Schools most harmed and those most benefiting once NIH, DHS funding resumes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

How can people seriously judge inflation in his first two weeks to him? That's insane and due to Biden's policy overhang.

Trump got almost all israel hostages to be released where as biden made significantly less progress. Trump also negotiated the ceasefire in Gaza when again Biden did absolutely nothing. I see progress.

Elon is the major area I disagree on from an execution perspective. I'd rather he be deported.

OMG, Trump did the same thing with those hostages that Reagan did with the US Embassy hostages in Iran. How can you be that ill-informed?

They got returned. what else are you looking for? why did nothing happen until trump took office?

History repeats itself: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/expert-analyzes-new-account-of-gop-deal-that-used-iran-hostage-crisis-for-gain

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

I'm not a MAGA troll, but NIH funds a lot of soft science research.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To state it simply, all universities and research institutions will be negatively impacted by this anti-science approach.

Nobody benefits from a world view that values dogma over discovery.

I absolutely agree, of course. This is 100% destructive and terrible.

Maybe because we feels so powerless at the moment, we’re trying to figure out if there’s anything we can or should “do” to reframe our DC’s college research process re 2026.

At the moment, DC is looking at a mix of public flagships and mid-sized privates. Should we be looking at the schools’ financials - endowments, dependence on federal funding etc - to try to identify those that may weather the storm better than others? Or is that like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Just apply out to Canada and UK.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

I'm not a MAGA troll, but NIH funds a lot of soft science research.

Yes but medical research is *not* soft science research. They are different. And the cuts do not focus on specific types of research, they just blanket cut everything. Cancer, immunology, biochemistry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

I'm not a MAGA troll, but NIH funds a lot of soft science research.

Trolly response right there. You understand neither NIH research nor funding.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it begins.

NIH lowers allowable indirect costs from 60% to 15%.

Seismic.

Indirect costs pay for the building maintenance, admin salaries, utilities, etc.

Johns Hopkins going to get slaughtered.

Yup. I am at Hopkins. We are in shock.

Hopkins will not get slaughtered. I doubt you are there. Internal contingency planning already underway without alarm.

Dp who works there. Absolutely not true, everyone is shocked and beyond alarmed.

They along with other universities will be impacted. See Penn and others. Stop making it sound like Hopkins will be disproportionately impacte. They have a separate medical endowment and revenue streams.

The ultra rich SLACs should muddle through.

Some kind of deal might save the public flagships.

All of the medical schools with midsize universities attached are toast. Harvard, Yale and Stanford will stumble forward, but most of the others will either have to get their goons to off Musk’s goons or face terrible pain.

The ultra rich SLACs hardly have grants at all. Their chem and bio faculty might not have the shiniest new tools, but there will be almost no change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To state it simply, all universities and research institutions will be negatively impacted by this anti-science approach.

Nobody benefits from a world view that values dogma over discovery.

I absolutely agree, of course. This is 100% destructive and terrible.

Maybe because we feels so powerless at the moment, we’re trying to figure out if there’s anything we can or should “do” to reframe our DC’s college research process re 2026.

At the moment, DC is looking at a mix of public flagships and mid-sized privates. Should we be looking at the schools’ financials - endowments, dependence on federal funding etc - to try to identify those that may weather the storm better than others? Or is that like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

My DD has applied to PhD programs for applied math for the fall and is very worried about how this will impact her plans.

Welcome to the club. ALL the students and ALL the professors and ALL the fedreal employees are worried. not just DD.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To state it simply, all universities and research institutions will be negatively impacted by this anti-science approach.

Nobody benefits from a world view that values dogma over discovery.

I absolutely agree, of course. This is 100% destructive and terrible.

Maybe because we feels so powerless at the moment, we’re trying to figure out if there’s anything we can or should “do” to reframe our DC’s college research process re 2026.

At the moment, DC is looking at a mix of public flagships and mid-sized privates. Should we be looking at the schools’ financials - endowments, dependence on federal funding etc - to try to identify those that may weather the storm better than others? Or is that like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

Absolutely. Forbes has a list of the financial ratings of each college. Cross reference that with NSF, NIH, and other departments. For example, NIH is here:

https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending#/

Each school will list their total federal funding through research, through all modalities. Some competitive grants, others non-competitive.

This is an earthquake followed by a Tsunami.

If we want to have a shot at a return to normalcy, we need the Senate and House out of Trump's control as soon as possible. The 2026 mid-terms will be critical to have Dems win. But Trump, Musk, Vance and Bannon will do so much damage to our children's education before then. Look how active they've been in just days/weeks.

Also, it doesn't matter if you are a lifelong GOP or Dem, if you voted for Trump or not, everyone must organize fast and work together now against Trump's crew to save this country for our kids. Otherwise, we are launching our kids into a permanent dystopia.

+1 million

1) Call all your reps in Congress now (and every day) registering your disapproval for these policies. especially critical for Republican reps
2) Register your teen to get ready to vote when they turn 18, in advance of 2026 election. And VOTE! There isn't a big gap in Senate or House.
3) Donate NOW to Dem candidates across the country for Sen, House, Gov races as much as you can comfortably afford.
4) If you have a lot of money, donate to your kids' colleges and note you want it to support faculty research.

This! + million

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it begins.

NIH lowers allowable indirect costs from 60% to 15%.

Seismic.

Indirect costs pay for the building maintenance, admin salaries, utilities, etc.

Johns Hopkins going to get slaughtered.

Yup. I am at Hopkins. We are in shock.

Hopkins will not get slaughtered. I doubt you are there. Internal contingency planning already underway without alarm.

Dp who works there. Absolutely not true, everyone is shocked and beyond alarmed.

They along with other universities will be impacted. See Penn and others. Stop making it sound like Hopkins will be disproportionately impacte. They have a separate medical endowment and revenue streams.

The ultra rich SLACs should muddle through.

Some kind of deal might save the public flagships.

All of the medical schools with midsize universities attached are toast. Harvard, Yale and Stanford will stumble forward, but most of the others will either have to get their goons to off Musk’s goons or face terrible pain.

The ultra rich SLACs hardly have grants at all. Their chem and bio faculty might not have the shiniest new tools, but there will be almost no change.

What are you going to do with your chem SLAC degree? Try to go get an advanced degree at some underfunded shrinking university stem department? Of course there will be a change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

Also that they refer to social science research as "garbage." What a dingbat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How did this thread turn into one about racism or DEI? Can we get back to the point? Which is that unless the most recent announcement is walked back due to it's ridiculousness, this is going to disastrous for scientific and medical research in our country. US will definitely no longer be a world leader in this area under these conditions. And no, it's not just going to affect the social sciences like some people seem to think. I work in research we are all stunned and find it surreal to see people celebrating Trump's decisions.

My advice is to calm down. There was a lot of bloat and wasteful research that didn't contribute much. People have illustrated examples on this thread. But you'd rather believe in a different narrative so you pretend otherwise. I also cannot jump to automatically defend higher education because I'm not wild on how certain aspects of research was utilized through higher education, to use as a controversial but increasingly likely example, NIH gave grants to various universities who in turn subbed out the grants to a certain research lab in Wuhan, either directly or indirectly via a certain entity called EcoHealth Alliance. This is indisputable and factual. And I don't doubt we will learn a lot more about this as the new administration is determined to turn over all stones and reveal everything.

As it is, we also have a $36 trillion dollar deficit that really is not sustainable either. Cuts will have to be made. Deeply and significantly. I did notice that so far the initial attacks by the new administration is effectively a class warfare against the "educated" classes of America: higher edu, legacy media, Fed agencies. But these entities were not kind to the rest of America either.

This is so on the point. I am a University professor at an A+ research univeristy and deal with both NIH and NSF. Double dipping and very high overhead is the major problem for these funding. Upper management at university keeps on coming after professors and they have to continue going after additional funding. Fat at the higher level within Universities is so bad that these positions need to go.

This is ridiculous -- US does not have a 36T deficit, you mean 32T debt, which is largely owed to us and is about 120% of GDP. Annual deficits are on the order of 1.5T. The Republicans are talking about blowing another 5-11T hole in the debt with their tax plan -- so none of this "cost cutting DOGE stuff" is in the name of fiscal responsibility. The fiction that tax cuts pay for themselves is just that. We can sustain debt loads of 120% GDP for a while, as long as we take sensible measures to both raise taxes and cut spending to reduce annual deficits and stabilize market concerns. Japan has done so in face of an aging population and stagnant growth. The US has a huge trump card -- immigration, which will keep the growth engine going. But the MAGA folks want to cut all that, which will lead us into some dark fiscal waters.

As for this overhead -- call it what it is. Every government contractor asks for overhead, which are capex. SpaceX does too. Some medical schools got a little ahead of their skis but many of the associate vice dean and other admin positions are because of all the compliance regs that NIH/NSF/DARPA/DOE all impose. Also, biomedical research has gotten expensive, while NIH direct costs have remained flat over 20 years. Something has to keep pace with inflation - so the burden gets shifted onto "overhead" which also comprise of core facilities, grant admin and all the ancillary activities that support research.

All of this is bad faith and the memo was clearly written by an ideologue with no knowledge of the research enterprise. A good way to do this would be to have the announcement after some audit and discussion about an optimal level of indirects (note that acutal indirects are 30-35% of the total award, not the 60+% claimed) and introduce it over a 3-5 year period.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it begins.

NIH lowers allowable indirect costs from 60% to 15%.

Seismic.

Indirect costs pay for the building maintenance, admin salaries, utilities, etc.

Johns Hopkins going to get slaughtered.

Yup. I am at Hopkins. We are in shock.

Hopkins will not get slaughtered. I doubt you are there. Internal contingency planning already underway without alarm.

Dp who works there. Absolutely not true, everyone is shocked and beyond alarmed.

They along with other universities will be impacted. See Penn and others. Stop making it sound like Hopkins will be disproportionately impacte. They have a separate medical endowment and revenue streams.

The ultra rich SLACs should muddle through.

Some kind of deal might save the public flagships.

All of the medical schools with midsize universities attached are toast. Harvard, Yale and Stanford will stumble forward, but most of the others will either have to get their goons to off Musk’s goons or face terrible pain.

The ultra rich SLACs hardly have grants at all. Their chem and bio faculty might not have the shiniest new tools, but there will be almost no change.

What are you going to do with your chem SLAC degree? Try to go get an advanced degree at some underfunded shrinking university stem department? Of course there will be a change.

Sure, but that is an issue with their graduate department, not their undergrad. The change you're speaking of is just an issue with research universities. The top SLAC grads will go on fine in their labs at Stanford and Uchicago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it begins.

NIH lowers allowable indirect costs from 60% to 15%.

Seismic.

Indirect costs pay for the building maintenance, admin salaries, utilities, etc.

Johns Hopkins going to get slaughtered.

Yup. I am at Hopkins. We are in shock.

Hopkins will not get slaughtered. I doubt you are there. Internal contingency planning already underway without alarm.

Dp who works there. Absolutely not true, everyone is shocked and beyond alarmed.

They along with other universities will be impacted. See Penn and others. Stop making it sound like Hopkins will be disproportionately impacte. They have a separate medical endowment and revenue streams.

The ultra rich SLACs should muddle through.

Some kind of deal might save the public flagships.

All of the medical schools with midsize universities attached are toast. Harvard, Yale and Stanford will stumble forward, but most of the others will either have to get their goons to off Musk’s goons or face terrible pain.

The ultra rich SLACs hardly have grants at all. Their chem and bio faculty might not have the shiniest new tools, but there will be almost no change.

What are you going to do with your chem SLAC degree? Try to go get an advanced degree at some underfunded shrinking university stem department? Of course there will be a change.

Sure, but that is an issue with their graduate department, not their undergrad. The change you're speaking of is just an issue with research universities. The top SLAC grads will go on fine in their labs at Stanford and Uchicago.

Stanford and U-Chicago are atop the list of grants that are being cut. What was your point?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

I'm not a MAGA troll, but NIH funds a lot of soft science research.

Social science is research is important! Among other things it supports the successful and cost effective application of a lot of hard science including health science, environmental science, etc. Labs are controlled environments, social science can help apply that to real world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A lot of US research funding has been absolute garbage. The STEM research too.

I look at recent research papers at my kids R1 school and 80% of social science papers are DEI garbage. We don’t need more of this junk.

Maybe you simply don't understand the research and are parroting right wing BS?

NP. I can't speak to the funding issue, but a ridiculous amount of social science research is ideologically motivated garbage. It may not be 80%, but whatever fraction it is, it's too much.

PSA: one good way to identify MAGA trolls is that they refer to medical research as “social science” research.

I'm not a MAGA troll, but NIH funds a lot of soft science research.

Social science is research is important! Among other things it supports the successful and cost effective application of a lot of hard science including health science, environmental science, etc. Labs are controlled environments, social science can help apply that to real world.

It is a shame that social science has been turned into a punching bag. I work in the weather field. There are serious social science questions about why people die in well-forecasted events (like hurricane landfalls) and whether different messaging or options could help. NOAA funds social scientists working on these topics, but I worry that they will just get caught up in the mess we are in.