I think one should ask whether they were doing $1.4bn worth of good with these programmes. More pressingly, whether this $1.4bn would result in significant economic growth - I suspect not. I'm not suggesting that none of this work had value, but we're in an economic downturn and the government actively borrows to fund these programmes.
> She also said that, while cancelled grants may cause serious disruption to labs, jobs and students, the plaintiffs hadn't met the high legal bar for proving "irreparable harm" needed to justify emergency relief.
Companies are going bust, people are in financial hardship, inflation is up, wages are stagnant, growth is low - why are these jobs more important than those of tax-payers? How can squeezing tax-payers to the brink be justified?
The annual deficit has massively increased this year, perhaps parent poster should be trying to apply the same rubric to the rest of the budget. Surely the ROI of spending money to commit crimes can't be good.
You're right it's unjustified. Labor is taxed too heavily considering most of the growth is in productivity. Tax the capital.
So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”
I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
eli_gottlieb•1h ago
Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
kolbe•1h ago
davidw•1h ago
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
philipallstar•1h ago
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
vlovich123•1h ago
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
philipallstar•21m ago
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_... (technically three massively smaller economies contribute more as a % of GDP, but that's off a crazily lower base)
rayiner•10m ago
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
flir•1h ago
*eyeroll*
noobermin•45m ago
mattlutze•1h ago
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
dataflow•1h ago
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
roxolotl•56m ago
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
SoftTalker•38m ago
kolbe•8m ago
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
dmoy•43m ago
So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction.
You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
prasadjoglekar•11m ago
rayiner•16m ago
More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.