6 ms·
NIH slashes overhead payments for research
- arcmechanica 2y agowell, pharma companies are screwed. They aren't going to do their own research, so no new drugs
- pfisherman 2y ago> They aren’t going to do basic research. Fixed that for you. Pharma companies do lots research. But the goal of that research is very narrow - to bring new therapies to the market. The Academy has very different goals - train next generation of researchers and make discoveries. IMO, expecting a pharma company to do the work of an academic institution is a recipe for failure. But that is just an opinion.
- malshe 2y agoAnother illegal move by Trump admin and the US Congress will do nothing.
- elontrump 2y ago[flagged]
- jordanpg 2y agoThe reputational damage to US scientific prestige is incalculable. And all for amounts that are tiny slivers of the federal budget for research that benefits potentially everyone.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>tiny slivers We have a saying in Japan that goes: "Even dust piled up will make a mountain." Considering the monies concerned here are also tax dollars, I am wholly unsympathetic to the actual monetary sums. They could be 1 cent and my feelings on this matter wouldn't change: Audit every single line item and slash anything wasteful. Collateral damage is unavoidable, and more importantly I don't care about collateral damage since we are finally getting the audits and cuts we the people demanded for way too long.
- addicted 2y agoAh yes, “collateral damage”. What a wonderful phrase that came into prominence to euphemise the killing of hundreds of thousands to millions of innocent Afghans and Iraqis. I believe your use of it here is equally appropriate considering what you’re suggesting. I’m guessing none of you our your loved ones will be affected by that “collateral damage”.
- Dalewyn 2y agoTrump's tariffs if (when) enacted will adversely affect our family business, as will some of his other policies which I won't get into because of confidentiality. I still voted for him. Why? Because his policies are things the people have demanded for a very long time and they are things we need to do sooner or later for the better future of our country. Even Musk admitted this will be painful in the short and possibly even mid term, but in the long term we will all be better off for it.
- voxl 2y agoI demanded he be in jail but somehow you voted for a convicted felon over a prosecutor.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y agoDodged a bullet, I say
- transcriptase 2y agoWhat was it like voting for Kamala in the primary?
- elontrump 2y agonobdoy tell him
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoConsider reading the original notice and decide if you should revise your opinion. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
- exmadscientist 2y agoReforming overhead payments, somehow, is probably a good idea. Altering the deal on existing contracts without notice is very much NOT a good idea. That they're attempting to do so is a pretty good sign of bad faith.
- refurb 2y agoIt will be interesting to see who comes out in defense of the schools who will have to take on the burden of indirect costs. How can they possibly shoulder the costs with their $40,000/yr tuitions and multi-billion dollar endowments?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ralph84 2y ago[flagged]
- dyauspitr 2y agoExactly. Research is overrated, we have progressed enough. The Chinese can do the rest. Everyone should join the trades.
- ggm 2y agoDegrees are somewhat overrated. Dating sites however suggest we've moved past peak tradie (plumber's bum wasn't a good look) and teacher is the new "it" partner. I'm still betting on a plumber. Handy in the apocalypse.
- refurb 2y agoPrecisely. I remember my university taking 35% off the top of all grants for a lab that was 30 years old (hadnt been updated), and a sufficient but hardly cutting edge instrument room. The university was getting far more money than if the PI rented lab space at an incubator.
- jltsiren 2y agoThat's a naive understanding of grant overheads. Only a portion of the overhead is used for facilities and services directly used by the PI and their lab. The rest are better understood as federal subsidies to research universities. The funds are allocated according to the ability of the university to win competitive grants, rather than via a political process or a rigidly specified funding model. At my university, 44% of the overheads go to the general fund, 34% are used to support research in various ways (including startup funds for new faculty), and 22% goes to the administration. For grants with the normal 56% overhead rate, that means 16%, 12%, and 8% of the total. Grant overheads are good for the university, because they mostly come with no strings attached. The university is free to spend them as it sees fit, rather than according to what some big important outsider says.
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- zmgsabst 2y agoThis is 0.25% of the national deficit by cutting indirect expenses from 30%+ to 15%. When the country is $1,830,000,000,000 further in debt every year, universities will simply have to figure it out. I suggest cutting their bloated administrations, to free up tuition and endowment funds for their actual purpose.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoSchools are going to follow the same playbook they've been following since 2008 as state and federal funding has dried up. They'll lean on international students first like they have for decades, but those numbers are going to be down. They'll follow that by leaning on undergrads, but those numbers are shrinking too because of cultural and demographic shifts. Then they'll cut graduate funding (again) to try and get more blood from the stone. Then they'll try cutting the "extraneous" departments that don't bring in money or grants (read: everything except engineering, medicine, law, and football) again. Then they'll cut the departments that do bring in money. Then they'll do the work to shoulder the costs directly. If you want reform, cutting funding doesn't work. It hollows out the entire institution before it even starts addressing the administrative issues. Reform needs to come from a different direction.
- refurb 2y ago> This is 0.25% of the national deficit by cutting indirect expenses from 30%+ to 15%. The federal budget (save DOD and entitlements) is stuff like this. Saying “oh well, it’s just 0.25%” is the reason why nobody can tackle the deficit. Do this 100x and you’ve suddenly reduced the deficit by 25%.
- divbzero 2y ago> Many who advocate for cutting NIH’s indirect cost rate have long argued that universities are willing to accept lower rates from philanthropic foundations. Today’s NIH notice, for example, notes the Gates Foundation limits indirect costs to 10%, while the Packard Foundation sets the ceiling at 15%. But such reasoning is based on “perverse logic,” Corey says, because foundations use their funds to increase the productivity of research infrastructure already paid for by the federal government. And universities say they are often willing to accept foundation grants that carry low overhead rates because those grants amount to a relatively small fraction of their funding. This detail is worth highlighting. NIH has traditionally borne the bulk of indirect costs, allowing non-profits to issue grants with low indirect costs. Slashing NIH’s indirect costs will force research institutions to seek funds elsewhere or become financially unviable.
- transcriptase 2y agoThey could simply stop hiring more admin and building offices for them to work in at a rate that far exceeds student population growth or hiring of professors.
- the_snooze 2y agoResearch overhead doesn't pay for that stuff. It pays for research-relevant infrastructure and staff. If a PI buys equipment, it's a waste to spend their own very expensive time to ensure purchase-tracking compliance. So you hire an inventory person. But it doesn't make sense to have one inventory person per research group. So you hire one to serve multiple projects and ensure their continued employment by averaging out the costs across those funding lines. That's the overhead cost.
- transcriptase 2y ago“Purchase compliance” with what? Arbitrary policies set by… university admin? Full disclosure I’ve dealt with this all first hand. The vast majority of universities contribute next to nothing to research programs except the space, utilities, and IT. And those costs do not need to be a % of incoming grant money. And the vast majority do just take that cut and use it as slush fund general revenue.
- transcriptase 2y agoOne of the main issues with overhead on grants is that it has nothing to do with overhead on the research itself. It’s instead a tax that a university applies to money that researchers bring in, that they use as general revenue to fund, for lack of a better term, bullshit including hiring more admin instead of professors. A $8M grant doesn’t cost a university any more than a $1M grant for university admin in terms of “indirect costs”. The fact that they think they’re entitled to several million of it to waste on things that shouldn’t be coming from taxpayer funded NIH grant money is obscene.
- Mortiffer 2y agoI have not found a single prof that thinks the trend have having higher and higher % of university staff be administrators is a good thing. I wonder if it is possible for them to connect funding to a maximum allowed ratio of admin to prof / lectures
- elontrump 2y ago[flagged]
- jeffbee 2y agoYou don't seem to have any experience with the subject. The "overhead" in question is, for example, the person who keeps clean glassware in inventory for chemistry, or the veterinarian for animal subjects, or the ethics board.
- elontrump 2y ago[flagged]
- donaldmusk 2y ago[flagged]
- transcriptase 2y agoAnd in the case of massive projects where service providers do the wet work, your lab primarily deals with data analysis, or you don’t even do your research with university space/equipment, they still get 30-60% just because. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. Look at how much grant money a given university brings in annually and ask yourself if 30-60% of that number is being spent on overhead related to research. It’s not.
- scirob 2y agono fan if this gov but I always found the university cut if grants designated for specific things too high. In many US universtiies the professors don't get a sallary if they don't bring in grants. And with such a big overhead universiteis sure want it this way. In some Euro universiteis like ETH Zurich or Max Planck instituties the prof's get a pretty good baseline funding from the institutional funding (given top down from taxes) and inside these kind of instutitions the professors have so much more freedom to think about what experiment is the most informative. Also a side note while bot of the named universities are top 10 world wide for research output they don't spend millions on landscaping or sports facilities most things are kinda old but functional.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoSwiss universities aren’t shabby, they were building a Swiss cheese building at EPFL when I was there. But ya, landscaping was mostly done by goats (really!). American universities are pretty luxurious in comparison.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agohttps://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0... The original grant notice is a good thing to read. They properly justify the cuts, and I think it's something that a lot of people would agree with - why is up to 70% of grant money being sent to "administration and overhead" at giant private universities? My small LLC is currently applying for an SBIR grant, and we were capped to 40% unless we provided a big justification - which we can't, because we're too small to justify anything like that. Meanwhile, big organizations and universities can throw their weight around and bully the government into handing them more money to do who-knows-what with. Maybe build a nice shiny new sports center with. This is a good reform - even though it will cost my LLC about $75k in indirect costs that we might have been able to bill (40% -> 15%). I'm more confident in my ability to reduce our indirect costs and compete on a level-playing field with everyone else.
- citrate05 2y agoJust so everyone reading this is clear, it’s not 70% of grant money, it’s an extra 70% on top of the direct costs (41% of the total awarded). A more typical number for a large state university would be somewhere around 55%, or around 35% of the total awarded funds. Also, indirect costs are not going to building sports centers. Funding agencies and the government audit universities in detail to make sure that the money is being spent only on research activities, down to calculating the amount of square footage per building that is being used exclusively for research, as opposed to instruction or clinical work. They have absolutely come after people and institutions, and successfully obtained multimillion dollar settlements, for using federal money to cover unrelated expenses. If NIH indirects were found to be going towards something like building a rec center or a facility for college athletes, it would be actual fraud and a national scandal, potentially on the “congressional inquiry” level.