You know, the stuff they claim to be really worried about.
Similar to the abortion policy; see the Pulitzer winning article https://www.propublica.org/article/propublica-wins-pulitzer-... . Sure, it might kill some women, but they're never going to pay attention to that.
Previously: communists / abortion
George Bush II: terrorists / LGBTQ+ / abortion
Trump: immigrants / LGBTQ+ / educators / liberals / terrorists / gangs / etc
Namely, blow out the deficit to fund tax cuts and engage in massive grift.
People have already made up their minds and it's inherently politicized, so if the research is funded by Republicans then it will be a study designed to emphasize the risks and harms and if it's funded by Democrats the opposite. Which means it's a waste of money to study because the outcome is decided by the political inclinations of the party that initially funded it, whereas the purpose of actual research is to study a question whose answer isn't known from the outset.
While i’m sure there would be some additional data/value from an additional study, it’s not like any of this stuff is new or novel in any way.
I’m not sure how or if that agrees with or contradicts your comment, or same with whatever political BS is going on, but this stuff is pretty well understood at this point.
I am not a transphobe but how in the world is that obvious?
Please don’t lie about what the Republicans are doing. They have no desire to help Americans. Their goal is to destroy things that serve the public so that their billionaire masters can capture these services and charge Americans 10x what it used to cost them (their taxes).
I simply stated what the NIH director has publicly said. (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/jay-bhattachar...)
RE: they'are increasing spending. - can you provide some evidence?
RE: their goal is to destroy things that serve the public... - you must be a genius to see through their goals. Has it occured to you that maybe they simply reflect that desire of the people you disagree with.
They can demonize them as an enemy while doing horrible but harder to understand things like hollowing out election oversight.
He proved he could shoot someone on 5th Ave and get away with it, so that someone could be whatever government employee tries to go after him (already evidenced using the purse strings and lawyers of the government rather than a bullet).
And congressional reps have seen others lose elections for going after Trump. The root problem is the voters, and that’s a tough one to fix.
A lot of people are completely fed up with "more of the same", so they voted for the clown or didn't bother to show up.
Don't blame the voters when they were never given a real choice.
There's no two parties.
> The root problem is the voters
The root problem is that we do not have an actual opposition party. The so-called Democrats are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide. The Republicans are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide.
I hope the so-called Democratic party completely implodes so we can, possibly, get a left-of-center party that will actually do things that the so-called Democrats only provide lip-service to, and that, only when the so-called Democrats are guaranteed to be unable to enact such legislation due to not having majorities needed.
I'd prefer that people withholding their votes from either lesser or greater evil right-wing corporate/oligarch, genocidal monster parties would instead vote 3rd party/independent, but I would not fault anyone for not voting for the so-called Democrats or Republicans.
As to blame for the current situation, remember, it was the so-called Democrats who did everything they could to make Trump the Republican presidential candidate, as they thought they would have a better chance against him with their extremely unpopular candidate, Clinton. And, that the so-called Democrats would rather lose elections than allow a non-corporate/oligarch controlled genocidal monster to be elected-- see how they treated Sanders.
* 'so-called' Democrats because they repeatedly engage in voter suppression during primaries to ensure their chosen right-wing pro-corporate/oligarch candidate will win. And, they repeatedly sue to remove from state ballots any candidates running on the left whether Greens, Peace and Freedom, or independent. In the last election, the Greens spent half of their campaign funds fighting these lawsuits so they could maintain ballot access. It was also the so-called Democrats with the Republicans who barred access to presidential debates of candidates who would challenge their right-wing, pro-corporate/oligarch, genocidal positions.
The flip side is that in other areas their powers are much more limited. Revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status? That’ll filter through the courts and years from now Harvard might actually have to make a tax payment (I expect they won’t.)
From a societal perspective, however, we’re in deep shit. There’s an excellent chance that you or a loved one will die from a potentially curable disease (cancer, dementia) because the research and clinical trials that should be bringing us those drugs are all being murdered. We should be reacting to this the same way we respond when someone shoots up a school or hospital. A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding to industry funding, but she is one of the lucky ones.
I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but we, as in the USA, don't do anything (besides offering the standard Thoughts And Prayers™) when someone shoots up a school.
The lesson is clear. Fight your way in to get your kids or die trying. No one is coming to help.
GP is being downvoted because it's a hyperbolic strawman.
We are: feeling horrible, knowing this is the only country where this happens, and also resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it.
This last election was mostly decided by the people who didn’t vote. The apathetic, the cynics and so on.
Isn't this the counterargument? Why should the US disproportionately pay for world-benefiting research instead of Europe or China?
The answer, of course, is that other governments do also fund some research, but each government decides how much they want to spend and on what. Which applies as much to each individual state as it does to the federal government.
> California already bears a large burden and that's on top of subsidizing other states through federal taxes.
It sounds like you're arguing that cutting federal programs would benefit California, because then they would have that money to appropriate as they choose for themselves.
States would need to increase taxes to fund more research, which would cause some of the wealthiest residents to flee to low-tax states. This would result in the pro-research states losing tax revenue and eventually cutting their research funding. The decline in research funding would result in the U.S. experiencing brain drain similar to what has been experienced in red states[1] for decades.
Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The people who actually pay most of the taxes aren't the billionaires (both because there aren't that many of them and because they already engage in sophisticated tax avoidance), they're the likes of senior partners at law firms, cardiologists, successful small business owners, etc. But these people are not only not going to move to Wyoming for lower taxes, because they can't operate the businesses that them that amount of money there, a lot of the reason Wyoming has lower taxes is because they're large net recipients of federal funds. If they had to fund their own stuff that would make it more attractive to live in the states that are currently doing the funding.
Moreover, research funding has always been a small proportion of government spending, e.g. the NIH is ~0.7% of the federal budget. This does not require a large change in tax revenues to move somewhere else.
> Some of us don't want the U.S. to experience brain drain that will cause our country to become more like the rural states that suffer from the loss of their best and brightest.
The first search result from your link is an article saying that isn't actually happening:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/tenure/20...
(I'm not a saint, a friend of mine goes out to protest against the ongoing genocide every week, I sit around and do nothing...).
We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.
Voting feels like you've done something. Cast a vote between the lady rammed through without even a primary, or the other oh so fabulous option. Go home and pat yourself on the back, you did something, you tried, and hey it is democracy so you deserve what you get. Now you can relax and mission accomplished.
People under eastern europe 'communist' dictators didn't have any of that. Just whisper in the shadows, and then suddenly Ceaușescu is swiss cheese, because there was literally no other option than to reject the whole system dominating them rather than exhausting their energies squabbling on twitter.
It's worse than that. It's possible to have a democracy where some of the options are better, e.g. switch to score voting so there can be arbitrarily many parties and candidates instead of major party insiders filtering out every decent candidate before you get to the election.
But the party insiders want that control, so they set up a narrative where every problem is caused by the other team, instead of the problem being caused by there only being two teams.
If you use a cardinal voting system (note: not ranked-choice voting), there are more than two viable candidates, and then putting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris on the ballet only causes them both to lose because they're both undesirable candidates and less undesirable candidates would score higher with the voters than either of them. And then you don't get Donald Trump. (Or Kamala Harris.)
You had a choice between Trump again and not Trump. You can't keep blaming others for your choices.
As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.
One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.
Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.
Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.
Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.
No. E.g. quite many monarchies have been reformed without revolutions.
Jail time (and now deportation) has been a risk for protesting for quite a while in the US. I can see why someone that doesn’t live here would see America’s longstanding reputation of being a cool place to protest in and assume that that is still the case, but that is outdated information. Heck, quite a few Americans insist that is still the case, but the ones that insist that there is no risk are mostly folks that “protest” through tweets
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/08/columbia-university-protest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/2/ucla-students-arrest...
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
"excellent chance that you or a loved one will die from a potentially curable disease (cancer, dementia) because the research and clinical trials that should be bringing us those drugs are all being murdered."
Why is this an excellent chance?
Seems like the bare minimum fear to me.
It's just wild to me that people aren't simply arrested when this kind of thing occurs. It's not Trump's money. It's not Republican money. He has a narrowly defined role and anything outside of that is illegal.
It's not exactly surprising, though, given half the government is run by the weakest and most deranged major political party in American history. The simple fact that the GOP has been steamrolled by this guy is the best evidence of the fact that since the 1970s they've been on a steep downward slide to become a party completely devoid of political talent, governing philosophy, or spine.
Even if this gang of dipshits were trying to do good, they don't have the capacity to be able to understand complex situations and make accurate and nuanced choices. An example of this situation being RFK Jr.
Normal people need to be screaming this from the hills. A healthy country in a competitive world cannot be run by grifters and morons. There's no "both sides" here.
Believing that any of this will result in a precedent for any future democrats means you haven't been paying attention.
Only democrats have to follow the rules. Republicans voters support them even through blatantly unconstitutional acts like "take the guns first, due process second" and forcing schools to display christian symbols. Republican voters do not give a shit that Trump's family has taken billions of American dollars. Trump voters don't even care that they paid Steve Bannon millions to build a wall he never intended to build, and still voted for a Trump admin with Steve Bannon!
These people believe anything is acceptable to topple the democrats because the democrats forced desegregation onto the southern states.
I’m arguing a Democrats who fights with the tools they’ve been given will be popular. Like, want to cancel student loans? Fuck process. Just declare them cancelled and shred the loan records before anyone can get to court.
This is a stupid endgame. But the system doesn’t work if one side constrains itself by rules the other doesn’t follow, because that means only one side will ever affect policy.
Why do you believe that? They're not defunding research in these areas.
> A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding
The administration's argument is that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, i.e. Congress has the power to prevent the executive from doing something by not funding it, but not the power to force the executive to do something just by appropriating money for it.
But the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research, so what's stopping them from issuing the cancer research grants to other institutions? Nothing, right?
Are you sure about that?
This administration's HHS Secretary has deep doubts about the efficacy of the scientific method, which underpins all of medical research in general and cancer research in particular. It seem more likely to me that the money impounded from cancer research will instead be redirected to organizations that use non-scientific methods to study the effects of nutritional supplements, water flouridation, and non-ionizing 5G radiation.
https://www.stopbreastcancer.org/national-breast-cancer-coal...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in...
https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-a...
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cance...
They’re ignoring the law. What the Congress appropriated, what contracts the U.S. has signed, what courts say is irrelevant to these folks.
But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
No. USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted [1].
[1] https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...
Leader is democratically elected so I guess yes.
…but the three branches of government system has clearly collapsed
Strongmen in (initially) parlimentary systems did the same thing Trump is doing. Expand executive power, reduce the legislative branch to a rubberstamping function and stack the courts with yesmen.
When there are majority governments, there is essentially no difference between executive and legislative power.
You're needlessly conflating the topic of stability and democracy, which muddles the discussion. Autocrats have come into power by championing "stability" at the expense of democracy since time immemorial. This is texbook by now.
hn_acker•5h ago
> Trump's NIH Axed Research Grants Even After a Judge Blocked the Cuts, Internal Records Show