patrick.net

Just wait. TPB or TLips will have an excellent defense for this and for all of the questionable moves Trump makes.

He's draining the swamp !

It all depends on how the NIH was spending the money.

I had a lab tech job at Harvard Med School just after college, and was stunned by the amount of money wasted on things that should have been very cheap. Like hundreds of dollars for a beaker. I was placing the orders for a lab. And they didn't care as long as they were spending money from government contract. Quite the opposite - they had to spend all the money in their contract or they would not get the same amount or more the next year.

I can tell you this. The NIH paid for my PhD in Physical Chemistry. $150k in my pocket. No gains in science. I've watched them piss away a lot of money on research. That being said, I've also seen them cure diseases off NIH money. One professor that I had a collaboration with had automatic funding from the NIH. He didn't even have to write grants. He and his collaborators just sat down and cured a disease every 5 years. Others, I watched 5 million dollars flushed down the tubes to promote "women and minorities" in science. People need to stop acting like every dollar put towards research is a dollar well spent.

A complete public accounting of all expenditures with real human names attached to every payment would probably do wonders to cut down on some of the more egregious violations.

So those $300 beaker payments should show up on a list of NIH-funded expenditures under the name recipient of the grant, which was Dr. Betty Hay at the time.