Understanding Trump's War on Research Funding & The Future
America the Irrelevant
From 2021 to now, Vinay Prasad of the University of California San Francisco has made quite the name for himself by demanding everyone else perform randomized control trials (RCTs) on everything from ivermectin, to PPE, to regular updates of the COVID-19 and flu vaccines. While RCTs are primarily limited to pharmaceuticals for numerous reasons, Vinay Prasad has misled his audience by insisting that they are the only way to evaluate science, in a bastardization of "Evidence-Based Medicine," subtly implying that all other forms of medicine are inferior. What Prasad hides from his audience is that RCTs are difficult to organize and perform, and that many of his proposed RCTs, including a state-by-state randomization of the pediatric vaccine schedule (because Denmark. No, really.), would never pass an ethics review board, much less find any actual willing volunteers.
Thus, these RCTs are impossible, making Vinay's proposals effectively worthless. What Vinay's doing is a form of what we call "Sealioning:" an annoying and pathetic attempt to win a debate by wasting the time of everyone involved with bad faith inquiries. Knowing these proposed RCTs are impossible, Prasad never bothered to attempt them, even with his own lab named after him. It was merely another shallow attempt to smear hard-working doctors and scientists, especially those in the federal government, as incompetent liars.
Of course, it is now 2025, and Vinay Prasad has finally given up the rouse. He never cared about RCTs - he's an overjoyed cheerleader for the Trump Administration's war on the NIH, CDC, and other federal public health agencies - as well as essential research funding for medical universities around the country. Thousands of scientists who rely on NIH funding - those same scientists who could perform the RCTs Prasad has demanded - are having their careers thrown in disarray. With total contempt and disdain for his professional colleagues, Vinay Prasad has relished in the adoration of the anti-vaccine fanbase he's cultivated and profited from across social media, totally isolated from the forefront of important scientific and medical breakthroughs that actually matter. A form of pseudo-intellectual “focused protection” from having to respect one’s colleagues, even.
Currently, Trump is letting the essential functions of the federal government be slashed and burned by 19-21 year old dickheads who rotted their potential for critical thinking by absorbing an endless stream of hate from "anti-woke" videogame streamers & other bigots. These pitiful swine lack any real technical ability, abusing ChatGPT and other faulty automated tools as a crutch only to make a steady stream of blatant, indefensible errors. The gutting of federal funding for scientific & medical research completely destroys America's position as a global science leader - sending a clear signal to the best and brightest in other countries who now no longer have a reason to immigrate here. China is being handed the rest of the century on a silver platter, along with the rest of BRICS, whilst America regresses into an irrelevant, backwater shithole that is the world's laughingstock.
While we all understand how truly foolish this is, it's worth digging deep into the thinking behind it and the larger political machinations at work, as absurd as it is.
The Privatized Society
In the 2011 reboot of Syndicate, a dystopian cyberpunk action game, the era of the nation-state has effectively ended, and the world is dominated by an elite few mega-corporations who dominate scientific research & development. Oh, and Brian Cox!
As the Obama-Biden Administration wasted the 2010s foolishly letting themselves be bamboozled by Silicon Valley, who flagrantly broke the laws governing industries such as taxis and hospitality by deciding that having an app and calling yourself a tech company meant you could do whatever you want, the economy would be fundamentally reshaped in a siege on what remained of labor protections. The result was a significant transfer of power to a few select billionaires over the American economy. Trump would only exacerbate this process, followed by Biden exploiting the pandemic to crush strikes and divert COVID-19 relief to buy more military toys for cops. This bold gamble did not secure Biden’s successor an electoral victory in 2024.
The National Institute of Health's (NIH) process to disperse funding, while imperfect, empowered scientists to pursue research that may lead to significant medical and scientific breakthroughs - free from corporate meddling. The justification for the slashing of federal research funding that Vinay Prasad is currently cheerleading is that the American taxpayer shouldn't be paying for "useless" studies, and that only wealthy interests, such as corporations or tech billionaires, should be able to dictate to scientists what they research. It is in fact much closer towards a regression towards feudalism, forcing our best and brightest to instead placate the whims of the wealthy nobles whose patronage becomes essential as a source of research funding.
What we are witnessing is a significant transfer of power, humiliating hardworking scientists and forcing them to grovel before the ownership class, so they can relish in exploiting America's brightest minds for profit. Scientists, understand this: Your corporate boss will own the intellectual property of your research, and will be the only one to profit from it - not you - leaving you out to dry with nothing but crumbs. This is the vision of "economic growth" that Trump, Elon, and their billionaire friends share for America. Of course, the current business mindset of short-term infinite growth at all costs (line go up) is completely incompatible with how scientific development actually functions. As Reddit user "throwawayainteasy" explains:
"Some of the most important scientific breakthroughs are things that we won't really understand the value of until 10-20 years from now or more...No for-profit company would fund the first 20 steps in that process, because there's no clear path to profitability until the end. That's why governments across the world are the primary funders of pure research."
This hard reality is incompatible with the absurd conservative/libertarian fantasy, one that Trump and Musk share, that the federal government should be "run like a business;" a for-profit entity. Decades of intellectual rot has devolved free-market thought into a twisted parody of itself - even Ayn Rand, the grandmother of libertarianism, understood the necessity of mandatory quarantine during pandemics to safeguard the rights of individuals from contagious pathogens. Now? These "captains of industry" are doing everything they can to kneecap the economies they sit comfortably atop of.
The Handyman, Janitor, and Umpire
In liberal democracy, the purpose of the federal government in a free-market economy is to facilitate and maintain the environment for economic activity & growth. Building and maintaining roads for the transportation of goods, regulating airline safety so planes don't fall out of the sky, and punishing scam artists who try to take advantage of hardworking Americans are just a few examples of this. Investing in scientific research that may not pay off for decades is another critical function of the federal government. Of course, the bi-partisan consensus on Capitol Hill has been one of collective abandonment of these central responsibilities - even including disaster management, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. The use of public power on behalf of the citizen is heretical thought. The only legitimate power is private.
Instead of looking at what's happening to the NIH and other federal institutions in isolation, realize that this is decades of institutional rot progressing towards its natural end. The breakdown of the enforcement of laws meant to prosecute those responsible for senseless wars & atrocity, or financial criminals, accomplished nothing except sowing chaos and empowering bad actors like many of the creeps you'll find on Silicon Valley. A number of which funded propaganda to sabotage America's pandemic response. The scale of mess we're facing, from public health to medical research, is catastrophic and truly destabilizing.
All so a few impotent excuses for men can play pharaohs and serfs with the lives of hardworking Americans.
As large swaths of the American economy have re-centered itself around the absolute scam of "artificial intelligence," which is actually automated MadLibs built off massive amounts of theft, data harvesting, and electric waste to produce garbage like erotic art of John Cena being overly familiar with Waluigi, America will only further cripple it's potential. We are already seeing that a reliance on platforms like ChatGPT are impeding critical thinking abilities. The combined mess of the economy, scientific research & development, and the federal government will take a dedicated campaign to rebuild and repair, casting out the charlatans with extreme prejudice.
Envisioning an America After Trump
There would be nothing more foolish than for the plan of when January 2029 possibly comes, than to simply shrug & normalize the utter mess that Trump and his goons have made of everything. So much of the Democrats' recent history of humiliating failure comes from inheriting a nation in disaster and refusing to accept the responsibility that comes with the job they campaigned for. Comically enough, the larger Democrat Party brain trust is already declaring that this is their exact plan! As billionaire pricks take a sledgehammer to America’s few remaining competitive advantages, including the medical and scientific research funded by the National Institute of Health, the proposed strategy is what journalist Jeer Heer calls “…a party entirely beholden to plutocracy.”
We simply cannot afford to repeat these same mistakes any longer.
As the opposition party has prioritized decorum over standing up for their constituents, even going so far as to fast-track the confirmation of anti-vaccine sadist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to HHS Secretary without an ounce of meaningful resistance, hardworking Americans are falling through the cracks. As countless thousands of federal workers are kicked to the curb, the party that burned over a billion dollars on an embarrassing sham of a presidential campaign has refused to lift a finger to help, much less make a promise to get these essential federal employees their jobs back. These jobs are one of (if not the only) last remaining paths to join the middle class without serving capital. The devastation of federal employment opportunities and public funding for essential projects is a nasty tear at the fabric of American society.
If the plan is to make these cuts permanent with the cowardly inaction of a Democrat leadership in 2029, establishing another new baseline of normalcy, then the Democrat Party might as well disband and abolish itself instead of wasting everyone's time.
The sheer scale of calamity that a future Democrat President will inherit in January 2029 will require a massive disaster relief program that not only includes restoring the public sector jobs lost under Trump, but also a massive expansion of the public sector. It's become obvious for years at this point that private capital is content with letting America rot and working Americans suffer in poverty.
Unlike how FDR's New Deal pulled America out of the Great Depression with the federal government making direct improvements to the quality of life for countless Americans, the current philosophy of Democrat Party involves crying about how powerless they are, meeting with Silicon Valley billionaires to let them dictate the party's platform, and terrorizing the homeless - destroying their shelters, medication, dentures, mobility aids, and other essentials - with a camera crew in tow. If America is ever to regain its competitive edge in scientific research, this philosophy will have to be burned to the ground and the earth upon which it was cultivated salted.
Unfortunately, the odds of this necessary shift happening, as of right now, are rather slim. Will liberals and Democrat voters admit that their Party has wasted the past decade crumbling into a non-viable sham, which needs a once-in-a-century pandemic in order to retake the White House, and demand these necessary changes? Or will they continue to pledge their undying loyalty to a party that in 2024, removed opposition to torture - an indefensible war crime! - from the party's platform?
We are already out of time. America just recorded its first measles death in a decade, in an unvaccinated child - the first of many horrors to follow if we continue to go down this road.
