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DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds
by SubiculumCode 2mo ago
DOGE fired a whole bunch of NIH staff that processed high scoring grants to get them ready for Notices of Awards (the official document that starts moving funds, etc). Meanwhile, the administration now requires final approval of any grant by non NIH political staff.
Consequently, Science is slowing down (and that is outside of other shenanigans). What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
For the many medical research Institutions where the dominant system for professors is soft money (no or partial tenure, salary is provided by research grants), there is a real crisis.
To try to make up the shortfall,we are submitting any more grants, doing less actual sciencee are submitting even more grants, and exacerbating the staffing issue at NIH.
DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government, doing what was lawfully passed legislation asked, and destroyed it anyway (instead of passing legislation to remove programs, the lawful way).
- Beijinger 2mo ago[flagged]
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoYou are largely misinformed, and if you are going to make such a wild (and defaming) claim, perhaps you'd back it up with some evidence. Not only are they highly skilled, they are completely dedicated. They are straining to meed the needs of researchers right now, with staff volunteering on the weekends, against policy, to help out where they can, because they believe in their mission and are highly motivated and competent at doing it.
- Beijinger 2mo agoUnfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about. But from another perspective, the reviewers: an idiot and google is a very dangerous combination.
- Thraway198 2mo ago"Unfortunately I have some insights I can not will not, must not talk about." Lol.
- Beijinger 2mo agoIt is actually a movie quote. The bottom line is very easy: I am not looking for problems.
- Thraway198 2mo agoLmao
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoConvenient.
- Beijinger 2mo agoNo. Smart. Life experience. I am not looking for problems. If authorities ask me: No, I know nothing, I just wanted to look important on Hackernews. All a joke, I have no inside information.
- Beijinger 2mo agoTo clarify one thing: NIH grants is a wide field. I only was talking about NIH SBIR grants and SBIR grants in general.
- JKCalhoun 2mo ago"DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government…" Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway.
- maximilianburke 2mo ago>Regardless, it had always seemed pretty clear to me that it was never about efficiency anyway. Nope, it was about looting the government's data and delivering retribution to perceived enemies (ie: USAID).
- MengerSponge 2mo agoAlso about destroying the government's investigative/enforcement capacity. USAID's destruction was ideological, but protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential.
- buran77 2mo ago> protecting Tesla and SpaceX was existential Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
- solumunus 2mo agoAnyone who thought this guy was a genius is probably still frantically applauding.
- MengerSponge 2mo agoThey saw Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but didn't really get it.
- chasing 2mo agoAnd racism.
- flockonus 2mo ago> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Wish we could see the evidence for that.
- vel0city 2mo agoWell, they sure seemed to fail at finding much meaningful savings to be had. The government seems to be throwing money in the furnace at rates never seen before while actual outcomes seem anywhere from mixed to bad depending on your viewpoints.
- moomin 2mo agoA weird question to ask in a thread about the destruction of evidence.
- jasonlotito 2mo agoDOGE's record.
- tadfisher 2mo ago> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more.
- hilariously 2mo agoThere's no need to do work for the jackbooted thugs at this point.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 2mo agohttps://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-government-221000191.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-fires-operative-admits-gover... "One of Elon Musk's austerity operatives discovered that the government had far less glut than he'd banked on — and tellingly, admitting as much publicly got him fired."
- dmix 2mo agosahil also said: > "The public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible," he continued. "In reality, DOGE had no direct authority. The real decisions came from the agency heads appointed by President Trump, who were wise to let DOGE act as the 'fall guy' for unpopular decisions." He also only very briefly worked with a single agency (VA), and his positives comments were about how the VA already had some open source Github repos and had a previous project to 'reduce claim times from "133 days to under a week"'. He was also critical of how they don't fire people with seniority, regardless of performance (which is enshrined in a reduction-in-force law from 1944) which explains why new and probationary employees were the ones let go when Trump's people took over. https://sahillavingia.com/doge https://sahillavingia.com/doge
- Executor 2mo ago[flagged]
- slopinthebag 2mo ago> DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government Really? From what I've heard, DOGE was completely incompetent. Are you claiming they were actually extremely competent and simply couldn't find the waste?
- well_ackshually 2mo agoThey're saying that the federal government that DOGE "investigated" was already highly efficient. Elon's goons are mostly a pack of bumbling morons sent on a mission to steal data for private purposes.
- slopinthebag 2mo agoBut if Elons goons are a pack of bumbling morons, it’s possible they simply didn’t find the waste that exists, or they had different goals (I.e. dismantling and looting). That they didn’t really find much isn’t evidence that waste doesn’t exist.
- ethbr1 2mo agoElon AND Russell Vought's / Project 2025 Let's not fall for the transparent narrative of post-hoc branding DOGE "Elon's thing" so that when there are inevitably Congressional hearing the real architects go uncalled.
- alwa 2mo agoSounds to me like the claim is—with the perspective of somebody who has lived an entire professional life within the federal research award system—that it actually was highly efficient. So whether or not they were competent, and whether or not they succeeded at finding anything, that’s the true nature that existed to find in the first place. What’s your basis for the assumption that “the waste” was there to find, particularly on the “burn it all down immediately” scale at which the grantmaking system was “reformed”?
- slopinthebag 2mo agoI don’t have any reason to believe the grantmaking system is particularly inefficient. If I was in charge with saving money I would look at consolidating welfare and slashing the bureaucratic apparatus. Research grants wouldn’t even be in my top 10. But this is what I mean, people are claiming that the government as a whole is efficient. I think that’s trivially false, and saying “doge didn’t find waste in research grants therefore the government is efficient, also doge is incompetent” is completely faulty logic.
- paul7986 2mo agoDOGE was run like a startup and many startups are run like Sh!t shows with them following the mantra of break things fast ask questions later. Case in point i know someone at the NIH who in March 2025 wasn't fired with his hordes of colleagues who were. Yet, fast forward a year later he gets a notice saying something like we are sorry but you should've been fired last year so be prepared to be let go at the end of June (2026). Thankfully i just saw my friend last week as the end of June has passed and now he says they might keep him. Talk about batsh!t insanity for him and his life.
- jknoepfler 2mo agoOf all the things a 250 year-old federal government serving hundreds of millions of people across the entire spectrum of services should be run like, "a start-up" is pretty close to the bottom of the list. I'm impressed we managed to arrive on an idea more detached from the fundamentals of public governance and less worthy of trust than running government "as a business." It takes real, concerted effort to be that thoughtless and shallow.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 2mo ago> as a business This is doubly-bad when the guy at the top's "business" has a nearly 1:1 mapping to the governance of North Korea: An unaccountable dictatorship where the head directly owns everything and cannot be fired for incompetence, he executes/fires people on a whim, and meanwhile relatives and courtiers spend most the time sucking-up and backstabbing to end up with the power when he dies. Why would any American patriot want to adopt that style? Even the people who sincerely advocate for "government like a business" draw upon a completely different type, one where the CEO is answerable to a board, the board answerable to a shareholders, and most of the shares are publicly circulating. P.S. We're not even touching whether the business-person sucked at business, which in this case is also quite damning.
- 2mo ago
- 0xy 2mo ago[flagged]
- BatteryMountain 2mo agoAnd who does this ultimately benefit?...
- ndsipa_pomu 2mo agoThe billionaires who don't like regulations and like the idea of a semi-starving population that are forced to work in inhumane conditions for the lowest possible wages. Also, destroying democracy seems to be desired by them as they wish to concentrate all the power into their own hands.
- ethbr1 2mo agoMaking their wealth in a democratic society is a temporary embarrassment to a Ellison/Thiel/Musk would-be technocrat.
- beanjuiceII 2mo ago[flagged]
- Rotdhizon 2mo agoI've seen both sides of it. It's an unpleasant discussion but the government did drastic overhiring and now there are thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. But how do you fix it? These thousands of people have these jobs that their families depend on for survival. It's not their fault that the government severely messed up their hiring pipelines. If you cut the fat and leave those people out to dry, they certainly are not going to find work anywhere else. It's a lose lose situation.
- wredcoll 2mo ago> thousands of people that do DoD/DA-civilian work that are sitting back collecting paychecks while doing almost nothing. A majority of them being retired military that got grandfathered into the positions so to speak but aren't at all qualified to do those jobs. Surely this is easy to prove, right?
- Rotdhizon 2mo agoAnyone who has been in the military can vouch for this. That is the primary angle I'm speaking from. The offices and installations are filled with the kind of people I described.
- lobsterthief 2mo agoWhat’s the sample size here? Sounds like anecdotal evidence to me.
- tetris11 2mo ago> What used to take 3 months is taking 9 or more. Yep. You used to apply for a few relevant grants ahead of time, wait for your talented grad student to wait a few months whilst they continue their summer project, and you'd have an answer on whether or not you can take them on right as they finish. Now? You apply continuously for a whole host of different grants, some of which are tentatively related to your field, at least a year in advance and hope that at least one of them pans out so that you can hire a potential grad student who might just wait around enough for the funding to come through. The competition for funding is fierce, and I'm seeing a depressing pattern of profs taking on post docs who secured their own funding and needed a complimentary signature, to then take it from them and kick them out as soon as the money comes through
- aeternum 2mo ago>DOGE found an actually highly efficient Federal government For anyone that has worked on either side of government procurement it is obvious that this is not true. It's quite common for contracts to no longer make sense yet neither side wants to cancel them due to the paperwork involved. "Just put the money towards something else similar" Plus the many high profile examples like high-speed rail, rent subsidies.
- sagarm 2mo agoAnd yet well known grift like corn-derived ethanol continue. Looking forward to cutting some welfare queens loose next go around! And repossessing the fruits of successful Obama era industrial policy (Tesla & SpaceX) for the American people who paid for them too, of course.
- intended 2mo agoYou responded to a detailed/narrow example flagged as an example, with a reiteration of the rule. Worse still, the lack of significant savings DOGE, indicate that the government was generally efficient. This means that while specific cases may exist, the vigilance of the public and the set up of the US system had kept average performance in bounds.
- aeternum 2mo agoCould there be any other reasons that DOGE did succeed?