6 ms·

> 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 th

by boben 1y ago

> 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. Why do you believe that? They're not defunding research in these areas.

Retric 1y ago
It looks like they are seeing exactly that: > A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  They're withholding funding from certain institutions, but that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there?
  - sterlind 1y ago
    nope. they're not giving the remainder of terminated grants to other institutions. they're also blatantly impounding Congressionally authorized funding, in violation of the Impoundment Control Act (e.g. with all the USAID grants.)
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      You're conflating two different things. 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?
      - Centigonal 1y ago
        > the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research 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-coalition-opposes-nomination-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr-for-secretary-of-the-department-of-health-and-human-services/ https://www.stopbreastcancer.org/national-breast-cancer-coal... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in-firefighters-and-super-gonorrhea-rfk-jr-s-cuts-halt-data-collection-00284828 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in... https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute-flagged-topics-vaccines-autism-rfk-jr https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute... https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-again-094503733.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-a... https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cancer-anti-vaccine/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cance...
      - matthewdgreen 1y ago
        You’ve written something like five comments implying they’re moving the money. They’re not. Then you say they could move the money. In fact they can’t because the research teams and labs to do this work just don’t exist in other places, and it would take years to rebuild them there even if the money was being sent somewhere else. But even if they could re-allocate the funds somewhere else, they’re not doing that. The money is just piling up and being unspent. You seem very determined to find some explanation for this that isn’t as terrible as the actual reality, and I’m sympathetic! But there isn’t one. It’s just a disaster in every sense.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there? They’re ignoring the law. What the Congress appropriated, what contracts the U.S. has signed, what courts say is irrelevant to these folks.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      There is a lot of narrative pressure right now to cast anything they do as illegal. So they issue an executive order saying to deny grants for "gender ideology" and plaintiffs do some forum shopping to find a lower court willing to issue an injunction against it. Then the grants would have to be reevaluated, but some of them that were denied based on the executive order would still have been denied based on other criteria anyway, only now there is a document saying they were denied based on the executive order. Then plaintiffs go to court based on the document and the administration claims they also had other reasons and the case makes its way through the courts and appeals etc., which hasn't happened yet so we don't know how it's going to turn out. 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?
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > 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-research-gets-cut https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...
        AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies. > Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other. It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.
  - matthewdgreen 1y ago
    From what I’ve seen, NIH funding has been withheld across a massive number of grants. This isn’t even a “stop work order” situation: the checks just aren’t being written. It’s absolutely going to kill everything from ongoing work to trials to hiring of research assistants. It’s already affecting PhD acceptance and hiring. The money is piling up and I’ve read rumors that the plan is to try to retroactively “rescission” it by having Congress vote to throw it back into the budget pool, when they pass their big tax cut budget.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    > doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated they cut tons of money that Congress had appropriated; USAID is just one example of many so yes, it's illegal and Congress could call them on it, but the GOP won't. the Admin is also counting on the allocation changing with the next budget, coming up, at which point it is "no longer allocated"
  - dekhn 1y ago
    No, it doesn't seem like the funding is going to go elsewhere. It looks like it will go unspent, or possibly clawed back.
misnome 1y ago
Why do you believe that? Do you think that this isn’t research that Harvard or Cornell do? Or that other blanket funding cancellations at the NIH don’t affect biology research?
malcolmgreaves 1y ago
They are. The dementia-riddled orange man has already had a few childish temper tantrums and is illegally withholding congressionally appropriated funds to entire university's research programs. The Republicans are the only ones supporting this criminal by the way. It's important to get your facts straight here.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
If that’s what you were told, you were lied to.
hn_acker 1y ago
> Why do you believe that? They're not defunding research in these areas. If you mean that the administration is not defunding cancer research more than it is defunding other medical research, then you might be right. If you mean that the administration is keeping cancer funding the same while defunding other medical research areas, then you are probably wrong [1]: > Separately, on Feb. 7, 2025, the NIH issued new guidance on indirect costs for grants. Published late on a Friday, the guidance capped such costs to 15% of the amount of the grants. According to a congressional research paper, "indirect costs represent expenses that are not specific to a research project and that maintain the infrastructure and administrative support for federally funded research." Effective the following Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, this cost cap would apply to all new grants, and also to all existing grants. Tangentially, the administration is cutting employees at the National Cancer Institute [2]: > Among the cuts on Friday were around 50 employees at the NIH's National Cancer Institute, or NCI. They had worked in the institute's Office of Communications and Public Liaison overseeing programs like the Cancer Information Service, which provides answers to doctors and patients about cancer, and updates to databases summarizing cancer information for healthcare providers. ... > While several communications offices at the NIH's institutes had been gutted during an initial round of layoffs on April 1, NCI's team was spared. Around 150 staff at NCI had been laid off last month, two people said. The institute's contracting and training staff were eliminated, and there were deep cuts to its human resources team. [1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/trump-nih-cancer-research/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/trump-nih-cancer-rese... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-lays-off-hundreds-more-staff-cancer-research-institute/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-lays-off-hundreds-more-staf...

by boben 1y ago

Retric 1y ago

It looks like they are seeing exactly that: > A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
They're withholding funding from certain institutions, but that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there?
- sterlind 1y ago
  nope. they're not giving the remainder of terminated grants to other institutions. they're also blatantly impounding Congressionally authorized funding, in violation of the Impoundment Control Act (e.g. with all the USAID grants.)
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    You're conflating two different things. 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?
    - Centigonal 1y ago
      > the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research 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-coalition-opposes-nomination-of-robert-f-kennedy-jr-for-secretary-of-the-department-of-health-and-human-services/ https://www.stopbreastcancer.org/national-breast-cancer-coal... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in-firefighters-and-super-gonorrhea-rfk-jr-s-cuts-halt-data-collection-00284828 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in... https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute-flagged-topics-vaccines-autism-rfk-jr https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute... https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-again-094503733.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-a... https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cancer-anti-vaccine/ https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cance...
    - matthewdgreen 1y ago
      You’ve written something like five comments implying they’re moving the money. They’re not. Then you say they could move the money. In fact they can’t because the research teams and labs to do this work just don’t exist in other places, and it would take years to rebuild them there even if the money was being sent somewhere else. But even if they could re-allocate the funds somewhere else, they’re not doing that. The money is just piling up and being unspent. You seem very determined to find some explanation for this that isn’t as terrible as the actual reality, and I’m sympathetic! But there isn’t one. It’s just a disaster in every sense.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there? They’re ignoring the law. What the Congress appropriated, what contracts the U.S. has signed, what courts say is irrelevant to these folks.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    There is a lot of narrative pressure right now to cast anything they do as illegal. So they issue an executive order saying to deny grants for "gender ideology" and plaintiffs do some forum shopping to find a lower court willing to issue an injunction against it. Then the grants would have to be reevaluated, but some of them that were denied based on the executive order would still have been denied based on other criteria anyway, only now there is a document saying they were denied based on the executive order. Then plaintiffs go to court based on the document and the administration claims they also had other reasons and the case makes its way through the courts and appeals etc., which hasn't happened yet so we don't know how it's going to turn out. 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?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > 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-research-gets-cut https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...
      - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        > USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies. > Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other. It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  From what I’ve seen, NIH funding has been withheld across a massive number of grants. This isn’t even a “stop work order” situation: the checks just aren’t being written. It’s absolutely going to kill everything from ongoing work to trials to hiring of research assistants. It’s already affecting PhD acceptance and hiring. The money is piling up and I’ve read rumors that the plan is to try to retroactively “rescission” it by having Congress vote to throw it back into the budget pool, when they pass their big tax cut budget.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  > doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated they cut tons of money that Congress had appropriated; USAID is just one example of many so yes, it's illegal and Congress could call them on it, but the GOP won't. the Admin is also counting on the allocation changing with the next budget, coming up, at which point it is "no longer allocated"
- dekhn 1y ago
  No, it doesn't seem like the funding is going to go elsewhere. It looks like it will go unspent, or possibly clawed back.

misnome 1y ago

Why do you believe that? Do you think that this isn’t research that Harvard or Cornell do? Or that other blanket funding cancellations at the NIH don’t affect biology research?

malcolmgreaves 1y ago

They are. The dementia-riddled orange man has already had a few childish temper tantrums and is illegally withholding congressionally appropriated funds to entire university's research programs. The Republicans are the only ones supporting this criminal by the way. It's important to get your facts straight here.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

If that’s what you were told, you were lied to.

hn_acker 1y ago

> Why do you believe that? They're not defunding research in these areas. If you mean that the administration is not defunding cancer research more than it is defunding other medical research, then you might be right. If you mean that the administration is keeping cancer funding the same while defunding other medical research areas, then you are probably wrong [1]: > Separately, on Feb. 7, 2025, the NIH issued new guidance on indirect costs for grants. Published late on a Friday, the guidance capped such costs to 15% of the amount of the grants. According to a congressional research paper, "indirect costs represent expenses that are not specific to a research project and that maintain the infrastructure and administrative support for federally funded research." Effective the following Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, this cost cap would apply to all new grants, and also to all existing grants. Tangentially, the administration is cutting employees at the National Cancer Institute [2]: > Among the cuts on Friday were around 50 employees at the NIH's National Cancer Institute, or NCI. They had worked in the institute's Office of Communications and Public Liaison overseeing programs like the Cancer Information Service, which provides answers to doctors and patients about cancer, and updates to databases summarizing cancer information for healthcare providers. ... > While several communications offices at the NIH's institutes had been gutted during an initial round of layoffs on April 1, NCI's team was spared. Around 150 staff at NCI had been laid off last month, two people said. The institute's contracting and training staff were eliminated, and there were deep cuts to its human resources team. [1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/trump-nih-cancer-research/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/01/28/trump-nih-cancer-rese... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-lays-off-hundreds-more-staff-cancer-research-institute/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-lays-off-hundreds-more-staf...