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Scott-featured global health philanthropist and activist John Green made a video about TB treatment and USAID. tl;dw, TB is the brick-shithouse of bacteria, so treatment takes 4-6 months, but the good news is that people mostly aren't contagious during treatment. Stopping treatment increases the risk of treatment-resistance, including the spread of newly-treatment-resistant strains, so interruptions in the supply chain are a major global health problem. Yes, it's bad that global health was overly reliant on the USA, but it requires government-level funding and logistics. (Unsaid, his family pledged $1m/year 2024-2027 for a USAID TB program in the Philippines, in addition to $6.5m for Partners in Health, so he's literally put his money where his mouth is.) His contacts in confirm that drug supplies are being interrupted.
Even if one wants to cut USAID, a stop-work order, rather than a phase-out, was likely a net-negative by most measures of utility.
The reason this is being done so crudely is because every less-crude attempt made in the past was stopped. If you let them slow you down they'll keep finding reasons to do it until the whole thing grinds to a halt.
There was a limited supply of veto power and it has been squandered on less important issues. Don't blame the bartender for cutting you off, blame yourself for drinking too much.
My thoughts throughout this Presidency (all three weeks of it) has been a mix of:
Damn, Trump is reckless, unprofessional, and vain.
How the fuck does he have so much ammo?
There's a plane crash? Air Traffic Controllers were hired under a racist system. Foreign aid? Transgender operas in Colombia. Funding basic science? >60% "administrative overhead" tacked on. Threaten Canada with tariffs? Suddenly our border security is a valid issue. Random whatever? $20M in subscriptions to the Associated Press, and another $1.6M to the NYT.
It feels like a weird mirror to the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: He gives every indication of shooting blindly, but there has actually been a bullseye where he hits all along. That could be luck or good spin, but the most compelling story is that everywhere is that bad.
(Related joke: There has been a shooting at a peaceful protest! A child molester, a sexual assaulter, and a convicted felon illegally carrying a gun are the only people injured.)
I still don't think he's doing a good job, but damn does he have a strong narrative.
"Indirect costs" are overhead, and 60% is too high (much higher than average in the US right now), but it's not all administrative overhead. Everything from lab equipment and computers to the lights and air conditioning in the research buildings is being paid for by that indirect take. You could make grant recipients itemize instead, but then you either have administrators (more administrative overhead!) do the itemizing, or you have often-highly-paid researchers wasting time on figuring out what fraction of their PC upgrade needs to come out of grant A vs grant B.
This feels like the ivory tower version of "What do you mean the plumber is charging $200! He worked for an hour to replace a $50 part!" You might want to look for a cheaper plumber next time (and in this analogy, I do think it's a problem that spending other people's money doesn't give grant committees so much incentive to price shop), but if you can't find any cheaper plumbers then it might just be possible that you're not considering his whole cost accounting.
It's one of those spectrum things or Russel conjugations. Hard to know when it goes from being somewhat convenient bundled billing to unaccountable slush fund. They are effectively lying on many of their budgets. I've seen some where the PI is taking less than a week's salary for the project. Everyone "knows" that's fake and that there's no real accounting of what the guy is spending his time on.
If they limit overhead unis probably will just start itemizing a few more of the regular things. I won't be surprised to see them start charging for their tuition 'waivers'. That'll still be a fake number that mostly finds its way into a slush fund. They'll pump up the base numbers with more 'newly standard' stuff, drop the overhead a bit and end up with about the same overall number.
I've seen "the PI is barely getting paid" budgets before, but they weren't lies, they were common cases where the bulk of the work was being done by a postdoc or one or two grad students, with a faculty member PI just providing supervision and answering questions for a couple hours a week for each such project. Arguably the most important thing the PI was doing in those situations was "having the paper qualifications for the bureaucracy to allow them to be a PI", and maybe that should raise some eyebrows, but about bureaucratic requirements rather than funding. Even then I'm not sure changing requirements would change much, because the second most important thing the PI was doing was acting as a guarantor, using their track record of good collaborative work to indicate that they were good at picking successful postdocs and students and that they'd help keep that record up if the current project ran into problems.
I might have just been lucky enough to be around honorable people, though. E.g. these were the sorts of PIs who would insist on a paper's first author being the lowly student who did most of the work, whereas I've heard that "the first author is the one with seniority" is sometimes the rule elsewhere.
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I just don’t have much belief in price discovery where the main buyer is price indifferent
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General rule of politics is that systems will be about as corrupt as they can get away with. One would presume that DOGE was not baked into the calculations of how much they could get away with.
The top level comment is about the hostage puppy of tuberculosis treatment. Which suggests how it works. Corruption grows, shielded by hostage puppies. The puppies are very effective at shielding corruption. Corruption grows: 10% corrupt, 90% puppies; 50% corrupt, 50% puppies; 90% corrupt, 10% puppies; 99% corrupt, 1% puppies.
Eventually the anti-corruption campaigners have a vast amount of ammo; there just aren't enough hostage puppies to provide cover for all the corruption. The level of corruption at which the anti-corruption campaigners can break through is determined by how sentimental the general public is. The more sentimental they are, the better the hostage puppies work at shielding corruption, and the more complete the corruption has to be before the dam breaks.
I doubt anything's 99% corrupt, at least with regard to its stated mission (obviously there are departments whose stated mission many think is evil). 1% puppy, sure, but there's usually quite a lot of stuff that's fulfilling the stated mission (so not corrupt) but also not puppy. I'd expect corruption levels to usually top out somewhere between 20% and 70%, depending largely on scrutiny levels (I developed this rule from experience in Australia; our local governments are typically shockingly corrupt but state and federal ones far less so, and the obvious reason why is that media and electorate attention focuses on state and federal politics).
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Corporate security at my job keeps referencing "attack surface". How much vulnerable and hypothetically open to malicious action "surface" are we exposing to the world? They go a bit far in fearing this, in my opinion. Saying we shouldn't be handing out business cards on foreign trips, etc. But their larger point is valid. If you go around leaving possible vulnerabilities exposed to the world, then someone is going to exploit some of them.
Millions spent on transgender animal research, millions on Central American gender assessment clinics, etc, etc. They are hanging targets for a Republican Texas sharpshooter to accidentally hit while making broad cuts. The attack surface was massive so even blundering unfocused "attacks" happen to stike it again and again.
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The name of the concept you're reaching for is "target-rich environment".
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I've been digging into some of these laws and regulations. I'm coming away more convinced than ever that democratic governance is a myth. No regular person could possibly comprehend the byzantine labyrinth of rules, regulations, and case law required to competently evaluate government decision making.
Every spigot of federal funds grows into a hydrothermal vent of highly-specialized fauna perfectly adapted for siphoning-off those sweet sweet grants. Congress can't fix the problem, because all they are able or willing to do is appropriate more funding for things.
At least in the US, Trump has demonstrated that democratic governance is not a myth. You can in fact elect someone to take an axe to everything and they can take an axe to everything.
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Robert Michels eternally vindicated. To say organization is to say oligarchy, where the people who care about the organization inevitably rule over the people who care about the goals of the organization.
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