NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring
298 comments
·January 23, 2025tired_and_awake
dekhn
NIH also played a big role in the creation of biotech industry (funding much of the basic research that set the foundation for amazing medical treatments). I guess we'll have to depend more on the largesse of billionaires.
chii
> funding much of the basic research
it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).
I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.
dekhn
NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).
grahamj
Remember when Idiocracy was just a movie?
petesergeant
I had a person on the other end of tech support tell me they’d _love_ to hear how my day was going as part of a script recently. Wasn’t Costco but still
bbarnett
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.
To be fair to both sides, I hear your right saying hiring has becone political. With DEI pledges for hiring.
Hiring should be merit baed, and not based upon politics either.
serf
would you expect double the nobels if you doubled their available resources?
another loaded question : do you believe the nih is the single government ran example of a perfectly lean and well managed agency without excess expenditure?
notjoemama
> $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
$47.4B is a significant amount of money. I don't know whether their expenditures are appropriate. I don't see that in the article either. Unless someone does know that can comment, the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide
> pause on communications and travel ... Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in.
Hmm, seem like the author is fomenting malice by using ‘devastating’ in the title. Perhaps building a character judgement that might not actually be there, helping to draw anger and hate from people already opposed to the new administration?
> NIH travel chief Glenda Conroy sent an email to senior agency officials early today notifying them of an “immediate and indefinite” suspension of all travel throughout HHS with few exceptions, such as currently traveling employees returning home. Researchers who planned to present their work at meetings must cancel their trips, as must NIH officials promoting agency programs off site or visiting distant branches of the agency. “Future travel requests for any reason are not authorized and should not be approved,” the memo said.
I guess someone needs to ask the question, how exactly is the NIH going to prevent people from "going home"? Does that mean simply that they will not be paying for their travel? Or for that matter, researchers who want to present their work must do it at their own cost or from approved unpaid time off?
I feel like someone is forgetting how hard the MAJORITY of US citizens have it. Inflation has hit non-wealthy people the most. They don't have jobs where they get paid travel or paid time off. While I don't mean to inject some form of class into the discussion, I do wonder what exactly are the things to be fearful of in this scenario. I'm just not seeing a worrying concern here given reality. Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community? I'm sorry. I just don't get it.
UniverseHacker
> the $47.4B is unaccounted for in coloquial dialog, is it not?
Almost all of it is research grants for biomedical research, with priorities set by congress. This includes the vast majority of all academic scientific research in the USA.
> Unless, there's a more rampant amount of fragility in the well paid health community?
Most of this work is done by graduate students and postdocs, which are paid very little. Traveling to conferences is part of doing their job, but they generally couldn't afford to pay for it themselves. They are already required to keep travel expenses down to the point where the hotels are often dirty and unsafe- usually whatever is cheapest in town.
Grad students in the USA currently make about $34k/year and postdocs (with PhDs) about $60k/year in the USA. They're usually in high cost of living urban areas, and in practice, they're often expected to work 60-80 hour weeks if they want to produce enough to remain in academia. This works out to less than minimum wage in the places they are generally located.
When I was a graduate student, I made just enough to rent a single bedroom in a large group house full of strangers, and as a postdoc I had a 4 hour round trip daily commute to get to someplace I could afford to live.
AlotOfReading
Have you ever worked in a government funded environment? Travel frugality is already the rule and has been for decades. This is going from "be frugal" to "don't".
dekhn
NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job).
As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.
duxup
> Another consequence of the communications pause, according to an NIH staffer involved with clinical trials at NIH's Clinical Center, is that agency staff cannot meet with patient groups or release newsletters or other information to recruit patients into trials. Another unknown is whether NIH researchers will still be allowed to submit papers to peer-reviewed journals.
That seems unnecessary at best.
arcticbull
None of this is necessary, that's the point.
johnnyanmac
>Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
I thought trump was bringing American jobs back? So far he's impacted thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2 days, and hasn't even made a plan for how to get americans hired.
(yes, a miniscule piece of me is enjoying how fast the Schedenfreude came. But still, I do mostly want to focus on fixing the country over pointing fingers).
chii
people who voted for trump is not going to change their mind based on evidence. They're essentially voting on faith, it's almost like a religion.
Dalewyn
Trump just mandated a legally binding and fundamental shift from equity-based hiring (eg: affirmative action, DEI, et al.) back to merit-based.
This by its very nature necessitates a temporary freeze on all human resources activites pending reviews to see if any as they currently stand violate equal opportunity guarantees and other requirements based on objective factors.
Personally, and I say this as a minority (Japanese-American male), I 300% approve of all this. People must be hired based on their character and capability, not because they happened to be born with the right skin color or sexual organs.
zzzeek
The point is to create chaos and panic so that , after a sufficient period of general suffering, the government can come back with a "solution to the problem" which is typically some vastly inferior approach with heavy privatization and corruption built in, but as the stakeholders are desperate for relief they have no choice but to accept.
This is how you tear the government down and replace it with corrupt oligarchic interests
CuriouslyC
Joke's on them, they're just going to hasten a revolution.
philipov
Now let's go break some windows!
monero-xmr
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tptacek
The replication crisis stuff is mostly a message board fixation. The problem we have is that people unfamiliar with the field don't have a sense of what the denominator is, only the numerator. There is a truly gargantuan amount of NIH-funded research happening; NIH funds over 30,000 PIs per year, and those grants cover years worth of research, most of which involve teams of 5-10 people.
I'm not saying research fraud doesn't matter or isn't worth the stories written about it. I'm saying that people commenting on it generally don't have any sense of its scale, and fill in some very weird blanks about it.
madhadron
Here speaks someone with no scientific training or knowledge of the NIH, public health, or how any of it operates.
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_DeadFred_
Wait until you learn about the first unscientific politicized traitor to Freedom in the USA. General George Washington, having survived smallpox himself, ordered the mass variolation (via inoculation, much more dangerous than a vaccine) of the Continental Army to protect troops from the disease, marking one of the first large-scale public health initiatives in American history.
light_hue_1
COVID was not a scientific crisis. It was an amazing success. We built and rolled out a vaccine in record time.
Science works. Amazingly well. We're making progress on cancer, on many disorders that used to kill or limit many people's lives.
Instead of actually looking at what science does for you constantly, every day, you prefer to attack people.
The result will be tragic. Realistically, your loved ones will die of heart disease or cancer. Sounds like a really smart move to not fund science that will save their lives. Much better to support Trump and save up for their funerals!
cruffle_duffle
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crooked-v
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khazhoux
People love that line, but is it true? The premise of this freeze --agree or not-- is that the U.S. Government spends too much.
Or are you suggesting that this is to get back at NIH because of Fauci?
Or, are you saying that Republicans hate cancer research, or...?
doomroot13
I think arcticbull is saying NIH is not necessary, essentially in favor of the freezes.
kurthr
Yeah, sounds right. Let's list the unnecessary drug treatments funded directly by NIH.
The treatment of HIV with AZT and other HAART drugs. AIDS is caused by "poppers" not HIV, duh!
Treatment of breast cancer and Myeloid Leukemia and with Herceptin and Imatinib. Fake cancers!
Vaccines for HPV and Corona viruses are useless, because horse de-wormers treat both! Also, they're not real because COVID and cervical cancer are harmless.
It's time to stop the insanity and realize that jade eggs in your bum are the real solution.
Other useless drugs funded by NIH: Depo-Provera, Taxol, L-DOPA, Propranolol, Tagamet, Embrel, Tamoxifen, Cyclosporin, Warfarin, Methotrexate, Hydrocortisone.
travisporter
Truly sad that I believed you were being genuine for a second
tptacek
They weren't saying the NIH was unnecessary, but since that thread got flagged, it's not easy to see their clarification.
dekhn
Some of these changes, if continued and expanded, will likely have long-term negative effects on the US's position in science. I have my issues with NIH but to fix NIH requires subtlety. This seems more designed to "punish those liberal researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_one%27s_nose_to_sp...
whyenot
This is surgery with a butter knife. It's going to cause a lot of unnecessary disruption and pain which could have been avoided with a more nuanced approach. What we are seeing with this and some of the new administration's other initiatives, is the abandonment of US soft power in the world.
dekhn
Huh, I like the way you phrased that: "abandonment of US soft power in the world". But I think there is also punitive aspect: they are intentionally "punishing" the people at NIH they perceive as being liberal and favoring other countries.
tired_and_awake
It's a good point. There is a target on the back of scientists who do research that is perceived as social science but is infact biology. Seems like they then construct myths of waste/corruption (just read this thread) and punish everyone.
gunian
the purge is real :)
duxup
I sometimes like to imagine if I was president ... how hard would it be to find someone in a given department who could lead it and know better than the communication restrictions as we have here.
Granted, I fear the folks in charge now DO know better and the side effects are intentional ... but I wonder if it would be possible to pick someone and get it reasonably right.
grahamj
Even if these idiots wanted subtlety they're too stupid to make it happen. They just want to do big, bold things but have no idea how to actually make anything better.
dekhn
I knew a guy who was the president of a co-op house at UC Berkeley (basically, a student-run housing system decoupled from the university). They had regular meetings and he described one of the challenges: while most people who came to the meetings just wanted to vote on measures to buy food and change policies, there was a subgroup that "just wanted to fuck shit up". You know, like during a protest there are always some people who go around doing unncessary damage to unrelated/innocent businesses. They just enjoy breaking things and enjoy making people mad.
It's not a perfect analogy but I see Trump and his cronies as a "fuck shit up" contingent- they seem to genuinely enjoy making their enemies unhappy by breaking things, regardless of the societal cost of their actions.
rUsHeYaFuBu
> Even more troubling to many researchers is a pause on study sections that many received word of today. Without such meetings, NIH cannot make research awards.
Cancer and many other topics of research will be hurt by this.
peppertree
The first pro-cancer administration in history.
jcgrillo
Second. They were just as anti-life the first time around just mercifully less competent.
duderific
I don't know if they are more competent now. There are just fewer people willing to push back, and few to no guardrails in place for when the leader doesn't adhere to the usual governmental and ethical norms.
PaulKeeble
Cancer, infectious diseases, brain disorders, HIV and the RECOVER programme for Long Covid. All have significant NIH funding and will be halted by this.
Lots of smaller funded conditions as well, the NIH does a lot both from a clinical research and a public health perspective.
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frob
All scientific communication must be reviewed by the incoming administration to make sure the findings are in line with their predetermined view. Any another conclusion is fake news.
xdennis
I don't know what role NIH played in the Covid response, but if they carry some responsibility for the previous administration's decision to force/coerce people to take the vaccine against their will then it seems fair that the new administration should hold them to account.
nothrowaways
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Johanx64
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dylan604
I reject the premise of your entire comment. Of course they can hide actual scientific data and replace it with their own version. They will tell anyone and everyone over and over that their version is the truth and people will believe it as such. They will also believe that anyone trying to dispute it is wrong and vilify them.
This has already happened in 1.0, and plenty of other examples of it from history. But one would have to crack open a history book to know about that, and the populace is trending to banning books rather than opening them.
Johanx64
Well, you see laws of physics and periodic table doesn't swap out every time there's a change in administration. Neither are field effect transistors swapped out for vacuum-tubes with a different ruling party.
That makes a pretty good first order approximation of what is and isn't scientific, and worth spending taxpayer dollar on.
Science isn't prescriptive (doesn't tell you what to do), it's descriptive. Prescriptions are policy and have nothing to do with science.
p_ing
> Of course they can hide actual scientific data and replace it with their own version.
They'll just break out the magic markers on all the dis-favorable weather reports.
nothrowaways
This seems more like a coup in developing countries as time goes by.
andrewstuart2
If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this. But it certainly looks like an authoritarian power transfer.
scarecrowbob
I am affected by this and I didn't vote for this. It's easy to say that "the American People" voted for this, but it's not correct to say that I am personally being affected by my bad choices.
I think the elections were "fair", for what its worth- I just don't agree that "fairness" makes me blame-worthy when I face the consequences of other folks actions.
freedomben
I agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO.
That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.
ch33zer
I 100% agree with what you said, but no one looks back and remembers the people who voted against Hitler, or says 'there were some good people in Nazi Germany'.
grahamj
All eligible voters are collectively responsible for the outcome of the election. You can't be proud of democracy if you won't shoulder the blame when it renders poor outcomes.
klipt
Elon Musk found that if you throw billions at getting our low propensity rural voters you can sway the election by enough percents.
nickff
Authoritarian power transfers usually involve (immediate) executions, or at least the imprisonment/exile of important people from the previous government/administration/regime, to stabilize the new regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Political_Surviva...
HumblyTossed
The Heritage Foundation (who is behind all this and has been at it since 1973), says that the transfer of power will be bloodless if we allow it to remain bloodless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/heritage-foun...
They've been telling us exactly what they're going to do ... and we just let it happen.
tshaddox
Presumably authoritarian regimes only execute/imprison/exile dissidents if they think it's necessary to eliminate opposition. An authoritarian regime which does not think there's much of a threat to opposition probably wouldn't bother.
groby_b
TBF, we're only on day 2. (I am 90% certain it won't come to that, but there's a 10% queasiness left that hasn't been ameliorated by the haphazard approach untethered from legality that we've seen so far)
gunian
that's the beauty of it all outright murders usually create resistance
this way the opposition is cleansed in a mini genocide as well as algorithmically in a decentralized manner so resistance can't form
the fourth reich is here :)
dekhn
I mean, it's pretty clear they want to sue Fauci and more. Attacking dedicated public servants working for the health of the country is going to have serious negative effects.
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swatcoder
> If you trust the election results, and I generally do because I have no proof otherwise, then the American people voted for this.
No, if you trust the election results, it's a legitimate election by defined process and there are no grounds to contest it.
But "The American people voted for this" is a distinct, strong, affirmative statement that doesn't hold.
The people that voted for this are the people that voted for it, and even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
rainsford
> ... even among the people who voted for the incoming administration (who only represent a third or so of eligible American voters and an even smaller share of American people), this isn't what many of them were voting for.
Yes it is. I understand the argument that this type of outcome wasn't their motivation for the ballot they cast. But it's also an entirely predictable outcome of their vote, which to me means this is exactly what they were voting in favor of happening.
I think one of the biggest issues with democracy in the US and probably democratic countries in general is infantilizing voters into being able to take credit for their intent rather than judging them based on the totality of the outcome of their choices. If you buy an Italian sports car because it's cool and your spouse is mad because it's also unreliable and can't fit your childrens' car seats, it's generally not considered a wise defense to say you only picked it based on the 0-60 time so it's not your fault it was less great by other metrics. Democracy would be a lot better off if we thought about voting the same way.
johnnyanmac
> this isn't what many of them were voting for.
So, Trump loses popularity over his original administration over lies and underdelivered promises, "we" vote him out. Then 4 years later we vote him back in?
At what point do we come and accept responsibility for falling for lies? And yes, there are in fact some people that voted against their best intertests because they fell into partisan politics; they still got their results, they just didn't read the fine print of the Devil's contract.
grahamj
Everyone's to blame - those who voted for this idiot and everyone else for not doing enough to stop it.
WesternWind
More eligible voters didn't vote for any candidate then for Trump or Harris.
Trump won a slim majority of the people who did choose to vote, but it's hardly an endorsement by a majority of Americans, much less the American people as a whole.
vkou
If this isn't what they were voting for, what did they think they were voting for? Did none of them believe that he would actually do the crazy shit he said he would? Did none of them pay attention to the insanity of his first term?
I have a simpler explanation: they all know what they were voting for, and none of them give a shit. It's the same as the mob cheering and applauding the sieg heil on Monday. They know it's deplorable and unamerican and they don't care. Because the only thing that matters is that their boy will stick it to the enemy.
UncleOxidant
Unfortunately, a good chunk of people who voted for him really didn't pay much attention beyond him promising to lower prices. But this is the electorate we have - a lot of them just can't be bothered with much detail as attention spans are short these days.
travisporter
No they listened about TikTok
paxys
Looking at history authoritarian power transfers usually start with a vote, or at least wide spread public support.
computerthings
If someone clicks on "click here to update your password" in a phishing email, are they choosing what actually happens, or what they thought would happen? Even if they should have known, and could have known, I think it's objectively true that they didn't.
johnnyanmac
it depends on the advancement of society to be honest. I wouldn't blame someone getting scammed in 2000 over a "Hot sexy singles in your area, click now!". I would 100% blame them in 2020+.
I don't know how far we've come in regards to email phishing to make a call on that.
derbOac
Americans also voted for their US Senators and Representatives.
It's funny how these discussions forget about that, which is part of the problem.
It's also worth remembering how the Trump campaign consistently denied Project 2025, and ridiculed those who suggested it was their agenda. Maybe it won't go there but so far it seems to be headed in that direction, and if so actively lying about your agenda raises questions about exactly what the American electorate was voting for.
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whyenot
I keep on thinking maybe it's time to move somewhere else. I'm a first generation American, so I'd just be doing what my parents did before me. The problem is, I have no idea what country I would move to.
int_19h
New Zealand is not the richest first world country, but when this global shitshow escalates into a major international war it'll probably be one of the safer places around.
marcus_holmes
I think most of the rest of the world is facing the same issues, just a few years behind the USA.
Except where the culture is completely different, e.g. East Asia. But they have different problems.
Australia is definitely facing the same problems and the same emerging far-right populist anti-immigration narrative as a result. Though to be fair, Australia has always had a pretty strong authoritarian populist far-right anti-immigration thing going on.
The one that has totally surprised me is Germany. Seeing them go down that same road again is genuinely shocking.
delichon
If you prefer the policies of the Democratic Party and have no special attachment here, then Canada or any European country is probably a level up for you.
d3nj4l
Except Pierre Poilievre is likely to become Prime Minister of Canada and is explicitly taking cues from Trump, so it's unlikely to be much different a few years from now.
CuriouslyC
Britain is great, you don't have to deal with another language and it's affordable.
ainiriand
Ireland.
phkahler
Hang in there, this is a long overdue correction. It's gonna over correct a bit, but then things should be better than before. The rhetoric of Trump being a dictator is way overblown. If this didn't happen we'd be heading toward bankruptcy around the time your kids grow up.
_DeadFred_
Considering the Republicans are the ones that weaponized debt in the 1980s with their policy to 'starve the beast' I don't see how Republicans are going to fix it. Unless you mean 'fix it' by shutting down those part of the government that they targeted in the 1980s?
thefreeman
right. because he did so much to reduce the deficit last time.
kristjansson
How did the deficit trend 2017-2019?
johnnyanmac
yes, he's just reassuring that we go bankrupt and have no kids by throwing half a trillion into AI. You complain about giving a trillion partially to people, and Trump is throwing all that, day one, into the richest corporations.
May as well speed to the inevitably cyberpunk future. Shame I'm not getting that cool cyborg arm.
kacesensitive
Ah yes the deficit which Republicans are famous for increasing will be fixed by... Trump? Ok.
generalizations
Remember what happened to Trump after his first term. He's extremely invested in making sure that he won't be raided/arrested/etc again at the end of this term.
The power structures that tried that the first time won't be here in 4 years...his personal freedom depends on it.
bitlax
Except it's not a coup and it's not a developing country but ok.
Drink some water.
austinjp
It is most assuredly a coup. It just took a few years rather than a few days.
1oooqooq
"just business as usual". i guess after you work hard to normalize these interventions on the thrid world, it becomes second nature here too.
grahamj
It's not developing anymore, that's for sure. Now it's devolving.
tptacek
Here's a really excellent piece on the guts of how NIH's processes work:
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/distinguishing-real-...
schmookeeg
I assume the NIH was singled out as some sort of vengeance for the CV19 response?
Hopefully they'll restore some semblance of order after the pound of flesh is theatrically exacted.
ericd
Sounds like it's happening in at least some other parts of the government, too. This order seems to have paused disbursement of even some already-committed funding:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unle...
"Sec. 7. Terminating the Green New Deal. (a) All agencies shall immediately pause the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (Public Law 117-169) or the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), including but not limited to funds for electric vehicle charging stations made available through the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, and shall review their processes, policies, and programs for issuing grants, loans, contracts, or any other financial disbursements of such appropriated funds for consistency with the law and the policy outlined in section 2 of this order. Within 90 days of the date of this order, all agency heads shall submit a report to the Director of the NEC and Director of OMB that details the findings of this review, including recommendations to enhance their alignment with the policy set forth in section 2. No funds identified in this subsection (a) shall be disbursed by a given agency until the Director of OMB and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy have determined that such disbursements are consistent with any review recommendations they have chosen to adopt."
fungiblecog
The USSR wasn't doomed by communism per se. it was doomed by prioritising ideology and politics over any other considerations. The US is now in the same doom-spiral.
travisporter
My issue is more with the CDC. Are there state institutions that can take up the slack locally? Asking for a friend with kids who wants to move to a place with a lower risk of getting measles
11101010001100
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trhway
My guess is what happening is influenced by and patterned after the Musk's Twitter initial period - getting rid of what Musk didn't like from the start, review and cuts/layoffs of what didn't pass the review.
With all the due respect to the science having been done at/with NIH, one can suspect that the bureaucracy there is out of control similar to what we see at academia. The huge sign that the things got really rotten is that NIH couldn't own its work in Wuhan on the coronavirus, and that Fauci needed preemptive pardon. So some dead tissue debriding seems to be in order.
174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l...
Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".
But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.