NIH is ending a key grant for budding clinical researchers (science.org)

It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.

A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.

There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...

Please understand that the goal of these policies is to weaken scientific research in the US. The people who push this stuff acknowledge openly that they oppose science, experts, and accurate information. This isn't a misunderstanding or a fumble.

We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so.

And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.

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Derek Lowe sees darker motives in the program of cuts to Federal research grants in NIH and NFS. I don't know how to fix some of the problems with how and to whom grants are awarded, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater, deliberately, looks like the very bad kind of malice. (I think this article may have been referenced on HN.) https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-fu...

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