[dekhn]

NIH pays for work travel. When a person is paid for NIH travel, it's bare bones (cheaper hotel, cheaper tickets). It's for work- you go, you work many long hours drinking shitty coffee. Maybe at the end of the day there is some fun at a restaurant/bar but it's not paid for in the per diem. It was brutal- typically, if I travelled on NIH or NSF or DOE dime, it was a red eye from California to Washington DC, take cheapest possible transport to the NIH offices, then turn around and return the same night, so that I could go to work the next day (to be productive with little sleep so I could keep my job).

As for "non-wealthy": most scientists are not well-compensated. They spent their 20s and 30s working for very little pay (for example, in grad school my pay was $25-33K/year in San Francisco, and even as a Staff Scientist at a national lab, there's no way I could afford to buy a house in the area). They work punishingly hard jobs competing with super-ambitious people for fairly small amounts of money. I don't really see what your point is; breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US.

[notjoemama]

Thanks for the information. It helps. People like me just don't know.

> breaking the NIH is not going to fix wealth disparity in the US

I didn't say or imply that. I'm sorry if that's how it sounded. I've traveled for work both paid and not, both with implicit and explicit frugality. I'm not seeing how a pause on paying for travel, as the norm quoted within the article, is an egregious practice, nor how it could break the NIH. Especially given it appears to be a norm when administrations turn over.

[dekhn]

The propaganda of Trump's people has been very effective. They managed to paint a bunch of people who work hard for the US and aren't particularly well-compensated (compared to what tthey could get in industry) are some sort of "elites" who are actively working to keep conservsatives down.

The way to look at it is like this: even if previous administrations froze travel for a bit (I don't recall that ever happening; a bigger impact was when the state or the federal government failed to pass a budget. That would break everything for weeks to months), the intent of the Trump administration is to harm the people they don't like. This freeze is only an opening move; we can expect to see far more dire and serious attempts at damaging our valuable public institutions (which fairly serve liberals and conservatives alike).

I appreciate you saying "people like me just don't know". It's rare that people will actually listen to the other side and admit they lacked perspective.