Nature has noticed that the United States is destroying its research infrastructure. The Trump administration is blocking research grants by hook and crook.
bout a month after Donald Trump took office as the 47th US president, almost all grant-review meetings remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget.
These review panels are suspended because the Trump administration has barred the agency from taking a key procedural step necessary to schedule them. This has caused an indefinite lapse in funding and led scientists to make difficult decisions about the future of their research programmes.
The Trump administration issued an order on 27 January freezing payment on all federal grants and loans, but lawsuits challenging its legality were filed soon after, placing the order on hold. The fact that payments still aren’t going out because Trump’s team has halted grant-review meetings is exploiting a “loophole” in the process, says Aaron Hoskins, an RNA biochemist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has had to reconsider hiring graduate students because of a frozen grant application. “It’s really quite nefarious.”
Getting a research grant has never been a process of pushing a button and the cash pops out. Writing grants is an arduous process, and after you submit it, the NIH brings in a large team of scientists from a relevant field to read them and review them and make comments and rate the proposal. It’s a big deal, and it’s not a process that can be bypassed. The trick they’re pulling is to prevent the NIH from scheduling review meetings, so the money is all bottled up. It’s devious and dishonest. Illegal, even.
Some legal scholars say this ‘backdoor’ approach to freezing funding is illegal. That’s because the US Constitution gives Congress, not the president or his team, the power to appropriate funds, says David Super, an administrative-law specialist at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC. Blocking “advisory-committee meetings that are legally required to make payments is no different in effect than simply refusing to sign contracts or issue checks”, he says.
My fellow Americans — we all remember those grade school civics classes, where we all learned about the tripartite division of powers, checks and balances, all that bullshit that Trump just ignores. Maybe we should try enforcing those principles?
How about marching on the state? Stand up for science!
March 7. We all need to get out there and make some noise. I can’t make it to the national event in DC, but there are local events all around the country, look up your nearest rally site. I’ll be in St Paul at noon that Friday!
Will I see you all there?
Oh, man! Fridays are so hard for me! Those are the days I volunteer at the vet clinic at the animal shelter! On the other hand, that is scientific endeavor, and Doc works with the vet school at Colorado State University on various experiments. Besides, I’ve made it my mission to attend as many protests as I can, and I’ll have somewhere to stay as my sister lives in Aurora (I have a restriction against driving after dark on my license, and it looks like the closest March for Science is in Denver). So, that’s two protests this week and two protests next week. I’m going to stop by Office Depot on my way home from my canine nosework class to pick up some posterboard. Bring it on!
You know who doesn’t remember any of that? I don’t have to spell it out here, but Elon Musk, an immigrant from apartheid South Africa who is somehow now in charge of dismantling the US government.
Musk had to pass the naturalization test so, yeah, he did have to memorize the Cliff Notes version. I’ve seen the material. It’s about the same level as a written drivers license test. He should not have made it to that step, at least not until explaining how he happened to be working illegally with a student visa intended to give him the privilege as a foreigner of attending Stanford. He obviously had no plan to study, since he dropped out without attending any classes. This is a clear case of visa fraud.
This is one of the things that sends me into a rage. I am pro-immigrant and pro-naturalization. I live and work with many permanent residents and naturalized citizens. (In fact, I’m married to one.) But Musk hasn’t acculturated himself to the US system of government. He clearly has no idea how it works and did not even grow up in an environment where he could have picked it up by osmosis. He is also way too arrogant to know this and intends to throw the constitution into “wood chipper” along with everything else that doesn’t fit his masturbatory libertarian fantasies.
Again, why is someone who never learned how to be an American citizen given unilateral power to destroy the country?
I agree with Barney Frank’s view on demonstrations and protests — they’re far less effective than lobbying your local representative. Mass calls and letter-writing campaigns would likely work much better in rousting the elected opposition to Trump than this would.
Naw.
He is just wrong here. Completely wrong.
Demonstrations with people in the streets scare the ruling classes silly.
Because it means they are losing control of the population.
That is why they often try to crack down on protests with state sponsored violence.
They call out the police and sometimes the National Guard here in the USA.
I’ve seen it myself, long ago growing up.
The numerous and growing demonstrations are a key reason why the Vietnam war ended. Even calling out the National Guard with their APCs didn’t stop them.
This is where I got my FBI file, that I consider one of my life’s major achievements.
That is how the USSR collapsed.
Demonstrations were illegal.
And people demonstrated anyway, until the Soviet government couldn’t stop them.
Same thing with East Germany and the Berlin wall.
Ukraine and the Maiden revolution.
Same thing with the Shah of Iran.
I knew an American oil worker who was there when the Shah fell.
He said every day, young men would dress up in funeral shrouds and dance in front of the soldiers.
The soldiers would shoot and kill them.
In the afternoon, the crowds had funerals.
The next day, young men would dress up in funeral shrouds, get killed, and buried.
And, one day the soldiers just decided they were sick of killing unarmed civilians, and refused to shoot anyone any more.
The Shah left a few days later.
Walter Solomon@3 People are writing letters and calling, as well as showing up at town halls. I agree that demonstrations and protests have limited effect, but they might at least alert those who would not otherwise be paying attention that we are in a state of crisis. They also could nudge news coverage away from NYT headlines like “Trump takes an aggressive approach with executive orders”, when the reality is that Trump is ignoring the constitutional separation of powers and attempting a coup. I mean, Trump and his goons are more honest about what they’re doing than the news media!
Finally, Barney Frank’s advice made sense when representative government still existed in the US. It does not give much guidance on how to respond to an autogolpe. A general strike could go a long way, though there would be hardship and possibly fatality. It is possible that massive and capricious firings will have the de facto effect of a government worker strike.
What I wonder is what happens when the Trump coup discovers it can’t get everything it wants by verbal bullying and really does have to apply state violence, not only against immigrants as it is already doing, but against anyone who continues to be a thorn in its side. Is there a case where an autocrat seizes power without violence? I know that’s Russ Vought’s dream (a “bloodless” revolution if the left accepts it spinelessly). I don’t think it is a likely outcome.
There is a large social and political literature on the role of nonviolent protests in creating social change.
I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole today.
Here is one article from the BBC on the subject.
This is a long article and I’m not going to copy the whole thing. Read it yourself if you want.
“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”
It takes a lot to get people out in the streets.
When enough people have had enough and do so, the ruling elites are scared silly and sometimes scared enough to just run away.
And, yeah, I’ll be out in the streets on March 7.
raven & paulBC
There’s also the possibility that if Trump feels threatened by this or another protest, he could order the National Guard, or some other force under his power, to open fire on protestors.
He requested this during the George Floyd protests after all. Fortunately that request was denied then. That may not be the case in the current climate.
If Trump orders peaceful protesters to be massacred he’ll lose any fig leaf of legitimacy his government has. Then he’ll be a tyrant out in the open and any and all means to get rid of him or his supporters will be fair play. Trump may be stupid enough to order it, but I think there’s still some semblance of brains left in the Trumplican government that they won’t go through with it.
He lost that already. In fact, he lost it January 6, 2021, long before taking control of the White House a second time.
Tiananmen Square was incredibly effective. So were Soviet actions to suppress revolution in Hungary and (what was then) Czechoslovakia. Americans aren’t any braver. We might be stupider or just unaccustomed to taking government seriously. That’s about the only thing in our favor. So I would say it’s a crap shoot what happens if and when Trump uses violence. It could backfire or it could work.
We need to find out where we stand. If it happens, it happens.
It’s critical information to determine how far down the USA will fall.
A lot of popular protests that succeeded such as the fall of the USSR, the fall of the Shah, the end of the Vietnam War (Kent state), and the Ukraine Maidan revolution were met with violence.
They were still successful.
FWIW, I’m expecting violence from the right wingnuts.
The only question is how much and when.
It’s already starting with a bomb threat from the Proud Little Boys.
raven@10
Yeah, that’s an important consideration. The US looks more like a failed state than a totalitarian government. Trump might not need to send in the National Guard at all, just muse out loud about who’s gonna rid him of those pesky protesters.
@PaulBC
Tiananmen was in fact very effective. The CCCP is still so scared about it that they are suppressing the very mention of it. They know their end might come as a result of such a protest, that’s why Xi was eventually forced to drop his draconic zero-CoViD policy after all. Hungary is a bit weird to mention since that required another country to basically invade and keep the lid on the population because the homegrown despots couldn’t.
AugustusVerger@12 My point was just that state suppression doesn’t necessarily backfire. Sure, the Soviet Union was “another country” but not a disinterested party, and they quashed any further revolution in Hungary for years to come. BTW, if we’re nitpicking, you mean CCP (Chinese Communist Party), not CCCP (the latter being the way the equivalent of USSR looks in Cyrillic).
Kevin Roberts’s (oops, not Russ Vought) threatening reference to a bloodless revolution “if the left allows it to be” shows that these goons are not prepared to lose. This is where it get’s frightening even though I am about as dismissive as any American. It is hard for me to conceive of the Trump coup arresting masses of people and disappearing some (except immigrants, which they are doing already.) If I was afraid, I’d shut up already, but I may just be naive and stupid.
It sounds great but it is told with survivor bias. “Then you are crushed.” is another potential outcome. Only time will tell which.
As I’ve pointed out before, not speaking up won’t make you more safe.
If anything it will make you less safe.
If you oppose the Trump fascists, you may well win.
We are the majority right now as his approval rating drops.
And, he didn’t even get a majority of the vote.
Or, worse case you might lose anyway. Who knows what the future will be?
But, if no one opposes them, then they inevitably win.
Then what?
We could end up like the US before 1865, North Korea, Iran, Syria, or the old USSR.
So much for playing it safe and trying to be obscure.
It’s a completely different scenario. A much stronger foreign nation invading to prop up an unpopular government is not the same as a local government successfully pacifying the population. As you can see, once the Soviet thugs were gone the Hungarians got rid of their communist government without problems. Should Trump ever be in a situation where an outright rebellion breaks out against him and he’s with the back to the wall, who’ll come to his aid? Russia? Doubtful.
You also mentioned the Prague Spring, but that was an entirely different scenario, that was the Soviet Union and several other Warsaw pact members invading to replace a government that wasn’t compliant enough with their overlord’s whims.
Kyle Rittenhouse already set the precedent that you can murder protesters and the judge won’t even let the prosecutor use the word “victim” to refer to your victims. That was before Trump pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists. So there are a lot of reasons to think that unless acquiescence to Trump continues, any effective reaction is likely to be met by violence, if not directly from government, from heavily armed private Americans. When I type that, I don’t really feel like I believe it, but if you apply the same reasoning you would to any other country in our circumstances, it seems inescapable.
I also don’t think that spineless acquiescence can continue either, only because there is already palpable harm to at least tens of thousands and probably millions of people who have previously had uneventful, comfortable lives and don’t consider oppression to be part of their normal experience. They are going to notice that something has changed.
AugustusVerger@15 Fair enough. Can we stick with Tiananmen Square as an analogy? It certainly ended any notion that economic liberalization was going to translate into political freedom. Xi’s mistake is that he is not content to suppress only political expression but wants to clamp down on economic and personal liberty as well.
The main reason it could fail in the US is that Americans for the most part don’t really have experience with an oppressive government, no matter what they say, and might just blunder along confused instead of getting in line. So communist China is probably not a good analogy. I would guess that the most violence will be private and not explicitly directed by the state.
I’m tempted to attend the DC rally. But, being all too familiar with NOVA traffic, I think the thing to do is get a room nearby and take the Metro into town.
I suspect Trump is just itching for an opportunity to call for some kind of national “emergency” so he can get his butt boy Hegseth to call out the regular army and take it to demonstrators. He almost managed it in 2020, but the generals weren’t going down that road. This time could be different. I suspect he’d have no trouble calling it an insurrection against the king and give the order for the bullets to fly.
Would that delegitimize him? In the eyes of some, but certainly not all. I recall watching a documentary on the Kent State shootings. One young college student who attended the demonstration came home and told her father what had happened. His reply was something to the effect, They should’ve shot them all. She looked at him, stunned. But, they would’ve shot me too! she said. He said nothing and turned away from her.
We still have that sort in this country. Under the cover of MAGA, they’ve been given license to reveal their deeply buried, cruelest selves.
Time you were out of there PZ.
I would still disagree because the Tiananmen example scared the bejeezus out fo the CCP to the point that they went for a “bread and circuses” approach regarding the wider population and China was actually somewhat amiable to live in (which included me for a while). It’s really only under Xi Jinping that the Chinese government has returned to more outright despotism but that was a creeping process so as to keep the frogs in the boiling water.
I would also like to mention that China has a long tradition of popular uprisings against despotic rule all the way back to the last kings of Shang 3000 years ago, so they actually know that they have to tread carefully. The Mandate of Heaven is not an empty principle even with the emperors gone.
@18 Yes and no. I remember Life magazine’s story on the Kent State shootings, yes I am that old. In a later issue, Life had reader’s letters about the story, and yes, there were many “shoot them all” letters. Yet a later issue had an unprecedented collection of reader’s letters by people who were appalled by the Kent State letters.
But no, Kent State is probably not an appropriate analogy. Protestors had been demonized in the popular imagination as traitors, Commie symps if not outright Commies. If America was in a life and death struggle with murderous dictatorships, and the Vietnam war was a legitimate part of that struggle, (as we were told), then anyone who was against the war, must be a murderous Commie too. Trump and his GOP apologists are doing their best to stigmatize all who appose Trump as radical leftists, horrible people. But most Americans are not stupid enough to fall for the lies of yet another politician. (I hope). Vietnam was a real war, Trump is just a blowhard, so demonization won’t be nearly as effective. Again, I hope.
… those grade school civics classes, where we all learned about the tripartite division of powers, checks and balances…
Aw, c’mon – the words “check” and “balance” do not appear even once in the Constitution!
/Mike Johnson
Just a quick side note about Tiananmen Square and the government’s crackdown: I remember reading somewhere that while security forces were all around the place the whole time, they didn’t get the order to move on the protesters until after they had decided to end the protest and voluntarily disperse. So it wasn’t the big protest rally itself that scared the government, it was the prospect of a protest movement choosing their own actions independent of the government.
[OT]
“I remember reading somewhere that while security forces were all around the place the whole time, they didn’t get the order to move on the protesters until after they had decided to end the protest and voluntarily disperse.”
That’s not supported by evidence, and seems kinda propagandistic.
Obs they were there the whole time, because it was Tiananmen Square.
But the point is, they didn’t actually leave after the decision.
Here:
“June 4 At about 1:00 a.m., the People’s Liberation Army finally reaches Tiananmen Square and waits for orders from the government. The soldiers have been told not to open fire, but they have also been told that they must clear the square by 6:00 a.m. — with no exceptions or delays. They make a final offer of amnesty if the few thousand remaining students will leave. About 4:00 a.m., student leaders put the matter to a vote: Leave the square, or stay and face the consequences. “It was clear to me that they stay votes were much, much, much stronger,” recalls eyewitness John Pomfret, who was near the students. “But Feng Congde, who was a student leader at the time, said, ‘The go’s have it.’” The students vacate the square under the gaze of thousands of soldiers.
Later that morning, some people — believed to be the parents of the student protestors — try to re-enter Tiananmen Square via Chang’an Boulevard. The soldiers order them to leave, and when they don’t, open fire, taking down dozens of people at a time. According to eyewitness accounts, the citizens seem not to believe the army is firing on them with real ammunition.
“[A]fter a little while, like 40 minutes, people would gather up their nerve again and would crawl back to the corner and start screaming at the soldiers, and then the commander would eventually give another signal … and they’d shoot more in the backs,” remembers journalist Jan Wong, who watched it all from her hotel room above the boulevard. “And this went on more than half a dozen times in the day.” When rescue workers try to approach the street to remove the wounded, they, too, are shot.
No one knows for certain how many people died over the two days. The Chinese Red Cross initially reported 2,600, then quickly retracted that figure under intense pressure from the government. The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.”
(https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/timeline-tiananmen-square/)
But the point is, they didn’t actually leave after the decision.
MY point was that the article I read (which I admit could be wrong, or misremembered since it was many years ago) had said Chinese forces had heard of a decision to disperse, and pre-emptively started firing on the protesters to prevent them from showing self-discipline and power over their own actions.
Easy enough to check, RB. I’ll leave it at that.
Anachronistic. That phrase should not be appearing on anything timestamped later than 5 November 2024.
They are still not quite mentally degenerate enough to not notice that Trump just cost them their job or that egg prices are only ever rising. Not quite idiocracy yet.
…and not too long after, voted in a fascist one.