PhD moron asks why no one is talking about NIH cuts

Because the leopards hunger for your face, you dangerous intellectual.
Anti-intellectualism was fine with this well-educated moron - supported by him, even - until it affected him, it would seem.
- I struggle to refer to these people as intellectuals considering these people have multiple certificates to show but otherwise they do fuckall with their brain.
  
  I've recently seen them referred to as midwits. People just dangerous though to cause severe harm. Personally i think that's giving them too much credit, these days I'm inclined to believe there is no job you couldn't train a monkey to do and these monkeys were just persistent enough to be trained.
  
  Sophomores. Wise fools.
  The living demonstration of the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
  
  Racism in science is old news
- Ah the defining characteristic of the conservative, an absolute vaccuum of empathy

I really cannot fathom how anyone that has been paying the slightest bit of attention to anything they've been doing during their PhD could vote for Trump and his fascists.
They were very clear what they were going to do and that included cutting this support.
It's a huge assault on the sciences and Trump being in power and acting as king has already been impacting American researchers in hard sciences to the point where papers on physics and chemistry that are under peer review are requested by authors (and in some cases journals that should be investigated by COPE) to be substantially changed.
The censorship is incredibly wide ranging and these idiot PhDs don't seem to have woken up yet to how bad it is.
- As a PhD student you'd be surprised at how many stupid people are in here. I've heard of people talking about using holy water in mouse before experimenting because they are "possessed by devil", people talking about how "I'm a liberal but female president isn't going to be strong enough for our country" to their female colleagues, talked with people who told " they[gay people] should just get help" to a gay colleague because her bible says being gay is a sin, those are just extra fun examples, there's a lot more in daily life that after joining PhD I've become a lot skeptic of any research or paper people cite for something. Because lot's of people just write sentences first then search for papers that agrees, instead of doing actual literature review and learning about diverse view on the matter.
  
  I'm not surprised sadly - I have a PhD in chemistry and then continued to a postdoc and teaching before heading elsewhere. During my undergraduate there was a woman on the course who was very good and very competent but was also evangelical to the point of believing in a young Earth. To her, concepts such as half-lives were just lies that needed to be learnt.
  Normally that has been flushed out by the time of doing a PhD, but if not it really should be.
  
  r our country” to their female colleagues, talked with people who told " they[gay people] should just get help" to a gay colleague because her bible says being gay is a sin, those are just extra fun examples, there’s a lot more in daily life that after joining PhD I’ve become a lot skeptic of any research or paper people cite for something. Because lot’s of people just write sentences first then search for papers that agrees, instead of doing actual literature review and learning about diverse view on the matter.
  You're in the wrong institution, LOL
- Woken? You trying to make them woke?
- TBF not all conservatives voted for trump.
  
  Kinda totally past the point of caring about that distinction tbh. We're seeing where conservatism leads and it's abhorrent for anyone with a mild sense of decency that cares a shred about science and a world with even a hint of equality and acceptance.

TL;DR: this isn't stupidity unraveling. It's the Oligarchic takeover of academia and science
It's cute that the post assumes ignorance. We are way past the Hanlon's razor phase. Cutting indirects is a way to punch $10-100M holes into elite universities' budgets overnight, sow fear and render them financially vulnerable. The prestigious universities will be bailed out by private donations and boom, you have an unprecedented scale of oligarchic influence of leading academic institutions and academic research.
- It's the same playbook that they used for public schools, strip funding, let the school flounder, then they'll start asking "well what have these universities contributed lately? Why should we fund their research when they haven't discovered anything recently?"
  The only colleges that will stay standing will be the networking hubs for their rich sons to plot the best ways to ~~exploit the working class~~ get business and economics degrees.
  
  yup. Ironically, NIH grants lead to quite tangible discoveries, and institutions with the highest indirects (overhead funding) usually have proportionally higher rate of major discoveries. So the original poster isn't wrong about this hamstringing US biomedical research. On another thread someone proposed that Canada should have a grant-buyout brain drain program for refugees from US academia. It was actually a pretty smart one. The EU could also bank on this.

We do not get rich off of research. We are very educated and could make more in things like medical specialties. We do it to help others. This is not profit. This is not theft. It saves lives. It creates drugs, therapies, treatments, and cures.
You mean in a commie way? /s

A conservative scientist, that's a new one for me. It feels like an oxymoron.
- It's like the doctors and nurses who are antivax they are not oxymorons, they are fucking morons
  
  I still remember working for a medical office during the beginning of COVID and seeing MULTIPLE SURGEONS wear shit like masks that say "this mask does nothing", which makes me question their credentials or the crackerjack box they got their doctorate from.
  
  They can be both, can't they? Antivax doctors are also an oxymoron.
- Just a regular moron.
  Or a homophobe/racist.
- What kind of scientist do you think work for big pharma, Exxon Mobile or Raytheon? It certainly ain’t leftist scientists.
  
  I'm not surprised that a scientist votes for Trump, I don't think they're some kind of super intelligent superhumans. I'm surprised that a scientist self-describes as a conservative, because being a scientist is about discovering new things, while being a conservative is about everything staying the same.
  
  From personal experience working in DoD research, the amount of compartmentalization a lot of those people have drove me insane. I knew quite a few young earth creationists & fake moon landing believers when I was there. I definitely think a lot of those folks think that their military funding is safer under trump, and everyone outside of their field is a "corrupt leftist scientist"
  
  Mostly just normal people with families trying to make ends meet... Scientists aren't like cartoon mad scientists, my dude, they're just normal people with careers.
- Fear makes even smart people stupid. Political ideology is about bravery and hope, not science.

We really need to study why people believe conservative when they lie but disbelieve them when they tell the truth.
- "Because HER EMAIL! LOCK HER UP!"
  "Btw, prosecution against a political opponent is a witchhunt... FREE TRUMP!"
  "BACK THE BLUE"
  "Also, FUCK THE POLICE at the capitol building on Jan 6"
  🙄
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234
- Leaded water, brain injuries, or education that teaches them 1+1=3
- Some version of only hearing what they want to I guess?

https://old.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1il59ud/nih_cuts_why_no_discussion/
- OP:
  This is not money wasted. If they want to lower it, it needs to be done gradually to give universities time to adjust.
  What exactly about the orange blob made you think he would have a carefully measured plan to do literally ANYthing?
  These people are so fucking delusional-- they hear and see exactly what they want. Check out this galaxy brain:
  One of the things they are doing is identifying waste. I'm sure if enough researchers make a racket about this specific thing it will get attention.
  Oh yeah, I'm sure that'll happen. Dumpy responds so well to listening to what the plebes want. He'll get right on fixing a problem he created just as soon as he gets off the golf course. Aaaaany day now...

A lot of posts to that subreddit are thinly veiled cosplay to get conservatives to question their cult.
They usually slip in during the first few hours/weeks of a new Trump disaster before their mods/subscribers have a chance to review marching orders from Fox and start removing/downvoting accordingly.

I have a PhD, I work in biotech and have been working on obtaining state and federal grants with University Minnesota. Indirects are like 55-60% for land grant institutions that don't have to pay for the property they operate on, additionally they have nearly 40k undergrads paying 17-38k a year in tuition. So the scope of the research and the staff we can budget for comes from the 40-45% remaining, this includes funding techs, post docs, and the personnel that directly run the projects.
No I didn't vote for these fools, and exponentially more damage than good is coming, and I'm good friends with postdocs who are getting screwed in real time by this nonsense.

Nobody ask industry how much they crib (read: steal) from publically funded research.
- Why leave us hanging? Go on...
  
  Drug companies largely use pathways discovered by academic research (which is much more trial and error) as targets for pharmaceuticals. "Steal" is a bit of a strong word, but they are okay with paying students and post-docs starvation wages. Essentially, it's privatizing profits and publicizing losses.

We discussed it thoroughly when they laid out the plan to dismantle the country and make it a dictatorship hyper capitalist stigh. You chose that option, presumably because so many are uneducated swines and future billionaires

[Scene opens on a wide, desolate savanna at dusk. The camera slowly pans over a leopard lying under a tree, its large body barely able to move. The sun is setting, casting a cold, dim light over the scene. Soft wind rustles through the dry grass. The leopard’s eyes are dull, its breathing labored.]
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Narrator: Overfed and unable to move, these leopards have been left to a slow, painful existence. They can no longer hunt their prey, no longer climb the trees to escape danger, no longer feel the thrill of the chase. They are trapped in their own bodies.
[Cue the soft, mournful opening chords of "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan. The camera slowly pans over a third leopard, sluggishly trying to rise, but its massive weight prevents it from standing. It lets out a heavy sigh, its once-strong legs buckling beneath it.]
Narrator: They are the forgotten victims of a world that has abandoned them. Too fat to run, too weak to fight... These leopards are slowly fading, one breath at a time. They need your help.
[Cut to a shot of a leopard staring out over the savanna. The camera lingers on its face, eyes half-closed, its expression one of quiet resignation.]
Narrator: For just $3 a day, you can provide the care and support these leopards so desperately need. A donation will help give them the chance to live a life of dignity. Help them find their way back to the wild they were meant to roam.
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Maybe it's time to lead their scientists to Germany as payback for the brain drain directly after the war.

In all honesty though, 60%+ overheads from a university is incredibly high. To an extent that shows that there is a large amount of management and administrative staff not contributing directly to the work. I'm not in medicine, but in the EU projects I'm in only 0-25% of overheads are funded. Though, I can imagine medicine requiring more than the hard sciences.
- 60%+ is what it takes to lease buildings and pay salaries in NYC, Boston, SF, LA, etc. So, are you okay with wrecking science in those cities?
  Have you any concept of how many people would be suffering or dead if Boston’s scientists were flipping burgers instead of making discoveries?
  1st pig organ transplant. 1st anesthesia. 1st live donor organ transplant. GLP1 agonists. Enbrel. Gene editing. Human genome. All out of Boston. Off the top of my head.
  
  Leases would show as zero on the balance sheet if the government owned their own buildings. But of course someone decided that was "against the free market" so now the government cannot own anything in the name of "efficiency"
- I’m under the impression that the cuts are from ~30% to ~15%
  
  The cuts are from whatever to 15%. Typically, in expensive cities that are world-class scientific hubs, the indirect rate is over 60%.
- 60% makes sense when you consider something like LIGO, or other real-estate heavy physics experimentation grounds, like a neutrino detector.