This was true when I was a grad student, decades ago. It was true when I worked in a lab as an undergraduate before that.

Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.

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PhotonHunter an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It really depends on what you mean by "decades", but I've been in the system for a generation and what you're saying doesn't match what I see on the ground.

During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.

My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.

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epistasis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But clearly there was some science going on. Any time spent writing grants rather than doing research feels wasteful, but it's the way to get funding. The percentage of time spent doing that is changing, and the percentage of grants applications that get funding is going way down, demonstrating a big change in the amount of effort that goes directly to waste. Unfunded grants are not evidence of bad research that does not get funded, but merely of the funding level.

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timr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Science gets done by the people you hire with the money you raise. And yes, everyone in a group is always thinking about the next grant.

I’m not joking. I’m not exaggerating. This is the job, and it’s always been this way (at least in my lifetime). Maybe it’s worse because of the current administration, but complaining that academic life is mostly about grant writing is like a fish complaining about water.

	▲	epistasis an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Undoubtedly the complaints are constant, but that is not evidence that the amount of work wasted on unsuccessful grant proposals is constant.

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esalman 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nope. My PhD lab never laid off any research scientists in almost 30 years, until 47 and DOGE came along.

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danaris 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I really wish people would stop trying to gaslight all of us into believing the current crisis is just business as usual.

Yes, previous US presidents told some lies.

Yes, previous US presidents and politicians had some unsavory associations or potential conflicts of interest.

Yes, previously some labs spent too much time writing grants and not enough actually doing research.

The problem is, these things are becoming the norm now, and your anecdotal memory of "aw, man, we spent all our time doing that back in the day!" is not a reliable indicator that really, nothing has changed, we should just stop complaining. Especially since we know that human memory is not only fallible, it is prone to specifically being better at remembering the exceptional, and the unpleasant.