Johns Hopkins University slashes 2k jobs
99 comments
·March 14, 2025adityaathalye
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.
black_13
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neuronexmachina
I wonder how many deaths the USAID cuts will cause in the next decade. Congrats again to everyone who voted for this.
a_bonobo
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...
AdieuToLogic
> 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...
jsemrau
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.
readyplayernull
And pandemics.
drivingmenuts
Sadly, most of them don't care what happens to foreigners. Even more sadly, some of those same people are hoping for those deaths.
oldpersonintx
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aaron695
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epistasis
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.
chneu
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.
whatshisface
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.
clumsysmurf
> 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...
arcmechanica
There is no gain, only loss
jfengel
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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monero-xmr
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epistasis
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...
monero-xmr
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.
ManuelKiessling
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.
yummypaint
Having read this guy's other comments, he's definitely a liar engaging in bad faith. Don't waste your time on him
esalman
Your example is anecdotal and does not present the whole picture.
lmeyerov
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.
monero-xmr
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
senkora
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)
somenameforme
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...
derbOac
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.
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pkphilip
Why is this person's comment being downvotted?
lmeyerov
Because it's almost guaranteed to be a lie and they refuse to provide basic information that would clear it up.
mindslight
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}.
justanotheratom
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.
gunian
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EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.
kergonath
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.
DeathArrow
>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.
kergonath
> The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.
Why are you spewing inaccurate propaganda talking points if propaganda is bad?
epistasis
Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?
somenameforme
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...
dh2022
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.
SoftTalker
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.
cryptonector
Tough. Researchers will have to get good at it.
fisherjeff
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.
arcmechanica
Brilliant people should be unencumbered by admin tasks. Rare minds should be supported for the benefit of all.
madiator
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.
lmeyerov
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.
epistasis
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.
michaelhoney
The US government has opened the top of the body politic's skull and it's hacking out chunks of the soft matter inside.
whatever1
They can always protest! Oh wait they will be stripped of their rights, thrown to jail and / or get deported.
bell-cot
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.
readthenotes1
That's $400k a worker, or over $3M per worker in the US.
Not sure that adds up...
stevenbedrick
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.).
Brybry
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
epistasis
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.
ta988
Indirect costs and non-payroll costs (equipment, travel, etc)
virgildotcodes
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GuestFAUniverse
$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.
oneshtein
Actual salary is a fraction of that number. Science is expensive.
GuestFAUniverse
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.
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.