The Continuing Crisis, Part IX: Inside the NIH Now

Honestly it's odd and out-of-touch to be motivated by being "competitive with China". Who cares? If you are a normal US resident, you care about improving the lives of you and your community, not competing against some far-away nebulous group of people whom you have never met and will never interact with. All while big brother is telling you that those far-away strangers are somehow your enemies. It makes sense as a rhetorical way to motivate action, but it's rather simple, short-sighted, manipulative, and divorced from reality for 99% of people.

I also reject the notion that progress is a zero-sum game, that we have to "compete" at all, that there needs to be a winner and a loser here. We could just as well work with others to improve the lives of us and our communities. Why isn't the notion "cooperate with China to uplift all"? Perhaps releasing your models under a MIT license is actually the right move here that is in everyone's best interest, perhaps the US should be following their lead?

Yes of course.

The problem is what can be done? The usual arrangement of letter writing or donating and voting is just more of the same cycle.

I'm not by any means in favor of what's going on, but some steam has to be let out of the system. And the real problem is trust in our institutions. What can be done about that?

I've noticed on HN that any post involving less wholesome takes on the US admin and/or doge leadership become brigaded quite heavily with more lower quality discourse than the normal fare.

It's a really interesting phenomenon. And I'm kind of surprised the community allows it.

> Much too quiet here on HN on this post

This whole topic has been done to death on HN, and this post doesn't contribute much that hasn't already been discussed extensively. Science underpins technology, but we've had 2-3 DOGE-related topics pinned to the front page at a time nonstop since the inauguration and the subject is bleeding incessantly into every other submission on the site.

Rest assured you'll have another 500+ comment rage fest in the near future, probably this week. This one just doesn't have enough going to feed the rage spiral—it's pretty blase compared to the dosage we've worked ourselves up to.

>If you want to see the US rapidly lose its place in the tech world over the next decade, this is a great way to go about it.

Too late, unless DOGE is stopped now and Trump is impeached, the US will lose its lead in tech and health (pharma) and many other industries. Pure and simple. Already the smartest of the smart are leaving the US for Europe and probably China.

If this is allowed to continue, in 6 months to a year, the US will be isolated and a third rate economy. All it will have is a first class war machine, which will not bode well for the world.

If things go for much longer it'll be too late. In many ways it already is. Scientists I know are changing careers. Thinking of moving. Other countries are thinking about how they can take advantage of the brain drain. Even if things turn around today so much damage has been done already that it'll be felt for a long time.

How do we know what projects are worth funding? Anything that labels itself science? Is sociology science and basic research? Do we fund people instead of projects? How do you get in the group?

The oligarchs can’t stand to see a single dollar go to a legit purpose though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

> The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals, the need to find new ways to generate domestic capital, rising enthusiasm about the potential results mass mobilization might produce

Because, many autocrats do this, a recent example is the Cultural Revolution in China. It took 50 years and a lot of hard work for China to recover from that.

Destroying the educational system allows these people to consolidate and maintain power.

1. It’s about the culture wars and also “evening the score” against opponents of Trump and MAGA. The Trump administration seems to be hellbent on “sticking it” to people, groups, institutions, and even nations that opposed him. Scientists and academics in general are on his hit list. There has always been an anti-intellectual bent on American society, but never have I seen it weaponized like this. Moreover, it’s unlikely that such policies will face blowback among Trump’s voting base. There are conservative scientists and academics whose careers have been upended by these moves, but they are a minority, and there aren’t enough of them to significantly erode the GOP’s electability.

2. It’s also about power and control. “He who pays the piper calls the tune,” and Trump and his administration are reveling in their abilities to withhold federal dollars (paid for with the tax monies from all American taxpayers, Trump- and non-Trump voter alike) from targeted agencies and institutions unless they meet whatever diktats they demand.

It’s a scary time for science in America now. Science is already dealing with the “publish-or-perish” culture of academia, the fact that academics are pressured to raise recurrent streams of grant money in order to earn tenure, and the fact that industrial labs are increasingly driven by short-term business pursuits instead of longer-term, more speculative projects. These disruptive freezes of NIH and NSF funds, as well as the targeted attacks on universities such as Columbia and UPenn over culture war matters, are reckless and destructive. If this does not stop soon, this could set back American science and research for decades.

The biggest motivation IMO is just punishing universities. The first move cutting overhead costs made this pretty clear to me. It was a shrewd move: if you squint, and use no critical thinking, you could be convinced they’ll still fund science all the same but are forcing university bureaucracies to be more “efficient”. In practice it’s just a massive cut to research universities, cause they’re viewed as enemies of the current ascendant right.

The other thing, IMO, is that it’s admitting we have no longer have any aspiration to technical innovation. If the tech oligarchs actually depended on hiring “the best and brightest,” they’ve be fighting this tooth and nail. Instead, they’re perfectly happy to destroy the education pipeline because they no longer need to make good products. They’ve attained monopoly status: all they need are lobbyists and a good legal team, the quality of their product is irrelevant. (The only spot where they still seem to be competing is “AI”).

The two broad things I see are that academia has for years been claimed to be an extreme-left wing indoctrination complex, increasingly broadly targeted as things like climate change denial became Republican loyalty tests, and medicine became a special focus as anti-vaccination became a core belief. This works as a political ad telling people that they’re really hurting their enemies.

The other big goal is probably financial: they really want to give rich people tax cuts, and there’s no way to do that without cutting social programs like Medicaid which even their voters want left untouched. They appear to be continuing to claim that there is so much waste and fraud that they’ll be able to pay for it by cutting that, and hoping that people will be distracted until it’s too late. Based on the 2017 version, I’m expecting some kind of time-delay where the tax cuts kick in immediately but cuts aren’t forced until after some very “optimistic” growth predictions fail to materialize.

You’re making two big mistakes in that comparison. The obvious one is simply magnitude: people are losing funding for entire labs and research projects years in the making, which details careers and destroys capacity which will have to be rebuilt when America resumes funding research.

The second error is conflating the impact on research: losing a grant _prevents_ science from happening but those DEI changes were very minor additions to an existing research program. Doing outreach doesn’t harm science, and often helps the researcher improve their ability to communicate their work to non-specialists. Considering a wider range of students or employees similarly doesn’t hurt research: you still didn’t have to hire someone unqualified, but maybe you gave a chance to someone from a less-prestigious university. In some cases, it even made for better science: for example, medical and safety research being careful to include women in their experiment planning benefits half of the population.

PERHAPS, and bear with me here, I know it's gonna be a stretch...

Perhaps those scientists you think ought to have been protesting "DEI" had zero problems with it? Perhaps they actually supported it? Perhaps that "statistic they dredged up" was actually meaningful to them and their community? Nah, can't be that. Must be them simply hungry for cash. Not a desire to do research, just basic human greed. That's really all they're capable of, right?

Are you suggesting that NIH isn’t valuable to society? Or that the people fired with no justification deserve it because not enough scientists protested DEI grant requirements?

Just because scientists want to be paid doesn’t mean they aren’t worth having around.

Even if that was true, and as big a problem as you say it is, realign the incentives.

Don't rip the whole thing down and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Put it like this: if Trump was a Russian agent attempting to destroy America, what actions would he be doing differently to achieve that? Destroying basic scientific research would definitely be step in that direction, right?

You’re not wrong — I have my own experience in padding my work with DEI drivel to get a grant — but the solution isn’t to salt the earth