American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr.

Posted by voxadam 19 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago

23% of the AAP’s revenue comes from grants and pledges [1], and their $100mm in investments could cover the shortfall for up to three years if all $28.5mm of that is HHS. A crisis, for sure. But not an urgent one. The AAP can fight.

To that end:

1) Does the AAP have a case that RFK Jr. acted unconstitutionally?

2) Were these “grants…previously awarded” in a binding nature? Or does the government sign grants with a get-out-of-jail-free clause?

3) Is Senator John Barasso, a pediatrician, a dues-paying member of the AAP?

[1] https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20Financial%20Statemen...

Comment by rtollert 18 hours ago

My recollection (apologies, I'm not able to turn up a citation on this) is that the AAP has not really shied away from gripping ideological third rails with both hands; they've taken very liberal-leaning positions on abortion rights, gun violence, trans healthcare, etc. (Of course, depending on how you look at things, such policy positions might appear either partisan or nonpartisan.) I would be surprised if Sen. Barasso were a member.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago

> I would be surprised if Sen. Barasso were a member

Hmm, I think you’re correct.

Comment by klaff 19 hours ago

How many people will this administration kill?

Comment by pixl97 19 hours ago

They've been given a blank check by their voters to take the numbers up to the millions at this point.

Comment by guizadillas 19 hours ago

How many MORE people will this administration kill?

Comment by voxadam 19 hours ago

I think they're trying to beat their first term high score they earned during the pandemic.

Comment by db48x 18 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago

> American Academy of Pediatrics treats nobody. At best it’s a lobbyist group

In their FYE 2025, the AAP spent 6% and 3% of its $113mm budget on advocacy and membership, respectively [1].

Most of its money goes to child health activities (43%), educational publishing (30%) and education activities (14%).

[1] https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/AAP%20Financial%20Statemen...

Comment by db48x 18 hours ago

    Nature of Business
    The mission of the American Academy of Pediatrics (the Academy) is to obtain optimal … health and well-being for all …. The Academy seeks to promote this goal by encouraging and assisting its members in their efforts …, by providing support and counsel …, and by serving as an advocate … within the community at large.
They don’t actually treat anybody. They spend $28 million a year on salaries and benefits for people who advocate for improving children’s health, not on treating children. And then some more on offices and software for those advocates to use, for meals and meetings attended by those employees, postage, freight, etc, etc. None of that is related to treating people.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago

> They don’t actually treat anybody

Neither does a pathologist. Or, more removed, anyone in research. Not everyone in medicine who doesn’t see patients is fluff.

I’m open to the idea that they’re a BS organisation. But saying they’re upstream from patient care is naïvely obvious; not every engineer is a car mechanic.

Comment by db48x 17 hours ago

I agree that it’s obvious, which is why I disagreed with someone who said that this decision would “kill” people. They clearly can’t tell the difference.

Comment by rtollert 18 hours ago

I think the content of the article sufficiently disproves your assertion. Actually, the headline does too IMHO.

The idea that it’s immoral for NGOs (much less professional orgs) to represent themselves to legislatures is unserious.

Comment by db48x 18 hours ago

I didn’t say it was immoral, I said that canceling a grant to them doesn’t somehow reduce treatment to patients. Of course they’re going to claim that it will, because they want to be important. But the reality is that most of what they do is either unnecessary, or easily replaced. Telling new mothers not to drink during pregnancy is useful but we don’t require this particular group to do it. Anyone can tell new mothers that. Same with all the other “outreach” and “advocacy” stuff that they do.

Comment by rtollert 18 hours ago

I'd want to see the grants in question (which infuriatingly haven't been linked to yet..?) before drawing further conclusions. And I continue to be annoyed at how nudge-based so much policy is nowadays... even more so when it seems to make an impact? Otherwise, fair enough.

Comment by db48x 17 hours ago

Personally I take the lack of concrete information as a sign that the reporter knows that this is ultimately unimportant. If it were contracts for something important then those details would be included in the story, because they support the narrative that this is a bad move.

Comment by jmye 17 hours ago

The reality? Based on what? What specific healthcare background do you have? What, specifically, do you know that you didn’t literally learn in the six seconds you spent on their website that you seem to think has made you an expert?

I’m so, so tired of people who think that building some shitty React apps, or whatever, means they’re experts in everything they’ve spent 12 seconds thinking about.

Comment by db48x 16 hours ago

I’m pretty tired of people who see an opinion they don’t like and immediately assume that they know everything about the commenter and their hypothetical “apps”. Ad hominem is so lame. Besides, the last app I wrote used XUL with XBL for reusable and composable widgets thank you very much.

Comment by wat10000 18 hours ago

That’s not the point. This isn’t about a professional association losing some government money. This is about the government’s war on vaccines.

Comment by etchalon 16 hours ago

This is about the thin skin of a government official who can't stand the fact no one serious respects him.

Comment by wat10000 14 hours ago

Same coin, other side.

Comment by tpoacher 18 hours ago

Reading the comments here, was hoping for some context ...

Gotta say, it's a sad day when you get a more nuanced discussion on 9gag than on HN on a political topic ...

Comment by wat10000 18 hours ago

What nuance? HHS is run by a completely unqualified jackass who is trying to carry out a war against the most effective medical interventions ever devised. There’s no other side to this.

Comment by lovich 14 hours ago

you can always add to the discussion and be the agent of change to help improve the situation.

I'm with the other poster though, there is no nuance here. Sometimes a spade is just a spade, and the HHS is being run by an incompetent jackass with literal insane beliefs about reality who is now forcing those beliefs on us

Comment by voxadam 19 hours ago

https://archive.is/ntMtT

Comment by HardwareLust 6 hours ago

Why is this flagged?

Comment by qiqitori 19 hours ago

He also drove his ex-wife into depression, who later committed suicide.

Comment by viccis 19 hours ago

The brain worm thing, as much as people think it's a funny stupid little story, was a lie he told to avoid paying any alimony when he divorced her.

Comment by raverbashing 18 hours ago

Nah my guess is that it was probably real, obtained from eating undercooked game

Comment by ortusdux 18 hours ago

Yeah IIRC it was diagnosed from a brain scan, which would make it easily fact-checked during discovery in a contentious divorce.

Comment by robomartin 19 hours ago

Interested in having a greater understanding of the matter. Can anyone point to the HHS order/action/documentation for this?

Comment by arjie 18 hours ago

Also, if someone can share a process for reliably getting these. One of the mentioned grants is here https://www.grants.gov/search-results-detail/340378

But that page does not seem to have been updated yet.

Comment by etchalon 19 hours ago

The era of petty government.

Comment by Hikikomori 19 hours ago

Big and petty.

Comment by buran77 18 hours ago

Hell of an opportunity to choose to not think of the children all of a sudden.

Comment by jmclnx 19 hours ago

What a country, looks like yet another lawsuit for cancelling already allocated funds.

Comment by lovich 19 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by owisd 18 hours ago

Free speech was always just the pretext. They still rage about Europe or Australia regulating social media or punishing people for using social media to commit crimes, even when the arguments those actions infringe on protected speech are far weaker than this situation.

Comment by wtfwhateven 18 hours ago

They're currently gleefully advocating for this situation and demanding anyone who disagrees be thrown in a cage.

Comment by croes 18 hours ago

They will just say free speech doesn’t mean free of consequences

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by outside1234 18 hours ago

And then that they aren't going to hold anyone accountable

Comment by lovich 18 hours ago

I know, I was mocking them. They’ve been liars from the start who always start screeching the second their thin skin is tested.

They desire the ability to say the most atrocious shit to anyone without consequences but then want anyone who questions them immediately silenced.

Meeting a self described “free speech absolutist” with principles is as rare as meeting a self described libertarian with principles

Comment by kr99x 18 hours ago

Hello.

I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to only censor what is "truly" good for us to have censored. Why would anybody? The free exchange of ideas is a prerequisite for a just world. You cannot build one without it, because to build a just world you must change what is unjust. To change what is unjust, you must remove power from those who unjustly hold it. You can't do that if you can't communicate the injustice. If you place limits on the free exchange of ideas "just for this one really bad thing" then you have forfeited your own future ability to resist when a good and true idea is wrongfully labelled harmful by powerful and corrupt figures. Every single authoritarian regime in history has made speaking ill of the leadership a crime, because speech control is powerful. The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed.

Must we burn this book? No. The answer is always no.

I am in favor of extremely strong free speech, legally and more importantly morally, because there is simply no acceptable alternative.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 18 hours ago

> I am in favor of extremely strong free speech, legally and more importantly morally

Sure. Whatever. Irrelevant.

The point is the loudest voices in Silicon Valley who were all in on free speech, knowingly joined hands with an authoritarian who is trashing it in its most protected form, political speech.

Comment by kr99x 18 hours ago

Not irrelevant. I'm responding directly to somebody saying people like me basically don't exist so that I am a data point. We do exist. We're rare, but not that rare.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago

> saying people like me basically don't exist

Fair enough. To be fair to OP, the top-level reference to any “they” is to “Elon Musk fans.”

Comment by lovich 14 hours ago

Frankly, I don't believe you without some strong evidence that you had fought or pushed back against this admin's censorship in some form, that is more than just words. Every single person I have met or read about who espoused your views, inevitably showed up on the side of censorship when they didn't like what the other guy said, or is still willing to vote for the candidate whose censoring others because of some social war bullshit.

For instance I used to be active in /r/Libertarian until the day the Mises Caucus took over and they banned anyone who said there were branches of libertarianism that were left leaning, for lying.

If, and I really stress the word "if" there, you are telling the truth, then cool, but you are exceedingly rare in that case

edit: Also lol, none of the "free speech absolutist" elon fanboys showed up, but my comments been flagged to reduce its viewership. Not really changing my mind on the opinion of people in this forum who wax poetic about free speech

Comment by kr99x 1 hour ago

You can look through my comment history here, if you like, to see that I've been consistently banging the same drum at least since 2020, but unfortunately without connecting this profile to others I can't show you I've been on it for much longer. Internet evidence might go back as far as perhaps 2010, but before writing a word about it online I'd already had some years under my belt telling people in person that W's national security letters including a gag order was hideously wrong or that the DMCA and its exception list process was unacceptable on first amendment grounds. I assure you, regardless of who is being officially censored or "just" denied a platform or communication tool to which they would otherwise have claim but for the content of their speech, by any government or corporation in any nation in any decade, it is, was, and always will be wrong. It was even wrong to try to suppress ISIS recruitment drives, and if THAT doesn't convince you I'm principled about it I don't know what will. And again, I admit we're rare, but I tell not vanishingly so. In my real life circle I know two others and online several more. I think we're at LEAST as common as principled vegans.

Comment by nine_zeros 18 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by Madmallard 18 hours ago

Where is Dang? Or the other staff? The comments here are embarassing to read as a long time member of HN. The next generation is bringing regression to the mean a little too hard here.