Trump seems determined to shut down research, especially medical research. First he ordered a halt to all scientific research grants awarded by the NIH and NSF and the suspension of all grant review panels, a vital step in the whole process of awarding them. Then after a judge blocked that ban, Trump seems to have searched for a loophole to continue the ban. And he thinks he has found an obscure one, by forbidding notices of meetings to appear in the Federal Register, usually a formality.
The National Institutes of Health has stopped considering new grant applications, delaying decisions about how to spend millions of dollars on research into diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and allergies.
The freeze occurred because the Trump administration has blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held.
While that may seem arcane, the stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications, according to two people familiar with the situation, one of whom was not authorized to speak publicly and the other who feared retribution.
Already, the meeting freeze has stalled about 16,000 grant applications vying for around $1.5 billion in NIH funding, one of the people who is familiar with the grant-making process said.
Officials at the NIH hope to get the freeze on Federal Register notices lifted soon to avoid a severe funding disruption. With an annual budget of nearly $48 billion, the NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
All requests for NIH grants go through an intensive review process. Each year there are about 2,600 meetings involving some 28,000 scientists, doctors, administrators and other expert reviewers. Their decisions keep the NIH funding flowing to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools and other institutions.
But because of the freeze, “applications will come in and basically they go into a black hole and nothing can be done with them,” said the person familiar with the NIH grant-making process. “That is where we are now.”
Some Trumpers have proposed that the NIH budget for grants be given to the states as block grants. Block grants are a popular means for conservatives to deprive federal programs they do not like of funding. By giving that money to states, the states can repurpose it for other things and eventually cut the grants. That is what they have long been calling for with Medicaid (the federal health insurance program for poor people).
But what exactly is reason for this antipathy towards research in heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and allergies? You would think that such research would transcend ideological barriers. Perhaps Trump is angry with the medical research community because they did not support his quack remedies to treat Covid and this is his way of getting back at them. And given that he has made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. head of HHS, that would add to the animosity since Kennedy has also been criticized for his anti-vaccine, anti-science crackpottery.
Petty, no doubt, but this is the way these people roll.
“what exactly is reason for this antipathy towards research?”
Like most benightedly stupid bullies, hates and fears everyone he perceives as cleverer than him. Which for him is everybody.
#KKKrasnov is the kind of person who, in the words of a character in a William Gibson novel, doesn’t know shit about anything and hates everyone who does.
You would think that such research would transcend ideological barriers.
Yes, it does, but so does the Retrumplitarians’ hatred of such research. They absolutely despise expertise and professionalism, even when it’s on their side. That’s why #KKKrasnov can’t brag about Operation Warp Speed, and why Chris Christie couldn’t find the voice or the spine to stand up to Trump in 2016.
I thought it was cut all spending so that they could use that as tax cuts -- because some of their hardliners had refused to allow the tax cuts without corresponding spending cuts. I dont think they really care about the deficit but atleast some of them had made too much of a public show to quietly back out now -- and atleast for the medical research they assume the private industries will somehow get it done
But its also a show of power -- They need to compensate for likely some sexual failing (why cant they just buy a cybertruck ?)
I am very much in the trenches on this and it’s a shifting battlefield with lots of confusion going around. It isn’t just medical research, NSF is being targeted with speculation of a cut of 2/3 of its budget in the president’s budget proposal.
Cutting off research funding will devastate the US economy if the taps are off long enough. That might be the goal -- billionaires like Musk gained immense wealth during COVID, and they’ll be in an even better place to profit during turmoil when they control the guy who’s causing it.
But if Trump has as much control over federal funds as he thinks he does, he can wait for Republican governors to come beg for the taps to be turned back on just for their state. And if they grant the proper concessions, he’ll do it, letting some states collapse while others scrape by.
This situation indicates we’re facing an even worse fascist dystopian nightmare than anyone imagined. I wish this was just speculation or hyperbole, but it’s just what’s happening. The US will not survive this as the country we once knew.
Will they learn anything from it?
I’d like to think so.
That has been true many times in the history of the US. The US pre-Marshall Court was different than the US post-Marshall Court. The US pre-civil war was different than the US post-civil war. The US in the 1970’s was different than the US today.
But that does not necessarily mean despair. It is quite possible that once we are past these times we might be able to fill in some of the holes which Trump and the Fascists have exposed in our social systems. We also might not. But regardless of where we are in 20 years, it will be different than today. I hope we will create a better social system from the lessons we are learning now, but I’ve been wrong before. I was dead wrong from my prediction over a year ago that Trump would badly lose the election.
I wish I knew where the actual divide in ideology lies. I’ve been told it’s a young/old divide, a secular/religious divide, a racist/diverse divide, a men/women divide, a rural/urban divide, a working class/manager class divide, a empathetic/psychopathic divide, a poor/rich divide, an educated/ignorance divide, a capitalism/socialism divide, a fill in the box with an X or a Checkmark divide. (Okay, maybe not that last one.) Or is the whole divide thing a tool used by those in power to prevent citizens from trusting each other?