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Conspiracy of Silence: How Trump is Covertly Strangling Billions in Disease Cure Research
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/conspiracy-of-silence-how-trump-is-covertly-strangling-billions-in-disease-cure-research/sharetoken/e5b50bec-59c0-4124-9667-fb28a73e3127The following is very important news about the Trump White House’s unfolding war against biomedical/disease-cure research in the United States. But the set up is a bit complicated. So I want to flag both the complexity and the importance in advance. Because I want to really encourage you to read the set up and the details. It’s important stuff and most of it remains unknown to the public, though a few threads of the story have been published.
Back in late March and early April the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against anti-Semitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern. Harvard eventually sued the administration. Princeton has decided to fight the cuts but hasn’t sued. But most of the universities have generally kept quiet about what they’re doing. And in most cases what that means is that they’re negotiating with the administration and trying to keep quiet and keep their faculties quiet to avoid antagonizing the administration during those notional negotiations.
The dollar figures at different universities were all into the hundreds of millions of dollars and in some cases well over a billion dollars. I thought these cuts were cuts. I thought they’d all gone into effect. But that’s not quite right. I’ve gotten some visibility into the situation at Northwestern where the administration has been very much in the “let’s be nice and keep quiet and negotiate and hope for the best” camp. I have confirmed the following with my own sources. But the outlines are contained by a story by Jerry Wu, the Managing Editor of the Daily Northwestern, the student paper, published yesterday.
Here’s the deal: Soon after the White House announced the grant freezes Northwestern received ‘stop-work’ orders for a range of mostly Pentagon contracts. That’s by the book. The government agency is the customer or funder. So they send a message saying discontinue work and then they stop sending payments. That’s how the federal government shuts down a research projects. But that didn’t happen with the National Institutes of Health grants. The stop work orders never came. The University didn’t know and wasn’t able to find out what that meant so they continued negotiating and did something between assuming and hoping that the money would continue to flow. After all the NIH grants never received stop work orders. And in the world of law and contracts that means the money has to keep flowing.
But it didn’t continue to flow.
(snip)
This is how the Trump White House is currently strangling billions in cancer, Alzheimers and other disease and cure research in real time while mostly managing to do it with near perfect radio silence.
Back in late March and early April the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against anti-Semitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern. Harvard eventually sued the administration. Princeton has decided to fight the cuts but hasn’t sued. But most of the universities have generally kept quiet about what they’re doing. And in most cases what that means is that they’re negotiating with the administration and trying to keep quiet and keep their faculties quiet to avoid antagonizing the administration during those notional negotiations.
The dollar figures at different universities were all into the hundreds of millions of dollars and in some cases well over a billion dollars. I thought these cuts were cuts. I thought they’d all gone into effect. But that’s not quite right. I’ve gotten some visibility into the situation at Northwestern where the administration has been very much in the “let’s be nice and keep quiet and negotiate and hope for the best” camp. I have confirmed the following with my own sources. But the outlines are contained by a story by Jerry Wu, the Managing Editor of the Daily Northwestern, the student paper, published yesterday.
Here’s the deal: Soon after the White House announced the grant freezes Northwestern received ‘stop-work’ orders for a range of mostly Pentagon contracts. That’s by the book. The government agency is the customer or funder. So they send a message saying discontinue work and then they stop sending payments. That’s how the federal government shuts down a research projects. But that didn’t happen with the National Institutes of Health grants. The stop work orders never came. The University didn’t know and wasn’t able to find out what that meant so they continued negotiating and did something between assuming and hoping that the money would continue to flow. After all the NIH grants never received stop work orders. And in the world of law and contracts that means the money has to keep flowing.
But it didn’t continue to flow.
(snip)
This is how the Trump White House is currently strangling billions in cancer, Alzheimers and other disease and cure research in real time while mostly managing to do it with near perfect radio silence.
Basically many major universities are completely cut off from their research grants and are not talking about it publicly because they are in negotiations with this insane administration and want to keep some sort of good graces.
IT'S FREAKING OUTRAGEOUS!!!