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Trump's perverse strangling of USA disease cure research [1]

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Date: 2025-05-06

This evening, Josh Marhsall of Talking Points Memo emailed this story to subsribers: Conspiracy of Silence: How Trump is Covertly Strangling Billions in Disease Cure Research. Marshall details how the Trump regime is doing to university researchers what Trump the huckster businessman did to hundreds of employers and contractors — simply refuse to pay them.

The key point is that the Trump regime has withheld payments for research already completed without telling the victim institutions ahead of time that their projects have been terminated — which is the normal way the federal government is supposed to end a contract. Marshall explains:

..Back in late March and early April, the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against antisemitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern…. Here’s the deal: Soon after the White House announced the grant freezes, Northwestern received “stop-work” orders for a range of mostly Pentagon contracts. That’s by the book. The government agency is the customer or funder. So they send a message saying discontinue work and then they stop sending payments. That’s how the federal government shuts down a research project. But that didn’t happen with the National Institutes of Health grants. The stop-work orders never came. The university didn’t know and wasn’t able to find out what that meant, so they continued negotiating and did something between assuming and hoping that the money would continue to flow. After all, the NIH grants never received stop-work orders — and in the world of law and contracts that means the money has to keep flowing. But it didn’t continue to flow…. ...So they not only had no warning the payments were getting stopped, it’s not entirely clear to me that they had permission to stop the research at all. There was one news report saying this would happen. Last month, Max Kozlov, a reporter for Nature, published an internal NIH email dated April 17th in which instructions were given to stop sending all money to the targeted universities. Critically it also included instructions not to “provide any communications to these schools about whether or why the funds are frozen.” So the strategy was intentional: create confusion about the status of grants and just have the money stop coming. [Emphasis mine].

Thus far, the universities targeted in emperor Trump’s scam have largely remained quiet, and have even tried to convince their faculty and staff to keep quiet, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue at each institution.

Why would the other schools be quiet about it? Well, that’s what’s happening at Northwestern. The university, both formally and informally, is itself remaining silent and doing everything it can to keep its researchers and faculty silent. Why? Because they’re still hoping something can be worked out with the administration to keep the money flowing.

Marshall further notes that the Trump regime

is following the same playbook as it did with Harvard. They’re refusing to say what it is they actually want and are thus making “negotiations” difficult or impossible. The White House already has its freeze. So they’re not in any rush to solve anything…. ...it is a way to strangle as much disease cure research as possible while keeping it out of the news. The universities can’t say the grants have been canceled because they in fact have not been canceled. And they’re scared to say they’re not being paid because they’re hoping the White House or the NIH will relent…. This is how the Trump White House is currently strangling billions in cancer, Alzheimer’s and other disease and cure research in real time while mostly managing to do it with near-perfect radio silence.

Why would Trump and his sidekicks do this? Why stop trying to cure diseases? Is this really just about cutting government and balancing the budget? Or is this about depopulation? Is this the result of the USA government being seized by plutocratic oligarchs who believe they are innately superior to other people, and that all the masses of worker drones don’t really deserve to live? Or, at least, “where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules”?

What do you think?

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