It's hard to overstate how chaotic and mismanaged NIH has been in the past two years. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, so it's hard to impute motives here.
A lot of labs are being defunded for no good reason, losing researchers, losing the thread, and putting entire directions of useful research on ice, likely forever.
There are some clear indications of where it is pure malice and not mere incompetence though. Sean Eddy is a foundational figure in my field of research, like a Hubble:
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/21/nx-s1-5828768/science-funding...
I'm going to call it malice. Either way the people running the government now are the avowed enemies of functioning institutions. No need to give these freaks the benefit of the doubt.
(See Russ Vought's comments about putting all government workers in trauma just for one and he's head of OMB.)
It's not the regulars at NIH. If anything they are pulling more unofficial overtime than ever before to try to compensate for what is coming from on top and what DOGE destroyed
From the outside, I can see how they want to revamp the institutions with hopes to accelerate timelines, and reduce waste. But it’s also funny because it’s not something that can be achieved in a span of 4 years and without long term goals/objectives/process changes/changing the pipelines/etc.
I’ve mentioned it in the past as well, but everything that US has done in the past looks like as a knee-jerk reaction to China’s achievements. That being said, I sincerely hope they can compete in advancing the tech and research, since competition is good for the world.
> At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.
Why doesn't he continue his research inside big pharma?
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old.
Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.
Even Bell Labs would not be doing the type of research that is necessary. Look at all the innovation in science that happened back then! Bell Labs was an outlier but it was not the primary driver of science by any means.
You're right, there were many other companies doing it too. General Electric, General Motors, Sylvania, etc.
That's not what I was saying. The foundational research that built the massive economic engine of the current US did not come from industrial research.
Sure - but it's a moot point unless you're proposing plausible ways of achieving that, and that could be adopted by a movement with credible political power.
They are not similar types of research. It's like asking why Knuth doesn't do systems research for a social network or advertising company.
Eddy's lab builds the tooling and concepts that everyone else uses throughout the field in foundation upon which new discoveries are built.
There's no commercial funding for that sort of work, and I'm honestly shocked at the lack of understanding of this is Silicon Valley. Nobody at Google or Meta or anywhere is given free reign to build the future of science of even computer science, all activity there is for the express commercial benefit of the company, exactly as it should be.
I see what you're saying, and think it makes sense.
Anecdotally, Apple (thinking different(ly)?) ran at least two pure research inner groups that i was in contact with when I was in engineering at Apple; to your point, I have no sense of impact on profits from doing that.
Sometimes an organisation has what I would call "Vanity Hires". People hired not because they really make much sense as part of the organisation but because their celebrity "rubs off" on the org by association.
These can be very transactional, they take your money and if they have a notional place of work (not so necessary in the era of WFH) you give them a broom closet somewhere as an "office" which they will never visit.
Or at the other end of the spectrum they try to actually be helpful, perhaps because they actually did want to do whatever it is you wrote on the hiring paperwork, and this might even be a productive relationship, at worst it's a distraction for anybody whose interest you've struggled to maintain and don't want to let go. Hey, go help uh, Doctor Frankenstein with his project to (checks notes) invent a new machine to replace Geese for some reason.
Given Apple's wealth I'd expect some mix of "Vanity Hires" and people who really are expected to do important strategic work for the $$$. As I described, to some extent you can't tell. If you've never heard of them, maybe that's just because you don't know their area of expertise, and equally even if they seem to be working their backside off, maybe they're just like that and Apple was astonished that they actually showed up and started working.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is malice.
Why would you ever give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt after the past 10y? They’ve been more than clear about the fact they want to destroy federal and scientific institutions (other than ICE of course)