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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Over ten years at NIH and I don't see any fat.  Funding was flat for a long time, raises were nonexistent.  These are highly specialized scientists dedicating their lives to finding cures for some of the most devastating diseases.  Not to mention responding to crises such as Zika, Ebola, and others.
I heard that Trump said he was going to "eliminate all diseases".  How is that consistent with a nearly 20% cut at NIH, which includes not just salaries and programs at NIH, but grant funding for scientists around the country?[/quote]

I am a foreign research scientist and I see a lot of "fat", but it is not limited to NIH, it is prevalent everywhere in the US, in professional as well as private life. You guys are just so rich, you don't even realize how much you're tossing and consuming :-)

I'm French, BTW, I don't come from a developed nation. I first realized this was a first world problem when a fellow researcher from Algeria worked in our Parisian department and commented on how wasteful we were, how we spent funds willy-nilly and didn't realize how lucky we were. Well, after several years of living in the US, I can forward that comment to Americans in general, because there's about the same financial gap!

It starts when Americans are young: the number of pencils consumed annually in one classroom, to pick a simple example. Here kids toss them about, lose them, break them, take a fresh one, etc, without thinking that this might be a precious resource. Same for drawing paper, or other classroom resource that's not electronic (and I'm pretty sure that in a few years, they'll toss their laptops to the floor unthinkingly!). In a research lab, the equivalent example are pipette tips: people lose their tips, it goes into the garbage, they take another one from the box, and think nothing of it, because they're so cheap it doesn't even cross their minds. Except that it should. In Algeria, they reuse those things because they can't afford to continually buy new ones. In France, we have to be conservative, but we do buy new tips as needed.

Not only do people think nothing of consuming great quantities of stuff that they could conserve better, but they are also used to certain luxury standards in their daily life. Houses keep getting larger, leading to more expensive housing, utilities and property taxes. For professional or school building, a certain number of bathrooms per people are set into the regulations, for example, and a certain amount of space per person calculated into the proportions of the rooms, or cubicles or toilet stalls. These things cost money, in total amount of square feet in the finished building and how many prime real estate was bought for the construction. Every building has to have art and green spaces and water fountains. There must be a room with complimentary coffee, refrigerators, microwaves and perhaps dishwashers. Every few years, people feel the need to redecorate the teacher's lounge or meeting space.

I'm not saying that we should do away with these things, and I'm not saying every American lives like this. I'm saying that saving money means doing very nitty-gritty work and shaving off a little bit of funding from every single operation in every single department. And that is usually impossible, because nobody wants to pay a group of people to do this, even thought it would be so much better than eliminating entire agencies who do critical work. 
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