Sen. Katie Britt: Yeah, Cut Those Federal Grants. Also Katie Britt: Wait, Not To MY State
The Alabama senator executes a near-perfect conservative walkback.
As awful as the first three weeks of Donald Trump’s second befouling of the Oval Office have been, we have to admit, we are grimly entertained by the thought of so many conservatives who have spent years screaming about cutting wasteful and fraudulent government spending, people who have been cheering on Elon Musk’s frontal and illegal assault on the Treasury of the United States, suddenly discovering that not a dollar of that spending in their states is either wasteful or fraudulent. In fact, all the spending in their states is crucial to the continued functioning of the Republic!
Case in point: breathy-voiced trad wife Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, who should wake up every morning thanking her Lord and Savior for Tommy Tuberville, because as long as Tubs is around, Britt will only be the second-dumbest senator from Alabama. Maybe.
Britt has been a staunch Trump supporter during her brief time in office. So when the Trump-Musk administration, with its customary hubris and impeccable knowledge of how America works, announced on Friday that it would cap indirect costs for research grants from the National Institute of Health that go to these schools, you can imagine the glee with which she and some of her MAGA-fied constituents might have reacted: Way to go! Make Harvard spend its billion-dollar endowment! Get them antisemitic Ivy League eggheads!
What are indirect research costs? The highly simplified explanation is that when the NIH grants research funding to a school, it tacks on extra funds that go to overhead — buying lab equipment, paying lab workers, and so on. These funds are, in our understanding, painstakingly negotiated between the NIH (or whoever is giving the grant) and the school. Sometimes these extra funds are equal to 50 percent or more of the grant. The Trump administration is now capping payouts for those indirect costs at 15 percent, which is a huge budget cut for a lot of organizations that rely on grants to fund scientific research. Particularly America’s cash-strapped universities.
The rate caps were announced on Friday. By Saturday, someone perhaps educated Britt about just how much some of that NIH spending props up the economy of that backwoods one-time slaveatorium of a state she represents, and suddenly she had changed her tune.
“While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” Britt told AL.com.
Just how much spending are we talking about here? And how important is it to Alabama’s economy? Well, the mayor of Birmingham seemed pretty un-chill about all the funding that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) was going to lose, and what it would do to the local economy:
“People need to be reminded that UAB is not just the largest employer in the city, it’s the largest employer in the state,” he said. “So as it relates to our state’s GDP, as it relates to our economic growth, as it relates to our future around genomics, personalized medicine, and where health care is going, NIH research dollars play a massive, significant role. And without a doubt, without knowing numbers yet, I can tell you this early, just receiving the information, those in the UAB family have a right to be concerned.”
One of the animating hatreds of MAGA — and there are so very, very, very many of them — is a loathing of the Ivy League schools that so many of them nonetheless attended and/or to which they send their children. But the vast majority of grants from the NIH or the National Science Foundation go to large public land-grant universities in states like ... oh, like Alabama, just to pull one off the top of our noggin.
Now imagine you are the state of Alabama. Your national reputation is of being basically a football-mad backwater filled with toothless men in overalls and boat salesmen wearing sports shirts with the University of Alabama crest on them. Your educational system consistently ranks around #45 out of the nation’s 50 states. Wouldn’t you want to attract the best and the brightest, or are you satisfied with forever being a national punchline and a hate object in a Neil Young song?
And that is why education professionals and researchers and professors and university administrators and the mayor of Birmingham were flipping out after the cuts were announced.
It is also why Sen. Britt on Saturday was promising to work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will oversee NIH just as soon as the Senate gives in to the measles lobby and confirms his appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, to make sure the cuts don’t hit her state. At least not too hard.
Her co-senator, Tuberville, felt differently:
“When the American people voted for President Trump on Nov. 5th, they voted for his campaign promise to create the Department of Government Efficiency and cut waste in the federal government,“ Tuberville said. “I am 100% supportive of DOGE and Elon Musk."
And that, folks, is why Britt should be grateful for Tuberville’s presence.
Britt was not the only senator who saw the light, sort of. On Monday, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine — state motto: Alabama, but colder and with moose — was also publicly complaining about the NIH cuts. In a public statement, she noted that no investment “pays greater dividends to American families than our investment in biomedical research.” She also promised to work with RFK Jr. to prevent the rate caps from gashing a hole in her state.
It should not really be the job of yr Wonkette, but we feel it is our duty to remind Susan Collins that she is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a high-ranking member of a body that actually has the power to tell RFK Jr. that the Trump administration he works for does not have the legal authority to cut funds Congress has already appropriated.
But she’s Susan Collins, so we just get these milquetoast statements about how the future HHS Secretary promised her he would “re-examine” the situation, just as soon as he enters office atop a golden litter borne aloft by the polio virus.
Federal judges are trying to unfreeze a lot of these cuts, because at least some of them understand the moment. Late Monday, a district judge in Boston froze the indirect costs rate cap in 22 states that had sued the Trump administration over them. Further briefing is set for the end of next week.
Oh, the state of Maine is a party to that lawsuit, so the state government is currently doing significantly more to save biomedical research than Susan Collins. She’d be embarrassed if she were capable of such an emotion.
We’re going to see so many more of the scales-falling-from-the-eyes moments as certain Americans learn just how deeply their bootstraps-hauling asses are actually entwined with the federal government and its checkbook, while their Senators profess to be shocked, SHOCKED WE TELL YOU by this state of affairs.
[AL.com]
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I live in Bham. It’s sooo frustrating. Bham and Huntsville are overwhelmingly blue cities. But straight ticket voting kills us in this state. I work as hard as I can for democratic causes. I can’t just move because work that I worked very hard to get is here. I have been calling britt and “coach” Tubbs (as his voicemail reminds us) non stop about Elon etc. I knew Katie Britt was a fraud the first time I saw her. I promise you she will do what her more important male overlords tell her to do. She might say she’s going to try to help with the NIH cuts but she won’t do anything substantive for fear of being primaried here and losing her Trump dollars. Also that fundie voice makes me want to scream. It’s everywhere here among the southern women. Anyway. Thank you for writing about her. She is scarier than Tubbs I think because people take her slightly more seriously here.
In other leopard eating faces news ...
"While some conservatives cheered [Donnie's call to end production of pennies], Tennessee workers who supply the U.S. Mint with the blank discs stamped into pennies weren't as thrilled, according to The Greenville Sun. Jobs could be lost at Artazn LLC, based in Tusculum, Greene County, in eastern Tennessee, which is politically conservative and Republican.
https://www.rawstory.com/penny-trump/
MAGAs,who many times do you have to be cheated at the carnival games before you realize the Carnival Barker is lying, and doesn't give a shit about you? Most marks learn the first time around they've been had. You people must have a masochistic streak in you, because you keep spending your money on the rigged game, hoping to get the big stuffed animal. You ain't never getting the cute stuffed animal. You know how much that stuffed animal has made the carnival? A lot.