Why cripple NIH? [DOGE]

Jeneen Interlandi, What Is Actually the Point of Treating the N.I.H. Like This? NYTimes, April 11. 1015.

By the time their spending accounts were reactivated on Thursday, some scientists at the National Institutes of Health said they were running on fumes.

They had spent weeks scrambling to keep their labs running amid spending freezes, firing rampages and the chaos and confusion brought on by both. They were reusing latex gloves in an effort to conserve supplies. They were borrowing, donating and sharing a long roster of crucial but dwindling reagents with one another, in email threads that had morphed into virtual bazaars. In interviews, several of them said they would have to close up shop in as little as two or three weeks if something didn’t change drastically, and soon.

The unfreezing of agency credit cards (what scientists there call purchasing cards or p-cards) is a welcome but insufficient reprieve from this spiral. [...]

For another, much more chaos is still in the offing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has ordered the N.I.H. to cut 35 percent of its $16.7 billion contract spending budget. If “contract spending” sounds like a code for bureaucratic waste, it is not. Scientists, research assistants and animal technicians are often funded through contracts. So are the clinical trial coordinators who process samples and monitor patient safety, the skilled machinists who maintain microscopes and mass spectrometers and M.R.I.s and the office managers who serve as the institutes’ de facto nerve centers.

The final paragraphs:

After a lifetime spent asking big, complicated questions, what the scientists most want to know now is this: Why? What, truly, is the goal of so much cruel and clumsy destruction?

Efficiency is not being enhanced, nor is waste being eliminated. (If anything, it’s increasing.) American interests are not being protected. And the quest to cure diseases or improve human health is not being advanced.

So when it’s all over, if the crown jewel of biomedical research — the enterprise that gave us the human genome sequence, Covid vaccines and treatments for cancer and H.I.V. and obesity — has been destroyed, what will have been the point?

There's more at the link.