And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...
That so many people think like this is the underlying problem.
It's not "a general anti-science movement", it's about tight control, everything else is unimportant.
> directly hurt industries like pharma/etc
Not a problem if tight control is in place.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
What I feel to be a common denominator for Trump, Thiel/Musk, and MAGA types, is that they are the people who "otherwise wouldn't have been chosen" for one reason or another. I've had stupidly engaged in a pointless argument with MAGA type people on some anonymous forum, and what I slowly realized is that a lot of them fail to hide having an okay picture of the actual reality when absolutely cornered and pushed hard, with the caveat that the chances for them getting any win whatsoever by embracing some alternative, conspiracy, false narratives is above zero, whereas the same for not doing so is at very most zero. There have been news reports of Bill Gates and Elon Musk both having engaged in quite some reprehensible acts on some island, but Gates would still always come first on headlines whenever they would be in a photo together. This would be contrast to how media universally reports Musk throwing the Nazi salute(which is the worst I've seen in any media that unironically makes me wonder how a real neo nazi would pause, exhale, say "you know," and shut up in German on camera reviewing it), which do yield a bunch of single name headlines. They would not have a chance of getting dopamine hit standing straight on both feet and looking straight ahead uttering all the correct words. Destroying everything that gets in the way to end this their "suffering" seem like the goal to me.
I mean, there's a very succinct and less nice word for that group of people that begins with the letter in the middle of the logo under the crown for the Dutch royal airline, but that word doesn't feel like it captures the verticality of this phenomenon.
This is still many people, but only in that “many” is more than a “few.” It’s not the case that most people voted for Trump, or even most voters. Or even most phds who voted. 70% of phds who voted didn’t vote for Trump.
This is why they are facing political retribution. He is creating suffering for revenge, the national interest be damned. Trump is more interested in the credulous, easily manipulated, low knowledge and easily conned masses. Many high IQ tech and science people are them, but not most. There are probably a few that aren’t easily manipulated and are instead just self serving sociopaths buying influence and contracts - but compared to the scale of the nation, this is indeed a few.
1st, K-awards are specially meant to provide a funding path to support an early career scientist to continue in the field. Expecting that another team has already replicated the early work of a young scientist is not realistic. They are just starting out.
2nd. If you want replication, you got to fund replication. Researcher money doesn't appear out of nowhere, so make the decision, increase the science budget with a new replication budget.
3rd. Yes there is some fraud. Always has been. Is it more than before? Maybe? But unless you count paper mill journals that no serious scientist reads, it is much smaller than pop media makes it out to be.
Scientists are notorious for believing in things like observable reality, truth, scientific and academic integrity, etc. That puts them in opposition to the people currently running the US government — who absolutely do not want "experts" pointing-out the deficiencies in their policies and scams.
Ron Suskind's quote of a Bush2-era politician sums it up:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." [1]
Trump etc want to create a non-reality reality in which their grift and social engineering are so normal that they're unnoticed. Their contempt for, and dismantling of science, is part of that.
Destroying sources of truth is a long standing goal for those who want people to act against their own interest, and scientists are a source of truth. It's shrinking the pie so that the republican leadership can capture a much bigger slice of it.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
I think most people support them once the realize exactly what they are doing. How could you not when "They research treatments for diseases" is basically all they do.
The list is long. First and foremost, it's never a good idea to forget that wherever there's intelligence there's always also stupidity. Then it's generally good advice not to confuse intelligence for wisdom. And between this and very long lists of cognitive biases, there's always the good old "Fuck ya, got mine!" Rule of Acquisition to remember. Et cetera.
That said I question both your and grandparents choice to look at only people who chose to vote. 68% of people who could have voted against this did not - either actively supporting it with a vote or deciding that they didn't give a fuck if it happened by not voting. Every potential voter either knew or ought to have known the result of this election result...
And, many of my friends who were doing PHD they used to follow dems, but are now supporting republicans after they got citizenship....
Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.
These can be very transactional, they take your money and if they have a notional place of work (not so necessary in the era of WFH) you give them a broom closet somewhere as an "office" which they will never visit.
Or at the other end of the spectrum they try to actually be helpful, perhaps because they actually did want to do whatever it is you wrote on the hiring paperwork, and this might even be a productive relationship, at worst it's a distraction for anybody whose interest you've struggled to maintain and don't want to let go. Hey, go help uh, Doctor Frankenstein with his project to (checks notes) invent a new machine to replace Geese for some reason.
Given Apple's wealth I'd expect some mix of "Vanity Hires" and people who really are expected to do important strategic work for the $$$. As I described, to some extent you can't tell. If you've never heard of them, maybe that's just because you don't know their area of expertise, and equally even if they seem to be working their backside off, maybe they're just like that and Apple was astonished that they actually showed up and started working.
Lilia Cervantes was a few years into her career as an internal medicine physician at a Denver hospital when she lost a patient who had become a friend. Hilda was an undocumented Mexican immigrant with kidney disease who did not have health insurance and could only get dialysis weekly at emergency rooms. She died in 2014, leaving behind two young sons. Cervantes felt the injustice of her death. “I decided I needed to learn to do research,” she says.
Cervantes later won an early-career development grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that would pay enough of her salary that she could spend 75% of her time studying barriers to dialysis for Latino people. The grant also funded a small study within this group investigating whether meeting regularly with a community health worker could improve their health by spurring them to get the blood-cleaning procedure more often. The work helped Cervantes—now a professor at the University of Colorado—fall in love with clinical research.
But that grant mechanism will no longer fund trials, she learned at a May meeting of an NIH advisory board she sits on. She’s “devastated,” Cervantes says, noting that she is not speaking for that board or her university. “I’ve lost so much sleep.”
Some NIH staff are also alarmed by the move. “It cuts off a critical training pathway for clinical scientists,” a scarce part of the biomedical research workforce, says Jenna Norton, an NIH program officer who has protested many recent changes at the agency and is speaking in her personal capacity. But others argue the career development awards—NIH makes about 90 of these K grants each year—are not the best use of the agency’s budget, as they only provide enough funding for small, exploratory clinical studies that lack statistical power.
NIH this week announced the ban on clinical trial funding for K award recipients as part of an effort to simplify the grants meant to help early- and midcareer researchers who have mentors become independent investigators. Starting in July 2027, the awards can still be used to gain clinical trial experience in a study led by a mentor, but not to directly fund any clinical trials. The change is intended “to better align K awards with their primary purpose of career development,” the notice says. If a K recipient wants to run a trial, they must find other funding from NIH or sources such as foundations.
The agency is seeking input on “additional strategies” to support budding “scientists who can lead rigorous clinical trials,” the notice adds. Another notice seeks input on two options: a special type of clinical research grant that would be paired with a K award, which would still pay for the person’s salary and mentoring; or a two-stage award broken into a mentored portion, then a research grant. Both would allow new clinical investigators to conduct “studies with greater complexity, rigor, and statistical power,” the NIH press office said in response to a request for comment.
Some NIH observers remain concerned that jettisoning the K clinical trial awards is a mistake. Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s basic research institute (and former editor-in-chief of Science), has examined K grants made from 2010 to ’20 to see how many awardees went on to win an R01, the main type of NIH research grant. He found that about 23% later received an R01 for a clinical trial—more than twice the frequency as in the much larger group of nonclinical trial K awardees.
“If I were looking at this [program], I would be pretty close to dancing on the table that this was a huge success,” Berg says.
Berg also worries that marginalized groups and certain research topics may be disproportionately harmed. Almost two-thirds of those receiving the K clinical trial awards were women, and much of the funded research centered on studies on HIV, women, and behavioral research, according to a grant wording analysis conducted by Berg. Those areas “are all things that [President Donald Trump’s] administration is generally not very enthusiastic about,” he says.
Michael Lauer, who stepped down as NIH’s extramural research chief in early 2025, is among those who support the new NIH policy. He says the K clinical trial awards came up 10 years ago when NIH officials took steps to address what they described as too many “small, crappy clinical trials.” They changed standards for NIH trial funding in multiple ways but in the end left those particular K awards alone.
But Lauer’s glad to see them go now. Even small studies with human volunteers “should be directed by experienced people,” he says. In his field of heart disease, Laurer notes that he’s always advised early career researchers to get experience with the large, multiskilled teams that conduct major clinical studies and eventually move up to leading trials.
Cervantes responds that K awards still entail oversight by established investigators, but the type of research on getting proven treatments to patients that she conducted is done by smaller teams within real-world clinics and hospitals—not by the big clinical trial organizations Lauer has in mind. “My concern is that this [eliminating the awards] will lead to further attrition” from this part of the clinical researcher pipeline, she says.
NIH is taking comments on ways to support early-career clinical researchers until 30 September.