A pause, a freeze, a ban, a cancellation
Trump’s return to the White House is already having a big impact at the $47.4 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), with the new administration imposing a wide range of restrictions, including the abrupt cancellation of meetings including grant review panels. Officials have also ordered a communications pause, a freeze on hiring, and an indefinite ban on travel.
The moves have generated extensive confusion and uncertainty at the nation’s largest research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee says.
Well, it’s only health. This would be bad if it were about something important, but health doesn’t matter.
The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
I suppose we can see the thinking. It’s health and human services. What good is that to Trump? How does it make him richer? Plus also, Fauci.
Hiring is also affected. No staff vacancies can be filled; in fact, before Trump’s first day in office was over, NIH’s Office of Human Resources had rescinded existing job offers to anyone whose start date was slated for 8 February or later. It also pulled down currently posted job vacancies on USA Jobs. “Please note, these tasks had to be completed in under 90 minutes and we were unable to notify you in advance,” the 21 January email noted, asking NIH’s institutes and centers to pull down any job vacancies remaining on their own websites.
The various directives have shaken the vast community of extramural scientists NIH supports. “[We] have not seen anything concrete from NIH yet,” said one scientist at a major academic medical center. “But just like about everyone in science, we are worried and waiting.”
Listen, these health people are dangerous. You gotta use caution.
H/t What a Maroon
Meanwhile in Canada, virtually all of the new jobs created in the country over the last couple years have been government positions at all three levels: federal, provincial, and municipal. The only thing keeping Canada’s economy afloat is government jobs.
With massive disruption in the labor force caused by AI and automation, now is a strange time to be deliberately slashing jobs that could be upheld. Most countries are beginning to talk about Universal Basic Income, which the Canadian government’s massive hiring spree is just a disguised form of — they’re handing out incomes to as many people they can, only with job titles attached.
Musk keeps vacillating between saying that soon there won’t be enough jobs for all the people, and soon there won’t be enough people for all the jobs. Canada came down on the side of “there won’t be enough jobs for all the people so let’s slash immigration and create as many government jobs as possible to keep the people afloat while we figure out a plan”. The US is slashing immigration but it’s also slashing the job force at the same time, which seems highly risky to me. There’s no guarantee that the private sector will make up all the jobs that get cut out of the public sector. Especially if they’re simultaneously pushing to automate everything with A.I.
This is capitalism: there is no guarantee of anything except that the rich get richer.
It has been my experience that government hiring freezes are never comprehensive; they can find ways to hire, but usually not the people at the bottom.
For instance, a college I know had a hiring freeze because of the legislature. They couldn’t hire professors, secretaries, or anything else. But…they hired seventeen administrators, all of them making substantially more than a professor. (Mind you, this was in Texas; but my experience suggests it’s not unique to Texas).
Trump’s already been forced to pull this back a little–apparently, the job offer retractions included the VA, which is one of those agencies that you really, really don’t want to screw over too obviously (administrations of both parties, of course, have often neglected the VA in subtle ways, but actually saying, ‘let’s not let vets get health care’ is a bit much). So now they’re scrambling to re-issue all the job offers that got retracted. (Source: I was listening to NPR last night.)
I imagine they’ll find other things they don’t screw over, either, but right now, so few people know what the government does for them that they don’t realize all the bads of an absolute freeze.
This is going to be a pretty big global economic storm that Trump’s brewing. I’m kind of glad to be in Australia right now, where we certainly have economic problems, just not as fundamentally bad as a lot of other economies. We may be well positioned to mitigate a lot of the chaos.
That being said, we’ve got an opposition that’s great at talking up its economic cred, but hasn’t done a competent job since 2007, despite being in government for most of it, and they weren’t even that s**t hot when they were okay (The Howard Gov’t 1996-2007 coasted on Keating’s economic reforms and a long-lasting mining boom). Since 2007, the Labor party has been better at micro-tweaking the economy through catastrophe (see the Rudd gov’t during the GFC), and there’s every sign that they’re competent to do as best as possible through this current mess, barring perhaps some issues with the reserve bank and how it operates.
On cultural issues, Labor is actually doing alright here when dealing with Nazis and various anti-Semites, despite what the opposition (repeatedly) says. It’s not adopting the worst of the left, and it’s not losing its spine in response to demands from the right.
However, Labor isn’t doing at all well when it comes to the erosion of women’s rights by gender woo, and yet, the opposition is leaving this alone. It’s conspicuous that the conservatives aren’t focusing on this, but then perhaps they aren’t prepared to touch the issue after the way the party messed up in the way it treated Moira Deeming.
I’ve heard a number of local GCs express the view that a Liberal Party (our conservatives) will solve the issue, but I really, really doubt it. It seems like rank tribalism, or opportunism. Both of the major parties are serving up s**t sandwiches on this issue, sans bread.
And gawd. The lynch pin of the conservatives’ economic plan; building nuclear plants magically faster than more experienced, trained and infrastructure-rich nations ever did, in a country with a grid that’s ill-suited to using nuclear. I’m not anti-nuclear (where else are we going to get a constant supply of Molybdenum-99?), and if we had industries that required a constant, high level output (such as high volume silicon lithography), then we’d absolutely need to at least consider nuclear. But Australia doesn’t.
Australia has a grid that flip-flops all over the place when it come to demand, while the price to run nuclear reactors doesn’t scale well with output – they’re not cost-effective at lower outputs. And that’s before considering difficulties in ramping output up and down fast enough to respond to demand. (And before considering questions of proliferation, how that effects regional geopolitics, and where we’re going to store the waste).
Hugely expensive tech, a phenomenally unrealistic timeline for implementation, costings as substantial as crepe paper on a rainy day, and a completely poor fit for existing demands and infrastructure; that’s the conservative economic plan here. And they’re definitely in striking distance of wining the election this year.
Conservatives the world over are selling a lot of economic cockamamie. A lot more than I remember them selling in my youth. Yet for some reason they’re retaining an illusion of economic credibility like an echo from decades past.
The specter of “efficient” conservative administration similarly haunts bodies politic the world over. Both the Tories in the UK, and the GOP in the US handle their bureaucracies in a manner that would be best narrated with a string of Hanna Barbera sound effects, and yet adherents will still believe. Just one slip from a centrist government seems enough to get people into a fit of buyer’s remorse over the supposedly “progressive” regime they supported, and then you’re back with delusional clowns with fetishes for white elephants and firing people.
My apologies for the rant. Maybe it wouldn’t have built up so much if I commented here more often.
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