I’m in leadership at a place everyone here has heard of. We are in absolute panic behind the scenes.
Hang in there. Hope for the best. Don’t give up.
What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
301–310 of 1001 posts
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hold the idea that brain drain, i.e. emigration of skilled people, is one of only a small handful of real methods to hold fascism to account. With that, as things start to get real bad it seems leaving is something of a moral duty for anyone who cares, has skills that hold real weight, and can still afford to do so. Obviously where this "real bad" point is is hard to say, and there's important tradeoffs to consider…
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At this point it's a question of whether the fundie extremists take out the broligarchs first, or vice versa.
You can't run a modern economy by being anti-science and anti-education. Believing otherwise is a self-harming absurdity.
There will absolutely be a brain drain, and the EU is already thinking about how to take advantage of it.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's a kind of lottery-mentality that Europe doesn't want to attract anyway. Except that it’s the opposite of a lottery. It’s almost entirely based on your skills and the decisions you make. There are right-place right-time effects, but it’s still your decision to be in the right place for the current time. Europe’s economy is badly lagging the US economy, and it’s because culturally they hold these types of inco…
It's almost entirely based on your skills, the decisions you make, and your privileged background. You're just not going to get past the first few rounds of the entrepreneur game if you're not a certain kind of person. The US has terrible social mobility. Objectively, by any measure. This isn't up for debate. Guess which state is #1 for social mobility? Wrong. It's Utah, which is a low bar because it's 28th by GDP. H…
This is nonsense.
The US is full of billionaires who came from underprivileged positions.
Infact, your advice is worse than wrong, it is actively harmful, because you're discouraging people from trying by (falsely) telling them that their efforts don't matter and they were destined to fail from birth.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
I contend that there existed too much incompetence across what the government has been funding. I’m looking forward to a ‘change’ for more competence, efficiency, innovation, accountability, etc
The process is the problem. There is no oversight and accountability for Musk and his "DOGE". That's pure poison to Democracy and to a functioning society. Musk is neither competent nor efficient. He looks at line items and makes stuff up. He destroys a hundred useful things to destroy a bad one. Details don't matter to him. Its the same con man mentality that feeds off the works of his workforce. People who think he…
His manage-by-trolling technique is demonstrably effective in industry.
It’s just that government isn’t that.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
A billion here, a billion there, before you know it you're talking about some real money. If I were president I would probably cut from military spending - but at some point that becomes painful to cut aswell. A lot of people have misunderstood me in this thread, at no point do I want to see public research cut. Its just that the same people who are worried about what climate change will bring over next 50 years (and…
Because the federal government is not in any sense living outside its means. I’m not sure how to explain this to you, really - you’re fundamentally stuck, I think, on the idea that the gov is like a business or a household, and needs to budget the same way. It really doesn’t. Maybe think of it this way, to start to get your head around it: current debt is just over 100% of GDP - so in some sense the US has borrowed a…
You can call it stuck if you want, I guess I am - how can this not be a bad thing? It feels like its not a bad thing until suddenly it is. Countries can & do go broke. You can sell your house and break even, thr govt cant sell the NIH
Consider the idea that without decades of money printing, your house might only cost 1 year of salary in the first place
Or maybe let me ask it a other way - if the govt really doesnt need to balance the budget, why dont we have 50 aircraft carriers and free healthcare for all? Such huge sums of money go beyond merely number balancing, at some piint theyre forcefully managing the real resources of the nation
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#306There seems to be a lot of negativity from the HN crowd about this. But, the reality is that your fellow Americans voted for this. If you don'y like it, you're going to have to convince people that it's a bad idea. Getting worked up about Trump or Musk or SV bros isn't getting us anywhere.
First, Trump voters didn't exactly vote for this, at least not many. Identify politics and owning the libs, sure, but I'd say that a minority of his voters wanted to totally dismantle the administrative state - or if they thought that sounded good, they may not have been aware the repercussions of that on their lives.
Second, we all have a right to bitch about what seems like a new America being formed. If things go as badly as many of us seem to think, well it doesn't really matter if we convince trump voters they were wrong, because democracy will be have evaporated anyway. Our society has been almost molded for this moment: Americans are more isolated and alienated from each other than ever. The internet today is a fundamentally difficult place to organize any sort of coherent protest when the places people post are algorithmically controlled, manipulated by bots, and moderated.
We are broken as a society. What a waste was all that 20th century plundering and bloodshed and brilliance and effort. I would imagine that even for someone looking at the teetering American Empire with satisfaction, there is a bit of emptiness in just how stupid and pathetic this all is.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good luck getting 500k+ grants in other countries. If you leave there won't be a shortage of postdocs looking for a new tenure track position.
Yeah that's kind of the thing. I think a lot of these guys and gals are fooling themselves with the whole, "find another country" thing. There is no other country that is A) doing research at these levels, B) Flush with cash, and C) needs you because they don't have a population that produces the necessary thinkers. That's basically only the US.
The European research budget is not insignificant. Horizon Europe 2021-2027 is the current vehicle that much of the funding is going through (European Research Council [ERC] being one of the most well known parts). It has a budget for the time-frame (all years) of EUR 96,899,000,000. [1] Of that, the ERC has EUR 16B [2], Digital, Industry and Space has ~EUR 15B, Climate, Energy and Mobility has ~EUR 15B, and several other sub-groups have smaller amounts.
Those then work with the country level organizations of Science Europe, and those together each spend about EUR 25B each year. [3] It's not insignificant. I tend to pay attention to space, and lately almost all there's been is European achievements in telescopes and astronomy.
[1] Horizon Europe, https://www.ffg.at/sites/default/files/downloads/HorizonEuro...
[2] ERC, https://erc.europa.eu/about-erc/erc-glance
[3] Science Europe RFOs, https://www.scienceeurope.org/about-us/members/?type=Researc...
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#308The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain: > The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the det…
Even quoting the NIH/NSF budgets (or their line items) misses the point of the current actions. Yes, they're smaller fractions of the USG budget, but they not immaterial.
This is not an attempt to 'save money' at the NSF and NIH (and USAID). A serious, rational effort to reduce their costs / increase their efficiency does not start with grep-ing manuscripts for 'underrepresented'. Part Five of TFA is on the money. This is an ideological attack on acronyms, and what they symbolize to the attackers. The actual agencies, their relative importance to the budget, etc. do not matter. The iconoclasts are here to smash the icons.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#309The big thing is this isn't really about any real monetary savings. What we get out of these budgets is a bargain: > The biggest single share of the NIH budget goes to the NCI ($7.8 billion in 2024), and the second-most to the NIAID ($6.5 billion) with the National Institute of Aging coming in third at $4.4 billion. (See the tables on numbered pages 11 and 46 of that link at the beginning of the paragraph for the det…
Of course it’s not about saving money. It’s about extinguishing facts. This is Orwell 101.
Re: What's happening inside the NIH and NSF
#310Despite all the hyperbole in this thread I will try to speak plainly. It has become tiring to see how DEI has affected all aspects of academia. Hiring people based on race, awarding grants to work exclusively with members of a particular set of minorities, etc. I'm sure most people choose to close their eyes to such things and move on and focus on the actual important work but there must be unimaginable waste going o…
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Academics should keep in mind that they rely on the generosity of taxpayers to fund their research.
They don’t have an entitlement to other people’s money, and if they are perceived as wasting it or spending in discriminatorily then you should expect the public to become less willing to give it to you.