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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

It looks like they are seeing exactly that:

> A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding

They're withholding funding from certain institutions, but that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there?

nope. they're not giving the remainder of terminated grants to other institutions. they're also blatantly impounding Congressionally authorized funding, in violation of the Impoundment Control Act (e.g. with all the USAID grants.)

You're conflating two different things.

The administration's argument is that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional, i.e. Congress has the power to prevent the executive from doing something by not funding it, but not the power to force the executive to do something just by appropriating money for it.

But the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research, so what's stopping them from issuing the cancer research grants to other institutions? Nothing, right?

> the administration objects to USAID, not cancer research

Are you sure about that?

This administration's HHS Secretary has deep doubts about the efficacy of the scientific method, which underpins all of medical research in general and cancer research in particular. It seem more likely to me that the money impounded from cancer research will instead be redirected to organizations that use non-scientific methods to study the effects of nutritional supplements, water flouridation, and non-ionizing 5G radiation.

https://www.stopbreastcancer.org/national-breast-cancer-coal...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/abortions-cancer-in...

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-cancer-institute...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rfk-jr-spreading-misinformation-a...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a63559859/rfk-jr-cance...

You’ve written something like five comments implying they’re moving the money. They’re not. Then you say they could move the money. In fact they can’t because the research teams and labs to do this work just don’t exist in other places, and it would take years to rebuild them there even if the money was being sent somewhere else. But even if they could re-allocate the funds somewhere else, they’re not doing that. The money is just piling up and being unspent. You seem very determined to find some explanation for this that isn’t as terrible as the actual reality, and I’m sympathetic! But there isn’t one. It’s just a disaster in every sense.

> that doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated, so doesn't that just mean the grants go to some other institution and the research happens there?

They’re ignoring the law. What the Congress appropriated, what contracts the U.S. has signed, what courts say is irrelevant to these folks.

There is a lot of narrative pressure right now to cast anything they do as illegal. So they issue an executive order saying to deny grants for "gender ideology" and plaintiffs do some forum shopping to find a lower court willing to issue an injunction against it. Then the grants would have to be reevaluated, but some of them that were denied based on the executive order would still have been denied based on other criteria anyway, only now there is a document saying they were denied based on the executive order. Then plaintiffs go to court based on the document and the administration claims they also had other reasons and the case makes its way through the courts and appeals etc., which hasn't happened yet so we don't know how it's going to turn out.

But none of that is really relevant to the question: If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?

> If there is money for cancer research, and the administration objects to Harvard but not to cancer research, then they still issue the grants just not to Harvard, right?

No. USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation. Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted [1].

[1] https://www.aamc.org/news/whats-stake-when-clinical-trials-r...

> USAID funding for AIDS research wasn’t given to another organisation.

USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.

> Similarly, right now, actual research is being halted

Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding. Whether this is a net cost or benefit depends on how they compare with each other.

It also depends on how institutions respond. If Harvard is doing trials A and C and that funding moves to trials B and D somewhere else, and as a result trial A gets canceled but Harvard chooses to continue to fund trial C out of its endowment, you now have three trials going instead of two. Maybe that's better. I doubt they were doing that on purpose, but if that's the result, it isn't necessarily bad.

> USAID isn't clinical trials, it's treatment subsidies in foreign countries and studies on the administrative efficiency of foreign healthcare bureaucracies.

That’s not completely accurate.

https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/interviews/usaid-sponsor...

Established in 1961, USAID is used to fund various projects including clinical trials for vaccines and therapeutics in lower-middle-income countries, as well as elsewhere worldwide. The organisation has been used to find research into human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria, among other diseases and research efforts. The sudden pull of funding has meant trials have been suspended until trial sponsors seek alternative methods of funding to restart studies.

I guess I should say it's predominantly not clinical trials.

> Obviously if you reallocate funding from trial A to trial B, trial A loses its funding

If this is happening, what organization are they relocating funding to?

The money is being cut, it is not being reallocated. Even if it was (and again, it is not!) you can’t magically re-create the staff doing cancer research at Johns Hopkins by writing bigger checks to U. of Florida. Those projects just die.

I am at Johns Hopkins and as far as I know all medical research funding is in free fall. We are not Harvard (although why “I am mad at Harvard” makes anything ok, I don’t know.) This research isn’t some favor the Federal government does for Universities. We, as a nation, decided to run medical research by funding it through grants to Universities, and now that’s all being turned off.

Presumably the motivation is some combination of “slash funding so we can give tax cuts” and “kill the Universities as an independent center of smart people who oppose us” but the actual effect is someone you love will die when they could have lived. It’s fucked.

From what I’ve seen, NIH funding has been withheld across a massive number of grants. This isn’t even a “stop work order” situation: the checks just aren’t being written. It’s absolutely going to kill everything from ongoing work to trials to hiring of research assistants. It’s already affecting PhD acceptance and hiring. The money is piling up and I’ve read rumors that the plan is to try to retroactively “rescission” it by having Congress vote to throw it back into the budget pool, when they pass their big tax cut budget.

> doesn't change the amount of money Congress appropriated

they cut tons of money that Congress had appropriated; USAID is just one example of many

so yes, it's illegal and Congress could call them on it, but the GOP won't.

the Admin is also counting on the allocation changing with the next budget, coming up, at which point it is "no longer allocated"

No, it doesn't seem like the funding is going to go elsewhere. It looks like it will go unspent, or possibly clawed back.

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