Christian Hubicki

You have to get grant money, too.

And you mentioned people like their own livelihoods are on the line.

Yes, that's true.

I'll tell you one thing that's a big pressure is your students' livelihoods are on the line.

Students come to your lab, they'll fly maybe across the world to work in your laboratory under the promise that you get funding.

And they can cancel it also according to this proposal for basically any reason in the middle of a grant.

And so they have that capability.

And so like when you're,

your poor students who are basically just trying to make ends meet on their stipends as they get through grad school can be taken away.

That's very motivating.

You know, even if it's not even for selfish reasons, it's for their, for their reasons.

And there's a lot of knock on effects.

Obviously you guys are handling the macro level of this, this greatly, but just sort of the granular level, what that means, like from like actually like putting these proposals out the door, it's a political process.

Like you mentioned, Steve, and that means it's very much like a patronage system, right?

You,

We do see this to some degree in some gradations already, even before all these changes in the research in the research world, like the NSF process is highly, highly peer review driven.

I mean, I've been on some NSF panels and it's and it's very intensive and scientists are really going at it, just debating, you know, the validity of the methods and all these and all of these details.

And at the end of the day, the program officer has to make a call.

They have some judgment there, but it's heavily peer review driven.

But there are other departments, particularly defense departments, where sometimes it's a program officer who really trusts this one researcher.