Without being sarcastic…

I think Project 2025’s goal is less about “cost cutting” and more about reducing bureaucracy & consolidating power… I genuinely don’t think they have real plans for where to spend the money besides some vague goals like lowering income tax or something

And in practice, they are cutting a bunch of important governmental endeavors that have very good ROI (NIH has always bipartisan for a reason), so they are literally wasting everyone’s money, not saving

Sadly, not quite: several countries want to, but they all have their own funding difficulties. They are trying to though, since these days American scientists might be seen as being offered at a steep discount

The HHS official announcement link if anyone is interested.

Yes, the double speak is quite strong. Also quite obvious who wrote this based on the URL.

I was actually pointed to this by two posts from Mekka on Mastodon:

• https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/112468474131649004
• https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/114135119202956481

Very bad precedent being set here.

I was at one of the local rallies. I think the organizers also know that this event alone won’t be effective & is only the beginning; there will be more to come. A lot more if (and most likely, when) the administration doesn’t comply with the demands.

Fun fact… My local rally literally featured a startup founder who scaled their company & attracted investors using NIH funding as seed money, and a community college student from a nearby red state. I would imagine that even the most die-hard traditional conservatives would find such stories inspiring/good use of tax payer money… Science support has traditionally been bipartisan too.

Again, if they don’t comply, more actions would come

The thing that annoys me is… even if they genuinely want to save money (and that’s a big if), this is barely even “saving” much money. NIH has historically been a very good return on investment for the US government despite running on a shoestring budget, and that is probably not even accounting for the various downstream applications (like all the pharma industry) that relies on NIH-funded research.

Part of the issue with indirect costs are due to the NIH never getting much of a budget raise and the ballooning bureaucracy… Yes, there are people wanting change for the better, but the current administration decided to wake up to violence by dealing with this in the worst way possible

There are a few active discussions on Reddit/Bluesky… I think the short answer is none of us are really sure. However, I read comments saying that language from the memo seems to suggest that they would stop disbursement of funds, which would be the absolute worst case scenario (since that would straight up terminate a lot of ppl’s jobs)

If there’s any lawyer here who can parse/interpret the original memo I’d appreciate some insights…

It was just HHS a few days ago… Then it came for NSF… Then this happened

I know the official memo claims this is “temporary” but there is literally no way this would end well. Heck there was at least one clinical trial terminated because of the “temporary” HHS pause, and this burden is on the entire country now

I envisioned for the worst when Trump was elected… and somehow this administration has managed to exceed some of my wildest expectations