Anonymous Scientist

Multiple things are true here:

- Ezra whitewashed Kirk

- Winning elections matters; moral purity is good for pundits and philosophers and BSky warriors, but bad for everyone else

- Ezra's style of 500 words of pontification followed by a question is extremely annoying.

A second-order problem of the left's "trust the experts" refrain has been the rise of academic grifters.

The public will not be able to differentiate true experts from grifters.

For this reason and issues with "appeal to authority" logic, I think the "trust the experts" refrain was an error.

Director Bhattacharya is a liar. NIH staff oftern send emails to PIs telling them to remove specific words from grants. This is a fact.

Theresa and her brethren are legit heroes. I often feel in awe of their courage.

I want to agree with these guys but it is pretty 🙄 that they seem to have no hesitation about making my unfunded abstracts available to anyone

Some additional framing on the MYF tragedy:

And it’s about people around us — people we love, our neighbors, our friends, our children — who will never benefit from this knowledge because it was stolen from them.

They may die or suffer, and it needn’t have been the case.

It is a form of violence that Vought has inflicted on us all.

If I may add, it’s not just about our colleagues on these grants that should have been funded but were not. That is a shame but it is not the entire tragedy.

It’s also about the discoveries and wonderful things we may never know because this science was not done.

Imagine all the discoveries that will not be made.

Imagine the young scientists who will leave science, who won't make more discoveries in the future either.

We won't even know what we have lost.

Gerrymandering and the supreme court are the best examples. R's have a first mover and structural advantage in a way they can consolidate power even against broad democratic (small d) wishes.

It is an orthogonal and deeply insidious strategy vs just making a political case to try and win elections.

This is what I worry about most. Once you poison the well of trust that underpins the system, then what we really have is a game of political brinksmanship. And the R's have advantages in winning that because of demographics and because they frankly have no qualms destroying the country to "win"

Thank you for providing these figures/data and advocating on behalf of scientists.

Progress is not linear or assured. But this country can surprise us. Things are worse than I ever expected but I still have hope. Trump is like -8% in approval ratings. It is not a situation where we have a dictator with large-scale approval... yet

Ask Kevin Hall about this who was purged when he refused to change his science to align with this administrations ideology. Shameful.

There really is no nadir. God help us.

Yes I confirmed this by building a little model. In fact, it made me realize that, compared to status quo, the total number of grants awarded never catches up under a multiyear funding policy

No offense, but in the current environment, if you spoke to 1 PO, you really only know what 1 institute is doing -- or even just 1 branch of 1 institute. You cannot generalize and this is an error I see a lot of senior mentors making (not accusing you of this, but just want to mention it)

This is incorrect. The number of new grants next year (year 2 of MYF policy) would be ~70% of the number of new grants as would be expected.

The number of new grants does not catch up until year 4 and the total number of active grants does not catch up until year 5-6.

OK well there goes my hypothesis ;)

Maybe it is just admin variation. I’m sure it’s a shit show internally right now.

Yah and something else that is very clear is that there’s an incredible variation in the appetite of how far IC directors and officials will go toward appeasing the regime. Lorsch a good example. So maybe this explains why some institutes like NCI have so much more aggressively MYF’ed

Did your grant have a different start date?

I’ve seen that in the past, that I received an NOA but the start date is not for like a couple of week and the project does not get posted on RePOrTER until after the start date

Agree with you. My hope re: FY25 is that RePORTER is delayed a little bit and that more has gone out than is public. Not sure what you are seeing but my anecdotal experience is that GMS's are crazy active right now.

Giving clear orders while maintaining plausible deniability is a hallmark feature of mobsters. Which is what Trump and he cronies are fundamentally.

For me, the variation in MYF R01's across institutes suggests MYF is not a formal policy being disseminated by the White House or OMB. It is something else. It might just be what Memoli is telling them on Zoom calls, but it's not getting put in writing.

@drugmonkey.bsky.social is asking a different question. He is not asking about FY 26. He is asking under what specific mechanism or policy some institutes are pursing MYF in FY 25.

So MYF is just a shake-up of the NIH by Vought. "Nice institute you got there, be shame if something happened to it."

But he is a straight-up mobster who doesn't want to put it in writing.

UAB and NIH announce renewed partnership to advance health care after federal funding cuts This announcement follows UAB’s administration’s request for staff to reduce spending after the federal government cut $70 million from the health care system in April.

So is the NIH Director lying to Katie Britt's face at their UAB visit together?

"Bhattacharya mentioned that the federal funds allocated to NIH were delayed earlier this year, but assured that they are on track to be fully spent."

www.wvtm13.com/article/uab-...

We are witnessing pocket rescission of NIH.

It is even more infuriating because Gorsuch stole Merrick Garland's seat.

The law for them is not about justice or fairness, it is about applying their power. Nothing short of that.

"Law" as practiced by the Supreme Court's 6 members is just post-hoc justification for Republicans doing whatever the fuck they want.

I would have more respect for them if they just admitted it. Instead Gorsuch lectures district judges on the "law"