On Wednesday, multiple sources confirmed to Splinter that Elon Musk’s DOGE army, who are now scattered across the landscape of the federal government hucking pipe bombs into as many internal systems as they can, had arrived at the doors of the National Institutes of Health. It sounds like they were more or less welcomed inside with open arms.
According to a source with knowledge, DOGE staff and NIH leadership had what someone in the room called a “productive” meeting. The term was not thoroughly defined, though another source said the Mini-Musks had demanded HR and personnel records. Later, a source inside NIH told Splinter that a “young” DOGE staffer had been given access to a system known as eRA, which is used to administer the tens of billions of dollars in research funding the agency distributes every year. It is not yet clear, of course, what these dweebs plan to do with that access, but it is potentially catastrophic.
The best guess is that wandering through the thousands of grants and grant applications stored in that system is ostensibly a part of a quarter-baked plan to root out fraud across the government — which in practice just means taking control of the country’s levers of payment in order to stop sending money to things they don’t like, in blatant disregard of god knows how many laws and, obviously, the scientific processes that have been built up behind the research endeavor in this country over the past century and a half. They may start by trying to cancel any grant with “DEI” or “gender ideology” underpinnings, an already dark-as-hell baseline; but who knows, would they move on to, say, any study that might be in competition with Musk’s Neuralink efforts? What if they use the access to just steal some ideas for themselves?
The extent of DOGE’s control over the system is not yet known. Maybe they won’t do much, at least yet. Or maybe they’ll just break the system because they feel like it; the due date for one of three yearly cycles of R01 grants — the basic and most common research grant from NIH — is today, Wednesday February 5. And even more broadly, independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported on Wednesday that DOGE has gained access to the entire Department of Health and Human Services (of which NIH is a part) payment system; maybe they’ll not bother with NIH when they can just grind it down from on high.
Meanwhile, there are hints that some of the NIH gears that ground to a halt over the past two weeks are starting to turn again. Study sections, the groups of experts who read and review all those grant applications are apparently now moving forward again, according to a source inside NIH as well as one expert from an outside institution who said a group scheduled for March has recently been confirmed. Reporting from Stat News said that some of the groups have started up again this week. Of course, it remains to be seen how useful the study groups are when the resulting grants are paid out, or not, at the whim of addled 20-year-olds and their Sieg-Heiling dad.
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