There is a lot of narrative pressure right now to cast anything they do as illegal. So they issue an executive order saying to deny grants for "gender ideology" and plaintiffs do some forum shopping to find a lower court willing to issue an injunction against it. Then the grants would have to be reevaluated, but some of them that were denied based on the executive order would still have been denied based on other criteria anyway, only now there is a document saying they were denied based on the executive order. Then plaintiffs go to court based on the document and the administration claims they also had other reasons and the case makes its way through the courts and appeals etc., which hasn't happened yet so we don't know how it's going to turn out.
But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
I am at Johns Hopkins and as far as I know all medical research funding is in free fall. We are not Harvard (although why “I am mad at Harvard” makes anything ok, I don’t know.) This research isn’t some favor the Federal government does for Universities. We, as a nation, decided to run medical research by funding it through grants to Universities, and now that’s all being turned off.
Presumably the motivation is some combination of “slash funding so we can give tax cuts” and “kill the Universities as an independent center of smart people who oppose us” but the actual effect is someone you love will die when they could have lived. It’s fucked.
> If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?
No. USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted [1].
> USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation.
USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.
> Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted
Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other.
It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.
The money is being cut, it is not being reallocated. Even if it was (and again, it is not!) you can’t magically re-create the staff doing cancer research at Johns Hopkins by writing bigger checks to U. of Florida. Those projects just die.
> USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.
Established in 1961, USAID is used to fund various projects including clinical trials for vaccines and therapeutics in lower-middle-income countries, as well as elsewhere worldwide. The organisation has been used to find research into human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, among other diseases and research efforts. The sudden pull of funding has meant trials have been suspended until trial sponsors seek alternative methods of funding to restart studies.
But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?