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.
rule by diktat
Axing the CDC is nuts. Would we even have federal level disease tracking anymore? Just going to wait until the next Covid-equivalent hits the country, and then hope that your state's Public Health Department catches it before it goes big? That will get plenty of Americans killed, especially in red states where the legislatures have been idiotic about this stuff since Covid.
Halving FDA spend will slow drug approval to a crawl, unless they're going with the idea of requiring only Stage I trials for drugs going forward (IE you only determine if it's going to kill you, not whether it actually works).
The NIH thing is getting litigated - it's probably illegal, although who knows if that's stopping them at this point. But it means a lot of universities would have to turn down federal grants for research, because they can't afford the indirect costs to support the research.
They're getting more frantic as well, as court orders come in stopping them here and there. I also think Musk is winding himself up to outright legally defy the district court orders (same for conservatives in general, who are falling in line). We really need a higher order court to slap these illegal executive orders down as well.
Universities would have to track everything and bill every PI. It would be a massive bureaucratic increase.
I read that present rules prevent moving expenses from overhead to direct or vice versa, so the universities would either have to suck up most of the overhead or turn the grants down.
You are correct, universities can't charge indirect costs to a Grant's direct costs.
The University won't turn down the grant (they can't), since only the reseacher who got it can do that. What will happen is that jobs that support researchers, or expenses that support academic work in general will have to be cut, making that much harder to conduct research.
You want to hire a new grad student? tough shit because there is no administrative staff to process the admission.
There is a water leak in your lab? Bring a bathing suit because no one will repair it.
Need to make a phone call to a collaborator? You better have a good phone plan because the university can't provide you a phone.
And on and on.
In the short term academic life and research will become a lot harder to do. In the mid term a lot of university positions will be lost. In the long term a lot of research programs will disappear all together.
Yeah, the University can effectively just turn down the grant. Someone needs to administer the grant, and if your university won't do it, you just don't get the money. In practice, it usually means you aren't allowed to apply for the grant in the first place.
Presumably once Junior Kennedy has Made America Healthy Again, the need to spend all this money on drugs and other unnatural "cures" will evaporate. Just eat well, go to the gym, and rely on your natural immunity.
But both he & Musk do have some drug preferences that present no obstacle to getting or performing the duties of government jobs, right?
I am not at all surprised at this.
Why is Kevin? Has no one paid any attention at all?
Yes. Trump is just doing exactly what he said he would do. The 'don't take what Trump says literally or seriously' crowd has looked rather foolish for years.
At some point something should click.
Kevin isn't unique in this approach, it's a very common pundit and everyman approach to Trump and has played a big role in Trumps ability to win elections.
RFK Jr has said he wants a four year pause in all research on drug development and infectious disease. This EO aligns with that policy.
We're in the fabulous New Era of MAGA Medicine
Feeling sick? Load up on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Still sick a week later? GTFOH, you woke loser.
Shut down the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
Say hello to the CHC (Conspiracy Health Cures)
So they want to lose an entire generation of research scientists, who will leave the field so they can actually make a living. Who in their right mind thinks that's a good idea? Oh right...
Rather than leave the field, I suspect they will just leave the country. The US is not the only place where medical research is conducted.
What grudge does Trump hold against the entire medical research community? Is this just part of the whole "Fauci is a murderer" thing?
It may be a grudge held by Trump. More likely the nutcase extremists he surrounds himself with—you know, the QAnon true-believing types—have suggested he needs to do this. Wouldn't be surprised if Bobby K. is involved, too.
In my view it makes a lot more sense to talk about what the regime wants than what Trump wants.
I'm pretty confident as long as Trump can hold the signed EO up for the cameras, he'll sign anything put in front of him. With multiple factions going to war, the various EOs will be at counter-purposes, but he's such a *strong man".
If anyone thinks about the consequences, that'll be the clue that they're woke losers who need to GTFOH.
Yep. He's an extremely useful tool for the most deeply malevolent domestic forces this country has ever seen. For me the final nail in the coffin of any any doubt I might have had about Trump's higher brain function was the Gaza Riviera idea. That concept would have been laughed out of contention at The Onion's morning pitch meaning. He's now a blathering nincompoop.
This is where the Supreme Court realizes that Biden v. Nebraska might not have been a good precedent to set.
Why? They seem completely on board with this impoundment. What are they odds they'll die from a pandemic?
Can someone put together a list of all the Republicans in congress who have been treated either for prostate cancer or breast cancer or are taking a statin for cholesterol? Perhaps somebody else with clinical experience can then explain the differences in treatment and outcomes since the 1950s.
Can somebody else explain the origins and R&D efforts that went into CT scans and MRIs?
The latest I've seen (still trying to get the details) has something to do with a freeze on publication of research out of the CDC in order to purge it of bad terms regarding gender etc. I'm confused why it would only be CDC, but leaving that aside, are these people unaware that there are racial and sex differences in all sorts of things that require keeping track of, such as the sexes of patients in clinical trials, not to mention age and race.
The problem is not that Congressional Republicans are ignorant. The problem is that they are craven and venal.
As long as Trump is popular with his base (and it is the base that is derply ignorant), they will say yes to anything Trump wants.
+100.
Once billionaires start dying in a pandemic or the stock market crashes, congressional republicans might also act to limit or eliminate Trump. Popularity with the base is one thing, but congresspeople also like money and the base doesn’t have much of that.
The loonies are seriously trying to kill people. He couldn't stop ACA so now they are going to stop health care. No health care no need for ACA. These people are really sick.
To reiterate, the convicted felon is a fucking idiot and a vain POS at that.
There is no point to trying to rationalize why he does or says something. He literally only has 3 motivations:
(1) Reaction to something/someone he saw on TV;
(2) Greed;
(3) Being insulted (pride).
That is just dumb.
1) He wants to be a dictator, and takes concrete steps towards this.
2) He wants to distract people from the fact that he trying to be a dictator, so he does all kind of idiotic things to distract.
3) He is also naturally good at saying idiotic things. But that doesn't mean you can ignore (1) and (2).
Scientists in general tend to be against Trump dictatorship, so weakening science institutions ia useful for (1). It is also useful for (2), as this blog proves.
The dude hasn't a single strategic bone in his skeletal system.
He doesn't necessarily want to be dictator; he craves the respect (fear) of people and the only way his pea brain can conceive of how to accomplish this is to become a dictator -- someone to be feared. It's a pathological issue from being taught to "be tough" which he believes means being mean and talking tough.
His sole skill is to sell half-wits -- of which there are quite a few in this world -- bullshit (see "be tough") and lies. He's convinced so many Christians that he believes in Christ, and then he says something stupid to show that he hasn't a fucking clue and doesn't give two shits about God or Christ.
His war isn't against scientists per say; it's against people who know he's a fucking idiot and have no respect for him. It so happens that most scientists see him as a complete idiot.
The penultimate proof of his idiocy is his penchant to keep stepping on his own dick.
“He's convinced so many Christians that he believes in Christ, and then he says something stupid to show that he hasn't a fucking clue and doesn't give two shits about God or Christ.”
To be fair, most self-identified Christians also don’t give two shits for Christ’s actual teachings either, as exhibited by both their words and their deeds.
The first dark skinned guy to go around handing out free health care wasn’t Obama. It was JC.
+1
Many very successful dictators have had been identified as bumbling idiots who aren't strategic enough to get themselves into power and maintain it.
It's always a mistake to assume big accomplishments are only achieved by superior people.
+25.
It doesn't take a lot of "smarts" or "strategic planning" to arrest, beat up, or put a bullet through the brain of critics. And it works pretty well to silence them. Look how well the Convict in Chief has done with his stochastic "army" of part time thugs.
I would add he's too lazy and undisciplined to be anything other than a disreputable businessman/con man. But he loves having the power of the presidency to reinforce his delusion of being tough. He's not so much a dictator as he is a pawn to set up the next real dictator. A test to see how far they can push things by letting this huge narcasist indulge in every impulse. Project 2025 and Musk are the real powers. Trump is the distraction. Something he's really good at.
* per se
was typing too furiously and the mind went fart
also, there's really a 4th category: inferiority complex
Yehouda: you really gotta let go of this "Trump is a Machiavellian mastermind" thing. It's ludicrous. Sure, the regime as a whole is like that. But the Occam's razor take on Trump himself is that he's about as sharp as Boris Yeltsin in the middle of a bender. But in Trump's case no booze is needed.
He's a puppet for a collection of deeply reactionary, evil people.
The "Occam razor" is bulshit squared.
The Occam Razor doesn't work by just declaring that you use it. You need to be able to argue that your explanation is the simplest.
So how do you explain the fact that Trump became preseident twice?
That one of these was after trying a coup?
That it was despite the fact that he clearly doesn't care about anybody else?
That he subjugated the Republican party?
That he ran fraudulant orgnizations for years without being caught?
My explanation is that he is a skilled bamboozler, specially good at bamboozling Americans.
Show me a simpler explanation.
As to "Machiavellian mastermind", wher did this come from? You realy think you need that to attack people that oppose you?
It's not hard to answer these.
"So how do you explain the fact that Trump became preseident twice?"
Because a huge portion of Americans at large, and close to the entirety of his base are terribly ill informed idiots just like him. It also helps that there is a rather large portion that are just bigots of all flavors that feel attracted to the promises of cleansing the country of anyone and anything they wish would be gone. It was also a huge assist that the US has one of the most undemocratic Presidential election systems in the world (among those that have democratic elections), which particularly for the first election helped him get elected. Idiots get elected or rise to power all the time, not just in the US but all over the globe.
"That one of these was after trying a coup?" Because most people don't care that he is a criminal. This is a benefit that not only he enjoys. In the US if you are famous the people are happy to downplay, or completely ignore a myriad of crimes as long as they find you appealing.
"That it was despite the fact that he clearly doesn't care about anybody else?"
Don't caring about anyone is a feature. As long as you hate the same people he does, or want the same things he wants, you know that he'll push to do those things and he won't let care for consequences get in the way. For those that want to influence him and help him get power it also makes it that much easier, because it is a lot easier to manipulate an idiot that only cares about himself.
"That he subjugated the Republican party?" The Republicans have always been authoritarians craving for a strong daddy that orders them what to do, and spanks anyone that doesn't fall in line. It also helps that they are mostly cowards that fear to speak up once there is a clear leader barking orders no matter how stupid or nonsensical they are. Also, because most of his policies are policies the party has pushed for decades, he just removed the friendly messaging about them.
"That he ran fraudulant orgnizations for years without being caught?"
Plenty of people do this and he was still caught at almost every instance. Unfortunately the US legal system is designed to benefit the rich and make it so that their penalties are nothing more than a soft slap on the wrist, if that.
"My explanation is that he is a skilled bamboozler, specially good at bamboozling Americans.
Show me a simpler explanation."
You don't really need smarts to bamboozle anyone, all you need is a mark that is dumber than you, and the US provided plenty.
That is supposed to be simpler?
If that is too hard to understand for you, that's on you.
But here, let me dumb it down to your level.
-Because a lot of people are stupid and the system is rigged in his favor.
-Because a lot of people don't care.
-Because a lot people don't care.
-Because he offers what they want, and they are cowards.
-He was caught but the system is rigged in favor of the rich.
Simple enough now?
You didn't answer the question I asked, so let us try again:
That is simpler than "Trump is a skilled bamboozler"?
More people tuned out than voted for him, dude. There's no mystery.
Those all seem to be covered by 2/ Greed.
“Trump's a plunderer. He was elected by the plunderer class – like the crypto bros who want to run wild, transforming workers' carefully shepherded retirement savings into useless shitcoins, while the crypto bros run off with their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money. Musk is the apotheosis of this mindset, a guy who claims credit for other peoples' productive and useful businesses, replacing real engineering with financial engineering. Musk and Krause, they're like two peas in a pod.
That's why – according to anonymous DOGE employees cited by Tckacik – DOGE managers are hired for their capacity for cruelty: "The criteria for DOGE is how many you have fired, how much you enjoy firing people, and how little you care about the impact on peoples well being.”
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless
Looting is its own justification. Why would you think looters cared about the people from whom they steal?
That explains a lot.
Question: You started your post with ". Was this a quote?
From the article at the link. Yes.
I don't know if this is any more than cutting "bad" government spending (i.e. not defense spending, something that is not directly immediately beneficial to me at this very exact moment) carried to its logical extremes. Yes, thousands may end up dying from preventable or curable diseases, but I want my tax cut now.
You could see this in Florida and Arizona 25 years ago. Arriving retirees, voting to halt all property tax increases for local schools, because “I don’t have any kids / my kids are already out of school” and “it’s not my responsibility to help other people’s kids” and “I’ll be dead by the time the world doesn’t have any educated people”… which are all basically just variations of “not directly immediately beneficial to me at this very exact moment.”
Selfishness is the true American religion, the belief that binds most Americans across even organized religious, racial, sexual and gender lines.
Yeah, that tracks. This selfishness has already been there, but Trump has found a way to turbocharge it for his own benefit.
And half those kids are Mexicans anyway.
Arizona passed one of those extreme school choice laws a couple years ago. Most of the money for private school tuition has gone to people whose kids were already in private school, so they could obviously afford it already.
Cause medical research involves elites doing science and MAGA hates both of those.
You get the prize for the most succinct summary. That's it in a nutshell. Facts have a well-known liberal bias, so MAGA is against any entity that generates facts.
"Facts have a well-known liberal bias, so MAGA is against any entity that generates facts."
Explains a lot. TY
This fits perfectly with MAGA's general opposition to the truth.
Reality has a well-known liberal bias, as we know, so anything that covers the eyes, stuffs the ears and goes "La-la-la!" really loud is what they'll push. Getting rid of all those eggheads who study reality is the first step.
ETA: or what FrankM said upthread
The regime wants to destroy everything that is good or useful. They want to promote everything that is bad or harmful. It really is that simple.
I think you’re asking the wrong question. Trump is totally checked out. The question is who’s gotten his ear on this and what their agenda is. I’m guessing Musk or Vought.
It's all about creating a lot of pre-injury, --crippling your enemy before you have to engage them.
For social conservatives this means anyone at all they can get away with pre-injuring.
It does not make sense, in a normal rational world. But we are so immersed in a culture of growth, developments, profits, advantages, give-and-takes, zero-sum-games, etc... that we are unable to conceive of people who act irrationally for reasons that are beyond comprehension. We can say this is self-destructive, but this is our point of view from our perspective. They cannot see this.
"Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." -- The Dark Knight.
Adding to my own post, it would be remarkably against the interest of very large capitalist$ interest$ of biotech and pharmaceutical companie$. It this why lightweight Vivek was thrown out? In any case, the fact that it does not make any sense should not give you comfort. They may very well do it for absolutely no rational reason.
The way to understand all of this is to think like a farmer in Europe in the Dark Ages. (This form of words gives you an escape hatch if you will not face the fact that that is the very same thing as thinking like a farmer today.) What is authority, where does it come from, how does it manifest? What are the means of survival, what is the rationale for survival? What form of community emerges from these considerations, what are its priorities? This explains everything that we are seeing around us, hour by hour.
I have a friend who is a lobbyist for a major university in a red state. During the last midterms, he was in the state capitol and got harangued by some aides from the Republican power brokers as they had lost some seats that election cycle. The gist of their anger was "why should we give you anything when we know you represent people who vote against us and give money to our competitors".
At this point, Republicans know that very few people with an advanced degree vote for them. I think they are trying to suck resources out of institutions that stand against them. You know, any institution that actually tells the truth.
"watered down"? Oh, hell no. Nothing gets watered down in Trumps world. Things only get made more "muscular" (per the NYT). If any reason is even needed my guess would be that anything even remotely Fauci adjacent gets the hatchet. At least that's what whoever puts the EO in front of Trump tells him.
I'm just guessing that most of these so-called "executive orders" (or X-ecutive Xits) have been prepared by the Project 2025 folks and they just shove them in front ot the Convict and his sharpie. He may not know and certainly doesn't care what he's commanding, and why should he? He gets to go out every day in front of a thousand cameras and blather dementedly about seizing new territory, hurting people, and acting the big man. It's his dream come true.
Make no mistake, Project 2025 is behind all of these Trump moves. This conservative catholic cult paid big $$ for Trump and was the spearhead on Hispanic outreach. They want the world to reorder around a Christian (really, catholic) authority and will burn anything down to get there.
Like in the Middle Ages, when America Was Great.
The reason is simple. Donald Trump has dementia and the people around him are cranks and conspiracy theorists. So, he has a broken brain, a complete lack of morality, and a steady diet of lies being fed into that mush between his ears.
There is no plan behind this. He's nuts. We are in danger. The sooner we come to grips with this dire situation the better, and folks like Kevin need to start with these brute facts before wasting time on other theories.
Actually, the folks who need to come to grips with this dire situation are Republicans. They are totally in control now: House, Senate, Courts, Executive. The police and military line up behind Republicans.
Right now, Republicans are quaking in their gucci loafers at the thought of "retribution" from their Convict Chief or his well-armed minions. If they acted together, they could put that mad dog down.
If. Trouble is, they're all so greedy, besides being craven, that each sees a financial or electoral advantage of sticking with the Mad King. So it's up to Democrats -- as always -- to keep blocking them, exposing them, reminding the electorate that This Is What Republicans Do (To You), and hope that in two years, the balance of pwer shifts.
It's a long game. Just ask Moscow Mitch. Oh, and start reviewing his playbook.
Again, the Führerprinzip.
The little rats are so busy scheming against each other that they can't assemble a team.
"For the good of the country" is like Charlie Brown Adult Babble to them
Imagine if you wanted to destroy America from within. Once you do that, none of this crap will surprise you any more.
I think this piece provides the best holistic explanation for what we are seeing that I've read:
https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-doge/
Basically we are living the realization of fuckball nuts plan hatched by a fucking idiot man child programmer named Curtis Yarvin. Dismantling all federal agencies and privatizing their functions is very much part of that plan.
I don’t know if that stuff is true, but it might be. The thing that seems missing to me is the military. These people seem to think the military will just do what they are told. There doesn’t seem to be a plan to give the military an important seat at the table. The military swore allegiance to the constitution and if the constitution ceases to exist why should they follow Thiel/Musk & Co.?
I’m not expecting them to be our savior in this, I’m just thinking that military leaders might want power for themselves, not answer to a bunch of snot nosed technocrats who would faint at the first sign of a bloody nose. I saw nothing in that article that takes the military into account.
The job of Hegseth is to filter out generals that are not loyal to Trump.
Anyway, Trump will get to be dictator by intimidating political opposition (like Putin did), and it will be difficult to the army to intervene in this process.
Pretty much every other country in which a military general seized control over the entire government also had leaders *just prior to the military junta happening* that thought "this general I handpicked will weed out all the troops disloyal to me, and certainly will never turn against me himself." They were all wrong in the end... but this time might be different!
Yes, but Trump's idol is Putin, and for him it works ok (until now at least). So Trump takes some actions to make the army less hostile, but will rely on it staying neutral.
He thinks this somehow hurts Fauci.....
For that all he needs is one nutball who blames their loved one's death on the killer COVID vaccine or whatever boogaloo bullshit they picked up on the web.
One nut in a world of nuts. And a pulled security detail.
And when it happens, he'll celebrate.
Trump has always said he wanted to wipe out disease. Well, if you don't research it, it's as good as gone!
QED!
That's how Florida and some other states ended global warming.
It's the whole industry dedicated to telling baboons they're clever. Keep telling them that for long enough, give the people who are doing it so much money the baboons notice and the baboons will start happily agreeing with you, they are pretty clever, damn it!
Who needs freedom when the guy telling me I'm clever has $200 million a year?
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet. Maybe I'm the only one who reads the right-wing viewpoints.
They intend to wage a war on universities. This is the first of many battles. By limiting overhead to 15%, instead of the 50-70% that has previously been negotiated between the government and universities, they get to start starving universities of funds. That some useful research will be discarded is simply unfortunate collateral damage.
Many more blows are coming to universities, this is just the first.
I said something similar and agree with you 100%. People get distracted by Trump the inane yapper, but behind him is a plan.
If you want more details, check out the Lex Fridman podcast interview of Marc Andreessen *. The relevant area starts around the 56 minute mark. Marc's perspective is that universities cannot be fixed; what must be done is to bankrupt them. He compares them to a bad restaurant, asking, have you ever seen a bad restaurant get good? He thinks the entire system must be torn down and built anew.
I am not endorsing his opinion, I'm just reporting it.
*Search for: Marc Andreessen: Trump, Power, Tech, AI, Immigration & Future of America | Lex Fridman Podcast #458
Some legit poll a couple years ago showed that the majority of Republicans thought that going to college was bad for you. Presumably because their ignorant conservative fundamentalist kids will get filled with Liberal Marxist stuff like knowledge plus critical and scientific thinking.