Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

And yet, if you read between the lines, the funding cut had next to no impact on what is reported here. The third-party organization still did the work, it's not stated how the work was slowed (if at all), and the case that speeding it up would have affected the outcome is pretty weak -- remember, they’re doing a retrospective on something that has already happened, and the article points out repeatedly that they have no effective tools on the mites.

I understand why Science engages in activism like this, but sometimes they take it too far. Because the reality is that it’s not a matter of “bee research or no bee research”, it’s a matter of cutting this or cutting something else with the marginal dollar. It's not even clear from the article what kind of cuts were made to the program. The only mention of budget at all is a brief, unexplained sentence at the top of the article:

> As soon as scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) caught wind of the record-breaking die-offs, they sprang into action—but their efforts were slowed by a series of federal funding cuts and layoffs by President Donald Trump’s administration.

My guess is that the third-party organization (Project Apis m.) gets a grant from the USDA. But they probably also get funding from the industry, because this is an important part of industrial agriculture. It's the sort of lazy drop-in that you could do in literally any article involving a government-funded organization.

There has been a lot of chaos, and extremely poor treatment of employees throughout the federal government. For instance, firing people because they were in the first couple of years of their tenure and had fewer protections, but then lying to them and telling them it was because of their performance (without actually doing any performance reviews). Mass emails telling people to quit and find more productive jobs in the private sector. Firing, then re-hiring people when it turns out that their work was actually essential (this is a deliberate strategy from Elon and Vivek - they talked about it openly). Telling government workers that you want to put them "in trauma" (Vought). Arbitrarily cancelling important projects and re-directing people to do things like scrub websites of disfavored words.

If you have a small team of experts and you put a couple on administrative leave because you're trying to fire them, and a couple more retire or quit because they don't want to deal with the stress, and the remaining members of the team have to pick up the work, but they're also getting confusing and contradictory directions from their supervisors and are feeling threatened, you're basically going to have productivity crater.