this because they've lost the economy of scale of the old system. So now they have to pay for direct costs they never had to before - a 20% bump is not unreasonable.
So what just happened? The researcher only needed $100 to do their research. But now because government introduced inefficiencies into the system, the total grant goes up, and the real overhead rate is 100% instead of 69%.
By trying to save money you've actually cost everyone to have to spend more money, meaning total research is going to go down because total research spend isn't going to go up. Such efficient.
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Name me 5 executive orders by Trump which, combined, disrupt normal economic affairs by as much as that single one. As for the broader efforts, the New Deal required various things like reinterpreting the Commerce Clause. Look up "the switch in time which saved nine" for why the Supreme Court went along with it. Not to mention things like the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW 2. No, FDR was the closest thing…
>Name me 5 executive orders by Trump which, combined, disrupt normal economic affairs by as much as that single one. By the end of this year, I think you're going to look back on this comment and wonder how you ever typed it. FDR's policies are responsible for literally saving the economy and pulling the US out of the Great Depression.
That said, many historians believe that FDR's actions made the Great Depression longer and more severe. Given that most other countries recovered more quickly than the USA, they may have a point. But that is a complex debate. Far simpler is how much executive power FDR wielded.
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Only if they don’t find a suitable scapegoat in time. I still hear people blaming Biden.
As they should! Everything you see around you was provided by Biden. Trump is only starting to make changes.
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> there is a strong legal argument that overruling congress via impoundment and/or the actions discussed here violate the constitutions most basic precepts No there isn't. The text of the Constitution says the opposite: it makes appropriation a necessary condition for expenditures, but omits any clause making it a sufficient one. And the only case law on this issue is Train v. New York, which assiduously avoids rulin…
the Take Care clause of Article II would like to have a word with you. The President has a positive duty to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress. if Congress passes a law funding something, the President must faithfully make it so.
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As they should! Everything you see around you was provided by Biden. Trump is only starting to make changes.
I’m pretty sure Biden had as little to do with gas (or Egg) prices as Trump has.
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Yes, those of us paying attention knew that when he disavowed Project 2025 he was talking nonsense. But OP said Trump "campaigned on doing exactly these things". He didn't. He campaigned on literally disavowing these things. "we knew this would happen" !== "he campaigned on doing exactly these things"
Yes, and that's my point. Anyone who truly, honestly "didn't know" doesn't deserve to have a vote.
We are, unfortunately, a country where the most popular search on Google on election day last November was "Did Biden drop out?".
That's the lack of an educated electorate we have to deal with.
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> allowing professional male combat athletes to unfairly dominate female participants Had this actually happened somewhere, or is it just a hypothetical? Like trans women assaulting cis women en masse in women's restrooms.
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Also note that Fox has not won all of her fights, which indicates that trans women are not as dominant as the one fight you mentioned would suggest.
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What I'd really be interested in is something larger than an anecdote: Do trans women dominate cis women in the sports they compete in? It would take a larger study, as a one-off doesn't really mean much. Also note that Fox has not won all of her fights, which indicates that trans women are not as dominant as the one fight you mentioned would suggest.