Well yeah. The brain drain is gonna be gnarly in a couple years.

Remember this is not NIH scientists and staff, but the Trump administrations appointed transition leaders making these changes. The staff is committed to the American people including those who are wholesale underserved by the corporate health care industry.

This is how empires crumble—by gutting the very infrastructure that fuels progress to score cheap political points. The NIH cuts aren’t about fiscal responsibility; they’re ideological arson, torching decades of biomedical advancement to own the libs. Slashing indirect costs isn’t trimming fat—it’s severing arteries. Labs aren’t just petri dishes and pipettes; they’re HVAC systems, salaries for lab techs, and the electricity keeping freezers full of cancer samples from rotting.

The irony? This performative “anti-wokeness” will immolate the working class they claim to champion. Those 4,000 tech firms in the Research Triangle? They’re not staffed by tenured radicals. They’re mechanics of innovation, welders of microscopes, and janitors mopping floors where Alzheimer’s breakthroughs happen. Privatize the gains, socialize the losses—classic oligarchy playbook.

But sure, let’s kneecap public science because a Heritage Foundation intern wrote a fanfic about DEI goblins. The only “nonsense” here is pretending you can dismantle the engine of American research and still lead the world in anything but decline.