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eks-reigh

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You may well know this, but I get the sense that it isn’t necessarily common knowledge, so I want to spell it out anyway:

In a lot of cases, the salary for a grad student or tech is small potatoes next to the cost of the consumables they use in their work.

For example,I work for a lab that does a lot of sequencing, and if we’re busy one tech can use 10k worth of reagents in a week.

I spent the summer of 2017 as an intern in the department of the interior. At the time, the white house was proposing to cut the DoI's budget by an order of magnitude. I went to a fascinating talk about how they strategize when faced with budget cuts. They don't just cut things from least to most important, they start by cutting things that have champions. For example, the first things on the chopping block at the time were Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay restoration, because those programs have champions in Congress who would fight to get them funded again. More obscure programs don't have that advantage, so if they get cut they're just gone.