Get ready for the Resistance

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?

Am I one of the cool kids yet?

I had to go shopping to replace my sad, tired, old winter coat, and I got this.

I see that “Carhartt” logo all over stuff here in the midwest. Did it work? Am I fashionable now?

Oh no! I am not one of the cool kids. The neighbors next door (a house full of college kids) is warming up for something — probably a big party tonight — and are out on their deck and throwing firecrackers and woo-hooing. That’s fine, but I noticed what they’re wearing.

That’s from a company called GameBibs, and I guess that’s how students show school spirit nowadays, wearing overalls with stripes in the school colors. I looked over there and my first thought was that it must be National Clown Day, or something, but no. It’s just that I’m not cool. Not cool at all.

Physiognomy tells me this man is the village idiot

Niall Gooch is a very Christian man. He writes for the Spectator, a conservative British news weekly, but he also publishes in the Catholic Herald and in Premier Christianity. He must be a good Christian, right?

It’s amazing how much crime could be prevented by something as simple as a physiognomy check at the border.
Simple basic science, easily taught to everyone, we just refuse to use it.

Who needs evidence, trials, lawyers, and juries? Just break out the calipers.

But really, I haven’t seen anyone discussing physiognomy as an indicator of behavior in ages (I don’t read Quillette). OK, though, if it’s a simple science (not that Niall Gooch has any knowledge of science) and anyone can do it, let’s try it.

This is Niall Gooch.

Diagnosis, anyone?

I’m going to say…gormless dweeb, not very bright but with a lot of unfounded confidence, not to be trusted with information or the dissemination thereof, shouldn’t be allowed outside the border of a small village.

Honest, I inferred that entirely from his face, not all from the stupidity of what he writes.

The US has always had an anti-science core, anyway

Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.

I will never be nice to MAGA

Increasingly, I’m seeing stories about how Trump’s policies are going to actually hurt the people who voted for him.

I don’t care. We’re all feeling the pain now, and it’s not going to end soon, and it’s going to get worse. These people who voted for him deserve all the pain they experience, and I’m all for making them miserable about it for the rest of their lives. It looks like Rebecca Watson feels the same way.

I won’t forgive them. Every day of this horrific administration does greater damage to the country.

Did you know Trump is going to take over the US Postal Service? You know, the service many Americans use to vote? It’s going to be a wasteland here.

Courage is what we need

We’re not going to see any bravery from the Republican lickspittles. In private, they’re even admitting that they’re trembling in fear.

Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.

According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about “credible death threats” when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. (When asked for comment for this story, a spokesperson for Tillis said it was false that the senator had recommended the book in that capacity. The FBI said it had no comment.)

Wow. Keep in mind that these are the boomer children of what they called “the greatest generation,” the sons and daughters of people who marched off to risk their lives fighting the Nazis, and now they’re hiding in terror from the Nazis running the country. What are they, the “weakest generation”? Their fathers were shot at and shelled and living under desperate conditions to fight off the fascist threat, and these people are whining that they might have to run against a well-funded opposition candidate. Oooh. Scary.

You want to see courage? Here’s Chris Kluwe standing up in court to protest the Trump regime by stating the truth.


MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.

Watch how brave the cops are to attack and tackle a man who threatened peaceful civic disobedience, scrambling madly to get at him. I’m not clear on what he was arrested for, but they sure were quick to take him away.

It’s also ridiculous that the city was discussing putting up a truly absurd plaque in the city library that said, “Magical, Alluring, Galvanizing, Adventurous,” four words that I would never associate with “MAGA”.

If you watch the video above to the end, you’ll also learn that the public is getting fed up with Democratic cowardice, too. Primary them all.

Bernie Sanders has a plan

Spoiler: it’s not much of a plan.

He points out the magnitude of the problem: Trump has the backing of billionaires, who are rushing to fund his every desire; he has the media under his control; he’s a master of the “big lie”; he does not believe in democracy, at all. That’s what we have to overcome.

What do we have? We have high aspirations and grand values.

Healthcare is a human right and must be available to all regardless of income.

Every worker in America is entitled to earn a decent income. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage and make it easier for workers to join unions.

We must have the best public educational system in the world, from childcare to vocational training, to graduate school – available to all.

We must address the housing crisis and build the millions of units of low-income and affordable housing that we desperately need.

We must create millions of good paying jobs as we lead the world in combating the existential threat of climate change.

We must abolish all forms of bigotry.

Great! But I’m 3/4 of the way through his essay, and he hasn’t said how we will accomplish that. In the final few paragraphs, he gives us one goal: we have to defeat one particular and particularly significant bill.

In the coming weeks the Republicans in Congress will be bringing forward a major piece of legislation, a “reconciliation” bill, that encapsulates the value system of greed and their obedience to oligarchy. It is the economic essence of Trumpism.

At a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality, this legislation will provide trillions of dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in our country. It will make the rich even richer. At a time when the working class of this country is struggling to put food on the table and pay for housing, this legislation will make savage cuts to Medicaid, housing, nutrition, education and other basic needs. It will make the poor even poorer.

That’s it? Defeat this one bill? You know, I don’t get to vote on it, this legislation is entirely in the hands of the current crop of elected congresspeople, and we already know that a lot of them are spineless simps who will bow down before authority. I am confident my senators will oppose it, and that my representative is a terrible Republican MAGA-head who will support it. This is a plan that leaves me helpless, only pawn in game of life.

It also reflects a naive confidence in the rule of law. Trump is busy trampling over the Constitution, issuing executive orders that are both illegal and in defiance of all political norms, and we’re supposed to think that one political setback in congress will stop him? He doesn’t respect congress or democracy. The only thing that will stop him would be for the police/FBI/whatever to intervene, arrest him and his cronies, and lock them all up. We know that no one in government will have the spine to do what needs to be done.

But sure. I’ll tell my representatives to vote against the reconciliation bill. I hope it fails.

Now what do we do about the gutting of NSF and NIH, the dismantling of the parks service, the dissolution of the board of education, the selling out of Ukraine to Putin, the alienation of all of our allies in the world, and on and on and on?