This is a great initiative, but unfortunately looks very amateur and I'm not sure the scientists I know would take it seriously. Do they have anything like a website or even more official contact information?
Email readers only saw the original version of the post and not the updated version, so this confusion probably persists for many (potentially most) readers. I think that'll remain the case unless you send out an update in a new post (or as a note in one of the weekly thread posts or something).
Soapbox: This is among the reasons we really should have move passed email for things like this; RSS was and is well-suited to solving this kind of problem (publishing items to subscribers where the content itself may be updated) and it sucks that we-as-a-society basically abandoned that standard. (Ideally you want a mechanism to specifically notify only people who saw the original version, but if we could embrace the 20-year-old-very-simple-technology-that-solves-part-of-this-problem first that would be a good start).
As stated in the premise, anyone who is revealed to be spearheading this effort has legitimate fear of vicious retaliation by the most powerful man on the planet.
In an environment like that, resistance will necessarily look amateurish, disorganized, and anonymous much of the time, as it's very hard to coordinate a polished and centralized resistance without making your identity known.
We should be taking that fact into account when judging these things. Acting like we're not in extraordinary times, and asking one side to maintain the old standards of decorum and professionalism while the other side has dropped the mask and will destroy them for doing so, is not *just* an isolated demand for rigor. It's also a failure mode that can easily lead to a civilizational death spiral (read M: Son of the Century).
Scott, I love and admire you but I cannot support this. In fact, I suspect it is a joke.
It is poorly written, takes lazy and unserious swipes at RFK Jr. and by extention the entire Trump administration, in support of the demand to Give Us Money because Medical Research is Good.
I'm disappointed you would entertain this. I really think it is a parody.
Yeah, but it does come down to Give Us Money (Or Else The Chinese Will Get You).
Gosh, isn't it so convenient the Chinese are fully-applicable villains for *every* thing anyone wants money for? From AI to medical research, Give Us Money Or Else The Chinese is the go-to reasoning!
Dear government of my nation:
Please give me a large lump sum deposit to my bank account or else some Chinese businessman in Chongqing is gonna earn way more than me and we can't let the Chinese beat us on the wage gap!
Gratefully anticipating the dosh,
Deiseach
EDIT: I think they'd do way better with concrete examples like "Ozempic came from Denmark and is now worth $22 billion in the American market. That should have been a US pharmaceutical company. Invest in medical research here so the next Ozempic doesn't belong to foreigners".
Someone can correct me on the history, but my understanding is that public funding of scientific research increased significantly following WWII because it turns out that science, even basic science, is actually very useful when conducting a modern war (Churchill called it the war of wizards if I recall correctly). Now, the US enjoys such military superiority over the rest of the world that I think they can significantly scale back scientific research for a number of years before they notice anything on that front, and even after the Chinese catch up they can absolutely learn on the job during WWIII just as they did during WWII, but the Chinese catching up if you don't outspend them in scientific research is definitely a real thing.
The thing is that you can't predict what research will be used in a future technology. In mathematics, mathematical logic was often the butt of the joke because of how useless it is. Now AI uses it in reasoning models. It really is extremely hard to predict. I won't try to write amateur science fiction to speculate what medical research will have military applications tomorrow.
The above commenter takes offense at “Give Us Money because Medical Research is Good”. You take offense at “Medical Research is Good, China is Doing It, We Should Too, Give Us Money”. I’m at a loss as to what substantiation of the request to release the already budgeted funding the commentariat would gracefully allow.
Not necessarily. Your loved ones might die regardless.
The reducto ad absurdum highlights the problem with this argument: to reduce the most amount of deaths, we should give all money everywhere to medical research. But we don’t, because at some point the marginal dollar on medical research will save fewer lives than that dollar being spent elsewhere. That boundary is difficult to find, and it is unclear whether we have crossed it. Certainly it is the case that too much money, poorly applied, leads to undesirable entrenched power structures that serve their own continuance rather than the original goal.
So the blanket request for more money in all areas is not terribly appealing. That being said, the current administration does not appear to have good judgement about allocation in any case, so perhaps burning money in stupid ways is the price of getting enough money to the few good programs that need it.
It's because "Or Else China" is the go-to for everything and I'm not convinced it's a good faith argument. Sometimes it seems to be the equivalent of "please let me push my granny down the stairs! if you don't, China will do it first, and we don't want China to win, do we?"
I've read some version of "if you don't let us do this, then China will..." for years now, and the resultant "okay, go ahead and do it" has neither resulted in any benefits, nor has it stopped China from "China will...".
The current admin's standard is that it's absolutely worth burning trillions of dollars bc it could maybe possibly some day weaken China.
So, yeah, if there is any argument that could sway them, it's the "Or else China" argument.
As an aside, I suspect if they made any different argument, from the inherent worthiness of carving reality at its knees to the sky-high ROI to disabled kids getting a chance at life, you'd probably have posted the same cheap sarcasm about them being out-of-touch dwellers of the ivory tower with no understanding of the Red Tribe, so...
I went and opened every hyperlink Scott had and searched for "rfk" and "kennedy" and got no hits.
The letter itself is a very "let's go America, let's not let China win" letter.
*EDIT* The letter's been edited. Was it just a first draft that was publicized? Was there any effort to run it by a small group of people before releasing to the public? If I signed before the edits then what? Geeze.
Was the letter edited, or are you noticing that I edited the text they sent me explaining the letter, after everyone got confused and thought it was the actual letter?
No I was reacting to the removal of the swipe at RFK.
I was all indignant at the thread OP for hallucinating something that didn't exist. Then I realized I was wrong and he was right.
Why would they think that's a good idea to include in their material? Maybe it was meant to be private. Why would you think it's a good to pass it on?
The context was telling me was that the post was quoting an excerpt from the letter. I read through it, and then later clicked to the letter and saw similar sentences. Then I found the original description.
Maybe because RFK Jr is a conspiracy theorist who constantly endorses evidence-free pseudoscientific ideas, who runs directly in the face of the scientifically established facts about topics like vaccine's and many essential medicines, and who embodies everything that is the opposite of what rationalist movement has argued for?
Your characterization of RFK is undoubtedly accurate, and if the goal is point that out, then by all means include it. If the goal is to try to get the NIH to spend the money, well...more flies with honey than vinegar.
Yes RFK is fucking up everything. I have family members I worry about being able to stay on their medications they need to stay functional.
But the stated mission on this page was about seeking out doctors and scientists, especially in red states. That's what was said in version #1, maybe version #2 (I can't remember any more), but it's not in the current version. You can see the original in your email.
Someone once said "There are people in the world who seem to sincerely believe both that the New York Times is insufficiently hard on Donald Trump and that, were they harder, he’d be toast by now." A long list of how conservatives suck doesn't work. Yet another list of institutions saying Trump bad will accomplish nothing. We've already had scientists and mathematicians and all sorts of institutions describing, accurately, how bad these funding cuts are [1].
The actual letter deliberately leaves out talking about how much Trump or RFK sucks. Because they're trying to accomplish the mission of getting the $5 billion of funding dispersed. It's rah-rah America, let's roll, don't let China beat us to the ~~moon~~ cancer cure. It's trying to build a coalition for success.
RFK Jr is a charlatan. He embodies the worst aspects of "crunchy" culture, including pan conspiracism, constant claims of scientific fact that are not remotely justified by responsible evidence, an embrace of an entirely vague and unproductive preference for "the natural," and endorsing thoroughly discredited arguments such as about vaccines. He's not a serious figure and his ethos is entirely contrary to any preference for rationality and living life under the guidance of fact and evidence. He does not deserve kneejerk defending, especially here.
It didn't sound like anything remotely resembling "kneejerk defending" to me. It sounded like a pragmatic critique of whether "hey your guy sucks, now give us money" is effective persuasion. Everything you said is true and worth saying... unless perhaps you are trying to get the agency he controls to give you money.
(I didn't have a particularly negative reaction to the initial version, but I do think BRetty has a pretty valid point)
When something morally shouldn't be true, but empirically is, simply acting as if it isn't has a... mixed, at best, record of actually solving the problem.
Sad but true, people with money like having their egos stroked.
Indeed, all of us do. How likely are you to help out a family member or friend who rolls off a long spiel of all your faults, then ends with a demand for help because you owe them? versus the one who asks politely and refers to your good qualities?
You're correct, we should probably just resort directly to bribery, since all politics are the politics of begging the powerful instead of, you know, having a democracy.
I am really concerned by how unprepared a lot of Americans seem to be for surviving and pushing back under the conditions they are very sure their country is facing. There is definitely a time and place for standing rigidly in the open and daring anyone to come for you, but it’s not a great survival tactic if you’re facing a genuinely hostile state.
The state is hostile, but its not consolidated its power yet, and part of the way you stop that from happening is by pushing back against the narrative that the government is already some kind of monarchy.
It's been commonly observed that, if you judge by most U.S. progressives' demonstrated priorities instead of their rhetoric, most of them aren't really that worried that the country is becoming a dictatorship.
(My own view is basically "the odds are something like 5-10%, which is consistent with business probably continuing as usual, but nonetheless is way too high and smart to worry about".)
The opposition, however, seemingly has taken a "wait and see" approach. Give MAGA enough rope, and they will lose the next round of elections. Whether that's true or not, or whether that's actually the best strategy right now, is arguable, but it is a strategy.
But the point of such an open letter isn't to actually persuade them into going "oh good heavens I never realised I was wrong" and then doing the right thing on the merits of the argument in the letter; it's to be an accretion nucleus for opposition to the extant policy, by laying out arguments against the policy that might cause reasonable opponents to accrete by signing the letter.
(Also, good on ya Freddie. You're right, hear hear, keep up the good fight comrade.)
You are correct about what the point of the letter is. But will that be an effective strategy to get what they claim to want - the release of funding for medical research? Having six thousand people all going "march for science!" rather than three thousand may be more impressive, but how did all those marches work out? They've pretty much petered out, so far as I know, from all the attention and reporting they get now (as distinct from when the first one took place):
Of course it won't work - basically nothing will work to persuade an administration not to pursue its stated policy. But will anything work? Is there actually _any_ effective strategy here? The best we can ever achieve is that this kind of thing, while never actively changing policy, tends to put limits on what an administration is willing to do. The 2003 Iraq War protests didn't stop the Iraq War but I'm pretty happy to indulge the counterfactual that, without them, the conduct of it would have been even more bloody and indiscriminate.
Are you aware of any alternative strategies likely to yield a better outcome (that don't involve some kind of full-commitment guerilla struggle)?
>"Are you aware of any alternative strategies likely to yield a better outcome"
"Dear Mr. Trump. We the undersigned acknowledge the medical community's past role as a hub of left-wing partisans. We deeply regret this and commit to refocusing all of our efforts towards increasing the quality of care and improving patient outcomes through medical research. As a gesture of goodwill, we have persuaded the American Medical Association to drop its radical opposition to capital punishment, and are currently pushing drug manufacturers to resume supplier relations with state correctional departments."
Did anyone involved even consider something like this? Did it even cross their minds?
I wish there were some strategies I could recommend, but it's very difficult because most things seem to get settled with a combination of "a quiet word in the ear of the right person by the right people" and "yeah, looks like the voters won't wear this one, boss, maybe we need to pivot?"
Open Letters buy advertising space in traditional media, which are very happy to run them for much-needed revenue, and get some pundits discussing them on their own channels, but do they convince the great unwashed? I very much think not.
That's all true, but you're not going to persuade American (or any) government to give you more money by "your guy, who is the boss of us, is nuts and we hate him, now hand over the dough you promised us".
More flies with honey than with vinegar, yes? The only people that "Orange Man Bad, also his minions bad" is going to appeal to are *not* the ones with their hands on the purse strings. Do they want to show off how right-thinking they are, or do they want to achieve something? I've had to write obsequious letters to rich guys for funding when all my instincts were to say "give us the cash, you hoor!" but you gotta play the game.
To explain this comment: the first version of this post quoted this: "Even as RFK Jr. has learned to diagnose mitochondrial disorders by sight, his subordinates at the National Institutes of Health are stuck supporting medicine through the less magical method of spending money." This is neither Scott nor the text to be signed, but part of the 'background/explanation" offered by those who initiated the 'open letter to the NIH'.
I agree: 1. it is not helpful to make fun of silly RFK quotes - I assume there are not so few cases where a doc or a parent can say: 'sth. wrong with this kid' just by looking at them.
2. the "China" issue seems designed to appeal to MAGAs. Sounds less convincing to non-MAGAs. And I doubt the authors know how to convince MAGAs.
3. Five billion Dollars not spent do not "disappear", but lead to 5 billion dollar less deficit than expected.
4. I guess, spending the money on medical research as planned IS a good investment. (Reducing the FDA powers to keep people from buying the medicine/baby-food/ ... they want to buy might have even better results.) Me no medic and not in the US; if I were, I might sign.
In the private sector, joining an open letter criticizing your company's business strategy would probably also lead to being fired. Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left (like, say, to pick a completely random example, a private citizen being doxxed by the NYT).
A private company which performs poorly because the bosses aren't receptive to criticism can lose out to a different company which does a better job. Unfortunately, we Americans are all stuck with RFK Jr no matter how bad a job he does.
> A private company which performs poorly because the bosses aren't receptive to criticism can lose out to a different company which does a better job.
Replace "private company" with "country".
> Unfortunately, we Americans are all stuck with RFK Jr no matter how bad a job he does.
You don't have to stay an American. If you have something of value to offer another country, I'm sure they'll take you in.
The United States has been around since 1776, which is longer than any for-profit company here. If you follow Patri Friedman in comparing governments to countries, you must conclude that the barriers to entry are far higher and there is far less competition for customers (most of whom are born there and thus never made an active choice to "opt in").
> You don't have to stay an American. If you have something of value to offer another country, I'm sure they'll take you in.
I wouldn't be sure about the immigration systems of other countries. In the US the process is slow enough that RFK could easily be out of office by the time everything is in order.
Yes, that's what Scott's first link refers to. Some FEMA workers signed an open letter criticizing Trump's management of FEMA, and were put on leave (technically not "fired", I suppose). Mind you, Scott's misleading description makes it sound like the link is about Trump retaliating against private citizens, not people who literally work under him.
> Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left
This is very wrong. Trump and RFK have been engaging in politically-motivated firings, slander and lawfare to a degree that makes the height of the woke moral panic look insignificant.
Remember when the administration indiscriminately fired (and repeatedly slandered) over a hundred NSA employees for posting on a LGBT chatboard? When they fired over a hundred EPA employees for signing a letter critical of the admin's stance on climate change? When they fired dozens of FEMA workers for signing a letter criticizing the agency rolling back hurricane preparations? All of the firings, slanders and retaliatory investigations of people in law enforcement who were involved in prosecuting the Jan 5 rioters? The way Chris Krebs and others were purged and subjected to lawfare for arguing publicly that the 2020 election was fair? Earlier today when RFK got Trump to fire the CDC director for opposing his anti-vax policies?
I'm sure I could think of many more examples given time. The degree of retaliation for disagreement we're seeing in the administration is absolutely unprecedented. And I think it's happening more broadly in the MAGA movement as well- anyone who even mildly criticizes Trump is attacked, both rhetorically and often professionally.
I’m sorry but all of your examples are pretty much in line with what I’ve seen and experienced from private retaliation during the time of peak woke.
I have very little sympathy for people who argued for my rights to be taken away while loudly insisting they shouldn’t be held to the same standards and should get special privileges.
Ok, but beware of the Goomba fallacy. At least one of the people asking you to sign the open letter (Scott) has never argued for your rights to be taken away.
When that Google employee was fired for publishing a mild criticism of the company's stance on inequality, that was a bad thing. There were a number of other, similarly egregious examples- professors and others being unreasonably slandered, harassed and fired. Now, we're seeing thousands of similar injustices being perpetuated by the right every month. This is bad for the same reasons- injustice is unjust whether the victim supports Democrat or Republican politicians.
Becoming so molded by the engagement-maximizing social reinforcements of social media that you adopt a position of "the outgroup is so evil that they deserve any injustice" will twist you into the same kind of person you have rightly despised. You can and should hold yourself to a higher standard. You can recognize and oppose injustice consistently.
Principles like that aren't in vain. Only a few centuries ago, freedom of speech, of political assembly, even the freedom of ordinary people to travel to different cities to find other jobs, were all but unheard of. From an enormous amount of hard work and moral strength in the face of emotional incentives, social progress has occurred. And for all that terminally online populists like the wokescolds and the Trump loyalists have set back that effort, it can continue to occur. We or our descendants can build a culture where reasonable criticism is met with good-faith debate, and not with oppressive retaliation.
This is why principles are important: contributing to that centuries-long project requires moral commitment.
I do not follow this stuff closely enough to have a reliable opinion on which is/was more intense and frequent, but I want to point out one particular way in which the woke version was clearly worse: how inescapable it was. The people in the line of fire here are, roughly, federal employees and nobody else. The people in the line of fire back then were... basically everybody working for entities with any sort of public profile. The fact that an entire nation was suddenly being held captive by a tiny ideological sliver was a serious problem, in a way that government employee purges (that don't stray into the Soviet sense of the term) can't possibly reach.
Homer Simpson voice "only happened to public employees so far..." the idea that this administration won't target private critics once they have fully consolidated power and established a norm of retaliation is at the very least hyper optimistic. For that matter, if you are so sure the government won't target you for speech, try raising money for Palestine.
I'll start worrying if the administration pressures law firms to get rid of clients, threatens to get a corporate CEO fired but then buys 10% of it, deploys troops in west coast cities to "liberate" them, and orders the arrest and prosecution of flag burners.
Until then there's probably nothing that people who aren't Federal employees have to fear.
1 I suffered so other people which might have nothing to do with my suffering should suffer is not a good philosophy by any metric.
2 I am sorry to hear that you suffered private retaliation but it would be a mistake to assume that a private experience can be generalized to the wider pubblic, unless there is some better grounds to assume that at least the slim majority of this individuals were asking for something like this private reprisal can be, well private. Still unjust but not society wide damage.
3 Personally i would like to make the argument that on low level repression (compared to phsyical aggression) state controlled retaliation is more dangerous then private one for two reasons. Organizational capacity of the state and extensive reach.
This clearly shifts if the private retaliation is so uniformely accepted and severe that an innocent person can be harmed anywhere, but as long as that isn't the case state repression remains more dangerous.
Is there any room in your worldview for a principled defense of what is morally correct, independent of your personal relationship to the principles involved?
You don't have a right to employment. That's because in the US, labor law is such that an employer can let someone go with no warning and no reason. If you would like stronger labor laws, you should support pro-labor candidates.
Apparently, there were a few fairly tame discussions of polyamory and experiences of gender transition surgery, similar to what you'd see in any LGBT forum. The administration called these sexually inappropriate, which I think is pretextual- while there are work contexts where discussion of that sort of thing would be inappropriate, a company-provided chat group specifically for LGBT issues is pretty clearly not among them. The administration also strongly condemned discussions of pronouns in the chats, citing those as another reason for the firings- which is even more plainly ideological.
If some of the comments in that chat really were inappropriate, a reasonable response would have been for HR to lay out some guidelines about which LGBT issues would be appropriate for the LGBT board, and then impose consequences on specific individuals who violated those guidelines- probably starting with warnings, rather than immediate firing.
Instead, Tulsi Gabbard, the newly appointed NSA director, became aware of the chat group shortly after taking the office, was ideologically offended by discussions that took place before her tenure, and ordered the immediate firing of everyone who had posted anything in the chat, regardless of what was said individually.
There's room for disagreement on appropriateness as this is fundamentally a matter of opinion, but I know that I would NEVER dare to say things like that on a work system. And in my case there is not even a company policy against personal chats. For this particular system it's much different:
> According to an NSA press official, “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.”
I'd ask why the heck the NSA had a LGBT chatboard in the first place. Did they also have ones for fibre arts and cookery recipes? Work things should be for work and things outside of that should be outside of that. If the LGBT NSA employees had a private group on some other social media platform, then it wouldn't be any of the NSA's beeswax if they were "hit me up if you're polycurious" or whatever.
Scott's taking an admirably consistent ethical position, opposing petty retaliation in all its forms, whereas you're getting on your keyboard and typing out an *extremely* low quality comment. (Hoping my watered-down, factual language keeps me from getting banned.) There's no reason to your comment. I honestly wonder what you were thinking.
Do you have a substantive criticism of what I said? "Your comment sux" isn't much of a counterpoint. Maybe you could keep from being banned by debating rather than insulting.
Ok sure. There's a serious issue here. Medical research saves lives and does other good things for America. Dispute that if you will, but talk about what matters.
Do private citizens/companies with business before the administration have reasonable grounds to fear retaliation? Yes, hence the anonymous letter. If you believe their cause (medical funding) is good, you should support the letter. Please don't bring the woke left into this.
Well, Scott didn't make the case that "private citizens/companies with business before the administration have reasonable grounds to fear retaliation". Maybe it's true...? But his example was bad. And I do think this "matters", which is why I posted about it.
As for the topic that you think "matters", well, I do think medical research is a worthy thing for the government to spend money on. But that doesn't mean it's inherently good to throw $5 billion into a bin with "MEDKAL RESARCH" scrawled on it in crayon. The focus on "spending money" being a good in and of itself (no matter what it's spent on!) just sounds like classic government waste.
> Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left
Hey I'm working on it. https://thekoopaking.substack.com/p/the-next-democrat-president-must If you see "Deport Republicans Now" signs at the DNC and a few spicy headlines of President Newsom detaining the Republican politicians responsible for the AEA flights in Guantanamo Bay, then I'll have successfully changed the Democrat messaging apparatus to be less asleep-at-the-wheel and here's-my-strongly-worded-letter, and more reciprocate-rights-violations.
I'm not sure you understood my point, which was that for the last decade or more it has been far, far safer to criticize the Right (like you're doing now) than the Left. I certainly don't want the Left to get even more vindictive! I want less retaliation on all sides! But I don't consider "putting insubordinate employees on leave" to be an egregious violation of norms.
Well thank you for unilaterally disarming. Hopefully you'll stay just as principled when the next Democrat President publishes an EO titled "Addressing Risks From [your employer's company] LLC," revokes Liberty University's accreditation license, revokes Fox News's broadcast license, revokes the visas and green cards of anybody who's voted for or donated to the RNC, prevents vaccines from being distributed to anybody in a red county, and conditions all other federal aid on party support.
The post is too long to reply to in full but this part
>even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives still won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government
is just straightforwardly wrong these past 7 months, also doesn't take into account the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v United States incentivizing lawless conduct by the Executive and insulating the pardon power from criminal prosecution due to it being conclusively and preclusively in the purview of the Executive. Happy to address a direct point, but the current political meta is defined by 1) Committing crimes while in office and 2) Giving unconditional pardons to your admin to avoid future prosecution. Republicans will destroy the country with these 2 tactics if Democrats keep on saying "We'll finally restore normalcy when we win" and following norms that allow Republicans to commit crimes with impunity. This would just reward Republicans for violating the Constitution. Instead, they should use Republicans' tactics to punish them in reciprocation to gain leverage to fix this problem in the future. And if Republicans don't like this plan they could just... hold Trump accountable.
<Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left (like, say, to pick a completely random example, a private citizen being doxxed by the NYT)
Not a valid comparison to joining an open letter. Scott was not a member of a group criticizing the left, he was saying things in his own that offended some lefties.
I think the people currently clapping and hooting about how Trump is owning the libs by firing people at FEMA who whistleblow about it being run incompetently are the first people who will be calling for someone's blood when FEMA fails to respond to a disaster because it's being run incompetently.
MAGA has a lot of antipathy towards FEMA after employees were instructed not to help disaster victims with Trump yard signs after Hurricane Helene last year
Evidence that a single supervisor issued a directive for which they were fired. I suppose that's in line with your claim, although you certainly worded it in such a way as to suggest the directive came all the way from the top.
Also, I agree they should have been fired, but I would be interested to hear their side of the story. I can think of one reason why a supervisor might instruct Fema employees not to engage with people with a lot of MAGA signage thay isn't retaliatory, and it has to do with the fact that in the deepest most conspiratorial part of the Trump base, they think FEMA is a program for putting microchips in people's brains and other nonsense. Judging how much of the communication was around the need to de-escalate, its clear they were receiving a lot of push back from the locals, so perhaps the supervisor thought mistakenly that it was more important to avoid conflict than to inform people of their rights.
Which is just to say, whatever happened, acting like MAGA and conservative antipathy towards FEMA is a recent development is incorrect.
I fail to understand the antipathy towards an organization that actually fires an employee who committed a gross and illegal injustice towards MAGAs. What would be their standards of not feeling antipathy? Never hiring anyone who would try something like this? How?
The firing would mean something if they'd done it before Trump was elected, instead of waiting to see if they could get away with not doing the firing.
I continue to think they would be sad if there was a disaster that wasn't properly responded to. I know it sounds trivial, but I think this is a really fundamental point.
Some libs are mad because a police officer was racist - great, let's retaliate against police to own the cons, uh oh, now our cities are overrun with crime.
Some MAGAs are mad because public health officials promoted BLM, great, let's ban vaccines to own the libs, oops, now we all have preventable diseases.
Some libs are mad at Border Patrol because they put kids in cages, great, let's screw over border patrollers to own the cons, uh oh, now we're overrun by illegal immigrants.
Some MAGAs are mad because of a FEMA supervisor who discriminated against Trump supporters, great, let's gut FEMA to own the libs, aaaaah, now a hurricane destroyed our city and there's nobody to help.
Everyone feels great about how owned their opponents are, but vital services don't work and the country is falling apart.
Yeah, I agree with you. And if these firings turn out to impede FEMA’s ability to successfully carry out disaster relief, I will agree that they were short sighted and poorly implemented.
It seems to me though that high quality information is basically not a thing that the media provides any more, they have drunk their own #resistance Koolaid and criticise everything that Trump does as short sighted and poorly implemented. Even when he does obviously good things like create peace between India and Pakistan or between Azerbaijan and Armenia. (he’s just angling to win a Nobel Peace Prize!)
So is he retaliating against people who are competent but he personally dislikes, or is he getting political operatives out of a corrupt agency? Former is bad, latter is good. Media says he’s doing the former, Trump claims he’s doing the latter. The rest of us get on with our lives, wait and see, and hope things get better from here.
There's two things going on here. One, as you mentioned, is straight up retaliation:
> Some MAGAs are mad because public health officials promoted BLM, great, let's ban vaccines to own the libs
But there is a larger problem here that once public health agencies openly supported progressive causes it destroys their credibility on other things. The CDC made statements about the public health implications of BLM protests that were so ridiculous and unscientific that even the two digit IQ crowd could instantly see that they weren't true. So, while I agree that there is an "own the libs" component to it, I think there is a much larger crowd who thinks "cut their funding because they aren't really doing science anyway. They're just a bunch of progressive hacks." And then there is an even larger group who may have been strongly against public health agency cuts before, but are now ambivalent about it because they don't trust those agencies.
If you see them brazenly lie about the public health implications of BLM protests, how do you know that they aren't lying about the vaccines too? In my case and yours it's because we understand some of the science behind them, but this is maybe 5-10% of the public. And while I know that even at the height of the woke panic, probably 99% of what the CDC did was politically neutral and legitimate public health work (though the effectiveness can argued, it was at least honest and legitimate), it sure wasn't 99% of the public facing communications by their leadership.
I don't disagree with any of this, except possibly directionally about how much responsibility some form of conservatism should take for the fact that it can't understand that the CDC also does good things.
(I also think some form of liberalism bears some responsibility about some libs being memed into police not affecting crime, etc, etc, etc)
Yeah, I'm in a really weird position on this where I both completely disagree with the Republican actions here and yet I sympathize with them a lot more than the people getting hit.
I manage a budget at work and if I diverted 1% of that to my personal political opinions I would be fired immediately. And I consider not doing that so easy that I don't even have to think about it, so I have a hard time understanding why the public health agency leadership couldn't meet such a low bar. And where were the open letters and protests from the rank and file scientists when their leadership was issuing politically motivated and completely unscientific decrees back then? Where were the people in the room stating the obvious "hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this because we're supposed to be a neutral scientific agency" or even just the self interested "you know if we take sides in politics the other side is going to hit back, right".
It just feels like there is this sense of entitlement by the left that they should be able to run the government like their own personal fiefdom and use money taken out of my paycheck to advance their personal politics over the public interest. And I really don't know how to solve the problem because the fact remains that these agencies absolutely do critical work where scientific progress and the economy will suffer, and even people (it could be me) will die if it doesn't get done.
I think you’re giving the anti-public health Republicans too much credit. They are not against public health because of BLM, they are openly against it because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking the covid vaccines were a mass murder weapon. RFK himself openly holds this position and doesn’t mention BLM, and he is the face of a sizable movement
No, this is totally wrong. Trump's position is that he wants to shut down FEMA and "return it to the states," like the Department of Education. Before the election he was claiming that FEMA was trying to reposses your house, impound your car and refine the cobalt and other minerals inside it, and that the funds paid out were loans. After the Texas floods where FEMA took 72 hours to respond because Noem instituted a red tape policy that said she had to sign off on any approvals, Leavitt said everything was done perfectly and Trump said the flood was a once in 1000 years happening. Importantly, the entire right wing media apparatus is completely lockstep with this, and so are conservstive voters, which is why Trump's approval rating has dropped like 1 point despite all the fuck ups that are a direct result of his policies. Happy to source anything.
Also will just point out that conspiracy theories are a modus operandi when attacking the left, but the same group of people are oddly suspicious about multiple once in a lifetime events happening under Trump, especially his Epstein responses. This isn't because Republicans have a principled epistemology and they just know nothing fishy happens when Republicans are in charge, it's because they're enemies of civilization and should be treated as such in light of the past few months of insanity after years of Biden saying he would unite the country and restore normalcy.
"A private news organization published someone's personal information, and other private citizens acted in an immoral way due to that information. This is equivalent to the federal government -- which is the only institution that has a monopoly on violence, and can near unilaterally take away your freedoms -- acting like a second world dictatorship."
In what way is the leader of the executive branch exercising his authority over the people working in the executive branch "like a second world dictatorship"? This is not violent, and their freedoms remain, so the rest of your statement is a non sequitur.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the authority of the executive is only bounded by literal acts of violence or curtailment of freedoms. This is such an extreme position that it comes across as willfully abstruse rather than being grounded in a sincere desire to engage in productive conversation.
Wait, the idea that the President can fire federal employees is an "extreme position"? I'm struggling to understand how this comment could possibly make sense.
It actually wasn't clear at all that the intent of the constitution was for the President to have complete control over the executive branch, even though he led it. The President's powers are very specifically enumerated in the constitution and doesn't include things like "hires and fires every employee in the executive branch." In fact, every cabinet position is approved by congress, so in a sense every sub cabinet executive official is at least as beholden to congressional approval as presidential approval. The consolidation of presidential authority over the executive branch didn't happen until the Reorganization Act of 1939, and if you look at the debate around that bill, a lot of people felt at the time it was un-American for the President to be able to act in a CEO like manner.
Thanks for steelmanning the claim. I still don't particularly buy it (federal employees need to be accountable to _someone_, and making it the legislative branch seems to violate separation of powers). But at least this is a coherent explanation of what some of the people yelling at me think.
We left the constitution behind a long time ago. The executive branch as we know it today isn't remotely comparable to anything laid out in the constitution. The federal agencies under the control of the president act like a fourth branch of government which is unaccountable to either the president or congress and has no effective democratic control either.
So you think retaliating against critics is good? Or bad? It's unclear. If you think it's bad, stand against it. If you think it's good, what are you complaining about the (apparently homogenous) left for?
Or if you really meant to say it's okay to do bad things if it's out of spite--fuck that, that's the root of evil, grow up.
Sure, retaliating against critics would be bad if it were happening, but that's not what Scott linked to. And you know, I'd say a pretty decent test for whether critics are being silenced are whether you can go for one minute online without hearing one. We're, uh, rather far from that. People who hate everything Trump stands for are quite loudly, frequently, and exuberantly saying so.
At this point when someone argues so disingenuously my first thought is that it's one of those propaganda farms that stirs up anger for someone's geopolitical/financial benefit.
Anyway, for any regular humans reading, Snapdragon is pretending like we're talking about Soviet-style censorship where people can't vocalize their disagreement in public, when we're actually talking about retaliation against employees, agencies, universities, politicians, etc. cf all the threats of violence, deportation, withholding funding, firings, etc that have been all over the news in the last seven months (note that Scott did link to this, despite the weird claim that he didn't).
Stop stumping for the crowd (whoever you think you're complaining to about "Snapdragon" arguing "so disingenuously"). It's quite rude. As I've stated many other times in this thread, the "this" you claim Scott linked to is only the last outrage you listed: Trump fired (well, technically put on leave) employees he was in charge of. I don't consider this immoral, let alone a threat to free speech. Feel free to argue this point, like @Kamateur did above. Feel free to also shore up Scott's original claim that "people and groups with business before the administration" are at risk for criticizing the government.
When your critics are employees and "retaliating" is firing them that's a bit different. Since when do you have the right to criticize your boss and also the right to receive a paycheck from him?
For one thing it is obviously absurd to characterize the relationship between a federal agency employee and the president as "your boss" akin to the relationship between a person and their immediate boss. Pretending like those are the same does not win arguments; it only reveals how much you are not arguing in good faith.
Second, you do have that right, morally, and if someone criticized their boss because their boss did a bad thing and were fired for it, I would have the same complaints about that: the boss is wrong, not the employee; the boss should be better; an injustice has occurred. After all if the boss were a good person then they would encouraging, not insecure, about criticism.
1. So what, the peans over the guy fired from Google after very much criticizing his employer were all a "when I'm down, I ask for tolerance, because that's your principle, when I'm above, I oppress you because that's my principle"?
2. We hold the government to a very standard very different from private actors and for good reasons. Outside of some basically sacred documents (eg ledgers), a company can release or withhold whatever info they please. If a policeman did the same, it'd be a crime. If the DMV had the same sign of most bars, "we retain the right to refuse service", it'd be illegal and likely unconstitutional. This doubles of technical agencies like the Fed and the NIH whose impartiality is something *the entire private sector* relies on when making decisions. If you wanna argue for a Venezuela model, you'll need more convincing arguments than "but but but the Left"
Google was perfectly within its rights to fire that dude. That said, if I agree with what he wrote, I’ll lower my opinion of Google as an organisation correspondingly.
Except google is a private entity you can mostly choose not to buy from, or trust. The federal government is not an entity you can disengage from if you live in the US. And NIH research affects everyone, far beyond US borders
This. It is actually not acceptable to publicly criticise your boss. If you post on social media, or talk to the media, or sign an open letter about how much your boss sucks and their opinions and policies and visions for the company suck, you risk getting fired.
This is normal and appropriate. Most large organisations have official policies to this effect.
(Of course you can complain to your spouse or your friends at a party.)
As a quick sanity/principle check, of the people who are complaining that the Trump admin is doing this, how many of you also feel that Obama was in the wrong for firing General McChrystal after he criticised Obama’s foreign policy in Iraq?
I would like to note that Chrystal was fired because he was insulting VC Biden, interestingly enough Chrystal he endorsed for Biden in 2020 essentially saying that while they didn't see eye to eye he respects him.
That said yes, I do think Obama should have had thicker skin for this low level insults.
I contend that it absolutely ought to be acceptable to criticise your boss. If you believe in democracy and free speech and all that stuff, why should you make an exception for this? A truly free society of free* men and women would feel entirely open to criticise their bosses.
* I mean, assuming they still had bosses in this truly free society; but I'm thinking "Four Freedoms" free, not "utopian workers' paradise big rock candy mountain in the sky" free
Is this how it works in your country—Australia, I believe—when someone criticizes Sam Mostyn?
You can have an opinion on Trump, of course, but LARPing as an American feels dishonest. You write a *lot* here about how great you think the guy is, but don’t have a direct stake in the game.
Like Nicolle Kidman, dual citizenship? You use Australiian/British/Canadian spellings quite a bit.
You quote MLK as talking about the ‘colour’ - we spell it ‘color’ here - of their skin and say that Trump represents King’s values well.
I disagree. Not even the in the same zip code as King. I remember when the guy said he couldn’t get a fair shake from a judge because the judge’s parents were Mexican immigrants. The judge himself was born in Indiana.
Long time conservatives with actual spines and character left the Republican party at that point. If they didn’t leave voluntarily they were driven out by a petty little boy. You do remember ‘shithole’ countries don’t you?
I was alive when King was assassinated. I’m pretty sure he would be rethinking his whole ‘arc of human history bending toward justice’ idea with the current moral cretin that inhabits the White House. I think and am sure King would agree that Trump is an incredibly cruel and ignorant man.
I can see you take exception with my political opinions.
God bless you for that. You are an American, and free speech is your birthright, and never would I dream of telling you what you ought to believe.
I may not have your wisdom and life experience, but I have lived in a few different places. One of them is the USA. I have a deep love for the American people. In my experience, they are friendly, helpful, and never shy to tell you exactly what they think.
As you may know, the rest of the world has mixed feelings towards Americans. America as a country has historically used its power and influence in some ethically dubious ways, including toppling democratically elected leaders in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa to allow the US State Department more influence and give American companies access to resources. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America backed Yeltsin and plundered Russia’s resources, sending the country into economic catastrophe, until Vladimir Putin put a stop to it.
Sometimes people on the far left say that America (and the West in general) are evil and must be decolonized. (American spelling! I am doing my best!) While I understand this sentiment, I don’t agree with it. I think most Americans are good people and, as a Christian, I don’t wish suffering on anyone. Even if someone has committed crimes, they can still repent and be forgiven.
I think that the things America has done, also, do not reflect the values and ideals of the average American. I think they reflect the values and ideals of a small number of very powerful people, who use their influence on media and culture to ensure that the average American voter remains mostly oblivious to what they are up to. These people make up the “permanent bureaucracy” in Washington DC (or as Trump calls them the Deep State). They have historically had significant influence over both political parties.
However that changed when Donald Trump entered politics and unexpectedly won the 2016 election. Trump was never in politics and independently wealthy (so couldn’t be bribed) and threatened to “drain the swamp.” This caused a realignment.
It’s important to remember the reason Trump won the election. It was despite the Republican elite, which actively tried to hinder him. It was despite his obvious personal flaws.
In prosaic terms, it was because Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan - the “Rust Belt” - flipped red. Free trade agreements under Obama had destroyed manufacturing jobs in these areas and poor border control had flooded them with fentanyl. Trump promised to bring the jobs back from China and build the wall to keep out the fentanyl, and that’s what these voters wanted to hear. They didn’t care about his personal life.
In less prosaic terms, it’s because Americans had started to suffer like the rest of the world. Obama had promised hope and change and instead protected the billionaire class who hid their money in Panama, gotten millions of people hooked on opioids and caused the housing crisis. His former voters had started to feel like so many in the Third World - that their politicians only protected each other and the donor class and didn’t care about everyday Americans.
How right they were.
It’s popular to say these days “it’s not left versus right, it’s right versus wrong.” I actually agree with that statement, although perhaps not in the way the people who say it usually intend.
After all, in his first term Trump was badly outnumbered. The swamp was able to prevent him making any major policy headway. The media was able to convince enough Americans that he was a uniquely terrible person that they threw him out of office in 2020 hoping for a return to “normal.” They played clips out of context, they called him racist (Scott has an article debunking this - You Are Still Crying Wolf - for which he got more hate than anything else he’s written. Trump has more support from Blacks and Hispanics than any Republican candidate in the last 50 years.) He was investigated on invented connections to Russia, then impeached for asking for an investigation on someone - Hunter Biden - who had definitely committed crimes.
To be fair, as you point out, Trump also got himself in trouble by saying a bunch of really dumb s**t. Career politicians know that they have to watch every word they say. Trump does not do that. He also has a giant ego, has definitely groped women without their consent, and done some sketchy things in business.
All his supporters know this! We have known this for 10 years. But Clinton was an Epstein client, Bush lied about WMD to invade Iraq, and Obama had the American military arm and train Al Qaeda so they could destroy Syria in an ultimately failed bid to topple Assad. What do you think is worse? Do you see how media frames issues to get us arguing about things that don’t really matter?
(If you feel I post too much about Trump you are welcome to block me. In general I post when I feel I have something to say, a perspective that isn’t being fairly represented, and I do try and present it respectfully.)
From the past, we learn that any would be authoritarian government must control speech. This is true for both communists and fascists. In Soviet Russia, even family members could be informants against people criticizing the government.
This is the really alarming thing about the left’s monopoly on information that in my experience most leftists don’t fully realize.
In another thread, we debated FEMA and whether they deliberately withheld aid from Trump supporters. Your sources tell you that they only did so when there was legitimate threat to aid workers.
I don’t know! You might be right. I don’t have direct experience. But I was on MAGA Twitter during Hurricane Helene, and I remember seeing report after report of really terrible stuff - not only were FEMA deliberately skipping Trump houses, they were blocking people from outside bringing aid in. Elon got into a Twitter spat with Pete Buttigieg about this. A guy called Matt van Swol who lives in Western North Carolina abruptly turned from a lefty into a major MAGA influencer because he saw the extent of destruction first hand and how the first response of media was to cover it up. And I remember the ire directed at Majorkas when he told Americans FEMA had run out of money for hurricane survivors because they spent too much on illegal immigrants.
And story after story is like this. There was a lot of anger about Trump pardoning Jan 6 rioters. But read some of the rioters’ accounts sometime. Most of those arrested were non violent. An elderly lady was arrested for praying inside the Capitol. There are reports of judges refusing to allow exonerating evidence, long prison sentences for crimes that essentially amount to trespassing, random FBI raids with laptops and phones confiscated - even after release.
Might these people be lying, or might these posts be written by bots? Of course. But I have yet to see an article in the Atlantic or the New York Times that really tries to grapple with the humanity of people who strongly support Trump. I have yet to see an interview with a non violent Jan 6 rioter on MSNBC, even one who admits in retrospect that the election may not have been stolen. Instead these people get othered and monstered.
And this leads to predictable consequences. Most prominent MAGA voices in America have at some point in the last four years been the victim of death threats from Antifa, run ins with the law, or hit pieces in the media. There was an epidemic of swatting (calling police to a persons house alleging there there is an active violent crime in progress) on MAGA influencers (such at Matt van Swol above) that took place in February of this year.
And there is never any apology when the cancellers get it wrong. Whether it’s Biden actually turning out to have cognitive impairment, or COVID actually plausibly being a lab leak, or Hunter Bidens laptop being real, the media just carries on as if nothing happened. Have to continue to #resist Trump! He is bad! Don’t let us be distracted by accountability!
Perhaps with this context you can understand why the July 13, 2024 photo of Trump, survivor of an assassination attempt, face bloodied, American flag behind him, raising a defiant fist in the air and shouting “fight, fight, fight!” became so iconic.
You’re right I do live and work in Australia. For better or for worse, we are all affected in the rest of the world by who is the president of your great country. But I used to live there, too, and I still have family there.
But yes my direct experience of this phenomenon (don’t make social media posts criticising your boss) came during COVID when Australian doctors were disciplined and even fired for publicly criticising the government’s COVID response.
That happened decades ago. To the best of my knowledge, it all started in a large scale, public way when anti-abortion activists began a campaign of assassination and violence against abortion providers. That predates the internet. Such activists began using websites publicising the names and addresses of doctors who provide abortions to pregnant women, resulting in a series of murders (they won the legal right to do this in 2001).
The term "doxxing" became part of popular culture in the aftermath of the "Gamergate" controversy, in which a group of male gamers attacked online a female gaming news reporter, but quickly spread to attacking feminists, and progressives in gaming culture in general, resulting in online harassment and death threats. This was roughly 2014-15.
This still goes on, of course (Google "Canary Mission" and "Harvard").
And, yes, Scott himself has had his own run-in with this. Which was a terrible thing that shouldn't have happened to Scott. That doesn't change my overall point.
Political harassment has gotten worse over the course of the last few decades, esp. online, and that mostly started with the right. Note that I am not arguing that the same activity is worse when one side does it rather than the other, nor that one side or the other never does this, nor am I arguing that this somehow taints the political opinions and views of people who have never engaged in doxxing. Only that there is a history here that shouldn't be ignored.
Presumably they believe in the things the money is being spent on. I work in the state health care field and I can tell you millions of dollars of great state programs are about to be cut if funds are not released.
That's something I'd have worked into the letter if it were me. "Government spends less money than usual" won't strike a lot of people as a negative. "Here's a list of cool projects that aren't being funded" (and a list of horrible diseases they might cure) has a lot more oomph.
Yeah, the problem there is that they may not have a list of cool projects and horrible diseases, but it really is just "spend more money, because, uh, spend more money on science in general and maybe something will come out of it, but anyway at least I'll get a job out of it".
Even then, you could punch it up a bit in a vaguer way.
"Every year, x-million Americans die of [cancer or whatever]. Y-million Americans don't die of [some disease NIH funding was peripherally involved in curing] thanks to research that was only possible with the NIH. That cost us [inflation-adjusted figure]. Imagine what we could do with [amount of underspending]. [First figure] was a small price to pay for a world without [polio or whatever]. [Figure] would be a small price to pay for a world without [cancer/alzheimers etc]."
You don't actually have to have a cancer cure, just a vague insinuation that medical research is the sort of thing that might help. If the NIH has literally never achieved anything, just take Jonas Salk's lab costs and take out the reference to it needing NIH funding.
You or someone you love might or have died from this, and we can cure it, is an attractive sales pitch. We're entitled to keep all our congressionally-mandated lucre because we're wonderful is a terrible sales pitch.
"You or someone you love might or have died from this, and we can cure it, is an attractive sales pitch. We're entitled to keep all our congressionally-mandated lucre because we're wonderful is a terrible sales pitch."
Exactly. But apparently that's treason to say it, or something, going by how Daeg got hot under the collar when I said it.
I read that as "How dare these oiks take OUR money, and how dare you suggest WE stoop to the level of asking them nicely for it" and rather liked it. Maybe there's hopes for the libs yet.
This is exactly why I'm pretty confident said programs can be cancelled without any noticeable impact on the future of anyone other than those who get paid from said funds. Alas, the vast majority of "good programs" are "good" but inconsequential.
Almost no one is collecting QALY impact data because almost all research has such a minuscule number saved that it’ll barely cover the investments made. But naturally those whose income, prestige and careers depend on government handouts would prefer everyone to think the world will collapse if X doesn’t get funded.
There’s also a bias at play here where we assign some sort of immense value to research that’s “already been approved”, but no value to research that’s been left out. I would argue that if NIH funding is so important a principled person should have just as strong of a rallying cry demanding it is doubled as they do when it is halved.
The thing about these kinds of things is that these people never once say "hey let's spend less money for once". It's infinite money that they're looking for
Not infinite money, but scientific research likely has higher marginal utility than most things the government spends on, so we'd probably benefit from a lot more. Richard Hanania summarizes some of the evidence: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/government-science-and-the-prestige
As he admits, it's not an ironclad conclusion, but I think the evidence is decent.
Grumble, I shouldn't have promised this because people are going to yell at me that each of these are the pillar holding our society together, or that they don't exist and anyone who says the government is funding these are vile lies, and I don't feel like defending my position on each one of them, but fine, here goes - fossil fuel subsidies, agricultural subsidies, sending people to Salvadorean prison, military foreign aid (except Ukraine because they're defending themselves and it serves US foreign policy interests), broadband subsidies, high-speed rail and realistically probably also Amtrak, the arts, having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime), welfare for illegal immigrants, TSA and Homeland Security, buying 10% of Intel, most of the things in Inflation Reduction Act, small business loans, dumb electric vehicle subsidies that exclude all the good EVs, weird spy actions to subvert Denmark in Greenland, most (all?) DEI programs, most college financial aid, alternately cracking down on / pouring money into crypto, Head Start, random one-time payments to sympathetic groups every time there's a stimulus, direct and indirect subsidies to labor unions.
This is probably not that interesting/convincing, because I think most problems are something like "the government regulates something so strictly that it becomes impossible to do without lots of money, then subsidizes it so that it's possible to do anyway", and I would be nervous cutting the subsidies without also ending the regulation that makes it impossible to do without subsidies, and the question didn't give me the option to also cut regulation.
I considered things like "enforcing Trump's tariffs", but decided that would have been cheating, and tried to mostly do things where the actual spending of the money was bad.
Brave. Appreciated. And avoiding going all Caplan. He recently recommended on betonit: no funding for college except STEM and less school for girls (and boys, but less education of girls may do more to raise TFR).
"less education of girls may do more to raise TFR"
Yeah, no. Not unless you want to raise fertility among the underclass. "Less education of girls" pans out to "we don't want women to have careers but to stay home".
Unhappily, right now, unless both spouses are earning, you won't be able to afford a home. Hence no marrying and no kids.
Fix the economic incentives first, Bryan, then come back with "the wimmenfolk don't need no book larnin'".
> having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime
Surprisingly we've got our arsenal down to ~10% what it was in the 60s and 70s. With currently deployed nuclear weapons, we have just about enough to destroy the world, given likely launch failures/refusals to launch, weapons destroyed before launch, and likely interceptions.
Is your objection specifically to California high-speed rail, or are you also against high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor? I think there's a pretty strong case to be made that the latter would have a good society-level return on investment if implemented at all competently (and there are serious proposals for how to do so).
I can't speak for Scott's position, but while it would be nice to have high speed rail in the east coast, I think skepticism is justifiable, since there were proposals for how to do so in California as well.
Maybe they were on some level less technically serious, but that's going to be outside of most people's expertise to assess.
The problem is, if you don't support rural communities, you end up with "ooops, where did our food security go?" and if you do support rural communities, you end up with the likes of "cash for ash".
If a Seraph not currently attending on the throne of the Lord God Almighty could come down from heaven with a list of "support this, don't support that", the nations of the earth would be very grateful.
I'm surprised you're against arts funding, much of modern art from the plastic to the visual to music to everything, really, makes me want to agree but there are some things that won't ever be profitable but which do make life better. As Terry Pratchett pointed out in "Maskerade", if you want to make money off music, then you put on the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber. If you want great art, you have to subsidise it.
There's room for both in the world!
EDIT: You did better than you said, you gave us 21 things not 20!
1. fossil fuel subsidies
2. agricultural subsidies
3. sending people to Salvadorean prison
4. military foreign aid (except Ukraine because they're defending themselves and it serves US foreign policy interests)
5. broadband subsidies
6. high-speed rail and realistically probably also Amtrak,
7. the arts
8. having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime)
9. welfare for illegal immigrants
10. TSA and Homeland Security,
11. buying 10% of Intel
12. most of the things in Inflation Reduction Act
13. small business loans
14. dumb electric vehicle subsidies that exclude all the good EVs
15. weird spy actions to subvert Denmark in Greenland
16. most (all?) DEI programs
17. most college financial aid
18. alternately cracking down on / pouring money into crypto
19. Head Start
20. random one-time payments to sympathetic groups every time there's a stimulus
Utah's agricultural subsidies aren't so defensible. The vast majority of it isn't food, it's alfalfa and we export most of it. (The subsidies are mostly in the form of refusal to reform water rights and subject them to market forces).
Because of water misuse like this, the Great Salt Lake is unable to maintain its water level which exposes toxic lakebed dust that will get kicked up into the air. It's a disaster in the process of happening.
Please do so! Everyone has their own idea of "this thing I don't like is pure pork barrel, that other thing I like is vital to the interests of the nation", so why not you as well?
Congress passed a law saying this is how much money the government will spend funding medical research this year. The executive branch is blatantly violating that law and not spending that money.
The quote above is not the open letter. The quote above is a note from the author's of the letter *about the letter*. Click the link to read the actual letter.
I do not think it is an obviously wrong interpretation (indicative of poor reading comprehension) to see "the authors write" (as it was previously written) and think that this means that the following is at least, in part, the letter.
In case people are wondering, this is the actual text of the letter:
Dear Dr. Bhattacharya,
We, the undersigned scientists, doctors, and public health stakeholders, commend your commitment to spend all funds allocated to the NIH, as reported in The Washington Post. At the same time, we are concerned by reports that U.S. institutions received nearly $5 billion less in NIH awards over the past year. With less than one month to the end of the fiscal year, we submit this urgent request to ensure that your commitment is upheld. If you anticipate that all appropriated funds cannot be spent in time, we request a public disclosure of the barriers preventing the achievement of this crucial responsibility.
We present this request in the spirit of the broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of spending appropriated NIH funds. In their July letter to the Office of Management and Budget, fourteen Republican senators, led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell, forcefully argued that suspension of NIH funds “could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science.” The case for investment in medical research transcends political divides as it serves our collective national interest.
The return on investment from research is compelling. Synthesizing the empirical literature, economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP—and about $11 when broader benefits are counted. Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem.
Spending these funds is also a competitiveness imperative as China attempts to transform itself from a low-end manufacturer to a high-tech research and innovation juggernaut. In 2024, the Chinese government increased its spending on science and technology by 10%, and the nation’s total expenditure on research and development increased by 50% in nominal terms between 2020 and 2024. As China’s number of clinical trials and new drug candidates begin to outpace the U.S., America cannot afford to allow biomedical research funding to go unspent.
We respectfully ask that you ensure that NIH will obligate all FY25 funds by September 30, 2025, and, if that is not possible, that you address the scientific community to explain why and what must be done to ensure all appropriated funds are spent in FY26. We stand ready to support your efforts to preserve this vital national investment.
I think you should make it clearer that you're restating the letter/reading between the lines. The quote block makes it look like you're quoting it verbatim.
I don't think these scientists quite understand the position that they are in. I was just reading the Melian dialogue from Thucydides, and the Melians were better negotiators than this.
One of the following is likely happening for those people who are commenting here about how the letter is unserious.
1) you didn't read the actual letter and just read the lead in (maybe blame Scott for that)
2) you are post-hoc rationalizing your fear to support this open letter for fear of retaliation
3) you don't believe that the funding of the NIH is a good use of taxpayer money (i.e. you don't believe the return on investment is good enough and you're in favor of withholding the money)
4) you're not commenting here in good faith (trying to sow doubt about the worthiness of this letter for an unspoken agenda) (for many this might be a repeat of 3)
I like the tone of the post (I'm generally a sucker for the "say true things in belligerently straightforward ways" rationalist style), but I was genuinely confused and did not realize that the quoted text was not the text of the open letter. I do think Scott needs to edit the post to make this clearer ASAP.
5) you don't understand that the point of an open letter is not to be rhetorically persuasive to a single decision maker but rather to document for the public a stance being held by a respecible portion of a stakeholding community.
But for a shocking number of people it appears ro be 1) people on this blog have lost the ability to finish reading a post before they rush to comment their opinion.
My understanding is that the full text of the letter had not been provided in the post initially - only the part that they sent to Scott. The text of the actual letter was added later. So it's not a surprise why people confused the scott-part with the actual letter.
It was not included but linked to (what did people think the "our open letter" link was supposed to be in the text snippet that they believed to be the open letter?). Scott clearly overestimated his audience's reading abilities there.
Granted it seems unprofessional and irresponsible on the part of the authors to write a carefully neutral and respectful open letter but fill the invitation to sign the open letter with potshots at the administration. It doesn't seem that unlikely that some political operative would use the invitation text against the people who sign the letter, even if it's not the actual text they sign.
“you don't believe that the funding of the NIH is a good use of taxpayer money (i.e. you don't believe the return on investment is good enough and you're in favor of withholding the money)”
I believe it’s a good use of money but also that we could cancel all of that funding and barely notice the difference. All the low hanging fruit in medicine has already been picked and the marginal value of extra government funded research is extremely low.
If the money truly disappears if not spent by September 30th, I would highly recommend that those at the NIH consider *all* of the applicants for SBIRs this round (due Sept 5th), to be fundable. Get the money to scientists before it's gone. Isn't that a better option than losing it?
I’m emailing the organizers as well, but this is a simple use case for the 2024 ACX grantee Spartacus.app, which is a platform for conditional commitments to solve coordination and collective action problems.
That was my first thought too. I asked the organizers if they wanted to use Spartacus. They found it interesting but said that they were working on too quick a deadline and preferred to try things the boring way first.
Conditional commitment via an app seems like one of those ideas that sound clever but are full of practical obstacles. How would the people coordinating an open letter know how many of the participants are actually "scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals" if it's all anonymous?
(The app's email signup workflow doesn't seem to be working btw, still no email after ten minutes or so.)
We just deprecated email logins yesterday. That option will be removed asap.
Everyone isn’t anonymous unless the organizers choose that setting. We can do identity verification according the parameters set by the organizer, via domain exclusions, referral codes or AI selfies
I'm not terribly versed on NIH matters, other than to note fairly massive funding cuts. Is there a link or a source laying out the case for and against these potential cuts or defending this specific NIH spending?
The initial letter (the one posted above has been edited from the one in my inbox) did not...inspire confidence that this was a nonpartisan affair that red state conservatives would want to lend their voice to. Having said that, cuts to important things like cancer research are bad. If the NIH spends $5 billion less than originally intended, what evidence is there that this will primarily harm real cancer research rather than "cancer" research? (1)
(1) Or, like, more that 50% of the cuts will affect "real" research. One singular good program being cut isn't enough; reform and/or a culling is impossible if you demand 100% accuracy and that would be in ideal circumstances.
I'm sure the data exists, but here's my concern aside from the obvious impact to high-value human disease research: the funding cuts impact grants which in turn limit academic research groups in their hiring. Anecdotally I've heard that universities are accepting fewer students. Long term it would seem that this will impact our scientific workforce and allows us to be surpassed by countries that are continuing their research efforts (e.g. China). So, in effect, it means that we will have less talent at home, and need to import it from other countries. On the business side, less grant money means fewer labs purchasing equipment and using services which impacts the biotech economy. It appears that we're already seeing this impact as layoffs continue, and companies contract to survive. That's my understanding-- happy to hear if I'm mistaken.
I’m applying to MD/PhD programs this year (those programs almost always being funded by the NIH), and this appears to be the case. I was urged by current MD/PhD students to apply more broadly, as their programs and those of their colleagues were cutting slots for the coming year. The number of people who are qualified and interested in pursing this training to take on biomedical research careers is limited, and cutting back on admissions decreases an already-small training pool.
Isn't NIH in theory required to spend whatever amount Congress has decided to be spent on research? They can choose to cut the funding of any specific project, but they aren't supposed to just not spend the money at all AIUI.
Without digging too deep into unproductive CW aspects, NIH funding seems like a suboptimal area for conservatives to defect from Trump to preserve constitutional norms.
It seems like a pretty good area to defect if the consequences are, like, medical advances that would save tens of thousands of lives over the next 5 years.
So what credible evidence is there that this NIH funding would actually go to saving tens of thousands of lives?
>Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem.
Have you and/or the authors considered that this might be precisely the point? Owning the libs and their lib institutions, no matter the long-term cost? I'm not saying that not writing the letter would be better, but it does confirm to the administration that the spending deficit hurts where it's supposed to hurt.
This is the practical effect but I'm not sure what they're planning behind the scenes. This EO https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/ is basically empty and Trump has publicly stated he likes vaccines and has tried to pass off Operation Warpspeed as an accomplishment (before getting booed at rallies when he mentioned it.) RFK and Trump didn't seem to have much in common (he's stayed silent about Trump's EPA deregulating things he once fought against as an environmental lawyer) so idk what the coordination is like that results in these things happening. Seems like it should be a strictly disfunctional relationship but they're doing quite well with random purges and I haven't heard of any friction compared to Tulsi or Waltz or the IRS heads.
I am one of the legion of the confused who opened my email and thought the summary was the letter itself. Rereading, I think the confusion was valid.
The shot at RFK was foolish, even if it wasn't supposed to be part of the actual letter, since it invites people to write off the letter as being some sort of anti-Trump swing, rather than a genuine appeal to the greater US good.
Yes, but given the context, the people leading the movement are very likely to be leftists, so they really shouldn't be surprised if people really don't want to be associated with that, given the current circumstances.
> Based on our understanding of current administration norms, we do not expect retaliation against private individuals who sign this letter.
That seems very hopeful. I still hope people will sign the letter, but I would, on the contrary, _assume_ that it's the kind of things that would cause retaliation.
(It does not apply to me in any way, being neither a scientist nor from the US ; so feel free to disregard this opinion.)
Scott, you did a bad job of clarifying what the contents of the letter are. I'm seeing the edited version now and it's not enough. Visually, it looks like this:
Scott's post seems very clear to me in its present form.
What is confusing me is the RFK Jr thing that many are talking about in the comments, and that is nowhere to be seen now. Was it something Scott wrote in his own name and then removed? Was it something the letter authors wrote to Scott personally, that he quoted here and then removed? Was it something the authors wrote in their open letter and then removed?
I think that if Scott removed something either from his own prose or from their quote, he should note somewhere that something has been removed, as he usually does.
It was something the letter authors wrote to Scott that he removed. Here's how the first paragraph originally went:
Even as RFK Jr. has learned to diagnose mitochondrial disorders by sight, his subordinates at the National Institutes of Health are stuck supporting medicine through the less magical method of spending money. Unfortunately, they have spent at least $5 billion less of that money than Congress has appropriated to them, which is bad because medical research is good and we want more of it.
I mean, as a jab it's not entirely wrong, but as a "we are presenting ourselves as reasonable, non-partisan people interested purely in the love of science for the betterment of mankind" tactic, yes way better to take it out.
Sorry if I'm being complicit in the destruction of American democracy by pointing out that you don't insult the people you are holding out the begging bowl to, as Daeg has told me I'm doing. When the Capitol goes up in flames, you are all free to blame me!
I applaud the good intentions but unfortunately I have doubts as to:
(1) the efficacy of any Open Letters. I think they work more as PR efforts to raise awareness than to make any government body take action and change course.
(2) an administration running on "we're gonna cut spending, we're gonna trim the fat" and clawbacks of unspent budgets is not inclined towards 'quick, spend all the left-over money before the end of September!'. I think it would be easier to point towards that $5 billion as "see, hard-working people of America? we have saved all this money from your tax dollars to spend on what benefits *you* directly like tax cuts or tackling rising grocery prices rather than pie-in-the-sky ivory tower eggheads fooling around with test-tubes!"
If the fact that withholding congressionally appropriate funds is blatantly illegal (impoundment control act), almost certainly unconstitutional (congress appropriated funds), and entirely without precedent at this scale in the history of the country just doesn’t matter to people like you, and the only resolution is not supposed to be public pressure or the judiciary, but… asking nicer? Well, then we are in a very bad place.
Not to speak for Deiseach, but she seemed generally in favor of the sentiment, while skeptical of success using this tactic.
Is there a better tactic? I’m not sure. I also think it’s a long shot, but if it has a 1% shot of success, that’s probably worth trying, given the stakes.
Maybe more likely to succeed: get a rich business owner who is friendly with Trump to hold a press event praising him and all he’s done for this country’s health care and advancing science. Maybe give him an award for it.
That might still be unlikely to work (given the factors Deiseach mentioned), but I think it’s a better strategy. However, it takes knowing a rich Trump-friendly business owner who is willing to use their influence like this, which seems pretty hard to find.
My point is that it’s a symptom of a state in serious decline when the best way to get the government not to violate its own rules is to get some president’s buddy to stroke his ego. There is a very long history in the US of mass protest movements and suing the government both being successful. If you and Deiseach are right that these can no longer succeed, America is now a deeply different and obviously worse place than ever before.
> My point is that it’s a symptom of a state in serious decline when the best way to get the government not to violate its own rules is to get some president’s buddy to stroke his ego
Can any sane people who are not convinced a foreigner wants to wipe her arse with your Constitution please chime in with some legal advice on this?
Is this illegal, unconstitutional, and unprecedented? Have no Congressional funds ever been diverted, frozen, or withheld before? Because wasn't there something about Biden withholding funds to pressure Ukrainian government into firing a corrupt prosecutor?
I mean, are we going to go after poor Joe now for being illegal, unconstitutional, and unprecedented? Or is that different because he was Our Guy?
(1) Is this illegal? - probably, though the actual demonstration of this for any specific funding is complicated. The budget bills passed by Congress appropriate the money and obligate the US to spend it, but there's a certain amount of squish to the process. The amounts withheld by this administration are absolutely enormous compared to prior ones, but it's true that every administration "fails" to spend certain amounts appropriated. In any event, there's no real mechanism for punishing anyone for it.
(2) Is this unconstitutional? - absolutely. From a lay perspective we can distinguish these recessions from past failure to spend cases based on the admin explicitly saying that they intend to cut spending without Congressional approval. The most straightforward case, to my mind, is the recent notice to Congress that the admin intends to let 5 billion in foreign aid spending expire; there's no real argument that this was administrative failure, it's straightforwardly saying "we don't think spending this money is good and we're not going to do it, whatever the appropriations bills say." That's the arrogation of power from the legislature to the executive, and is a perversion of the constitution.
(3) Is this unprecedented? - it depends, I guess. It's not literally unprecedented; Congress passed the antideficiency act in 1884, and has updated it many times since in response to alleged violations where the President or some officer plays too fast and loose with the budget. I'm not aware of any previous administration playing games with authorized funding on this scale. In my view, scale and purpose matter a lot to this because they're the difference between minor conflicts with Congress or administrative failure and active attempts to seize power from the legislature.
As for the Biden incident, I assume we're talking about the anecdote he mentioned in his 2018 Foreign Affairs interview, where he said he had told Ukraine they weren't getting "the billion dollars" unless they fired an allegedly corrupt prosecutor. IIRC there were three billion-dollar loan guarantees given by the Obama Administration to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, under the Support for the Sovereignty, Integrity, Democracy, and Economic Stability of Ukraine Act of 2014, and this is probably referring to one of them.
As far as I know that's not, strictly speaking, an example of this kind of rescission because that act didn't actually require the President to grant the specific loan guarantees they were negotiating over; but I'll be totally honest and admit that I'm not an expert on our relations with foreign governments and whenever I try to read the act in question my eyes glaze over. Notably, Congress doesn't always specify exactly what a President should do with the monies it appropriates or authorizes; this is one of the reasons why a large rescission might not actually be illegal. Sometimes program funds don't actually have to be spent.
So to sum up, in my view these rescissions are maybe illegal, probably unconstitutional, and unprecedented in scope but not in kind. I think it's altogether an alarming situation, and it casts the President in a role of much more personal power than we usually accord them at a time when the person in the office doesn't fill me with much confidence. But I am not a federal attorney or a historian.
Doesn't every government come into power with at least one campaign promise of "we'll cut unnecessary spending"? It's a good old slogan often dragged out when the Opposition party is looking for something to castigate the Government party with, and if the parties swap places, the slogan still works.
The objection thus seems to be "they're actually doing it instead of just letting it be a campaign promise, which everyone knows you don't believe campaign promises".
The better grounds for objection is that the funding cuts are not targeted, they're just scattershot and will do as much, or more, harm than good. Also that they are politically and partisan motivated.
That second part, when we've had Open Letters, marches, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all from SCIENCE!!! perfectly happy to come out behind political and partisan grounds for 'their' side, means I don't pay much heed (they can object, but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you're going to play 'this lab supports no human is illegal' then don't be surprised if this lab gets the stinkeye from the administration).
As for Biden, I didn't mean it as a serious comparison, but just to point out that there has been funding used to put pressure on for preferred outcomes by other administrations. Maybe Joe was lying through his teeth about it, but that he felt confident enough to brag that holding the purse strings mean we get to tell you what to do shows that nobody is above doing this. It's not unprecedented, which was the main point I wanted to make.
Well, I think the disconnect here is the level of generality- it is true that every single politician in all of history has said that they'll cut unnecessary spending ("waste, fraud, and abuse" is the popular term). As a rule, that means they spend less on stuff they don't like and more on stuff they do, and obviously that upsets the people who think they've got their priorities backwards.
The distinction here is that the federal government was designed such that Congress decides how much is spent and how, and the Executive branch then works out how to spend it in accordance with those laws. If Congress says "take 10 billion from the Treasury and establish a program of grants for scientific research according to these principles" then the Executive is supposed to have the power to administer the program (up to and including saying "I am in favor of this kind of research but not this kind", unless the law clearly states otherwise) but is not meant to have the ability to say "no, I won't spend that money" or "actually that 10 billion should go to something else I like better."
Here, the Republicans also control Congress, and the last budget bill they passed *did* cut a lot of things Republicans don't like, alongside spending way more money on stuff they do. But Congress is very sensitive to small-d democratic pressures and tends to move slowly and incrementally, so they didn't cut literally everything the President wanted to cut and now he's decided just to do the other cuts himself. So you can see there are two objections- the one you're talking about which is just "I think these cuts are bad" which everyone has in every administration, and "wait a second the lawmakers who are empowered to make these cuts didn't go this far, you're breaking the law and ignoring my representative's expressed will by doing this."
And the reason this is important is that if you have a system where there are a lot of state representatives getting together to hash out how the spending should happen, you get a variety of views, pressures, and desires which generally shape up to be something like a general picture of what the voting population wants. If you allow Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy to single-handedly decide what money is spent and how, you will get a program dominated by whatever one guy feels like, subject only to the threat that Trump might fire him if he gets too much annoying press.
(It's also true that every administration will have people saying that the admin is breaking the law on X subject, but I think it's been vastly more blatant and far-reaching this time, and again it's the sort of thing where the scope matters a lot.)
My basic objection to the concept that this is what people voted for by voting for Donald Trump is that if I vote for someone for mayor of my city on their promise to clean up crime and then they imprison the city council and begin making laws by decree... well that's not exactly what the vote was about, was it? Most people making their choice at the ballot box didn't think that was a possibility because mayors aren't supposed to be doing that. I would guess that a very small minority of voters thought they were casting the deciding vote as to whether or not pediatric hospitals get research funding last November.
I am a somewhat rare species, the research consultant: I work for myself, but am supported entirely by research funding, mostly from the NIH though also from the DoD and Medicare. I had 4 NIH grants cancelled this year - these were projects that had been funded only after extensive peer review by other scientists, often after multiple revisions and resubmissions, and all represent extensive sunk costs. Of the 4, I can see how one violated the new political correctness standards, but the other three made no sense. In addition, I had one more that was cancelled and then restored after 6 months, which is no way to treat an ongoing prospective study that is supposed to collect data at pre-specified intervals. Finally, there's a large multicenter trial I lead (an intervention to save the lives of distressed newborns - isn't this politically correct?) where a third of our sites are in Canada and we were told we had to drop those sites because well Canada is the new bad guy. This is a multimillion dollar trial that took a year of planning and is 2 years underway and now we are woefully uncertain of being able to complete it unless we can find someone to replace or support those terrible Canadian neonates.
I signed the letter, but I don't think it will make a fig of difference because we're talking morons here.
I’m so sorry. The cuts are terrible, but their implementation has been absolutely insane. The response of the commentariat here is deeply depressing, as if we have to prove the value of medical science from first principles and act as if RFK Jr is an honest actor who could be convinced. Whatever rationalism is supposed to be, this ain’t it
Agree. I wonder if Scott would humor an NIH 101 post that describes what NIH funding has historically supported, and the machete swings that have been taken to it.
I am confused by your description of your work/role — like you started a little research company/institute? And what's a good way to save life of distressed newborn?
Spending 5Bn in 31 days, is it even possible to spend it wisely in such a timeframe, or you think any research is better than no research? Like, is there already a ranked list of which proposals are best, and then he can just take the top X?
A lot of the frozen spending is on already-funded projects that were partway done. For example, Northwestern has been cut off for all their ongoing grants since April, for reasons that have never been clearly stated. Just releasing that money and funding continuing grants (technically, non-competitive renewals) would spend a big chunk of this money
It is far from clear that a marginal $5B from NIH actually helps science or does anything useful other than employ marginally competent scientists. (Fully competent scientists pursuing useful research have no problems raising funding from the private sector and charitable foundations.)
Much depends on exactly how it's spent, but MOST NIH-funded research is BS busywork. At least money spent by pharma companies is spent with the expectation of a return on investment - if NIH funds were directed toward unpatentable drugs and techniques, that might be worthwhile. Few are.
I have tremendous respect for Jay Battacharya, and tend to defer to his judgement on these things; I wouldn't pressure him.
Also the $5B if unspent doesn't "disappear". It stays in the Treasury, reducing the national debt by that amount. Congress is free to re-allocate it and spend it the following year on the NIH or anything else.
Just personal experience - been in the field 20 years. IMHO the vast expansion of the Scientific Research Establishment since WW2 - since the US federal government started funding most of it - has resulted in a shocking decrease in the average quality of published science. And a vast increase in the quantity.
The best is just as numerous and as good as ever. But there's vastly more mediocre and useless science. And vast numbers of scientists who would never had made the grade previously, supported by endless NIH grants.
It seems that we may have already skimmed the cream of potentially worthwhile scientific effort (at least in medicine) before WW2; all the additional resources since then have been invested in the hope that spending more will get us more and better results. It's far from clear that was ever true. But we have built a gigantic class of people and institutions who depend on the continuing largesse.
Expanding on my own reply - in any field there's a point of diminishing returns to additional investment. At some point the low-hanging fruit have been picked and putting more effort in doesn't get you much. In the US there are big returns to successful medical research whose results can be patented. Investors and foundations are happy to fund and collect those big returns - anything the government invests beyond that point is pretty much by definition expected not to be worth the money invested (or investors would have already put in their own money).
One obvious exception is research whose payoff isn't in terms of things that are patentable or otherwise capturable by the funders. For those, arguably federal funding is worthwhile and positive-sum. If there are available competent scientists not already busy with other things. (And most NIH funding isn't directed to those unpatentable-type things.)
But science is hard and very few people are cut out to be good scientists. It seems, from experience, that most of the marginal scientists and marginal science that wouldn't be done without federal funding, isn't very good. Those people would contribute more to society if they did something else.
(I'm NOT saying that everyone funded by NIH grants is doing bad science - some great work and great people are funded that way, together with a lot of mediocre stuff. But the great work and great people would mostly get funded by somebody else if NIH went away. The mediocre stuff wouldn't.)
Do you think we can tell in advance what is "good" research or who is a "good" scientist? I do not, which is why both the private sector and the government fund a lot of expensive research projects that go nowhere or produce something actively net negative. Many of the biggest wins are not from projects that anyone thought had strong prospects in advance - Scott has written about this before. And given the current structure of research funding in America, both our best and worst outcomes are usually funded by a mix of public and private money. But if you do have a better crystal ball on this topic, you should be making billions in VC or consulting for Merck, Pfizer, JNJ et. al., as the historical record indicates that they have approximately no idea which projects will play out favorably.
In a world of high uncertainty, long delays before outcomes are measured, competition, etc., it's easy to see why private sector actors, many of whom are public company executives reporting results to a largely unscientific audience quarterly, might underinvest in projects that have a minority chance of huge research breakthroughs, majority chance of spectacular failure and a full write-off, and within the research success category there's a set of outcomes like "competitors get to market with a similar product first" or "bureaucrats hold up approval until after I am fired for failure to produce results, and successor takes credit for the eventual success of my work" or "product has safety concerns and no one can do cost/benefit analysis or is willing to bear risk of getting it wrong in hindsight as applied by our fairly deranged tort system."
Government-backed research is well-positioned to do what venture capital claims to do - back a portfolio of high-risk, high-return projects and let the winners pay for the losers, with the added benefit that the government need not spend so much energy on protecting its specific rights to be paid, turning a quick profit, or backing the winning horse in a multi-party race, since the government has a stake in the profits of all companies as well as an interest in consumer benefit. If you object to specific unscientific and political choices made by the government in terms of what gets funded - that's why we have elections and lobbying, go fix it! But if you look at the period WW2 to present and see a decline in American science caused by government intervention, please share whatever evidence you're looking at because it is not in line with most people's experience of the same period.
Also if you're objecting to having too much education in America - well I agree in terms of garbage online degrees, expensive private undergrad institutions that are no better than the nearest state school, law schools that produce people unfit to practice law or unable to pass a bar exam. But what do you think the bottom half of hard science PhDs should be doing instead that would be more valuable? Farming? Improving the quality of our lesser law schools? App engineering?
Yes, I think it is often possible to rank science and scientists, some being better than others. There's a lot of uncertainty, but it's not total.
This seems to be a general argument that more subsidy for medical research is always better. Do you think there's ANY point of diminishing returns? A point of returns worth less than the cost of the research?
I tried to be careful to not say the total value or quantity of American science has declined. It hasn't. The quantity is clearly much larger, but the *average* quality is much lower. The best science produces almost all of the value, and there has been no reduction in that, so the value remains.
Bad-to-mediocre science produces almost no value, and by distracting good scientists with lots of noisy bad science, may reduce the total value of all science.
If this is to be a serious argument worth having, we need better evidence than vibes based on personal experience that medical research funding has reached a point of diminishing returns. Especially when you consider the things we spend a lot more money on. E.g. since we're going on vibes, the returns on the money we spend on our nuclear arsenal seem a whole lot more diminishing, and that's about twice as much as the entire NIH budget.
There is a strong case for reducing support for marginally valuable science, but this is not that. There was no review of ongoing projects to assess them for scientific value; there seems to be no considered logic at all behind the cuts. And even if a study is marginal, it's inane to cut the last year of a five year project - the year when all of the collected data will be analyzed, and after 90% of the project budget has been spent. Though this was also done for projects of potentially high scientific merit.
You might say there's been a shocking decrease in the average quality of decision making in DC.
I agree. The cuts are not well-considered or targeted. (Well that's what I read. Maybe Bhattacharya is actually cherry picking the worst to cut; that would be good.)
But if the *average* NIH grant produces less value than it costs (what I claim), then cutting at random is still better than not cutting.
From what I've seen of interviews of him on the Hoover Institution YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7XZ2JXZqY he is a hack who just rehashes random covid talking points that are nonsensical like pushing ivermectin.
I'd like to sign this letter but after discussing with my advisor we're concerned that we could face retaliation. I'm also somewhat concerned that this might be a fishing expedition to out scientists who are willing to be publicly outspoken against the administration. I don't think you'd willingly share something like that, but are you confident that the authors are acting in good faith? In short, I'd like to help but my financial situation is vulnerable and NIH-dependent, and I have to weigh the risks of all of my political activity at the moment.
Spending a bunch of money because otherwise you loose it is a classic way for government to waste a bunch of money. It is probably best for these resources to not be hastily allocated and returned to the resource pool.
Maybe it's not the smartest thing to entrust a slush fund to an administration operating on impoundment being a President's right in violation of multiple Supreme Court rulings, taking emoluments from Middle Eastern countries, insider trading before huge tariff increases are announced, getting rid of DOGE which didn't work in light of the OBBBA, and in term 1 having the largest budget deficit of any President, as these indicate fiscal mismanagement and not good faith attempts at servicing the public.
What I really don’t understand is how you couldn’t see this coming last November. The man was saying the quiet part out loud during the entire campaign. This is just part of what he is. We elected an amoral buffoon and this is pretty much in line with what I expected. Scott Aaronson had it nailed. It’s only going to get worse.
Thiel and Andreesen are happy on top of their billionaire’s Mount Olympus after throwing the world of mortals into disarray. They’ll never be touched by the chaos. Marc Andreesen remarked at the end of his interview with Douthat, “The dog has caught the bus by the tailpipe now.” Yeah, I guess that’s funny if you have the material resources to float above the fray.
“This is just an anti-Trump swipe” says one very intelligent idiot, “research is useless, all low- hanging fruit has been picked”, I can’t even; “but they are woke”, etc and ad nauseum, we’re truly cooked and done.
Scott did see it coming since he endorsed not Trump for the election, but he didn't see the greedy shylocks jacking up the interest rates on the trillions of dollars of tariff revenue coming, thus making it so we can't fund the NIH. Nobody could have predicted this - except maybe Maoists.
In one of the previous open forums, I mentioned the dueling Quillette articles on the subject. It is an interesting question. Some thoughts.
There is a strain of libertarian thinkers who argue against any government funding of science, except possibly for military research. Much of their argument on the subject seems to be that government funding of science, particularly on a large scale, is historically unusual, and yet we had technical innovation and economic progress anyway, and if there is any exception, philanthropic spending can cover the gap. My response would be something like, yes, we did have technological process, but it was very slow, and it was based on science that was essentially intelligent observation and cut-and-try tinkering. But at a certain point, you really do have to understand why you are doing what you are doing. (It is one thing to praise Thomas Jefferson as a model of the gentleman scientist, but much as I respect him- the man was supported by slave labor. I don't see how that is better than a democracy taxing and spending.)
There is, of course, a lot of room to question the particulars of scientific spending. The obvious one is that the line between pure and applied research is always going to be blurry. This is probably particularly difficult in health research, because governments have long had an interest in public health. And there is the small fact that a fair amount of scientific spending could reasonably called pork. And the undeniable fact that much research can sound rather weird. (A few hundred years ago, the news that this Newton fellow was trying to figure why apples fell off trees probably sounded very pointless, but it revolutionized out understanding of the universe.) And, of course, the nature of research means that you will spend a lot of time going down blind holes. I think that most of this is summed up by the famous joke "Half of the money we spend doing X is completely wasted. Unfortunately, nobody knows which half."
Possibly the most serious question is if massive government funding has corrupted scientific research. This is best reflected in the replication issues (which, admittedly, J.D. Vance has talked about.) Has easily available massive funding led to a decline in standards, which might not have happened if money and scrutiny were tighter? It seems to be a legitimate question. I would feel better if the administration were asking it.
I'm not surprised that these doctors want more funding. Everybody has bills to pay.
But let's step back for a second and try to see the big picture. Doctors are one of the best paid professions in the US, so they're not truly struggling. Meanwhile we have a public debt of about 30 trillion dollars.
So I don't think it would be a tragedy if the NIH ended up saving 5 billion dollars.
What if those 5 billion dollars were used to pay for expenses the Executive incurred by deploying the military domestically against protestors? Would it be better to have them in debauched doctors' hands then?
The premise if, frankly, absolutely bizarre. Spending money, per se, without specifying what the money is spend on, is awesome, as long as it is thrown in the general direction of "science", and we must hurry to spend us much as possible of it, because otherwise China would definitely win? What kind of argument is this? What kind of people they are counting on to believe this kind of argument?
Of course, _some_ medical research is good and useful. Some is an utter waste of money and a useless boondoggle. Some is political or ideological bullshit masquerading as research. And everybody who pays minimal attention is well aware of that. Yet, absolutely no argument is even being made that the cuts are concerning the useful part. They don't even consider necessary making this argument! "Give us moar money or else!"
Sorry, no, you lost your mantle of universal uncontroversial utility when you got into political bullshit games, and now you have to prove you deserve the money, just like everybody else does. If you want the taxpayer money, it's time to show you deserve it more than all other options, and this letter does piss poor job as such an argument.
I did not see where they did. Usually things like that are authorized in 1000+ page bills and are allocated as a bulk sum, with the real gatekeeping authority vested into the executive, which has the power to approve or disapprove specific line items. The Congress almost never discusses specific line items and almost never allocates money specifically to them - only to the generic pile of money marked "NIH". And the size of that pile is mostly based on the size of the last year's pile and not on specific examination of where the money is about to go - which is, given the 1000+ page bills, is understandable, if they starts discussing each line item separately they'd take a decade to pass single year's budget. Instead, they just shove the whole pile towards NIH and if the pile is not enough, they'd hear NIH ask for more. I am not super happy about the Congress delegating this authority but that's how it always worked, at least lately - for decades for now. Except when this authority is now not under the control of the Left and the executive tries to use it to implement its policies, the Left turns around and claims the authority has not been delegated. That's just not true. And pretending that the size of the pile at a particular year is some kind of sacred number which can not be changed is nonsense - there wasn't any proof of it anywhere.
Ah but Hulk, if we object, then (going by the dusty answers I received) we are destroying democracy, the Constitution, and doubtless Mom and apple pie as well.
The money was promised, so it must be delivered and spent! Who cares if it's spent on hookers and blow, it must be spent! For Science!
Will it do a blind bit of good? Who knows? Can it be held over for next year? Who knows? Can we ask for promised funding to be paid, rather than just generally 'spend spend spend'? Who knows?
All we know and all we need to know is Science Good (and perhaps as a corollary Orange Man Bad).
There's a case to argue that promised funding should be honoured, but as you point out, the letter demand seems to be "there's five billion wasn't spent, now spend every last cent of it in thirty days".
> economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP
It doesn't even separate between private and public investment! It doesn't even mention medical research! It's just "spending taxpayer money on literally anything is pure PROFIT, just give all the money to us and you'll be rich!" That's Nigerian prince level of argument, if you saw a proposed investment that said "economist Joe Whathisname says investments in business yielded X%, therefore you should invest all your savings with us" you'd run from them screaming "SCAM!". But somehow when talking about taxpayer's billions, this level of argument is the norm. This and just throwing abuse at the opponents and calling them names.
(Ah, if only I had some pearls I could now don in order to clutch them).
But Hulk! If the guessestimation of an economist - AN WHOLE AND COMPLETE AND FULL ECONOMIST, HULK! - is not sufficient for you, then what madness lies that way? Why, big piles of cash will no longer be flung around like snuff at a wake, and then what will befall the economy?
No more science, (excuse me, I mean SCIENCE!!!) is what! And then the total collapse of civilisation as we know it!
The returns to the most successful medical research are insanely high. Of course they diminish, but I’ll take the 2x projects even if they are less efficient than the 1000x projects. We don’t know the exact shape of the diminishing returns curve, but our alternative is accepting the current state of human health (which seems suboptimal based on all available evidence) so we can invest more of our enormous wealth in whatever higher-EV project you are imagining without specifying. Look around at the low value activities we engage in and explain how we can’t afford to fund speculative medical research because some scientists are less effective than the best scientists.
We don't, and sufficient funding of research is indeed necessary, but "quick! spend all the rest of the money before the end of the month!" is not responsible.
I've worked/work in government-funded jobs. I know about clawback. I know about "if we don't spend all the budget by the end of this fiscal year, it'll be cut next year, so go and buy something, anything, to spend it all" measures.
But "let's go buy pastel floor mats because we need to spend that last remaining bit of the budget" is not speculative research.
If the letter instances concrete examples of "funding for X has been withheld or frozen, please fund X out of the surplus right now", then I give it more chance of success than "Please sir you said you'd spend the money now spend the money".
This is a great initiative, but unfortunately looks very amateur and I'm not sure the scientists I know would take it seriously. Do they have anything like a website or even more official contact information?
I thought so too. Although I fully agree with the sentiment I wasn't sure if it was meant to be satirical due to the tone of voice used.
Yeah, the sarcasm seemed out of place.
The actual doc is better—I think it would be beneficial if Scott explicitly stated that the quoted text is not what the document says.
Agreed. I'm afraid that this confusion makes this initiative dead on arrival, if not fixed
Sorry, I didn't realize that people would confuse the description of the letter with the letter itself. I've edited the post to make it clearer.
Email readers only saw the original version of the post and not the updated version, so this confusion probably persists for many (potentially most) readers. I think that'll remain the case unless you send out an update in a new post (or as a note in one of the weekly thread posts or something).
Soapbox: This is among the reasons we really should have move passed email for things like this; RSS was and is well-suited to solving this kind of problem (publishing items to subscribers where the content itself may be updated) and it sucks that we-as-a-society basically abandoned that standard. (Ideally you want a mechanism to specifically notify only people who saw the original version, but if we could embrace the 20-year-old-very-simple-technology-that-solves-part-of-this-problem first that would be a good start).
As stated in the premise, anyone who is revealed to be spearheading this effort has legitimate fear of vicious retaliation by the most powerful man on the planet.
In an environment like that, resistance will necessarily look amateurish, disorganized, and anonymous much of the time, as it's very hard to coordinate a polished and centralized resistance without making your identity known.
We should be taking that fact into account when judging these things. Acting like we're not in extraordinary times, and asking one side to maintain the old standards of decorum and professionalism while the other side has dropped the mask and will destroy them for doing so, is not *just* an isolated demand for rigor. It's also a failure mode that can easily lead to a civilizational death spiral (read M: Son of the Century).
Scott, I love and admire you but I cannot support this. In fact, I suspect it is a joke.
It is poorly written, takes lazy and unserious swipes at RFK Jr. and by extention the entire Trump administration, in support of the demand to Give Us Money because Medical Research is Good.
I'm disappointed you would entertain this. I really think it is a parody.
Have you opened the Google doc? It states the same things but in a very different style.
Yeah, but it does come down to Give Us Money (Or Else The Chinese Will Get You).
Gosh, isn't it so convenient the Chinese are fully-applicable villains for *every* thing anyone wants money for? From AI to medical research, Give Us Money Or Else The Chinese is the go-to reasoning!
Dear government of my nation:
Please give me a large lump sum deposit to my bank account or else some Chinese businessman in Chongqing is gonna earn way more than me and we can't let the Chinese beat us on the wage gap!
Gratefully anticipating the dosh,
Deiseach
EDIT: I think they'd do way better with concrete examples like "Ozempic came from Denmark and is now worth $22 billion in the American market. That should have been a US pharmaceutical company. Invest in medical research here so the next Ozempic doesn't belong to foreigners".
Someone can correct me on the history, but my understanding is that public funding of scientific research increased significantly following WWII because it turns out that science, even basic science, is actually very useful when conducting a modern war (Churchill called it the war of wizards if I recall correctly). Now, the US enjoys such military superiority over the rest of the world that I think they can significantly scale back scientific research for a number of years before they notice anything on that front, and even after the Chinese catch up they can absolutely learn on the job during WWIII just as they did during WWII, but the Chinese catching up if you don't outspend them in scientific research is definitely a real thing.
Sure, but medical research isn't particularly relevant to the military these days. Nobody's using chemical weapons.
The thing is that you can't predict what research will be used in a future technology. In mathematics, mathematical logic was often the butt of the joke because of how useless it is. Now AI uses it in reasoning models. It really is extremely hard to predict. I won't try to write amateur science fiction to speculate what medical research will have military applications tomorrow.
Yes, we should indeed do more basic science.
lol
great
The above commenter takes offense at “Give Us Money because Medical Research is Good”. You take offense at “Medical Research is Good, China is Doing It, We Should Too, Give Us Money”. I’m at a loss as to what substantiation of the request to release the already budgeted funding the commentariat would gracefully allow.
"Give us money or your loved ones will die."
I wish that was satirical...
Isn’t that going to be the exact unironical outcome of cutting medical research funding?
Not necessarily. Your loved ones might die regardless.
The reducto ad absurdum highlights the problem with this argument: to reduce the most amount of deaths, we should give all money everywhere to medical research. But we don’t, because at some point the marginal dollar on medical research will save fewer lives than that dollar being spent elsewhere. That boundary is difficult to find, and it is unclear whether we have crossed it. Certainly it is the case that too much money, poorly applied, leads to undesirable entrenched power structures that serve their own continuance rather than the original goal.
So the blanket request for more money in all areas is not terribly appealing. That being said, the current administration does not appear to have good judgement about allocation in any case, so perhaps burning money in stupid ways is the price of getting enough money to the few good programs that need it.
It's because "Or Else China" is the go-to for everything and I'm not convinced it's a good faith argument. Sometimes it seems to be the equivalent of "please let me push my granny down the stairs! if you don't, China will do it first, and we don't want China to win, do we?"
I've read some version of "if you don't let us do this, then China will..." for years now, and the resultant "okay, go ahead and do it" has neither resulted in any benefits, nor has it stopped China from "China will...".
‘“Or Else China” is not a good faith argument’ is not a good faith argument. “Or Else USSR” has resulted in a lot of benefits, for example.
The game theory going on is definitely hardball.
The current admin's standard is that it's absolutely worth burning trillions of dollars bc it could maybe possibly some day weaken China.
So, yeah, if there is any argument that could sway them, it's the "Or else China" argument.
As an aside, I suspect if they made any different argument, from the inherent worthiness of carving reality at its knees to the sky-high ROI to disabled kids getting a chance at life, you'd probably have posted the same cheap sarcasm about them being out-of-touch dwellers of the ivory tower with no understanding of the Red Tribe, so...
> takes lazy and unserious swipes at RFK Jr.
I didn't see any mention at all.
I went and opened every hyperlink Scott had and searched for "rfk" and "kennedy" and got no hits.
The letter itself is a very "let's go America, let's not let China win" letter.
*EDIT* The letter's been edited. Was it just a first draft that was publicized? Was there any effort to run it by a small group of people before releasing to the public? If I signed before the edits then what? Geeze.
Was the letter edited, or are you noticing that I edited the text they sent me explaining the letter, after everyone got confused and thought it was the actual letter?
No I was reacting to the removal of the swipe at RFK.
I was all indignant at the thread OP for hallucinating something that didn't exist. Then I realized I was wrong and he was right.
Why would they think that's a good idea to include in their material? Maybe it was meant to be private. Why would you think it's a good to pass it on?
The context was telling me was that the post was quoting an excerpt from the letter. I read through it, and then later clicked to the letter and saw similar sentences. Then I found the original description.
Any way I give up.
Maybe because RFK Jr is a conspiracy theorist who constantly endorses evidence-free pseudoscientific ideas, who runs directly in the face of the scientifically established facts about topics like vaccine's and many essential medicines, and who embodies everything that is the opposite of what rationalist movement has argued for?
Your characterization of RFK is undoubtedly accurate, and if the goal is point that out, then by all means include it. If the goal is to try to get the NIH to spend the money, well...more flies with honey than vinegar.
Yes RFK is fucking up everything. I have family members I worry about being able to stay on their medications they need to stay functional.
But the stated mission on this page was about seeking out doctors and scientists, especially in red states. That's what was said in version #1, maybe version #2 (I can't remember any more), but it's not in the current version. You can see the original in your email.
Someone once said "There are people in the world who seem to sincerely believe both that the New York Times is insufficiently hard on Donald Trump and that, were they harder, he’d be toast by now." A long list of how conservatives suck doesn't work. Yet another list of institutions saying Trump bad will accomplish nothing. We've already had scientists and mathematicians and all sorts of institutions describing, accurately, how bad these funding cuts are [1].
The actual letter deliberately leaves out talking about how much Trump or RFK sucks. Because they're trying to accomplish the mission of getting the $5 billion of funding dispersed. It's rah-rah America, let's roll, don't let China beat us to the ~~moon~~ cancer cure. It's trying to build a coalition for success.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02612-9 https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/15/1121885/why-us-federal-health-agencies-are-abandoning-mrna-vaccines/ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/federal-mrna-funding-cut-is-most-dangerous-public-health-decision-ever-expert-says https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/06/despite-rfk-funding-block-mrna-vaccines-are-too-impressive-to-ignore https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/114956840959338146 https://www.sciencenews.org/article/mrna-vaccines-diseases-tech https://www.livescience.com/health/medicine-drugs/these-decisions-were-completely-reckless-funding-cuts-to-mrna-vaccines-will-make-america-more-vulnerable-to-pandemics
What on earth are you talking about? Can you quote what parts you think are unreasonable?
A portion was removed by the time you got here.
I was going to quote it here, but I don't want to become part of the problem. If you're subscribed you can read the original in your email.
I'm disappointed you did not read it carefully....
RFK Jr is a charlatan. He embodies the worst aspects of "crunchy" culture, including pan conspiracism, constant claims of scientific fact that are not remotely justified by responsible evidence, an embrace of an entirely vague and unproductive preference for "the natural," and endorsing thoroughly discredited arguments such as about vaccines. He's not a serious figure and his ethos is entirely contrary to any preference for rationality and living life under the guidance of fact and evidence. He does not deserve kneejerk defending, especially here.
It didn't sound like anything remotely resembling "kneejerk defending" to me. It sounded like a pragmatic critique of whether "hey your guy sucks, now give us money" is effective persuasion. Everything you said is true and worth saying... unless perhaps you are trying to get the agency he controls to give you money.
(I didn't have a particularly negative reaction to the initial version, but I do think BRetty has a pretty valid point)
Yes, because every part of how our government works should now revolve around managing the egos of various irrational narcissists....
When something morally shouldn't be true, but empirically is, simply acting as if it isn't has a... mixed, at best, record of actually solving the problem.
Always has been
Sad but true, people with money like having their egos stroked.
Indeed, all of us do. How likely are you to help out a family member or friend who rolls off a long spiel of all your faults, then ends with a demand for help because you owe them? versus the one who asks politely and refers to your good qualities?
You're correct, we should probably just resort directly to bribery, since all politics are the politics of begging the powerful instead of, you know, having a democracy.
Hate it all you want, but the RFK endorsement probably won Trump the election. This is democracy. You're living in it.
I am really concerned by how unprepared a lot of Americans seem to be for surviving and pushing back under the conditions they are very sure their country is facing. There is definitely a time and place for standing rigidly in the open and daring anyone to come for you, but it’s not a great survival tactic if you’re facing a genuinely hostile state.
The state is hostile, but its not consolidated its power yet, and part of the way you stop that from happening is by pushing back against the narrative that the government is already some kind of monarchy.
It's been commonly observed that, if you judge by most U.S. progressives' demonstrated priorities instead of their rhetoric, most of them aren't really that worried that the country is becoming a dictatorship.
(My own view is basically "the odds are something like 5-10%, which is consistent with business probably continuing as usual, but nonetheless is way too high and smart to worry about".)
You're right. It's much more likely to become an illiberal democracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illiberal_democracy) One can easily argue that it already has.
The opposition, however, seemingly has taken a "wait and see" approach. Give MAGA enough rope, and they will lose the next round of elections. Whether that's true or not, or whether that's actually the best strategy right now, is arguable, but it is a strategy.
But the point of such an open letter isn't to actually persuade them into going "oh good heavens I never realised I was wrong" and then doing the right thing on the merits of the argument in the letter; it's to be an accretion nucleus for opposition to the extant policy, by laying out arguments against the policy that might cause reasonable opponents to accrete by signing the letter.
(Also, good on ya Freddie. You're right, hear hear, keep up the good fight comrade.)
You are correct about what the point of the letter is. But will that be an effective strategy to get what they claim to want - the release of funding for medical research? Having six thousand people all going "march for science!" rather than three thousand may be more impressive, but how did all those marches work out? They've pretty much petered out, so far as I know, from all the attention and reporting they get now (as distinct from when the first one took place):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_for_Science
I see the new version is called Stand Up For Science. Hands up everyone who heard of it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_Up_for_Science_2025
Of course it won't work - basically nothing will work to persuade an administration not to pursue its stated policy. But will anything work? Is there actually _any_ effective strategy here? The best we can ever achieve is that this kind of thing, while never actively changing policy, tends to put limits on what an administration is willing to do. The 2003 Iraq War protests didn't stop the Iraq War but I'm pretty happy to indulge the counterfactual that, without them, the conduct of it would have been even more bloody and indiscriminate.
Are you aware of any alternative strategies likely to yield a better outcome (that don't involve some kind of full-commitment guerilla struggle)?
>"Are you aware of any alternative strategies likely to yield a better outcome"
"Dear Mr. Trump. We the undersigned acknowledge the medical community's past role as a hub of left-wing partisans. We deeply regret this and commit to refocusing all of our efforts towards increasing the quality of care and improving patient outcomes through medical research. As a gesture of goodwill, we have persuaded the American Medical Association to drop its radical opposition to capital punishment, and are currently pushing drug manufacturers to resume supplier relations with state correctional departments."
Did anyone involved even consider something like this? Did it even cross their minds?
I wish there were some strategies I could recommend, but it's very difficult because most things seem to get settled with a combination of "a quiet word in the ear of the right person by the right people" and "yeah, looks like the voters won't wear this one, boss, maybe we need to pivot?"
Open Letters buy advertising space in traditional media, which are very happy to run them for much-needed revenue, and get some pundits discussing them on their own channels, but do they convince the great unwashed? I very much think not.
Hey Freddie! I loved your piece on being a father, man. One of the best things I’ve ever read.
That's all true, but you're not going to persuade American (or any) government to give you more money by "your guy, who is the boss of us, is nuts and we hate him, now hand over the dough you promised us".
More flies with honey than with vinegar, yes? The only people that "Orange Man Bad, also his minions bad" is going to appeal to are *not* the ones with their hands on the purse strings. Do they want to show off how right-thinking they are, or do they want to achieve something? I've had to write obsequious letters to rich guys for funding when all my instincts were to say "give us the cash, you hoor!" but you gotta play the game.
To explain this comment: the first version of this post quoted this: "Even as RFK Jr. has learned to diagnose mitochondrial disorders by sight, his subordinates at the National Institutes of Health are stuck supporting medicine through the less magical method of spending money." This is neither Scott nor the text to be signed, but part of the 'background/explanation" offered by those who initiated the 'open letter to the NIH'.
I agree: 1. it is not helpful to make fun of silly RFK quotes - I assume there are not so few cases where a doc or a parent can say: 'sth. wrong with this kid' just by looking at them.
2. the "China" issue seems designed to appeal to MAGAs. Sounds less convincing to non-MAGAs. And I doubt the authors know how to convince MAGAs.
3. Five billion Dollars not spent do not "disappear", but lead to 5 billion dollar less deficit than expected.
4. I guess, spending the money on medical research as planned IS a good investment. (Reducing the FDA powers to keep people from buying the medicine/baby-food/ ... they want to buy might have even better results.) Me no medic and not in the US; if I were, I might sign.
I do not understand the defense of RFK from those that consider themselves rationalists considering how irrational and anti-intellectual he is.
In the private sector, joining an open letter criticizing your company's business strategy would probably also lead to being fired. Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left (like, say, to pick a completely random example, a private citizen being doxxed by the NYT).
Private companies being run as petty fiefdoms by thin-skinned bosses is not a good thing either
but people who defended those abuses were very adamant that it was okay *because* it was the private sector doing it and not state action
A private company which performs poorly because the bosses aren't receptive to criticism can lose out to a different company which does a better job. Unfortunately, we Americans are all stuck with RFK Jr no matter how bad a job he does.
> A private company which performs poorly because the bosses aren't receptive to criticism can lose out to a different company which does a better job.
Replace "private company" with "country".
> Unfortunately, we Americans are all stuck with RFK Jr no matter how bad a job he does.
You don't have to stay an American. If you have something of value to offer another country, I'm sure they'll take you in.
> Replace "private company" with "country".
The United States has been around since 1776, which is longer than any for-profit company here. If you follow Patri Friedman in comparing governments to countries, you must conclude that the barriers to entry are far higher and there is far less competition for customers (most of whom are born there and thus never made an active choice to "opt in").
> You don't have to stay an American. If you have something of value to offer another country, I'm sure they'll take you in.
I wouldn't be sure about the immigration systems of other countries. In the US the process is slow enough that RFK could easily be out of office by the time everything is in order.
Didn't a bunch of people get fired from a federal agency recently for having signed an open letter of this kind?
Yes, that's what Scott's first link refers to. Some FEMA workers signed an open letter criticizing Trump's management of FEMA, and were put on leave (technically not "fired", I suppose). Mind you, Scott's misleading description makes it sound like the link is about Trump retaliating against private citizens, not people who literally work under him.
> Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left
This is very wrong. Trump and RFK have been engaging in politically-motivated firings, slander and lawfare to a degree that makes the height of the woke moral panic look insignificant.
Remember when the administration indiscriminately fired (and repeatedly slandered) over a hundred NSA employees for posting on a LGBT chatboard? When they fired over a hundred EPA employees for signing a letter critical of the admin's stance on climate change? When they fired dozens of FEMA workers for signing a letter criticizing the agency rolling back hurricane preparations? All of the firings, slanders and retaliatory investigations of people in law enforcement who were involved in prosecuting the Jan 5 rioters? The way Chris Krebs and others were purged and subjected to lawfare for arguing publicly that the 2020 election was fair? Earlier today when RFK got Trump to fire the CDC director for opposing his anti-vax policies?
I'm sure I could think of many more examples given time. The degree of retaliation for disagreement we're seeing in the administration is absolutely unprecedented. And I think it's happening more broadly in the MAGA movement as well- anyone who even mildly criticizes Trump is attacked, both rhetorically and often professionally.
I’m sorry but all of your examples are pretty much in line with what I’ve seen and experienced from private retaliation during the time of peak woke.
I have very little sympathy for people who argued for my rights to be taken away while loudly insisting they shouldn’t be held to the same standards and should get special privileges.
Ok, but beware of the Goomba fallacy. At least one of the people asking you to sign the open letter (Scott) has never argued for your rights to be taken away.
Sure and because there are people like Scott who are capable of reasoned criticism I am nominally in favor of funding this.
I just don’t view them as moral paragons or victims in the slightest.
When that Google employee was fired for publishing a mild criticism of the company's stance on inequality, that was a bad thing. There were a number of other, similarly egregious examples- professors and others being unreasonably slandered, harassed and fired. Now, we're seeing thousands of similar injustices being perpetuated by the right every month. This is bad for the same reasons- injustice is unjust whether the victim supports Democrat or Republican politicians.
Becoming so molded by the engagement-maximizing social reinforcements of social media that you adopt a position of "the outgroup is so evil that they deserve any injustice" will twist you into the same kind of person you have rightly despised. You can and should hold yourself to a higher standard. You can recognize and oppose injustice consistently.
Principles like that aren't in vain. Only a few centuries ago, freedom of speech, of political assembly, even the freedom of ordinary people to travel to different cities to find other jobs, were all but unheard of. From an enormous amount of hard work and moral strength in the face of emotional incentives, social progress has occurred. And for all that terminally online populists like the wokescolds and the Trump loyalists have set back that effort, it can continue to occur. We or our descendants can build a culture where reasonable criticism is met with good-faith debate, and not with oppressive retaliation.
This is why principles are important: contributing to that centuries-long project requires moral commitment.
I do not follow this stuff closely enough to have a reliable opinion on which is/was more intense and frequent, but I want to point out one particular way in which the woke version was clearly worse: how inescapable it was. The people in the line of fire here are, roughly, federal employees and nobody else. The people in the line of fire back then were... basically everybody working for entities with any sort of public profile. The fact that an entire nation was suddenly being held captive by a tiny ideological sliver was a serious problem, in a way that government employee purges (that don't stray into the Soviet sense of the term) can't possibly reach.
Homer Simpson voice "only happened to public employees so far..." the idea that this administration won't target private critics once they have fully consolidated power and established a norm of retaliation is at the very least hyper optimistic. For that matter, if you are so sure the government won't target you for speech, try raising money for Palestine.
I'll start worrying if the administration pressures law firms to get rid of clients, threatens to get a corporate CEO fired but then buys 10% of it, deploys troops in west coast cities to "liberate" them, and orders the arrest and prosecution of flag burners.
Until then there's probably nothing that people who aren't Federal employees have to fear.
Of course, now that the Govt is a significant stakeholder in Intel...
(extrapolate and solve for equilibrium)
Can you share the total number of people, over what period of time, who had their rights taken away because they offended some left wing ideology?
There are some flaws with this argument.
1 I suffered so other people which might have nothing to do with my suffering should suffer is not a good philosophy by any metric.
2 I am sorry to hear that you suffered private retaliation but it would be a mistake to assume that a private experience can be generalized to the wider pubblic, unless there is some better grounds to assume that at least the slim majority of this individuals were asking for something like this private reprisal can be, well private. Still unjust but not society wide damage.
3 Personally i would like to make the argument that on low level repression (compared to phsyical aggression) state controlled retaliation is more dangerous then private one for two reasons. Organizational capacity of the state and extensive reach.
This clearly shifts if the private retaliation is so uniformely accepted and severe that an innocent person can be harmed anywhere, but as long as that isn't the case state repression remains more dangerous.
Reference this before you descend into an orgy of vengeance: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before
Is there any room in your worldview for a principled defense of what is morally correct, independent of your personal relationship to the principles involved?
Sure, once your enemies who would use these principles as weapons against you are in the ground.
You don't have a right to employment. That's because in the US, labor law is such that an employer can let someone go with no warning and no reason. If you would like stronger labor laws, you should support pro-labor candidates.
> Remember when the administration indiscriminately fired (and repeatedly slandered) over a hundred NSA employees for posting on a LGBT chatboard?
Those workers were posting sexual things on a work owned system. I would be insta fired if I did that.
Apparently, there were a few fairly tame discussions of polyamory and experiences of gender transition surgery, similar to what you'd see in any LGBT forum. The administration called these sexually inappropriate, which I think is pretextual- while there are work contexts where discussion of that sort of thing would be inappropriate, a company-provided chat group specifically for LGBT issues is pretty clearly not among them. The administration also strongly condemned discussions of pronouns in the chats, citing those as another reason for the firings- which is even more plainly ideological.
If some of the comments in that chat really were inappropriate, a reasonable response would have been for HR to lay out some guidelines about which LGBT issues would be appropriate for the LGBT board, and then impose consequences on specific individuals who violated those guidelines- probably starting with warnings, rather than immediate firing.
Instead, Tulsi Gabbard, the newly appointed NSA director, became aware of the chat group shortly after taking the office, was ideologically offended by discussions that took place before her tenure, and ordered the immediate firing of everyone who had posted anything in the chat, regardless of what was said individually.
This article here has some actual quotes. https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-security-agency-internal-chatroom-transgender-surgeries-polyamory
There's room for disagreement on appropriateness as this is fundamentally a matter of opinion, but I know that I would NEVER dare to say things like that on a work system. And in my case there is not even a company policy against personal chats. For this particular system it's much different:
> According to an NSA press official, “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.”
I'd ask why the heck the NSA had a LGBT chatboard in the first place. Did they also have ones for fibre arts and cookery recipes? Work things should be for work and things outside of that should be outside of that. If the LGBT NSA employees had a private group on some other social media platform, then it wouldn't be any of the NSA's beeswax if they were "hit me up if you're polycurious" or whatever.
Scott's taking an admirably consistent ethical position, opposing petty retaliation in all its forms, whereas you're getting on your keyboard and typing out an *extremely* low quality comment. (Hoping my watered-down, factual language keeps me from getting banned.) There's no reason to your comment. I honestly wonder what you were thinking.
Do you have a substantive criticism of what I said? "Your comment sux" isn't much of a counterpoint. Maybe you could keep from being banned by debating rather than insulting.
Ok sure. There's a serious issue here. Medical research saves lives and does other good things for America. Dispute that if you will, but talk about what matters.
Do private citizens/companies with business before the administration have reasonable grounds to fear retaliation? Yes, hence the anonymous letter. If you believe their cause (medical funding) is good, you should support the letter. Please don't bring the woke left into this.
Well, Scott didn't make the case that "private citizens/companies with business before the administration have reasonable grounds to fear retaliation". Maybe it's true...? But his example was bad. And I do think this "matters", which is why I posted about it.
As for the topic that you think "matters", well, I do think medical research is a worthy thing for the government to spend money on. But that doesn't mean it's inherently good to throw $5 billion into a bin with "MEDKAL RESARCH" scrawled on it in crayon. The focus on "spending money" being a good in and of itself (no matter what it's spent on!) just sounds like classic government waste.
Yeah, its not like the letter includes any solid arguments about the benefits of medical research and how it helps us economically.
> Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left
Hey I'm working on it. https://thekoopaking.substack.com/p/the-next-democrat-president-must If you see "Deport Republicans Now" signs at the DNC and a few spicy headlines of President Newsom detaining the Republican politicians responsible for the AEA flights in Guantanamo Bay, then I'll have successfully changed the Democrat messaging apparatus to be less asleep-at-the-wheel and here's-my-strongly-worded-letter, and more reciprocate-rights-violations.
I'm not sure you understood my point, which was that for the last decade or more it has been far, far safer to criticize the Right (like you're doing now) than the Left. I certainly don't want the Left to get even more vindictive! I want less retaliation on all sides! But I don't consider "putting insubordinate employees on leave" to be an egregious violation of norms.
It does become a problem when "insuborindation" becomes "publishing data I don't like" https://apnews.com/article/trump-jobs-firing-f00e9bf96d0110519be9bf4f3ec89195
A better example, thanks. While not a threat to our freedoms, I agree this looks like classic bad leadership.
Well thank you for unilaterally disarming. Hopefully you'll stay just as principled when the next Democrat President publishes an EO titled "Addressing Risks From [your employer's company] LLC," revokes Liberty University's accreditation license, revokes Fox News's broadcast license, revokes the visas and green cards of anybody who's voted for or donated to the RNC, prevents vaccines from being distributed to anybody in a red county, and conditions all other federal aid on party support.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/?s=addressing+risks
https://time.com/7301306/harvard-trump-administration-accreditation/
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/how-the-trump-fcc-justified-requiring-a-bias-monitor-at-cbs/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mahmoud-khalil-court-arrest-detention-immigration-green-card-rcna195990
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-fda-revokes-pfizer-emergency-authorization/
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/08/federal-grants-must-demonstrably-advance-trumps-agenda-president-orders/407335/
Assuming you're serious, I really very strongly recommend reading our esteemed host's excellent post https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before.
The post is too long to reply to in full but this part
>even if Trump wins in a landslide, conservatives still won’t control the levers of cancel culture. Did the Republicans taking the White House, House, and Senate in 2016 end cancel culture? Did it even slow it down? Plus or minus a few civil rights laws, cancel culture isn’t implemented at the government level. It’s implemented at the level of media, institutions, and popular taste-making, which Democrats hold more firmly than federal government
is just straightforwardly wrong these past 7 months, also doesn't take into account the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v United States incentivizing lawless conduct by the Executive and insulating the pardon power from criminal prosecution due to it being conclusively and preclusively in the purview of the Executive. Happy to address a direct point, but the current political meta is defined by 1) Committing crimes while in office and 2) Giving unconditional pardons to your admin to avoid future prosecution. Republicans will destroy the country with these 2 tactics if Democrats keep on saying "We'll finally restore normalcy when we win" and following norms that allow Republicans to commit crimes with impunity. This would just reward Republicans for violating the Constitution. Instead, they should use Republicans' tactics to punish them in reciprocation to gain leverage to fix this problem in the future. And if Republicans don't like this plan they could just... hold Trump accountable.
What you are calling retaliation of norms is retaliation of *breaking* norms.
You are right
<Call me when the "retaliation" comes even close to the level of risk that used to come from criticizing the Left (like, say, to pick a completely random example, a private citizen being doxxed by the NYT)
Not a valid comparison to joining an open letter. Scott was not a member of a group criticizing the left, he was saying things in his own that offended some lefties.
I think the people currently clapping and hooting about how Trump is owning the libs by firing people at FEMA who whistleblow about it being run incompetently are the first people who will be calling for someone's blood when FEMA fails to respond to a disaster because it's being run incompetently.
MAGA has a lot of antipathy towards FEMA after employees were instructed not to help disaster victims with Trump yard signs after Hurricane Helene last year
https://perry.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=403129
This is the kind of claim that requires extraordinary evidence, certainly more than the attached link.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/09/g-s1-33601/fema-worker-hurricane-trump-signs-florida
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/09/fema-supervisor-fired-milton-relief-team-trump-signs
Is that enough evidence for you?
Evidence that a single supervisor issued a directive for which they were fired. I suppose that's in line with your claim, although you certainly worded it in such a way as to suggest the directive came all the way from the top.
Also, I agree they should have been fired, but I would be interested to hear their side of the story. I can think of one reason why a supervisor might instruct Fema employees not to engage with people with a lot of MAGA signage thay isn't retaliatory, and it has to do with the fact that in the deepest most conspiratorial part of the Trump base, they think FEMA is a program for putting microchips in people's brains and other nonsense. Judging how much of the communication was around the need to de-escalate, its clear they were receiving a lot of push back from the locals, so perhaps the supervisor thought mistakenly that it was more important to avoid conflict than to inform people of their rights.
Which is just to say, whatever happened, acting like MAGA and conservative antipathy towards FEMA is a recent development is incorrect.
Their side of the story is that they were unfairly scapegoated for something that was a widespread unofficial policy at the agency.
There are similar claims about Western North Carolina. Want links?
I fail to understand the antipathy towards an organization that actually fires an employee who committed a gross and illegal injustice towards MAGAs. What would be their standards of not feeling antipathy? Never hiring anyone who would try something like this? How?
The firing would mean something if they'd done it before Trump was elected, instead of waiting to see if they could get away with not doing the firing.
I continue to think they would be sad if there was a disaster that wasn't properly responded to. I know it sounds trivial, but I think this is a really fundamental point.
Some libs are mad because a police officer was racist - great, let's retaliate against police to own the cons, uh oh, now our cities are overrun with crime.
Some MAGAs are mad because public health officials promoted BLM, great, let's ban vaccines to own the libs, oops, now we all have preventable diseases.
Some libs are mad at Border Patrol because they put kids in cages, great, let's screw over border patrollers to own the cons, uh oh, now we're overrun by illegal immigrants.
Some MAGAs are mad because of a FEMA supervisor who discriminated against Trump supporters, great, let's gut FEMA to own the libs, aaaaah, now a hurricane destroyed our city and there's nobody to help.
Everyone feels great about how owned their opponents are, but vital services don't work and the country is falling apart.
Yeah, I agree with you. And if these firings turn out to impede FEMA’s ability to successfully carry out disaster relief, I will agree that they were short sighted and poorly implemented.
It seems to me though that high quality information is basically not a thing that the media provides any more, they have drunk their own #resistance Koolaid and criticise everything that Trump does as short sighted and poorly implemented. Even when he does obviously good things like create peace between India and Pakistan or between Azerbaijan and Armenia. (he’s just angling to win a Nobel Peace Prize!)
So is he retaliating against people who are competent but he personally dislikes, or is he getting political operatives out of a corrupt agency? Former is bad, latter is good. Media says he’s doing the former, Trump claims he’s doing the latter. The rest of us get on with our lives, wait and see, and hope things get better from here.
There's two things going on here. One, as you mentioned, is straight up retaliation:
> Some MAGAs are mad because public health officials promoted BLM, great, let's ban vaccines to own the libs
But there is a larger problem here that once public health agencies openly supported progressive causes it destroys their credibility on other things. The CDC made statements about the public health implications of BLM protests that were so ridiculous and unscientific that even the two digit IQ crowd could instantly see that they weren't true. So, while I agree that there is an "own the libs" component to it, I think there is a much larger crowd who thinks "cut their funding because they aren't really doing science anyway. They're just a bunch of progressive hacks." And then there is an even larger group who may have been strongly against public health agency cuts before, but are now ambivalent about it because they don't trust those agencies.
If you see them brazenly lie about the public health implications of BLM protests, how do you know that they aren't lying about the vaccines too? In my case and yours it's because we understand some of the science behind them, but this is maybe 5-10% of the public. And while I know that even at the height of the woke panic, probably 99% of what the CDC did was politically neutral and legitimate public health work (though the effectiveness can argued, it was at least honest and legitimate), it sure wasn't 99% of the public facing communications by their leadership.
I don't disagree with any of this, except possibly directionally about how much responsibility some form of conservatism should take for the fact that it can't understand that the CDC also does good things.
(I also think some form of liberalism bears some responsibility about some libs being memed into police not affecting crime, etc, etc, etc)
Yeah, I'm in a really weird position on this where I both completely disagree with the Republican actions here and yet I sympathize with them a lot more than the people getting hit.
I manage a budget at work and if I diverted 1% of that to my personal political opinions I would be fired immediately. And I consider not doing that so easy that I don't even have to think about it, so I have a hard time understanding why the public health agency leadership couldn't meet such a low bar. And where were the open letters and protests from the rank and file scientists when their leadership was issuing politically motivated and completely unscientific decrees back then? Where were the people in the room stating the obvious "hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this because we're supposed to be a neutral scientific agency" or even just the self interested "you know if we take sides in politics the other side is going to hit back, right".
It just feels like there is this sense of entitlement by the left that they should be able to run the government like their own personal fiefdom and use money taken out of my paycheck to advance their personal politics over the public interest. And I really don't know how to solve the problem because the fact remains that these agencies absolutely do critical work where scientific progress and the economy will suffer, and even people (it could be me) will die if it doesn't get done.
I think you’re giving the anti-public health Republicans too much credit. They are not against public health because of BLM, they are openly against it because they’ve been brainwashed into thinking the covid vaccines were a mass murder weapon. RFK himself openly holds this position and doesn’t mention BLM, and he is the face of a sizable movement
No, this is totally wrong. Trump's position is that he wants to shut down FEMA and "return it to the states," like the Department of Education. Before the election he was claiming that FEMA was trying to reposses your house, impound your car and refine the cobalt and other minerals inside it, and that the funds paid out were loans. After the Texas floods where FEMA took 72 hours to respond because Noem instituted a red tape policy that said she had to sign off on any approvals, Leavitt said everything was done perfectly and Trump said the flood was a once in 1000 years happening. Importantly, the entire right wing media apparatus is completely lockstep with this, and so are conservstive voters, which is why Trump's approval rating has dropped like 1 point despite all the fuck ups that are a direct result of his policies. Happy to source anything.
Also will just point out that conspiracy theories are a modus operandi when attacking the left, but the same group of people are oddly suspicious about multiple once in a lifetime events happening under Trump, especially his Epstein responses. This isn't because Republicans have a principled epistemology and they just know nothing fishy happens when Republicans are in charge, it's because they're enemies of civilization and should be treated as such in light of the past few months of insanity after years of Biden saying he would unite the country and restore normalcy.
"A private news organization published someone's personal information, and other private citizens acted in an immoral way due to that information. This is equivalent to the federal government -- which is the only institution that has a monopoly on violence, and can near unilaterally take away your freedoms -- acting like a second world dictatorship."
I'm sorry, this is flatly ridiculous.
In what way is the leader of the executive branch exercising his authority over the people working in the executive branch "like a second world dictatorship"? This is not violent, and their freedoms remain, so the rest of your statement is a non sequitur.
Of course, he doesn’t have the authority.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the authority of the executive is only bounded by literal acts of violence or curtailment of freedoms. This is such an extreme position that it comes across as willfully abstruse rather than being grounded in a sincere desire to engage in productive conversation.
Wait, the idea that the President can fire federal employees is an "extreme position"? I'm struggling to understand how this comment could possibly make sense.
It actually wasn't clear at all that the intent of the constitution was for the President to have complete control over the executive branch, even though he led it. The President's powers are very specifically enumerated in the constitution and doesn't include things like "hires and fires every employee in the executive branch." In fact, every cabinet position is approved by congress, so in a sense every sub cabinet executive official is at least as beholden to congressional approval as presidential approval. The consolidation of presidential authority over the executive branch didn't happen until the Reorganization Act of 1939, and if you look at the debate around that bill, a lot of people felt at the time it was un-American for the President to be able to act in a CEO like manner.
Thanks for steelmanning the claim. I still don't particularly buy it (federal employees need to be accountable to _someone_, and making it the legislative branch seems to violate separation of powers). But at least this is a coherent explanation of what some of the people yelling at me think.
We left the constitution behind a long time ago. The executive branch as we know it today isn't remotely comparable to anything laid out in the constitution. The federal agencies under the control of the president act like a fourth branch of government which is unaccountable to either the president or congress and has no effective democratic control either.
"The President can hire and fire whoever he wants" is how we got the Spoils System and we got rid of that a century and a half ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
So you think retaliating against critics is good? Or bad? It's unclear. If you think it's bad, stand against it. If you think it's good, what are you complaining about the (apparently homogenous) left for?
Or if you really meant to say it's okay to do bad things if it's out of spite--fuck that, that's the root of evil, grow up.
Sure, retaliating against critics would be bad if it were happening, but that's not what Scott linked to. And you know, I'd say a pretty decent test for whether critics are being silenced are whether you can go for one minute online without hearing one. We're, uh, rather far from that. People who hate everything Trump stands for are quite loudly, frequently, and exuberantly saying so.
At this point when someone argues so disingenuously my first thought is that it's one of those propaganda farms that stirs up anger for someone's geopolitical/financial benefit.
Anyway, for any regular humans reading, Snapdragon is pretending like we're talking about Soviet-style censorship where people can't vocalize their disagreement in public, when we're actually talking about retaliation against employees, agencies, universities, politicians, etc. cf all the threats of violence, deportation, withholding funding, firings, etc that have been all over the news in the last seven months (note that Scott did link to this, despite the weird claim that he didn't).
Stop stumping for the crowd (whoever you think you're complaining to about "Snapdragon" arguing "so disingenuously"). It's quite rude. As I've stated many other times in this thread, the "this" you claim Scott linked to is only the last outrage you listed: Trump fired (well, technically put on leave) employees he was in charge of. I don't consider this immoral, let alone a threat to free speech. Feel free to argue this point, like @Kamateur did above. Feel free to also shore up Scott's original claim that "people and groups with business before the administration" are at risk for criticizing the government.
So your stance is that being fired is not "retaliation" because you are still capable of criticizing Trump after being fired? Fascinating.
When your critics are employees and "retaliating" is firing them that's a bit different. Since when do you have the right to criticize your boss and also the right to receive a paycheck from him?
For one thing it is obviously absurd to characterize the relationship between a federal agency employee and the president as "your boss" akin to the relationship between a person and their immediate boss. Pretending like those are the same does not win arguments; it only reveals how much you are not arguing in good faith.
Second, you do have that right, morally, and if someone criticized their boss because their boss did a bad thing and were fired for it, I would have the same complaints about that: the boss is wrong, not the employee; the boss should be better; an injustice has occurred. After all if the boss were a good person then they would encouraging, not insecure, about criticism.
This should be... obvious.
1. So what, the peans over the guy fired from Google after very much criticizing his employer were all a "when I'm down, I ask for tolerance, because that's your principle, when I'm above, I oppress you because that's my principle"?
2. We hold the government to a very standard very different from private actors and for good reasons. Outside of some basically sacred documents (eg ledgers), a company can release or withhold whatever info they please. If a policeman did the same, it'd be a crime. If the DMV had the same sign of most bars, "we retain the right to refuse service", it'd be illegal and likely unconstitutional. This doubles of technical agencies like the Fed and the NIH whose impartiality is something *the entire private sector* relies on when making decisions. If you wanna argue for a Venezuela model, you'll need more convincing arguments than "but but but the Left"
Google was perfectly within its rights to fire that dude. That said, if I agree with what he wrote, I’ll lower my opinion of Google as an organisation correspondingly.
The exact same applies here.
Except google is a private entity you can mostly choose not to buy from, or trust. The federal government is not an entity you can disengage from if you live in the US. And NIH research affects everyone, far beyond US borders
I find it really hard to not USE any Google product, however so far I am not BUYING as in not clicking on ads.
This. It is actually not acceptable to publicly criticise your boss. If you post on social media, or talk to the media, or sign an open letter about how much your boss sucks and their opinions and policies and visions for the company suck, you risk getting fired.
This is normal and appropriate. Most large organisations have official policies to this effect.
(Of course you can complain to your spouse or your friends at a party.)
As a quick sanity/principle check, of the people who are complaining that the Trump admin is doing this, how many of you also feel that Obama was in the wrong for firing General McChrystal after he criticised Obama’s foreign policy in Iraq?
I would like to note that Chrystal was fired because he was insulting VC Biden, interestingly enough Chrystal he endorsed for Biden in 2020 essentially saying that while they didn't see eye to eye he respects him.
That said yes, I do think Obama should have had thicker skin for this low level insults.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/us/politics/stanley-mcchrystal-biden.html
Would it still not be acceptable to criticize your boss if they never hired you and it was expected to leave their position in 4 years?
Yes.
I contend that it absolutely ought to be acceptable to criticise your boss. If you believe in democracy and free speech and all that stuff, why should you make an exception for this? A truly free society of free* men and women would feel entirely open to criticise their bosses.
* I mean, assuming they still had bosses in this truly free society; but I'm thinking "Four Freedoms" free, not "utopian workers' paradise big rock candy mountain in the sky" free
Is this how it works in your country—Australia, I believe—when someone criticizes Sam Mostyn?
You can have an opinion on Trump, of course, but LARPing as an American feels dishonest. You write a *lot* here about how great you think the guy is, but don’t have a direct stake in the game.
I am an American citizen
Like Nicolle Kidman, dual citizenship? You use Australiian/British/Canadian spellings quite a bit.
You quote MLK as talking about the ‘colour’ - we spell it ‘color’ here - of their skin and say that Trump represents King’s values well.
I disagree. Not even the in the same zip code as King. I remember when the guy said he couldn’t get a fair shake from a judge because the judge’s parents were Mexican immigrants. The judge himself was born in Indiana.
Long time conservatives with actual spines and character left the Republican party at that point. If they didn’t leave voluntarily they were driven out by a petty little boy. You do remember ‘shithole’ countries don’t you?
I was alive when King was assassinated. I’m pretty sure he would be rethinking his whole ‘arc of human history bending toward justice’ idea with the current moral cretin that inhabits the White House. I think and am sure King would agree that Trump is an incredibly cruel and ignorant man.
Dear Gunflint,
I can see you take exception with my political opinions.
God bless you for that. You are an American, and free speech is your birthright, and never would I dream of telling you what you ought to believe.
I may not have your wisdom and life experience, but I have lived in a few different places. One of them is the USA. I have a deep love for the American people. In my experience, they are friendly, helpful, and never shy to tell you exactly what they think.
As you may know, the rest of the world has mixed feelings towards Americans. America as a country has historically used its power and influence in some ethically dubious ways, including toppling democratically elected leaders in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa to allow the US State Department more influence and give American companies access to resources. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America backed Yeltsin and plundered Russia’s resources, sending the country into economic catastrophe, until Vladimir Putin put a stop to it.
Sometimes people on the far left say that America (and the West in general) are evil and must be decolonized. (American spelling! I am doing my best!) While I understand this sentiment, I don’t agree with it. I think most Americans are good people and, as a Christian, I don’t wish suffering on anyone. Even if someone has committed crimes, they can still repent and be forgiven.
I think that the things America has done, also, do not reflect the values and ideals of the average American. I think they reflect the values and ideals of a small number of very powerful people, who use their influence on media and culture to ensure that the average American voter remains mostly oblivious to what they are up to. These people make up the “permanent bureaucracy” in Washington DC (or as Trump calls them the Deep State). They have historically had significant influence over both political parties.
However that changed when Donald Trump entered politics and unexpectedly won the 2016 election. Trump was never in politics and independently wealthy (so couldn’t be bribed) and threatened to “drain the swamp.” This caused a realignment.
It’s important to remember the reason Trump won the election. It was despite the Republican elite, which actively tried to hinder him. It was despite his obvious personal flaws.
In prosaic terms, it was because Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan - the “Rust Belt” - flipped red. Free trade agreements under Obama had destroyed manufacturing jobs in these areas and poor border control had flooded them with fentanyl. Trump promised to bring the jobs back from China and build the wall to keep out the fentanyl, and that’s what these voters wanted to hear. They didn’t care about his personal life.
In less prosaic terms, it’s because Americans had started to suffer like the rest of the world. Obama had promised hope and change and instead protected the billionaire class who hid their money in Panama, gotten millions of people hooked on opioids and caused the housing crisis. His former voters had started to feel like so many in the Third World - that their politicians only protected each other and the donor class and didn’t care about everyday Americans.
How right they were.
It’s popular to say these days “it’s not left versus right, it’s right versus wrong.” I actually agree with that statement, although perhaps not in the way the people who say it usually intend.
After all, in his first term Trump was badly outnumbered. The swamp was able to prevent him making any major policy headway. The media was able to convince enough Americans that he was a uniquely terrible person that they threw him out of office in 2020 hoping for a return to “normal.” They played clips out of context, they called him racist (Scott has an article debunking this - You Are Still Crying Wolf - for which he got more hate than anything else he’s written. Trump has more support from Blacks and Hispanics than any Republican candidate in the last 50 years.) He was investigated on invented connections to Russia, then impeached for asking for an investigation on someone - Hunter Biden - who had definitely committed crimes.
To be fair, as you point out, Trump also got himself in trouble by saying a bunch of really dumb s**t. Career politicians know that they have to watch every word they say. Trump does not do that. He also has a giant ego, has definitely groped women without their consent, and done some sketchy things in business.
All his supporters know this! We have known this for 10 years. But Clinton was an Epstein client, Bush lied about WMD to invade Iraq, and Obama had the American military arm and train Al Qaeda so they could destroy Syria in an ultimately failed bid to topple Assad. What do you think is worse? Do you see how media frames issues to get us arguing about things that don’t really matter?
To be continued…
(If you feel I post too much about Trump you are welcome to block me. In general I post when I feel I have something to say, a perspective that isn’t being fairly represented, and I do try and present it respectfully.)
From the past, we learn that any would be authoritarian government must control speech. This is true for both communists and fascists. In Soviet Russia, even family members could be informants against people criticizing the government.
This is the really alarming thing about the left’s monopoly on information that in my experience most leftists don’t fully realize.
In another thread, we debated FEMA and whether they deliberately withheld aid from Trump supporters. Your sources tell you that they only did so when there was legitimate threat to aid workers.
I don’t know! You might be right. I don’t have direct experience. But I was on MAGA Twitter during Hurricane Helene, and I remember seeing report after report of really terrible stuff - not only were FEMA deliberately skipping Trump houses, they were blocking people from outside bringing aid in. Elon got into a Twitter spat with Pete Buttigieg about this. A guy called Matt van Swol who lives in Western North Carolina abruptly turned from a lefty into a major MAGA influencer because he saw the extent of destruction first hand and how the first response of media was to cover it up. And I remember the ire directed at Majorkas when he told Americans FEMA had run out of money for hurricane survivors because they spent too much on illegal immigrants.
And story after story is like this. There was a lot of anger about Trump pardoning Jan 6 rioters. But read some of the rioters’ accounts sometime. Most of those arrested were non violent. An elderly lady was arrested for praying inside the Capitol. There are reports of judges refusing to allow exonerating evidence, long prison sentences for crimes that essentially amount to trespassing, random FBI raids with laptops and phones confiscated - even after release.
Might these people be lying, or might these posts be written by bots? Of course. But I have yet to see an article in the Atlantic or the New York Times that really tries to grapple with the humanity of people who strongly support Trump. I have yet to see an interview with a non violent Jan 6 rioter on MSNBC, even one who admits in retrospect that the election may not have been stolen. Instead these people get othered and monstered.
And this leads to predictable consequences. Most prominent MAGA voices in America have at some point in the last four years been the victim of death threats from Antifa, run ins with the law, or hit pieces in the media. There was an epidemic of swatting (calling police to a persons house alleging there there is an active violent crime in progress) on MAGA influencers (such at Matt van Swol above) that took place in February of this year.
And there is never any apology when the cancellers get it wrong. Whether it’s Biden actually turning out to have cognitive impairment, or COVID actually plausibly being a lab leak, or Hunter Bidens laptop being real, the media just carries on as if nothing happened. Have to continue to #resist Trump! He is bad! Don’t let us be distracted by accountability!
Perhaps with this context you can understand why the July 13, 2024 photo of Trump, survivor of an assassination attempt, face bloodied, American flag behind him, raising a defiant fist in the air and shouting “fight, fight, fight!” became so iconic.
It's amusing to see this level of xenophobia ("talk American!" "Dual citizens aren't real Americans") juxtaposed with these political opinions.
You’re right I do live and work in Australia. For better or for worse, we are all affected in the rest of the world by who is the president of your great country. But I used to live there, too, and I still have family there.
But yes my direct experience of this phenomenon (don’t make social media posts criticising your boss) came during COVID when Australian doctors were disciplined and even fired for publicly criticising the government’s COVID response.
If I had criticism of my employers I always did it directly to their faces. Let the chips fall where they may.
Spoken like a true American. I really do love the US of A and its culture. Australians are so timid.
Retaliation from the Government is considerably more scary than retaliation by private companies
That happened decades ago. To the best of my knowledge, it all started in a large scale, public way when anti-abortion activists began a campaign of assassination and violence against abortion providers. That predates the internet. Such activists began using websites publicising the names and addresses of doctors who provide abortions to pregnant women, resulting in a series of murders (they won the legal right to do this in 2001).
The term "doxxing" became part of popular culture in the aftermath of the "Gamergate" controversy, in which a group of male gamers attacked online a female gaming news reporter, but quickly spread to attacking feminists, and progressives in gaming culture in general, resulting in online harassment and death threats. This was roughly 2014-15.
This still goes on, of course (Google "Canary Mission" and "Harvard").
And, yes, Scott himself has had his own run-in with this. Which was a terrible thing that shouldn't have happened to Scott. That doesn't change my overall point.
Political harassment has gotten worse over the course of the last few decades, esp. online, and that mostly started with the right. Note that I am not arguing that the same activity is worse when one side does it rather than the other, nor that one side or the other never does this, nor am I arguing that this somehow taints the political opinions and views of people who have never engaged in doxxing. Only that there is a history here that shouldn't be ignored.
Spending money just to spend money is not good.
Presumably they believe in the things the money is being spent on. I work in the state health care field and I can tell you millions of dollars of great state programs are about to be cut if funds are not released.
This is exactly the point, nothing more!
That's something I'd have worked into the letter if it were me. "Government spends less money than usual" won't strike a lot of people as a negative. "Here's a list of cool projects that aren't being funded" (and a list of horrible diseases they might cure) has a lot more oomph.
Yeah, the problem there is that they may not have a list of cool projects and horrible diseases, but it really is just "spend more money, because, uh, spend more money on science in general and maybe something will come out of it, but anyway at least I'll get a job out of it".
Even then, you could punch it up a bit in a vaguer way.
"Every year, x-million Americans die of [cancer or whatever]. Y-million Americans don't die of [some disease NIH funding was peripherally involved in curing] thanks to research that was only possible with the NIH. That cost us [inflation-adjusted figure]. Imagine what we could do with [amount of underspending]. [First figure] was a small price to pay for a world without [polio or whatever]. [Figure] would be a small price to pay for a world without [cancer/alzheimers etc]."
You don't actually have to have a cancer cure, just a vague insinuation that medical research is the sort of thing that might help. If the NIH has literally never achieved anything, just take Jonas Salk's lab costs and take out the reference to it needing NIH funding.
You or someone you love might or have died from this, and we can cure it, is an attractive sales pitch. We're entitled to keep all our congressionally-mandated lucre because we're wonderful is a terrible sales pitch.
"You or someone you love might or have died from this, and we can cure it, is an attractive sales pitch. We're entitled to keep all our congressionally-mandated lucre because we're wonderful is a terrible sales pitch."
Exactly. But apparently that's treason to say it, or something, going by how Daeg got hot under the collar when I said it.
I read that as "How dare these oiks take OUR money, and how dare you suggest WE stoop to the level of asking them nicely for it" and rather liked it. Maybe there's hopes for the libs yet.
How many QALYs would be lost if those “great state programs” are indeed cancelled?
I have absolutely no way of qualifying that.
This is exactly why I'm pretty confident said programs can be cancelled without any noticeable impact on the future of anyone other than those who get paid from said funds. Alas, the vast majority of "good programs" are "good" but inconsequential.
Program impact is hard to measure if you're not collecting the right data, but that doesn't mean it has no impact. I don't think those follow.
But I'm sure you're right about some of them.
Almost no one is collecting QALY impact data because almost all research has such a minuscule number saved that it’ll barely cover the investments made. But naturally those whose income, prestige and careers depend on government handouts would prefer everyone to think the world will collapse if X doesn’t get funded.
There’s also a bias at play here where we assign some sort of immense value to research that’s “already been approved”, but no value to research that’s been left out. I would argue that if NIH funding is so important a principled person should have just as strong of a rallying cry demanding it is doubled as they do when it is halved.
The thing about these kinds of things is that these people never once say "hey let's spend less money for once". It's infinite money that they're looking for
Not infinite money, but scientific research likely has higher marginal utility than most things the government spends on, so we'd probably benefit from a lot more. Richard Hanania summarizes some of the evidence: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/government-science-and-the-prestige
As he admits, it's not an ironclad conclusion, but I think the evidence is decent.
Would you like me to give you a list of twenty things I think the federal government should spend less money on?
I'm fully on your side and support the letter, but such a list would be independently interesting to me
Grumble, I shouldn't have promised this because people are going to yell at me that each of these are the pillar holding our society together, or that they don't exist and anyone who says the government is funding these are vile lies, and I don't feel like defending my position on each one of them, but fine, here goes - fossil fuel subsidies, agricultural subsidies, sending people to Salvadorean prison, military foreign aid (except Ukraine because they're defending themselves and it serves US foreign policy interests), broadband subsidies, high-speed rail and realistically probably also Amtrak, the arts, having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime), welfare for illegal immigrants, TSA and Homeland Security, buying 10% of Intel, most of the things in Inflation Reduction Act, small business loans, dumb electric vehicle subsidies that exclude all the good EVs, weird spy actions to subvert Denmark in Greenland, most (all?) DEI programs, most college financial aid, alternately cracking down on / pouring money into crypto, Head Start, random one-time payments to sympathetic groups every time there's a stimulus, direct and indirect subsidies to labor unions.
This is probably not that interesting/convincing, because I think most problems are something like "the government regulates something so strictly that it becomes impossible to do without lots of money, then subsidizes it so that it's possible to do anyway", and I would be nervous cutting the subsidies without also ending the regulation that makes it impossible to do without subsidies, and the question didn't give me the option to also cut regulation.
"Over-regulating [X]" seems like it would be a valid thing to say you wish less money was spent on.
I considered things like "enforcing Trump's tariffs", but decided that would have been cheating, and tried to mostly do things where the actual spending of the money was bad.
Brave. Appreciated. And avoiding going all Caplan. He recently recommended on betonit: no funding for college except STEM and less school for girls (and boys, but less education of girls may do more to raise TFR).
"less education of girls may do more to raise TFR"
Yeah, no. Not unless you want to raise fertility among the underclass. "Less education of girls" pans out to "we don't want women to have careers but to stay home".
Unhappily, right now, unless both spouses are earning, you won't be able to afford a home. Hence no marrying and no kids.
Fix the economic incentives first, Bryan, then come back with "the wimmenfolk don't need no book larnin'".
We don't have enough nukes to blow up the world https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness
> having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime
Surprisingly we've got our arsenal down to ~10% what it was in the 60s and 70s. With currently deployed nuclear weapons, we have just about enough to destroy the world, given likely launch failures/refusals to launch, weapons destroyed before launch, and likely interceptions.
I'm just glad he doesn't want to blow up the moon. I like the moon, I want to keep it as is.
Is your objection specifically to California high-speed rail, or are you also against high-speed rail on the Northeast Corridor? I think there's a pretty strong case to be made that the latter would have a good society-level return on investment if implemented at all competently (and there are serious proposals for how to do so).
I can't speak for Scott's position, but while it would be nice to have high speed rail in the east coast, I think skepticism is justifiable, since there were proposals for how to do so in California as well.
Maybe they were on some level less technically serious, but that's going to be outside of most people's expertise to assess.
Agricultural subsidies are a bitter and sore point everywhere. Just ask about CAP spending.
https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/data-and-analysis/financing/cap-expenditure_en
The problem is, if you don't support rural communities, you end up with "ooops, where did our food security go?" and if you do support rural communities, you end up with the likes of "cash for ash".
If a Seraph not currently attending on the throne of the Lord God Almighty could come down from heaven with a list of "support this, don't support that", the nations of the earth would be very grateful.
I'm surprised you're against arts funding, much of modern art from the plastic to the visual to music to everything, really, makes me want to agree but there are some things that won't ever be profitable but which do make life better. As Terry Pratchett pointed out in "Maskerade", if you want to make money off music, then you put on the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber. If you want great art, you have to subsidise it.
There's room for both in the world!
EDIT: You did better than you said, you gave us 21 things not 20!
1. fossil fuel subsidies
2. agricultural subsidies
3. sending people to Salvadorean prison
4. military foreign aid (except Ukraine because they're defending themselves and it serves US foreign policy interests)
5. broadband subsidies
6. high-speed rail and realistically probably also Amtrak,
7. the arts
8. having more nukes than it takes to blow up the world (the amount needed to blow up the world is fine, we might need to do that sometime)
9. welfare for illegal immigrants
10. TSA and Homeland Security,
11. buying 10% of Intel
12. most of the things in Inflation Reduction Act
13. small business loans
14. dumb electric vehicle subsidies that exclude all the good EVs
15. weird spy actions to subvert Denmark in Greenland
16. most (all?) DEI programs
17. most college financial aid
18. alternately cracking down on / pouring money into crypto
19. Head Start
20. random one-time payments to sympathetic groups every time there's a stimulus
21. direct and indirect subsidies to labor unions
Utah's agricultural subsidies aren't so defensible. The vast majority of it isn't food, it's alfalfa and we export most of it. (The subsidies are mostly in the form of refusal to reform water rights and subject them to market forces).
Because of water misuse like this, the Great Salt Lake is unable to maintain its water level which exposes toxic lakebed dust that will get kicked up into the air. It's a disaster in the process of happening.
Great art is art people like. Taylor Swift beats Bach.
I might like some art which isn’t beloved by enough people to cover its costs, but taxpayers have no reason to fund my idiosyncrasies.
Release the list sir
Please do so! Everyone has their own idea of "this thing I don't like is pure pork barrel, that other thing I like is vital to the interests of the nation", so why not you as well?
Some of us actually enjoy shopping, thanks.
Congress passed a law saying this is how much money the government will spend funding medical research this year. The executive branch is blatantly violating that law and not spending that money.
And they've been trying to evade judicial review by claiming that rescinded memos are invalid but the policies they are meant to implement are not rescinded https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5113776-white-house-press-secretary-spending-freeze/
The actual open letter reads much better than the "authors write" in the post.
The quote above is not the open letter. The quote above is a note from the author's of the letter *about the letter*. Click the link to read the actual letter.
Yeah, they are different enough that Scott should really make that more explicit in the lead-in.
I agree but also people with poor reading comprehension shouldn't be on ACX
I do not think it is an obviously wrong interpretation (indicative of poor reading comprehension) to see "the authors write" (as it was previously written) and think that this means that the following is at least, in part, the letter.
In case people are wondering, this is the actual text of the letter:
Dear Dr. Bhattacharya,
We, the undersigned scientists, doctors, and public health stakeholders, commend your commitment to spend all funds allocated to the NIH, as reported in The Washington Post. At the same time, we are concerned by reports that U.S. institutions received nearly $5 billion less in NIH awards over the past year. With less than one month to the end of the fiscal year, we submit this urgent request to ensure that your commitment is upheld. If you anticipate that all appropriated funds cannot be spent in time, we request a public disclosure of the barriers preventing the achievement of this crucial responsibility.
We present this request in the spirit of the broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of spending appropriated NIH funds. In their July letter to the Office of Management and Budget, fourteen Republican senators, led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell, forcefully argued that suspension of NIH funds “could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science.” The case for investment in medical research transcends political divides as it serves our collective national interest.
The return on investment from research is compelling. Synthesizing the empirical literature, economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP—and about $11 when broader benefits are counted. Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem.
Spending these funds is also a competitiveness imperative as China attempts to transform itself from a low-end manufacturer to a high-tech research and innovation juggernaut. In 2024, the Chinese government increased its spending on science and technology by 10%, and the nation’s total expenditure on research and development increased by 50% in nominal terms between 2020 and 2024. As China’s number of clinical trials and new drug candidates begin to outpace the U.S., America cannot afford to allow biomedical research funding to go unspent.
We respectfully ask that you ensure that NIH will obligate all FY25 funds by September 30, 2025, and, if that is not possible, that you address the scientific community to explain why and what must be done to ensure all appropriated funds are spent in FY26. We stand ready to support your efforts to preserve this vital national investment.
I didn't realize the quote from the author was different from the content of the letter. The letter is much better written IMO
(although plausibly this is reasonable given they're targeted at different audiences
I think you should make it clearer that you're restating the letter/reading between the lines. The quote block makes it look like you're quoting it verbatim.
I don't think these scientists quite understand the position that they are in. I was just reading the Melian dialogue from Thucydides, and the Melians were better negotiators than this.
Yeah, it worked out so well for them.
The comments on this post are wild.
One of the following is likely happening for those people who are commenting here about how the letter is unserious.
1) you didn't read the actual letter and just read the lead in (maybe blame Scott for that)
2) you are post-hoc rationalizing your fear to support this open letter for fear of retaliation
3) you don't believe that the funding of the NIH is a good use of taxpayer money (i.e. you don't believe the return on investment is good enough and you're in favor of withholding the money)
4) you're not commenting here in good faith (trying to sow doubt about the worthiness of this letter for an unspoken agenda) (for many this might be a repeat of 3)
I mean, not signing for fear of retaliation may be a rational decision. Would you advise a federal employee to sign at this point?
As I read it I was expecting some kind of contingent contract where people would be given the option to sign it only if X,000 other people did.
Why does nobody reach out to me with stuff like this? Spartacus.app
this is great, totally should be used
Well nothing I guess, Trump is giving the anti science folks their retribution so don't sign unless you want an unpaid vacay...😕
I like the tone of the post (I'm generally a sucker for the "say true things in belligerently straightforward ways" rationalist style), but I was genuinely confused and did not realize that the quoted text was not the text of the open letter. I do think Scott needs to edit the post to make this clearer ASAP.
5) you don't understand that the point of an open letter is not to be rhetorically persuasive to a single decision maker but rather to document for the public a stance being held by a respecible portion of a stakeholding community.
But for a shocking number of people it appears ro be 1) people on this blog have lost the ability to finish reading a post before they rush to comment their opinion.
My understanding is that the full text of the letter had not been provided in the post initially - only the part that they sent to Scott. The text of the actual letter was added later. So it's not a surprise why people confused the scott-part with the actual letter.
It was not included but linked to (what did people think the "our open letter" link was supposed to be in the text snippet that they believed to be the open letter?). Scott clearly overestimated his audience's reading abilities there.
Granted it seems unprofessional and irresponsible on the part of the authors to write a carefully neutral and respectful open letter but fill the invitation to sign the open letter with potshots at the administration. It doesn't seem that unlikely that some political operative would use the invitation text against the people who sign the letter, even if it's not the actual text they sign.
“you don't believe that the funding of the NIH is a good use of taxpayer money (i.e. you don't believe the return on investment is good enough and you're in favor of withholding the money)”
I believe it’s a good use of money but also that we could cancel all of that funding and barely notice the difference. All the low hanging fruit in medicine has already been picked and the marginal value of extra government funded research is extremely low.
If the money truly disappears if not spent by September 30th, I would highly recommend that those at the NIH consider *all* of the applicants for SBIRs this round (due Sept 5th), to be fundable. Get the money to scientists before it's gone. Isn't that a better option than losing it?
That's up to the director, who this letter is trying to convince.
I’m emailing the organizers as well, but this is a simple use case for the 2024 ACX grantee Spartacus.app, which is a platform for conditional commitments to solve coordination and collective action problems.
We’ll be happy to help!
That was my first thought too. I asked the organizers if they wanted to use Spartacus. They found it interesting but said that they were working on too quick a deadline and preferred to try things the boring way first.
Ah. Thanks for thinking of us!
Conditional commitment via an app seems like one of those ideas that sound clever but are full of practical obstacles. How would the people coordinating an open letter know how many of the participants are actually "scientists, doctors, and healthcare professionals" if it's all anonymous?
(The app's email signup workflow doesn't seem to be working btw, still no email after ten minutes or so.)
We just deprecated email logins yesterday. That option will be removed asap.
Everyone isn’t anonymous unless the organizers choose that setting. We can do identity verification according the parameters set by the organizer, via domain exclusions, referral codes or AI selfies
I'm not terribly versed on NIH matters, other than to note fairly massive funding cuts. Is there a link or a source laying out the case for and against these potential cuts or defending this specific NIH spending?
The initial letter (the one posted above has been edited from the one in my inbox) did not...inspire confidence that this was a nonpartisan affair that red state conservatives would want to lend their voice to. Having said that, cuts to important things like cancer research are bad. If the NIH spends $5 billion less than originally intended, what evidence is there that this will primarily harm real cancer research rather than "cancer" research? (1)
(1) Or, like, more that 50% of the cuts will affect "real" research. One singular good program being cut isn't enough; reform and/or a culling is impossible if you demand 100% accuracy and that would be in ideal circumstances.
I'm sure the data exists, but here's my concern aside from the obvious impact to high-value human disease research: the funding cuts impact grants which in turn limit academic research groups in their hiring. Anecdotally I've heard that universities are accepting fewer students. Long term it would seem that this will impact our scientific workforce and allows us to be surpassed by countries that are continuing their research efforts (e.g. China). So, in effect, it means that we will have less talent at home, and need to import it from other countries. On the business side, less grant money means fewer labs purchasing equipment and using services which impacts the biotech economy. It appears that we're already seeing this impact as layoffs continue, and companies contract to survive. That's my understanding-- happy to hear if I'm mistaken.
I’m applying to MD/PhD programs this year (those programs almost always being funded by the NIH), and this appears to be the case. I was urged by current MD/PhD students to apply more broadly, as their programs and those of their colleagues were cutting slots for the coming year. The number of people who are qualified and interested in pursing this training to take on biomedical research careers is limited, and cutting back on admissions decreases an already-small training pool.
Doing a little more digging before bed, is the $5.50 ROI figure coming from this FAQ by Matt Clancy?
https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/frequently-asked-questions-about
Isn't NIH in theory required to spend whatever amount Congress has decided to be spent on research? They can choose to cut the funding of any specific project, but they aren't supposed to just not spend the money at all AIUI.
Yes, this is the unconstitutional part.
Without digging too deep into unproductive CW aspects, NIH funding seems like a suboptimal area for conservatives to defect from Trump to preserve constitutional norms.
It seems like a pretty good area to defect if the consequences are, like, medical advances that would save tens of thousands of lives over the next 5 years.
So what credible evidence is there that this NIH funding would actually go to saving tens of thousands of lives?
For Trump, charity, from his enemies, the evidence.
>Every dollar of NIH funding not deployed represents lost opportunities for breakthrough treatments, missed chances to train the next generation of scientists, and diminished returns on America's innovation ecosystem.
Have you and/or the authors considered that this might be precisely the point? Owning the libs and their lib institutions, no matter the long-term cost? I'm not saying that not writing the letter would be better, but it does confirm to the administration that the spending deficit hurts where it's supposed to hurt.
This is the practical effect but I'm not sure what they're planning behind the scenes. This EO https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/ is basically empty and Trump has publicly stated he likes vaccines and has tried to pass off Operation Warpspeed as an accomplishment (before getting booed at rallies when he mentioned it.) RFK and Trump didn't seem to have much in common (he's stayed silent about Trump's EPA deregulating things he once fought against as an environmental lawyer) so idk what the coordination is like that results in these things happening. Seems like it should be a strictly disfunctional relationship but they're doing quite well with random purges and I haven't heard of any friction compared to Tulsi or Waltz or the IRS heads.
I am one of the legion of the confused who opened my email and thought the summary was the letter itself. Rereading, I think the confusion was valid.
The shot at RFK was foolish, even if it wasn't supposed to be part of the actual letter, since it invites people to write off the letter as being some sort of anti-Trump swing, rather than a genuine appeal to the greater US good.
But it IS an anti-Trump swing, just veiled as an appeal to the greater good, and everyone knows it.
Does everyone know that?
I feel like a lot of people can very genuinely believe that an effective reduction in medical research funding is bad
Yes, but given the context, the people leading the movement are very likely to be leftists, so they really shouldn't be surprised if people really don't want to be associated with that, given the current circumstances.
> Based on our understanding of current administration norms, we do not expect retaliation against private individuals who sign this letter.
That seems very hopeful. I still hope people will sign the letter, but I would, on the contrary, _assume_ that it's the kind of things that would cause retaliation.
(It does not apply to me in any way, being neither a scientist nor from the US ; so feel free to disregard this opinion.)
Scott, you did a bad job of clarifying what the contents of the letter are. I'm seeing the edited version now and it's not enough. Visually, it looks like this:
---
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah embedded letter link blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah SOME DISCLAIMER
> long long quote
a bit more text
> long long quote
---
I think this would have been a lot more intuitive as:
---
Blah blah blah blah blah
**Embedded letter link, bold and in its own line**
For convenience, here are the contents of the above letter:
> long long quote of letter
Why should you sign this or care about this?
The authors tell me in an email:
> long long quote of authors explaining
Scott's post seems very clear to me in its present form.
What is confusing me is the RFK Jr thing that many are talking about in the comments, and that is nowhere to be seen now. Was it something Scott wrote in his own name and then removed? Was it something the letter authors wrote to Scott personally, that he quoted here and then removed? Was it something the authors wrote in their open letter and then removed?
I think that if Scott removed something either from his own prose or from their quote, he should note somewhere that something has been removed, as he usually does.
It was something the letter authors wrote to Scott that he removed. Here's how the first paragraph originally went:
Even as RFK Jr. has learned to diagnose mitochondrial disorders by sight, his subordinates at the National Institutes of Health are stuck supporting medicine through the less magical method of spending money. Unfortunately, they have spent at least $5 billion less of that money than Congress has appropriated to them, which is bad because medical research is good and we want more of it.
Thanks!
I mean, as a jab it's not entirely wrong, but as a "we are presenting ourselves as reasonable, non-partisan people interested purely in the love of science for the betterment of mankind" tactic, yes way better to take it out.
Sorry if I'm being complicit in the destruction of American democracy by pointing out that you don't insult the people you are holding out the begging bowl to, as Daeg has told me I'm doing. When the Capitol goes up in flames, you are all free to blame me!
I applaud the good intentions but unfortunately I have doubts as to:
(1) the efficacy of any Open Letters. I think they work more as PR efforts to raise awareness than to make any government body take action and change course.
(2) an administration running on "we're gonna cut spending, we're gonna trim the fat" and clawbacks of unspent budgets is not inclined towards 'quick, spend all the left-over money before the end of September!'. I think it would be easier to point towards that $5 billion as "see, hard-working people of America? we have saved all this money from your tax dollars to spend on what benefits *you* directly like tax cuts or tackling rising grocery prices rather than pie-in-the-sky ivory tower eggheads fooling around with test-tubes!"
If the fact that withholding congressionally appropriate funds is blatantly illegal (impoundment control act), almost certainly unconstitutional (congress appropriated funds), and entirely without precedent at this scale in the history of the country just doesn’t matter to people like you, and the only resolution is not supposed to be public pressure or the judiciary, but… asking nicer? Well, then we are in a very bad place.
Not to speak for Deiseach, but she seemed generally in favor of the sentiment, while skeptical of success using this tactic.
Is there a better tactic? I’m not sure. I also think it’s a long shot, but if it has a 1% shot of success, that’s probably worth trying, given the stakes.
Maybe more likely to succeed: get a rich business owner who is friendly with Trump to hold a press event praising him and all he’s done for this country’s health care and advancing science. Maybe give him an award for it.
That might still be unlikely to work (given the factors Deiseach mentioned), but I think it’s a better strategy. However, it takes knowing a rich Trump-friendly business owner who is willing to use their influence like this, which seems pretty hard to find.
My point is that it’s a symptom of a state in serious decline when the best way to get the government not to violate its own rules is to get some president’s buddy to stroke his ego. There is a very long history in the US of mass protest movements and suing the government both being successful. If you and Deiseach are right that these can no longer succeed, America is now a deeply different and obviously worse place than ever before.
> My point is that it’s a symptom of a state in serious decline when the best way to get the government not to violate its own rules is to get some president’s buddy to stroke his ego
You aren't wrong.
Yeah, agreed.
(though I would probably have sometime in the US Civil War as America being in a worse place than currently)
Can any sane people who are not convinced a foreigner wants to wipe her arse with your Constitution please chime in with some legal advice on this?
Is this illegal, unconstitutional, and unprecedented? Have no Congressional funds ever been diverted, frozen, or withheld before? Because wasn't there something about Biden withholding funds to pressure Ukrainian government into firing a corrupt prosecutor?
I mean, are we going to go after poor Joe now for being illegal, unconstitutional, and unprecedented? Or is that different because he was Our Guy?
I'll give it a shot.
(1) Is this illegal? - probably, though the actual demonstration of this for any specific funding is complicated. The budget bills passed by Congress appropriate the money and obligate the US to spend it, but there's a certain amount of squish to the process. The amounts withheld by this administration are absolutely enormous compared to prior ones, but it's true that every administration "fails" to spend certain amounts appropriated. In any event, there's no real mechanism for punishing anyone for it.
(2) Is this unconstitutional? - absolutely. From a lay perspective we can distinguish these recessions from past failure to spend cases based on the admin explicitly saying that they intend to cut spending without Congressional approval. The most straightforward case, to my mind, is the recent notice to Congress that the admin intends to let 5 billion in foreign aid spending expire; there's no real argument that this was administrative failure, it's straightforwardly saying "we don't think spending this money is good and we're not going to do it, whatever the appropriations bills say." That's the arrogation of power from the legislature to the executive, and is a perversion of the constitution.
(3) Is this unprecedented? - it depends, I guess. It's not literally unprecedented; Congress passed the antideficiency act in 1884, and has updated it many times since in response to alleged violations where the President or some officer plays too fast and loose with the budget. I'm not aware of any previous administration playing games with authorized funding on this scale. In my view, scale and purpose matter a lot to this because they're the difference between minor conflicts with Congress or administrative failure and active attempts to seize power from the legislature.
As for the Biden incident, I assume we're talking about the anecdote he mentioned in his 2018 Foreign Affairs interview, where he said he had told Ukraine they weren't getting "the billion dollars" unless they fired an allegedly corrupt prosecutor. IIRC there were three billion-dollar loan guarantees given by the Obama Administration to Ukraine between 2014 and 2016, under the Support for the Sovereignty, Integrity, Democracy, and Economic Stability of Ukraine Act of 2014, and this is probably referring to one of them.
As far as I know that's not, strictly speaking, an example of this kind of rescission because that act didn't actually require the President to grant the specific loan guarantees they were negotiating over; but I'll be totally honest and admit that I'm not an expert on our relations with foreign governments and whenever I try to read the act in question my eyes glaze over. Notably, Congress doesn't always specify exactly what a President should do with the monies it appropriates or authorizes; this is one of the reasons why a large rescission might not actually be illegal. Sometimes program funds don't actually have to be spent.
So to sum up, in my view these rescissions are maybe illegal, probably unconstitutional, and unprecedented in scope but not in kind. I think it's altogether an alarming situation, and it casts the President in a role of much more personal power than we usually accord them at a time when the person in the office doesn't fill me with much confidence. But I am not a federal attorney or a historian.
Thank you for a sensible and reasonable reply.
Doesn't every government come into power with at least one campaign promise of "we'll cut unnecessary spending"? It's a good old slogan often dragged out when the Opposition party is looking for something to castigate the Government party with, and if the parties swap places, the slogan still works.
The objection thus seems to be "they're actually doing it instead of just letting it be a campaign promise, which everyone knows you don't believe campaign promises".
The better grounds for objection is that the funding cuts are not targeted, they're just scattershot and will do as much, or more, harm than good. Also that they are politically and partisan motivated.
That second part, when we've had Open Letters, marches, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all from SCIENCE!!! perfectly happy to come out behind political and partisan grounds for 'their' side, means I don't pay much heed (they can object, but what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you're going to play 'this lab supports no human is illegal' then don't be surprised if this lab gets the stinkeye from the administration).
As for Biden, I didn't mean it as a serious comparison, but just to point out that there has been funding used to put pressure on for preferred outcomes by other administrations. Maybe Joe was lying through his teeth about it, but that he felt confident enough to brag that holding the purse strings mean we get to tell you what to do shows that nobody is above doing this. It's not unprecedented, which was the main point I wanted to make.
Well, I think the disconnect here is the level of generality- it is true that every single politician in all of history has said that they'll cut unnecessary spending ("waste, fraud, and abuse" is the popular term). As a rule, that means they spend less on stuff they don't like and more on stuff they do, and obviously that upsets the people who think they've got their priorities backwards.
The distinction here is that the federal government was designed such that Congress decides how much is spent and how, and the Executive branch then works out how to spend it in accordance with those laws. If Congress says "take 10 billion from the Treasury and establish a program of grants for scientific research according to these principles" then the Executive is supposed to have the power to administer the program (up to and including saying "I am in favor of this kind of research but not this kind", unless the law clearly states otherwise) but is not meant to have the ability to say "no, I won't spend that money" or "actually that 10 billion should go to something else I like better."
Here, the Republicans also control Congress, and the last budget bill they passed *did* cut a lot of things Republicans don't like, alongside spending way more money on stuff they do. But Congress is very sensitive to small-d democratic pressures and tends to move slowly and incrementally, so they didn't cut literally everything the President wanted to cut and now he's decided just to do the other cuts himself. So you can see there are two objections- the one you're talking about which is just "I think these cuts are bad" which everyone has in every administration, and "wait a second the lawmakers who are empowered to make these cuts didn't go this far, you're breaking the law and ignoring my representative's expressed will by doing this."
And the reason this is important is that if you have a system where there are a lot of state representatives getting together to hash out how the spending should happen, you get a variety of views, pressures, and desires which generally shape up to be something like a general picture of what the voting population wants. If you allow Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy to single-handedly decide what money is spent and how, you will get a program dominated by whatever one guy feels like, subject only to the threat that Trump might fire him if he gets too much annoying press.
(It's also true that every administration will have people saying that the admin is breaking the law on X subject, but I think it's been vastly more blatant and far-reaching this time, and again it's the sort of thing where the scope matters a lot.)
My basic objection to the concept that this is what people voted for by voting for Donald Trump is that if I vote for someone for mayor of my city on their promise to clean up crime and then they imprison the city council and begin making laws by decree... well that's not exactly what the vote was about, was it? Most people making their choice at the ballot box didn't think that was a possibility because mayors aren't supposed to be doing that. I would guess that a very small minority of voters thought they were casting the deciding vote as to whether or not pediatric hospitals get research funding last November.
Land of free, eh?
Seems like a great time to try that Australian test by randomly selecting from the proposals, see if you get better net outcomes.
I guess I’m not the target audience (non-American), but I feel like the post should have specified what “NIH” even stands for.
Here, let me duck it for you, look for the top result:
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&hps=1&start=1&q=nih&ia=web
It was more about giving feedback on the article than asking for information. I was able to figure it out. But I appreciate the thought.
I am a somewhat rare species, the research consultant: I work for myself, but am supported entirely by research funding, mostly from the NIH though also from the DoD and Medicare. I had 4 NIH grants cancelled this year - these were projects that had been funded only after extensive peer review by other scientists, often after multiple revisions and resubmissions, and all represent extensive sunk costs. Of the 4, I can see how one violated the new political correctness standards, but the other three made no sense. In addition, I had one more that was cancelled and then restored after 6 months, which is no way to treat an ongoing prospective study that is supposed to collect data at pre-specified intervals. Finally, there's a large multicenter trial I lead (an intervention to save the lives of distressed newborns - isn't this politically correct?) where a third of our sites are in Canada and we were told we had to drop those sites because well Canada is the new bad guy. This is a multimillion dollar trial that took a year of planning and is 2 years underway and now we are woefully uncertain of being able to complete it unless we can find someone to replace or support those terrible Canadian neonates.
I signed the letter, but I don't think it will make a fig of difference because we're talking morons here.
I’m so sorry. The cuts are terrible, but their implementation has been absolutely insane. The response of the commentariat here is deeply depressing, as if we have to prove the value of medical science from first principles and act as if RFK Jr is an honest actor who could be convinced. Whatever rationalism is supposed to be, this ain’t it
Agree. I wonder if Scott would humor an NIH 101 post that describes what NIH funding has historically supported, and the machete swings that have been taken to it.
I am confused by your description of your work/role — like you started a little research company/institute? And what's a good way to save life of distressed newborn?
Spending 5Bn in 31 days, is it even possible to spend it wisely in such a timeframe, or you think any research is better than no research? Like, is there already a ranked list of which proposals are best, and then he can just take the top X?
A lot of the frozen spending is on already-funded projects that were partway done. For example, Northwestern has been cut off for all their ongoing grants since April, for reasons that have never been clearly stated. Just releasing that money and funding continuing grants (technically, non-competitive renewals) would spend a big chunk of this money
It is far from clear that a marginal $5B from NIH actually helps science or does anything useful other than employ marginally competent scientists. (Fully competent scientists pursuing useful research have no problems raising funding from the private sector and charitable foundations.)
Much depends on exactly how it's spent, but MOST NIH-funded research is BS busywork. At least money spent by pharma companies is spent with the expectation of a return on investment - if NIH funds were directed toward unpatentable drugs and techniques, that might be worthwhile. Few are.
I have tremendous respect for Jay Battacharya, and tend to defer to his judgement on these things; I wouldn't pressure him.
Also the $5B if unspent doesn't "disappear". It stays in the Treasury, reducing the national debt by that amount. Congress is free to re-allocate it and spend it the following year on the NIH or anything else.
> Much depends on exactly how it's spent, but MOST NIH-funded research is BS busywork
Could you provide any evidence to back this claim?
> (Fully competent scientists pursuing useful research have no problems raising funding from the private sector and charitable foundations.)
Or this one? Note that most biomed scientists who get funding from the private sector or charities still get more funding from NIH. https://www.statnews.com/2025/06/26/nih-funding-budget-cuts-philanthropy-private-sector-funding-pharma-replacement/
Just personal experience - been in the field 20 years. IMHO the vast expansion of the Scientific Research Establishment since WW2 - since the US federal government started funding most of it - has resulted in a shocking decrease in the average quality of published science. And a vast increase in the quantity.
The best is just as numerous and as good as ever. But there's vastly more mediocre and useless science. And vast numbers of scientists who would never had made the grade previously, supported by endless NIH grants.
It seems that we may have already skimmed the cream of potentially worthwhile scientific effort (at least in medicine) before WW2; all the additional resources since then have been invested in the hope that spending more will get us more and better results. It's far from clear that was ever true. But we have built a gigantic class of people and institutions who depend on the continuing largesse.
Expanding on my own reply - in any field there's a point of diminishing returns to additional investment. At some point the low-hanging fruit have been picked and putting more effort in doesn't get you much. In the US there are big returns to successful medical research whose results can be patented. Investors and foundations are happy to fund and collect those big returns - anything the government invests beyond that point is pretty much by definition expected not to be worth the money invested (or investors would have already put in their own money).
One obvious exception is research whose payoff isn't in terms of things that are patentable or otherwise capturable by the funders. For those, arguably federal funding is worthwhile and positive-sum. If there are available competent scientists not already busy with other things. (And most NIH funding isn't directed to those unpatentable-type things.)
But science is hard and very few people are cut out to be good scientists. It seems, from experience, that most of the marginal scientists and marginal science that wouldn't be done without federal funding, isn't very good. Those people would contribute more to society if they did something else.
(I'm NOT saying that everyone funded by NIH grants is doing bad science - some great work and great people are funded that way, together with a lot of mediocre stuff. But the great work and great people would mostly get funded by somebody else if NIH went away. The mediocre stuff wouldn't.)
Do you think we can tell in advance what is "good" research or who is a "good" scientist? I do not, which is why both the private sector and the government fund a lot of expensive research projects that go nowhere or produce something actively net negative. Many of the biggest wins are not from projects that anyone thought had strong prospects in advance - Scott has written about this before. And given the current structure of research funding in America, both our best and worst outcomes are usually funded by a mix of public and private money. But if you do have a better crystal ball on this topic, you should be making billions in VC or consulting for Merck, Pfizer, JNJ et. al., as the historical record indicates that they have approximately no idea which projects will play out favorably.
In a world of high uncertainty, long delays before outcomes are measured, competition, etc., it's easy to see why private sector actors, many of whom are public company executives reporting results to a largely unscientific audience quarterly, might underinvest in projects that have a minority chance of huge research breakthroughs, majority chance of spectacular failure and a full write-off, and within the research success category there's a set of outcomes like "competitors get to market with a similar product first" or "bureaucrats hold up approval until after I am fired for failure to produce results, and successor takes credit for the eventual success of my work" or "product has safety concerns and no one can do cost/benefit analysis or is willing to bear risk of getting it wrong in hindsight as applied by our fairly deranged tort system."
Government-backed research is well-positioned to do what venture capital claims to do - back a portfolio of high-risk, high-return projects and let the winners pay for the losers, with the added benefit that the government need not spend so much energy on protecting its specific rights to be paid, turning a quick profit, or backing the winning horse in a multi-party race, since the government has a stake in the profits of all companies as well as an interest in consumer benefit. If you object to specific unscientific and political choices made by the government in terms of what gets funded - that's why we have elections and lobbying, go fix it! But if you look at the period WW2 to present and see a decline in American science caused by government intervention, please share whatever evidence you're looking at because it is not in line with most people's experience of the same period.
Also if you're objecting to having too much education in America - well I agree in terms of garbage online degrees, expensive private undergrad institutions that are no better than the nearest state school, law schools that produce people unfit to practice law or unable to pass a bar exam. But what do you think the bottom half of hard science PhDs should be doing instead that would be more valuable? Farming? Improving the quality of our lesser law schools? App engineering?
Yes, I think it is often possible to rank science and scientists, some being better than others. There's a lot of uncertainty, but it's not total.
This seems to be a general argument that more subsidy for medical research is always better. Do you think there's ANY point of diminishing returns? A point of returns worth less than the cost of the research?
I tried to be careful to not say the total value or quantity of American science has declined. It hasn't. The quantity is clearly much larger, but the *average* quality is much lower. The best science produces almost all of the value, and there has been no reduction in that, so the value remains.
Bad-to-mediocre science produces almost no value, and by distracting good scientists with lots of noisy bad science, may reduce the total value of all science.
If this is to be a serious argument worth having, we need better evidence than vibes based on personal experience that medical research funding has reached a point of diminishing returns. Especially when you consider the things we spend a lot more money on. E.g. since we're going on vibes, the returns on the money we spend on our nuclear arsenal seem a whole lot more diminishing, and that's about twice as much as the entire NIH budget.
There is a strong case for reducing support for marginally valuable science, but this is not that. There was no review of ongoing projects to assess them for scientific value; there seems to be no considered logic at all behind the cuts. And even if a study is marginal, it's inane to cut the last year of a five year project - the year when all of the collected data will be analyzed, and after 90% of the project budget has been spent. Though this was also done for projects of potentially high scientific merit.
You might say there's been a shocking decrease in the average quality of decision making in DC.
I agree. The cuts are not well-considered or targeted. (Well that's what I read. Maybe Bhattacharya is actually cherry picking the worst to cut; that would be good.)
But if the *average* NIH grant produces less value than it costs (what I claim), then cutting at random is still better than not cutting.
From what I've seen of interviews of him on the Hoover Institution YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zG7XZ2JXZqY he is a hack who just rehashes random covid talking points that are nonsensical like pushing ivermectin.
Good morning Scott,
I'd like to sign this letter but after discussing with my advisor we're concerned that we could face retaliation. I'm also somewhat concerned that this might be a fishing expedition to out scientists who are willing to be publicly outspoken against the administration. I don't think you'd willingly share something like that, but are you confident that the authors are acting in good faith? In short, I'd like to help but my financial situation is vulnerable and NIH-dependent, and I have to weigh the risks of all of my political activity at the moment.
Thanks for sharing this, Scott. I think this is a worthy use of your platform.
Would a retired teacher of psychology count?
Spending a bunch of money because otherwise you loose it is a classic way for government to waste a bunch of money. It is probably best for these resources to not be hastily allocated and returned to the resource pool.
Maybe it's not the smartest thing to entrust a slush fund to an administration operating on impoundment being a President's right in violation of multiple Supreme Court rulings, taking emoluments from Middle Eastern countries, insider trading before huge tariff increases are announced, getting rid of DOGE which didn't work in light of the OBBBA, and in term 1 having the largest budget deficit of any President, as these indicate fiscal mismanagement and not good faith attempts at servicing the public.
Resource pool being the American economy not the US government
What I really don’t understand is how you couldn’t see this coming last November. The man was saying the quiet part out loud during the entire campaign. This is just part of what he is. We elected an amoral buffoon and this is pretty much in line with what I expected. Scott Aaronson had it nailed. It’s only going to get worse.
Thiel and Andreesen are happy on top of their billionaire’s Mount Olympus after throwing the world of mortals into disarray. They’ll never be touched by the chaos. Marc Andreesen remarked at the end of his interview with Douthat, “The dog has caught the bus by the tailpipe now.” Yeah, I guess that’s funny if you have the material resources to float above the fray.
It’s… hopeless.
“This is just an anti-Trump swipe” says one very intelligent idiot, “research is useless, all low- hanging fruit has been picked”, I can’t even; “but they are woke”, etc and ad nauseum, we’re truly cooked and done.
Scott did see it coming since he endorsed not Trump for the election, but he didn't see the greedy shylocks jacking up the interest rates on the trillions of dollars of tariff revenue coming, thus making it so we can't fund the NIH. Nobody could have predicted this - except maybe Maoists.
In one of the previous open forums, I mentioned the dueling Quillette articles on the subject. It is an interesting question. Some thoughts.
There is a strain of libertarian thinkers who argue against any government funding of science, except possibly for military research. Much of their argument on the subject seems to be that government funding of science, particularly on a large scale, is historically unusual, and yet we had technical innovation and economic progress anyway, and if there is any exception, philanthropic spending can cover the gap. My response would be something like, yes, we did have technological process, but it was very slow, and it was based on science that was essentially intelligent observation and cut-and-try tinkering. But at a certain point, you really do have to understand why you are doing what you are doing. (It is one thing to praise Thomas Jefferson as a model of the gentleman scientist, but much as I respect him- the man was supported by slave labor. I don't see how that is better than a democracy taxing and spending.)
There is, of course, a lot of room to question the particulars of scientific spending. The obvious one is that the line between pure and applied research is always going to be blurry. This is probably particularly difficult in health research, because governments have long had an interest in public health. And there is the small fact that a fair amount of scientific spending could reasonably called pork. And the undeniable fact that much research can sound rather weird. (A few hundred years ago, the news that this Newton fellow was trying to figure why apples fell off trees probably sounded very pointless, but it revolutionized out understanding of the universe.) And, of course, the nature of research means that you will spend a lot of time going down blind holes. I think that most of this is summed up by the famous joke "Half of the money we spend doing X is completely wasted. Unfortunately, nobody knows which half."
Possibly the most serious question is if massive government funding has corrupted scientific research. This is best reflected in the replication issues (which, admittedly, J.D. Vance has talked about.) Has easily available massive funding led to a decline in standards, which might not have happened if money and scrutiny were tighter? It seems to be a legitimate question. I would feel better if the administration were asking it.
I'm not surprised that these doctors want more funding. Everybody has bills to pay.
But let's step back for a second and try to see the big picture. Doctors are one of the best paid professions in the US, so they're not truly struggling. Meanwhile we have a public debt of about 30 trillion dollars.
So I don't think it would be a tragedy if the NIH ended up saving 5 billion dollars.
What if those 5 billion dollars were used to pay for expenses the Executive incurred by deploying the military domestically against protestors? Would it be better to have them in debauched doctors' hands then?
It's funding of medical research, not handouts to practicing physicians.
The premise if, frankly, absolutely bizarre. Spending money, per se, without specifying what the money is spend on, is awesome, as long as it is thrown in the general direction of "science", and we must hurry to spend us much as possible of it, because otherwise China would definitely win? What kind of argument is this? What kind of people they are counting on to believe this kind of argument?
Of course, _some_ medical research is good and useful. Some is an utter waste of money and a useless boondoggle. Some is political or ideological bullshit masquerading as research. And everybody who pays minimal attention is well aware of that. Yet, absolutely no argument is even being made that the cuts are concerning the useful part. They don't even consider necessary making this argument! "Give us moar money or else!"
Sorry, no, you lost your mantle of universal uncontroversial utility when you got into political bullshit games, and now you have to prove you deserve the money, just like everybody else does. If you want the taxpayer money, it's time to show you deserve it more than all other options, and this letter does piss poor job as such an argument.
But they did prove it -- to the satisfaction of Congress, who authorised the funding.
That is not proven, that is "you asked for X, we authorised Y".
I did not see where they did. Usually things like that are authorized in 1000+ page bills and are allocated as a bulk sum, with the real gatekeeping authority vested into the executive, which has the power to approve or disapprove specific line items. The Congress almost never discusses specific line items and almost never allocates money specifically to them - only to the generic pile of money marked "NIH". And the size of that pile is mostly based on the size of the last year's pile and not on specific examination of where the money is about to go - which is, given the 1000+ page bills, is understandable, if they starts discussing each line item separately they'd take a decade to pass single year's budget. Instead, they just shove the whole pile towards NIH and if the pile is not enough, they'd hear NIH ask for more. I am not super happy about the Congress delegating this authority but that's how it always worked, at least lately - for decades for now. Except when this authority is now not under the control of the Left and the executive tries to use it to implement its policies, the Left turns around and claims the authority has not been delegated. That's just not true. And pretending that the size of the pile at a particular year is some kind of sacred number which can not be changed is nonsense - there wasn't any proof of it anywhere.
Ah but Hulk, if we object, then (going by the dusty answers I received) we are destroying democracy, the Constitution, and doubtless Mom and apple pie as well.
The money was promised, so it must be delivered and spent! Who cares if it's spent on hookers and blow, it must be spent! For Science!
Will it do a blind bit of good? Who knows? Can it be held over for next year? Who knows? Can we ask for promised funding to be paid, rather than just generally 'spend spend spend'? Who knows?
All we know and all we need to know is Science Good (and perhaps as a corollary Orange Man Bad).
There's a case to argue that promised funding should be honoured, but as you point out, the letter demand seems to be "there's five billion wasn't spent, now spend every last cent of it in thirty days".
And the argument for it is:
> economist Matt Clancy estimates that each public and private R&D dollar yields roughly $5.50 in GDP
It doesn't even separate between private and public investment! It doesn't even mention medical research! It's just "spending taxpayer money on literally anything is pure PROFIT, just give all the money to us and you'll be rich!" That's Nigerian prince level of argument, if you saw a proposed investment that said "economist Joe Whathisname says investments in business yielded X%, therefore you should invest all your savings with us" you'd run from them screaming "SCAM!". But somehow when talking about taxpayer's billions, this level of argument is the norm. This and just throwing abuse at the opponents and calling them names.
(Ah, if only I had some pearls I could now don in order to clutch them).
But Hulk! If the guessestimation of an economist - AN WHOLE AND COMPLETE AND FULL ECONOMIST, HULK! - is not sufficient for you, then what madness lies that way? Why, big piles of cash will no longer be flung around like snuff at a wake, and then what will befall the economy?
No more science, (excuse me, I mean SCIENCE!!!) is what! And then the total collapse of civilisation as we know it!
(And then the octopi take over and put all that funding into research on unscrewing jar lids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w-sZ-iDe1c )
The returns to the most successful medical research are insanely high. Of course they diminish, but I’ll take the 2x projects even if they are less efficient than the 1000x projects. We don’t know the exact shape of the diminishing returns curve, but our alternative is accepting the current state of human health (which seems suboptimal based on all available evidence) so we can invest more of our enormous wealth in whatever higher-EV project you are imagining without specifying. Look around at the low value activities we engage in and explain how we can’t afford to fund speculative medical research because some scientists are less effective than the best scientists.
We don't, and sufficient funding of research is indeed necessary, but "quick! spend all the rest of the money before the end of the month!" is not responsible.
I've worked/work in government-funded jobs. I know about clawback. I know about "if we don't spend all the budget by the end of this fiscal year, it'll be cut next year, so go and buy something, anything, to spend it all" measures.
But "let's go buy pastel floor mats because we need to spend that last remaining bit of the budget" is not speculative research.
If the letter instances concrete examples of "funding for X has been withheld or frozen, please fund X out of the surplus right now", then I give it more chance of success than "Please sir you said you'd spend the money now spend the money".