My partner works in academic research. Morale is extremely low with many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.

This is generational damage being done. Most of these people will not want to work in the public sector again, or at least anytime soon. The next admin will have difficulty coming back from this. This is by design.

This happened in particle physics in the 90s. What you'll see is Europeans being hired in 20 years to fill all the positions, when the continent has LHC and the US doesn't. I think there was also a smaller, but also very significant setback at the start of the Bush Jr. era. We're stuck in a vicious cycle where every cancer researcher votes for the candidate they don't think will fire them, and then the other candidate tries to fire everyone who they know didn't vote for them.

> many people exiting the industry entirely because of the uncertainty.

It might be time to exit the US.

"Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university ... announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States."

https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-co...

There is no gain, only loss

There's plenty of gain: $4.5 trillion in reduced taxes.

Not for you, of course. But for other people. You should be happy for them. Maybe they'll trickle some down on you.

My wife is a pediatric cancer researcher at a major research hospital and literally nothing has changed for them, all the grants are the same and nothing is cut off. In fact they are hiring!

I wonder if the pain is not being distributed evenly? Perhaps the core, important science is unaffected and science of questionable value is being reduced

It probably depends on when the grant cycle was going to pay them. A month ago, all payments were stopped, illegally, until a court continued them. They may continue trying to cancel existing grants, and many politically motivated targets, say anybody at Colombia, are getting hit.

Last I heard all study sections are cancelled, hopefully they resume or there will be no more grants.

A friend just got back from a meeting at NIH on Monday and said that three people got up in the middle and left because NCI had cancelled all travel, so they couldn't continue their talks.

Pediatric cancer has lots of external funding from wealthy families that have been affected by pediatric cancer. My wife also works in pediatric cancer, but most of her funding has come from NCI in recent years rather than private donations. The payment from an existing contract to pay her lab was caught up in the several days of cancellation before being corrected by the courts.

Calling science of "questionable value" is at a minimum a questionable value judgement. Suggesting that the hits are due to somebody looking at the science and deciding "this is good value" is also a very questionable statement.

Moods are bad because the "fuck you" attitude of current management in trying to cut off payments, as well as statements about cutting two thirds of the science budget: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/white-house-budget-p...

Last year, my wife was flown into a beautiful American resort for a conference. It had a hosted a casino night where the top prize was $5000. There was much drinking and dancing, and to be frank the "conference" part of it was an afterthought. One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.

She has admitted she cannot understand the purpose of this, why it was funded, how the budget was deemed acceptable. To be honest, over the past decade she has attended many conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Austin to name some. The taxpayer dollars allocated to this seem quite suspicious. She doesn't understand why the data can't be presented over Zoom instead of a large conference center with such luxurious accommodations.

Waste is real, even in the sciences we all worship.

I have never heard of a scientific conference with a $5000 prize. Was it a private fundraising conference? Perhaps it was private clinicians? Scientific research conferences are far more austere, but conferences for medical doctors are often like that (they do not usually get paid out of grants).

What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.

> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.

Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?

Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.

If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.

Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.

You say "political" as if expressing any hesitation whatsoever about how our limited taxpayer dollars are spent is some sort of insane delusion. Maybe think about how the average taxpayer trying to make ends meet would see this.

A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical

You still didn’t name the conference

Why would I take any chance risking my wife's illustrious career on an internet forum? A career that supports maintenance and taxes on our historic mansion, multiple yearly vacations, our children's private school tuition, and our multiple monthly expensive restaurant meals? You surely must be joking!

Most universities do not contain sufficient capacity to host both the conference and the overnight stays of thousands of people. Even a major university would face significant disruption by hosting a conference, it is simply not built for it. Building venues at each university doesn’t make sense either because it doesn’t have 100% utilization.

Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.

Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.

Their point was fairly straightforward. Don't know why you are mischaracterizing it. They just said that it was weird that state driven budgets are used for splurging on a party, rather than using it purely for the "conference" part, i.e lunch+conference hall+utilities+special guest fees.

Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.

It is not the least bit established that state driven budgets are paying for this, that wasn't even in the comment. So making that assumption is not merited, much less telling me I should be taking it as evidence.

> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,

That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.

I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?

There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.

> I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to.

Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.

> Benefits of exchange of information

You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.

Agreed with others that not being willing to name any of these "many" events means it is likely nonsense and manipulative to bring up as it's impossible to shoot down. Likewise, name the cancer research institution who is not feeling the loss of NIH, NCI, VA, etc funding and collaborators.

Ironically, the one deceptive truth I can think of here is still worse than wrong. Big pharma does hold fancy events, including at conferences, as part of how they attract and fund drug trials. However, cutting basic cancer research and the people who do it means the only people who will be left are the big pharma party people that you seem to dislike.

As far as the institution it's very likely St. Judes. They took a ton of Trump money and have floors plastered with Trump family photos to play to their narcissism. St. Judes is also rolling in tons of private donations that most basic hard science would never ever receive. They are also extremely bad at data sharing and have a poor name in the pediatric cancer community for it, even though the amount of money they have collected makes it one of the better places to perform research. So it's likely that St. Judes is completely protected from all the cutoffs, but even if they got the same cutoffs the private money is highly insulating. But as I said, lots of other pediatric cancer researchers are able to live off of private donations in ways that others could only dream of, so any other similarly funded institution (which would be much smaller than St. Judes) would have similar protection. Private donations go to the areas where the donors care, rather than to the areas where the scientific community finds most promising. Nobody is going to get private donations to sequence the genome the first time or build the LHC.

I work in science, and it is definitely not normal. Doesn't sound like state funded. Likeky private/industrial sponsorship

Vague descriptions of wild partying and other "shameful" behavior at a taxpayer-funded scientific conference is a classic attack by conservatives aimed at discrediting, in this case, scientists.

Until you name the conference, I'm just going to label this as conservative bullshit.

That's because your wife works in medicine, not because she does science. The pharmaceutical industry spends enormous amounts of money to influence medical practicioners and researchers.

Actual academic conferences are very different. Budgets are much tighter than in medical conferences, or even in tech conferences. Academics usually have to adhere to the same rules and restrictions as government employees. For example, having wine and/or beer at the conference dinner sometimes depends on private sponsors, as government money cannot be used for alcoholic drinks.

Practically everything we take for granted today to be core, important science was considered science of questionable value if go back in time long enough.

Your example is anecdotal and does not present the whole picture.

Same but different.

I've been watching someone close to me have all their direct collaborators & senior mentors in cancer research across the top national labs (NIH, the top VAs, etc) be systematically fired and/or defunded. Pure R&D cancer researchers are typically on 'annually renewing contracts': think tenure-level principal investigators, not just lab techs/coordinators/programmers. They are all, by default, fired. The remaining senior cancer researchers with partial clinical duties might stay due to clinical duty exclusions, but they are still closing their cancer R&D lab portion because they have to fire all their staff specialists, cannot pay people, and cannot hire replacements. Each PI is basically a small business that got pieced together over years, so reestablishing them and their R&D programs performed by all their staff means many man-years of cancer research going down the tubes. The fraud, waste, and inefficiency is from the people lying about this.

It is pretty 1984. When they fired "powerpoint people", that meant clinical trial coordinators who, as part of coordinating cancer trials, need to convey information. They gutted teams running active cancer drug trials with sick people getting cancer drugs through them. "Oops." (And no, the "mistakes" have not been corrected".) Even when cancer research staff is externally funded by non-government sources, they're still being fired.

The university hospital + R&D side is a mess as well due to frozen funds, retroactive grant cancellations, well-performing grants not being renewed, review committees not looking at new grants, and even the program directors overseeing it all being fired. Imagine if you are a small business and your customers are not allowed to pay you - how would you plan your next 12 months? The result has been a slower version of the same thing. Universities and lab heads are firing trained staff and gutting future generations of new faculty & grad students. You can see this in the hiring freezes & job offer retractions, and less obvious, when openings are more about reshuffling internal staff.

The people who are less impacted are researchers essentially bought out by big pharmaceuticals to run their trials, those not performing cancer research, etc. Different people.

People aren't saying things because, until they're officially fired, federal law prohibits it. Even if they want to, they are busy trying to get their cancer research staff not fired, and do not want to put targets on the backs of people relying on them.

Anyways, next time you see or write nonsense like this, please remember you are being lied to about basic things like cancer research and medical care. By supporting them, you are likewise promoting harmful lies about cancer research and medical care.

No, your description of doomer destruction is non-factual. She works in the blue state, Ivy-league affiliated research hospital that is supposedly on the chopping block. We are not observing child cancer funding being eliminated even in the lion's den of leftism

> even in the lion's den of leftism

Interesting choice of words but it throws all the rest of your assessment into doubt.

Especially your idea that your wife's research is worthy and then all the rest is less worthy.

I think the academy is long overdue for a reckoning. The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.

The golden age of the academy is ending, and to pretend there is nothing to cut or make more efficient can only be the opinion of someone whose bread is buttered by the existing system

no biases detected

> The Assistants to the Assistant Vice Deans, the absurd grants in the soft sciences, the absurd increases in undergraduate tuition for degrees that make absolutely no sense.

None of this is related to research funding. Indeed, reducing spend on this could increase money available for research.

Fundamentally, the US has done well by investing in research (and by being a native English country), but it appears that's not something that the current government wants to continue.

And that's totally fine as a democratic decision, but don't pretend that this won't have economic consequences down the line.

Is your wife's research overdue for reckoning or nah?

Ah yes, the questionable value of checks notes reducing child and maternal mortality and providing HIV/AIDs treatment.

(That seems to be the primary mission of Jhpiego, where 90% of the layoffs occurred)

They've removed this [1] page from their site, but it's quite relevant. The main reason funding is being cut is for things related to DEI, gender, and so forth. And it seems this organization was heavily involved in such, which means they may have seen a significant reduction to their funding, even if nothing but funding related to these issues was scrapped.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...

Why is this person's comment being downvotted?

Because it's almost guaranteed to be a lie and they refuse to provide basic information that would clear it up.

there is a mob mentality on HN where a certain group of people go burying dissenting opinion, because they can just downvote without posting a thoughtful response.

The insult about "worthwhile" research is a bit more negative than is usually tolerated on HN plus it is completely inaccurate as there has been zero assessment of worthwhile or not in these cuts.

True. As you can see I have been downvotted just for asking that question

Because most people have gotten sick of steelmanning the deliberate destruction of our country.

My own cutoff was June 2020. I figured Trump had to come around to accepting reality and leading by then. At the very least it would have made for a shoe-in second term. But nope! He really is that {retarded, xitter-addicted, foreign-controlled}.

This comment is an example why a reply should be required before allowing a downvote. HN members with the privilege to downvote seem to be simply burying anything that disagrees with their opinion bubble.

There were already several replies to this comment 20 minutes before you made your comment. There were no downvotes when I made my reply, and note that I can not downvote it because it was a reply to one of mine.

So everything not pediatric cancer research is of questionable value?

Of value to who exactly? Trump and Musk? RFK Jr?

mRNA vaccines seem pretty valuable to me, for example. They did to the Nobel committee.

Having read this guy's other comments, he's definitely a liar engaging in bad faith. Don't waste your time on him

nah white collar / academic locations are pro freedom albeit on paper or freedom non aryan sympathetic which makes the job of ministry of information slightly harder

shift power balance back to trades and construction feudal order restored aryan nation based supremacy back it was a good few years but pendulum gotta swing back some poor schmuck lost the games so bad lmao

its a feature not a bug :) downvotes incoming but yes i get the ministry of information packets abe lincoln freed the slaves china bad russia bad :)

No scientific researchers have been fired. Almost all of the terminations occurred within the international health aid nonprofit.

You have not been paying attention. No tenured researcher was. Plenty of post-docs were, the moment the grant money did not come through. If they have to resort to firing professors, the whole thing is neck-deep in shit. You need at least a decade for someone to end up there. If they leave, they will take their experience with them.

Also, there are things like this: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/03/umass-disbands-its-en...

This is a lost class. Do it for 4 years and you have a lost generation.

Plenty of PhD offers have been rescinded, and stipend cut.

We don't need more PhDs. People foolish enough to have sought a PhD will benefit as they are now limited to a master's degree, with which their career will be much better.

That is an incredibly short sighted view of the world.

>Every single economic analysis of NSF and NIH research funding that I have seen has shown economic return on investment from $2.5-$10 for every dollar of science spending.

But the academic institution didn't spend money on science. The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.

> The did spend money on propaganda and promoting ideology.

Why are you spewing inaccurate propaganda talking points if propaganda is bad?

Can you provide an example of this propaganda and ideology? Do you really think this is true?

It's generally pretty easy. Any time some organization's name comes up for cuts, just do a quick search + equity, gender, or various other buzzwords. It's always the same, because that's the reason the funding for these orgs is being cut. In this case here [1] is a page they removed.

It's difficult to find the breakdown of where the job cuts are going, but as only 247 of the jobs being terminated are in the US, it's suggestive that the cuts are weighted towards their international branch - jhpiego (which is where the above link is from).

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20240807150252/https://www.jhpie...

This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?

Propaganda doesn't mean something you have to disagree with or that is somehow wrong. Rights are a political and ideological component of a society, and trying to persuade other countries to adopt those social positions is most certainly propaganda.

Whatever you want to define it as, it is not science in any way, shape, or fashion. And funding intended to further science could certainly be far more well spent.

> This is the best you can come up with? Supporting women's rights is propaganda?

Is it hard science?