This would be something:
Draft Exec Order wld halve FDA staffing, slash NIH, eliminate CDC. WH being warned of impact on public health, biopharma industry, science. OPM back to work starts at FDA March 17. https://t.co/FvA1ul50W5
— steve usdin (@steveusdin1) February 7, 2025
This may or may not happen, or the draft EO might get watered down. But the possibility that anybody is even thinking this is alarming as hell.
And why? What grudge does Trump hold against the entire medical research community? Is this just part of the whole "Fauci is a murderer" thing? Or the more general "tyrants forced us to wear masks" thing? Or the FDA approving the deadliest vaccine ever created?
Or is this a personal Trump vendetta that I'm not up to speed on?
Either way, if there's any truth to this it would be unbelievably destructive. The MAGA crew is getting more harebrained every day.
Wasn’t this all in Project 25?
Yes. Directly.
https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/project-2025-outlines-possible-future-for-science-agencies?
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-14.pdf
It's all about information control. If you control who gets the information and when, you can control them. Trump hated the CDC and Fauci in 2020 not because he's against public health, but because the facts made him look bad.
trump isn't playing 3 dimensional chess. he's eating the pieces.
forgive me for forgetting who said that during Trump V1. it applies here. he might be doing this because of a gas bubble in his intestines.
It’s not shock and awe, it’s political bukkake being performed on lady liberty.
I can't imagine how the convicted felon emperor will respond when he is diagnosed with some horrid medical condition, I wish, and he will be begging for researchers!! Good luck there bud.
Josh Marshall has a better, clearer explanation for why MAGA is going after federal research grants, medical and other:
I think it’s a combination of two things. One is anti-COVID research payback, combined with a general hostility to scientific expertise culture and a general and not-incorrect belief that the kinds of people who work in these institutions are mainly not friendly to Trumpism. Basically, it’s seen as a body blow to blue-state and -city culture. Combined with this is a more structural belief that universities and colleges are institutional loci of opposition to MAGA and Trumpism. So you can knock them out of commission in a broader political and culture war by simply defunding them.
On a secondary level, once you’ve established that these grants are at the political pleasure of the chief executive, they’re a powerful tool for disciplining these institutions. Criticize President Trump and watch half your budget disappear. This latter model is very much the one pursued by people like Viktor Orbán in Hungary: discipline the universities and bring them under political and patronage control. Putting it all together, it’s very much a move in a broader culture war, seeing universities as the breeding ground of cosmopolitan, liberal, empirical values in the society. So you either destroy them or put them on a tight leash.
See several of his posts in the past couple of days, e.g. "More on Trump’s Effort to End Basic Medical Research in the United States"
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-on-trumps-effort-to-end-basic-medical-research-in-the-united-states
It's the same know-nothing ignorance this country has always run on. When science tells you everything you believe is wrong, science must be eliminated.