> The US Congress allocates budget money to the NIH for funding research, he adds, so “the will of Congress will be challenged if we don’t change what is going on”.

How much can the Executive Branch mess with the laws Congress has passed before "checks and balances" fails entirely and we have a dictatorship of the Executive?

How effectively Congress can stop these efforts remains to be seen.

One thing I learned in the past decade is how much democracy depends on decorum. It needs more solid protection mechanisms than just that.

It's called Project 2025, not Project Someday/Maybe, after all.

I thought Congress held power over the purse? How come anybody is listening to these "orders" ?

"Adding to the worry: the Trump team appears to have deleted entire webpages about diversity programmes and diversity-related grants from the agency’s site."

Some people would cheer soldiers removing books from a library to just suppress information and culture, but this is transferring money into the rest of their agenda, this will not be general taxpayer savings.

First they say healthcare is expensive because of the research costs involved, why does healthcare research also require govt funding too?

Institutes like the NIH fund and do basic research and population health studies.

Drug companies do some basic research too, but their focus is on applications like drug development.

There's a large but not complete overlap.

Think of it like lasers. NIH is where you might see someone do research into the theory of light. The commercial medical industry is where you might see research into creating lasers of a particular colour, power, etc.