8 ms·

How Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State

119 points by erickhill 2y ago

sQL_inject 2y ago
[flagged]
- danorama 2y ago
  That’s a great question to ask. And if it were the question being asked by the new folks in charge that would be pretty great. Instead we’ve got drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat. I’m not sure that’s an improvement over the status quo.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    > drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat Believing your own government does such things seems extreme. Where did you hear that? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan? Have those sources pushed any other obviously false, now-debunked, partisan stories in the past?
    - danorama 2y ago
      Where do you see an ordered, thoughtful, deliberate process taking place here? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan?
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Nowhere – I don’t follow the issue. The question was for those people who are somehow convinced that it’s complete chaos. In my experience, complete chaos is very rare, but fake reports of chaos in every field are a daily occurrence. If you believe every report of chaos that comes along, you’ll believe the world is ending every day. Which it obviously has not, yet. It follows that most reports of chaos are always false. Therefore, if you believe that some specific issue is really as chaotic as reported, you’ll have to have some pretty good sources to back that up.
        petschge 2y ago
        How chaotic does https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o sound to you?
        teddyh 2y ago
        [flagged]
        petschge 2y ago
        I was referring to the "The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported. [...]An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees 'are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel'." part. It's about 300 people affected. And when you apply at these types of positions they ARE aware of private contact information.
        teddyh 2y ago
        I really don’t get it. What is the story? Should the employer be shamed for not keeping home/private contact information for all employees? Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are.
        dralley 2y ago
        >Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are. They build, maintain and run security for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This was, in fact, mentioned in the article. Quote: "The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN." Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Nevermark 2y ago
      The problems you point out are very real. Serious. Frustrating. None of which invalidate the points you replied to in any way. Some kind of methodical work to solve problems is still how you keep a plane flying while you fix it. Handing bats to kids isn’t going to be better than the status quo Even though the status quo is miserable and increasingly intolerable, it is always easier to make things worse I would like to end this comment on an up note, a solution: be rich. Very very rich. Live in Canada or New Zealand. Carry a towel and remember: electrolytes.
    - jmcgough 2y ago
      We are looking at a generational loss of research talent that directly benefits public health. Every post-doc and researcher I know is looking at options outside of academia, or even outside the country. This will not solve administrative overhead, it will lead to a brain drain.
      - varelse 2y ago
        [dead]
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > If that worked then drunk toddlers wouldn’t win elections promising the baseball bat. Even if one believes that overall, over a long term, democracy tends to produce more “accurate” assessments of merits of policy disputes than other systems—which, of course, is not generally the argument for democracy—that still wouldn't imply that there are no cases where the electorate just makes completely bad judgements. So, I’m not sure what your basis for the claim here is; as presented the argument seems to be the electorate never makes bad decisions, which is ludicrous on its face.
      - rayiner 2y ago
        Nobody knows what the “bad judgments” and what the “good judgments” are, and we certainly can’t trust anyone with self interest to tell us. Democracy is a means for empirical truth finding that’s resistant to manipulation. I’m 40 years old. In my lifetime, educational and healthcare overheads have exploded while outcomes have gotten worse. Nobody working within these systems understands why or is capable of fixing them.
- CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
  I'd like to reframe your question just a bit. Instead of "At the current overhead spending rates, has the research been effective enough?", I think the question should be "At the current indirect rates, has the research been supported enough?". My proposed reframing is because the indirect costs are meant to cover the costs of supporting the research. A side node: If you're interested in gauging the effect of a particular NIH grant, the NIH RePORTER site is your friend: Any publication that is grant-supported will mention this in the acknowledgments. For example, our SGI UV300 (360 CPU cores, 10TB RAM, 20TB PCIe flash, and 4 NVIVIA P100s) was funded thanks to NIH grant S10 OD023452. If you search that ID in RePORTER, you'll get https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288 https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288: Towards the bottom of the page, you'll find a list of publications (that the NIH was able to find) that used the UV300. With funding in FY17, the machine's past end-of-life and the funding's ended (it was one-time funding, with a 5-year (I think) lifespan), but publications are still coming in. One thing that's worth noting: The grant had no indirect costs. The money went straight to SGI (they were acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in November 2016, and were still being absorbed). The UV300 is not a "set it and forget it" machine. It's not 'cattle'. So, where did the money come from to run the UV300, and answer questions of researchers who (for example) have never heard of "NUMA"? The money to pay the supporting folks (sysadmins, etc.) came, indirectly, from the researchers: The S10 grant was structured such that the majority of time on the UV300 was for folks doing work under NIH grants. The indirect portion of those NIH grants is what helped fund the sysadmins (like me) who kept (and still keep) the UV300 up and running. I think grant-funded research is supported enough if… 1. The facilities researchers use (buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc.) are available enough (they are online for some % of the year) 2. Researchers are able to get technical assistance (for the buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc. that they use) in a reasonable amount of time. What values should be used for "available enough" and "reasonable amount of time"? Honestly, I'm not sure, and since I've got 'skin in the game' my guesses would probably be too generous towards me. Plus, Goodhart's law applies here.
- whatever1 2y ago
  All government spending is a waste, as it should be. Governments should not be in the business of making profit, after all they are bad at it. They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, research, ensuring fair game (by legislating and enforcing), protecting their resources with military. The more left wing folks, are also interested in providing directly for the ones in need. As long as the spending is in these directions is good for the country, KPIs be damned.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    All government spending is not “waste”. All government spending should be unprofitable (for the reasons you eloquently describe). Which is a different thing entirely.
  - taurknaut 2y ago
    > after all they are bad at it This is really strange framing. Profit is a form of inefficiency. It's quite easy to generate profit—just take from others. How we came to view it as something that makes more sense to structure society around than zero-margin services is bewildering. There isn't a single responsibility government has I don't trust private enterprise to deliver less competently and at greater cost.
    - 6510 2y ago
      We need some kind of theme park village where everything is privatized.
      - taurknaut 2y ago
        Sounds expensive as hell.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    I think you used “waste” improperly. Try “net zero cash”? > They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, […] Absolutely. Run & improve the positive sum systems, that work best at national scale, that really do pay for themselves, by delivering greater value to citizens than the taxes taken from citizens. When people imagine a tiny government with tiny taxes, they haven’t understood how much fewer of us could survive without those positive sums. How much more of their life’s time value it would take to pay for an egg. (Just as the private sector organizes, and reorganizes, to create and grow a stream of positive sums, at a higher variety and speed, at less than national scales.)
- taurknaut 2y ago
  Well it's certainly more effective than the DoD at providing value per cost.
- cma 2y ago
  Go through congress. If you don't want the Senate filibuster then lobby the senate majority to to get the rule changed. Vice president gets one vote in the Senate only, not unilateral control of the budget.
  - BatFastard 2y ago
    Ez, just vote to eliminate the filibuster. Only takes 51 votes
- atoav 2y ago
  The question we must ask is why, faced with blaringly obvious evidence to the contrary, people still do not trust their eyes. Elon Musk gets 8 million a day from your tax money and somehow he is going to save you the money elsewhere without this even being remotely in his interest. The only thing in his interest is to appear as if he did something, that's it. And all of that grifting relies on marks, who reflexively defend every action their betters take. Betters that tell them they are true, strong men that deserve power. But ironically that is the polar opposite of what actually strong men would do..
  - varelse 2y ago
    [dead]
refurb 2y ago
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- malcolmgreaves 2y ago
  [flagged]
clcaev 2y ago
Some believe this cut will be covered by the research universities and their associated medical centers. That may be true for a limited time, in a few institutes, for a small set of cases. However, it’s just a cut to medical research, and a deep one at that. Indirect costs support researchers’ needs that the institution provides. For example, who ensures the researcher’s laptop is secure? For basic research, how is lab equipment obtained? Who provides infrastructure to access observational data from an electronic health record system? Categorize these services as you wish, but these services are needed, they have costs, and the expense will need to be covered for medical research to happen. If they can no longer be considered indirect, then they will become itemized and the researcher’s direct budget will have to cover them. For example, laptops permitted to access the institutional network may have a monthly fee that covers system admin time. In the short run, it’ll mean some research simply won’t happen as the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free”. For new grants, it means a greater part of the research budget will have to be itemized with these costs, eg less funding for researcher or graduate assistant effort. Either the overall grant direct costs will have to go up, or less research happens.
- analog31 2y ago
  Indeed the status quo is that these costs are spread over the research projects without having to itemize each expense. Now every research lab, from small to large, will need to hire an accountant to keep track of expenses. Or the grad students spending their time filling out spreadsheets. That strikes me as probably being a lot less efficient.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
    Lets not pretend efficiency had anything to do with this. It’s all part of an ordinary power grab by the cronies of Trump and Musk, with the only goal the looting of America.
- csa 2y ago
  > eg the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free” I think many people don’t realize this point. The universities made it easy with large indirect costs that also covered a lot. The biggest research universities will just be able to take a lower indirect cost and start charging for things that used to be included in indirect costs. This may sound more “transparent” or “efficient”, and it is in some ways, but adding admin work to track stuff like this is its own form of inefficiency. It will be like moving from an AYCE model to an a la carte model, but the grant writer will need to know the orders and special requests needed by everyone many months (or more) before the grant is scheduled to start. This is not the strong suit of researchers and/or grant writers. This will end up being a shit show.
Kelvin506 2y ago
The real cost will play out over years after Trump's term. When funding cuts like this hit, researchers and programs decide to find homes elsewhere with better funding. Cuts like this cause current and future talent loss that is very slow to reverse.
- _bin_ 2y ago
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  - ks2048 2y ago
    We had nearly a century of the best scientists in the world wanting to come to the US to study, teach, and work. To view this as America loosing and the rest of the world getting a "free ride" is pretty crazy.
    - _bin_ 2y ago
      how else would you prefer to frame America footing a bill for a benefit to everyone? we benefited, sure, but everyone else received the same benefit for zero cost. we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. when you amortize your R&D costs across a small population instead of your whole market, that will mean charging everyone in that small population much more. my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others. i am pretty comfortable at a fundamental level with public support for medical research. i am not comfortable with failing to protect the results of that research and ensuring that if anyone outside the borders of our country wants a scrap of benefit from those, we enforce payment for that benefit.
      - ks2048 2y ago
        Our insane spending on health care is independent from funding of scientific research, and only a small amount of your tax funds it (again - different than spending on "healthcare"). Being that country that makes scientific breakthroughs is a good thing. Name one of these "free loading" countries out there is in better shape because they don't do science and just sit back reap the benefits?
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
[flagged]
- protimewaster 2y ago
  As others have pointed out, this will actually require more accountants since more things will need to be itemized. It's not really about learning to be more efficient, because it's not going to be more efficient to require more accountants.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    It will require different accounting, probably. It's not really true to say that these costs are not accounted for. Every dollar a university pays out is accounted for somewhere.
- gammarator 2y ago
  Most colleges don’t have billion dollar endowments.
nn3 2y ago
It is hard to say what the effect will be: If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change. But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem. I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  > I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Yep- when I was a PI and had several grants, when one was getting close to used up, the finops people would call me over and we'd switch people around to working on a different grant. I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done". After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.
- lalaland1125 2y ago
  > they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead This is not true due to the retroactive nature of this change. The problem is that the grant budgets are already fixed and will not increase. You can't move those costs to the grant budget since the grant money is already fully allocated to things like salary, etc. In order for this to work, DOGE would have to automatically increase the grant budgets for already awarded grants, which they are unlikely to do.
KikoHeit 2y ago
[dead]
ks2048 2y ago
Sean Carroll (the physicist) just did a solo podcast about federal funding for universities and what these cuts would mean, https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonus-cuts-to-science-funding-and-why-they-matter/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
toomim 2y ago
When I was a PhD student in Computer Science, I wanted to fund my research without depending on other people. So I wrote, and won, a grant for $650,000. The University of Washington took 55% off the top in "indirect costs." Then of the direct costs, a bunch more taxes went to the department, the lab, etc. I ended up getting about $40,000 total from that grant to fund my actual research. I was told that this is just how the game works. The Lesson: There is a huge amount of waste in academic grants. The university does not need 55% indirect costs to fund my research. They gave me a laptop and an office to work in. But the laptop actually came out of direct costs. And as for the office... well, I tended not to use it. Coffeeshops were nicer places to work. So that 55% — $357,500 — was not necessary for research. It disappeared in an administrative hierarchy that kept growing. I talked to professors from 20 years before, and they said that the administration had grown 3x in their time being there. They built their reputation as scientists when everything was smaller and cheaper. Now all that reputation is generating more money, which is getting gobbled up by an administration that wasn't needed when they produced their original successes.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  "I got an office but I decided I'd rather be in a coffee shop" doesn't mean you should get a refund... I love it when people misrepresent things to people who don't know better. This happens every time research funding gets mentioned on HN, by people looking to rile up HNers who absolutely love hearing that their prejudices against the government and scientists are true and academia is robbing the dear taxpayer blind, like it's all some big shady scam. Direct costs are things that are directly and solely related to or used for the grant. Labor. Equipment. Supplies. For the research funded by the grant, within reason (nobody accounts for or cares about, say, a lab mate asking to use some of a chemical, or one of your DVD-R disks. If you have plenty of room in that incubator that was paid for with your grant and a labmate or someone in the department could really use a corner of it to try something on their experiment, or their incubator dies and you've got room? You say yes. Captain NIH does not descend and go HALT SCIENTIST! THAT EQUIPMENT WAS PAID FOR OUT OF DIRECT COSTS FOR YOUR GRANT, NOT THEIRS!" Indirect costs are all the costs necessary for "keeping the lights on." Indirect costs are like taxes because everyone's grants are "taxed" and that pays for all the things everyone uses. Maintaining the buildings, paying the electric bill, paying the salaries of the IT staff, paying for network equipment, servers, storage, UPSs. Indirect grant costs pay for the trash (and hazardous waste) to get collected, for the parking lot to get plowed in the winter, for the buildings to be cooled in the summer and heated in the winter. In a lab it pays for stuff like centralized purified water, central gas supplies, and so on. You don't get to cry about how your work doesn't need all that lab stuff those bio researchers need, or that big storage cluster so you couldn't have to pay for it. Just like you don't get to cry about how the road you live off of is very short so your taxes should be lower because the town has to pay less to pave and plow it, and since you don't have any kids your taxes should be lower still because you're not using the schools. And really, your house didn't catch on fire (and you're very careful about fire safety) so why do you have to pay for the fire department? etc. Indirect costs are negotiated between schools and the organizations that award grants. A school doesn't get to make up whatever they want. It's known by everyone involved, well ahead of time. Nobody walked into Toomim's office and said "ooo, nice shiny $650k grant you got there, Michael Toomim. We're gonna just...take...about half of that. YOINK! SUCKER! Where does everyone want to go next weekend? Bermuda, or Italy? WHY NOT BOTH!" Further, indirect costs are accounted for when grants are awarded. The awarding organization didn't think his grant proposal was worth $650k and then oooo, the Big Mean School Administration came and took half his stuff and poor Michael Toomim was left with half the money he thought he needed...frowny face :( The organization thought the work proposed in the grant application would require $300k in direct costs. They looked up what his school uses for indirect costs, and "wrote the check" for $650k. Other grant organizations award an amount and then an additional amount is added equal to whatever the school charges for indirect costs. Everyone knows this, grad students included. Nobody counts indirect costs as part of their grant. Ever. When they say "I got a million dollar grant!" they mean "a million dollars plus indirect costs charged by the organization." Third, there is no fucking way whatsoever that the school took any additional money from the grant for anything except direct costs - stuff that was used solely and exclusively for that grant. Nothing in the grant was yoinked "by the lab" or "by the department." That's called "double dipping." Every org that gives grants prohibits it, and if you're caught doing it, it is a big fucking deal.
jmyeet 2y ago
I hope people start to realize that nothing about what's going on is about eliminating waste. It's about destroying the government for the profit of the top 0.1%. But it's all so very shortsighted. The people directing all of this clearly have no idea what they're doing or why things are the way they are. Take USAID as a good example. The reality is that USAID is a wealth transfer from the government to American companies (where most of the money was spent) AND it was an expresion of American soft power on foreign regimes. Dismantling USAID just creates a power vacuum for some other power to fill, likely China. You see this with talk of a massive ethnic displacement from Gaza and the West Bank into Egypt and Jordan, an action that would likely topple what are essentially puppet regimes for US Middle Eastern interests. NIH funding is actually a massive wealth transfer from the government to Big Pharma. Why? Because Big Pharma doesn't really discover novel compounds. Federally-funded research does. A lame duck Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act [1] in a bipartisan way that was signed into law by the outgoing Jimmy Carter in 1980. This Act basically allowed Big Pharma to profit fully from federal research. Big Pharma spends money on marketing, lobbying and any research they do is pretty much limited to patent extension. We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of American power here. Certain accelerationists who would otherwise be in complete opposition to the current administration are actually celebrating what's going on for that reason. The government is setting up China to be the new big bad of the 21st century but ironically is creating a massive power vacuum for China to fill and extend its influence. This is pure short-term profit thinking and we will see over the next 4 years looting of the public purse on a scale we've never seen before. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
abctx 2y ago
https://archive.ph/KqZLU https://archive.ph/KqZLU

119 points by erickhill 2y ago

sQL_inject 2y ago

[flagged]

danorama 2y ago
That’s a great question to ask. And if it were the question being asked by the new folks in charge that would be pretty great. Instead we’ve got drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat. I’m not sure that’s an improvement over the status quo.
- teddyh 2y ago
  > drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat Believing your own government does such things seems extreme. Where did you hear that? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan? Have those sources pushed any other obviously false, now-debunked, partisan stories in the past?
  - danorama 2y ago
    Where do you see an ordered, thoughtful, deliberate process taking place here? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan?
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Nowhere – I don’t follow the issue. The question was for those people who are somehow convinced that it’s complete chaos. In my experience, complete chaos is very rare, but fake reports of chaos in every field are a daily occurrence. If you believe every report of chaos that comes along, you’ll believe the world is ending every day. Which it obviously has not, yet. It follows that most reports of chaos are always false. Therefore, if you believe that some specific issue is really as chaotic as reported, you’ll have to have some pretty good sources to back that up.
      - petschge 2y ago
        How chaotic does https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g3nrx1dq5o sound to you?
        teddyh 2y ago
        [flagged]
        petschge 2y ago
        I was referring to the "The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported. [...]An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees 'are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel'." part. It's about 300 people affected. And when you apply at these types of positions they ARE aware of private contact information.
        teddyh 2y ago
        I really don’t get it. What is the story? Should the employer be shamed for not keeping home/private contact information for all employees? Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are.
        dralley 2y ago
        >Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are. They build, maintain and run security for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This was, in fact, mentioned in the article. Quote: "The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN." Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    The problems you point out are very real. Serious. Frustrating. None of which invalidate the points you replied to in any way. Some kind of methodical work to solve problems is still how you keep a plane flying while you fix it. Handing bats to kids isn’t going to be better than the status quo Even though the status quo is miserable and increasingly intolerable, it is always easier to make things worse I would like to end this comment on an up note, a solution: be rich. Very very rich. Live in Canada or New Zealand. Carry a towel and remember: electrolytes.
  - jmcgough 2y ago
    We are looking at a generational loss of research talent that directly benefits public health. Every post-doc and researcher I know is looking at options outside of academia, or even outside the country. This will not solve administrative overhead, it will lead to a brain drain.
    - varelse 2y ago
      [dead]
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > If that worked then drunk toddlers wouldn’t win elections promising the baseball bat. Even if one believes that overall, over a long term, democracy tends to produce more “accurate” assessments of merits of policy disputes than other systems—which, of course, is not generally the argument for democracy—that still wouldn't imply that there are no cases where the electorate just makes completely bad judgements. So, I’m not sure what your basis for the claim here is; as presented the argument seems to be the electorate never makes bad decisions, which is ludicrous on its face.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Nobody knows what the “bad judgments” and what the “good judgments” are, and we certainly can’t trust anyone with self interest to tell us. Democracy is a means for empirical truth finding that’s resistant to manipulation. I’m 40 years old. In my lifetime, educational and healthcare overheads have exploded while outcomes have gotten worse. Nobody working within these systems understands why or is capable of fixing them.
CaliforniaKarl 2y ago
I'd like to reframe your question just a bit. Instead of "At the current overhead spending rates, has the research been effective enough?", I think the question should be "At the current indirect rates, has the research been supported enough?". My proposed reframing is because the indirect costs are meant to cover the costs of supporting the research. A side node: If you're interested in gauging the effect of a particular NIH grant, the NIH RePORTER site is your friend: Any publication that is grant-supported will mention this in the acknowledgments. For example, our SGI UV300 (360 CPU cores, 10TB RAM, 20TB PCIe flash, and 4 NVIVIA P100s) was funded thanks to NIH grant S10 OD023452. If you search that ID in RePORTER, you'll get https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288 https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288: Towards the bottom of the page, you'll find a list of publications (that the NIH was able to find) that used the UV300. With funding in FY17, the machine's past end-of-life and the funding's ended (it was one-time funding, with a 5-year (I think) lifespan), but publications are still coming in. One thing that's worth noting: The grant had no indirect costs. The money went straight to SGI (they were acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in November 2016, and were still being absorbed). The UV300 is not a "set it and forget it" machine. It's not 'cattle'. So, where did the money come from to run the UV300, and answer questions of researchers who (for example) have never heard of "NUMA"? The money to pay the supporting folks (sysadmins, etc.) came, indirectly, from the researchers: The S10 grant was structured such that the majority of time on the UV300 was for folks doing work under NIH grants. The indirect portion of those NIH grants is what helped fund the sysadmins (like me) who kept (and still keep) the UV300 up and running. I think grant-funded research is supported enough if… 1. The facilities researchers use (buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc.) are available enough (they are online for some % of the year) 2. Researchers are able to get technical assistance (for the buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc. that they use) in a reasonable amount of time. What values should be used for "available enough" and "reasonable amount of time"? Honestly, I'm not sure, and since I've got 'skin in the game' my guesses would probably be too generous towards me. Plus, Goodhart's law applies here.
whatever1 2y ago
All government spending is a waste, as it should be. Governments should not be in the business of making profit, after all they are bad at it. They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, research, ensuring fair game (by legislating and enforcing), protecting their resources with military. The more left wing folks, are also interested in providing directly for the ones in need. As long as the spending is in these directions is good for the country, KPIs be damned.
- teddyh 2y ago
  All government spending is not “waste”. All government spending should be unprofitable (for the reasons you eloquently describe). Which is a different thing entirely.
- taurknaut 2y ago
  > after all they are bad at it This is really strange framing. Profit is a form of inefficiency. It's quite easy to generate profit—just take from others. How we came to view it as something that makes more sense to structure society around than zero-margin services is bewildering. There isn't a single responsibility government has I don't trust private enterprise to deliver less competently and at greater cost.
  - 6510 2y ago
    We need some kind of theme park village where everything is privatized.
    - taurknaut 2y ago
      Sounds expensive as hell.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I think you used “waste” improperly. Try “net zero cash”? > They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, […] Absolutely. Run & improve the positive sum systems, that work best at national scale, that really do pay for themselves, by delivering greater value to citizens than the taxes taken from citizens. When people imagine a tiny government with tiny taxes, they haven’t understood how much fewer of us could survive without those positive sums. How much more of their life’s time value it would take to pay for an egg. (Just as the private sector organizes, and reorganizes, to create and grow a stream of positive sums, at a higher variety and speed, at less than national scales.)
taurknaut 2y ago
Well it's certainly more effective than the DoD at providing value per cost.
cma 2y ago
Go through congress. If you don't want the Senate filibuster then lobby the senate majority to to get the rule changed. Vice president gets one vote in the Senate only, not unilateral control of the budget.
- BatFastard 2y ago
  Ez, just vote to eliminate the filibuster. Only takes 51 votes
atoav 2y ago
The question we must ask is why, faced with blaringly obvious evidence to the contrary, people still do not trust their eyes. Elon Musk gets 8 million a day from your tax money and somehow he is going to save you the money elsewhere without this even being remotely in his interest. The only thing in his interest is to appear as if he did something, that's it. And all of that grifting relies on marks, who reflexively defend every action their betters take. Betters that tell them they are true, strong men that deserve power. But ironically that is the polar opposite of what actually strong men would do..
- varelse 2y ago
  [dead]

refurb 2y ago

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malcolmgreaves 2y ago
[flagged]

clcaev 2y ago

Some believe this cut will be covered by the research universities and their associated medical centers. That may be true for a limited time, in a few institutes, for a small set of cases. However, it’s just a cut to medical research, and a deep one at that. Indirect costs support researchers’ needs that the institution provides. For example, who ensures the researcher’s laptop is secure? For basic research, how is lab equipment obtained? Who provides infrastructure to access observational data from an electronic health record system? Categorize these services as you wish, but these services are needed, they have costs, and the expense will need to be covered for medical research to happen. If they can no longer be considered indirect, then they will become itemized and the researcher’s direct budget will have to cover them. For example, laptops permitted to access the institutional network may have a monthly fee that covers system admin time. In the short run, it’ll mean some research simply won’t happen as the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free”. For new grants, it means a greater part of the research budget will have to be itemized with these costs, eg less funding for researcher or graduate assistant effort. Either the overall grant direct costs will have to go up, or less research happens.

analog31 2y ago
Indeed the status quo is that these costs are spread over the research projects without having to itemize each expense. Now every research lab, from small to large, will need to hire an accountant to keep track of expenses. Or the grad students spending their time filling out spreadsheets. That strikes me as probably being a lot less efficient.
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
  Lets not pretend efficiency had anything to do with this. It’s all part of an ordinary power grab by the cronies of Trump and Musk, with the only goal the looting of America.
csa 2y ago
> eg the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free” I think many people don’t realize this point. The universities made it easy with large indirect costs that also covered a lot. The biggest research universities will just be able to take a lower indirect cost and start charging for things that used to be included in indirect costs. This may sound more “transparent” or “efficient”, and it is in some ways, but adding admin work to track stuff like this is its own form of inefficiency. It will be like moving from an AYCE model to an a la carte model, but the grant writer will need to know the orders and special requests needed by everyone many months (or more) before the grant is scheduled to start. This is not the strong suit of researchers and/or grant writers. This will end up being a shit show.

Kelvin506 2y ago

The real cost will play out over years after Trump's term. When funding cuts like this hit, researchers and programs decide to find homes elsewhere with better funding. Cuts like this cause current and future talent loss that is very slow to reverse.

_bin_ 2y ago
[flagged]
- ks2048 2y ago
  We had nearly a century of the best scientists in the world wanting to come to the US to study, teach, and work. To view this as America loosing and the rest of the world getting a "free ride" is pretty crazy.
  - _bin_ 2y ago
    how else would you prefer to frame America footing a bill for a benefit to everyone? we benefited, sure, but everyone else received the same benefit for zero cost. we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. when you amortize your R&D costs across a small population instead of your whole market, that will mean charging everyone in that small population much more. my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others. i am pretty comfortable at a fundamental level with public support for medical research. i am not comfortable with failing to protect the results of that research and ensuring that if anyone outside the borders of our country wants a scrap of benefit from those, we enforce payment for that benefit.
    - ks2048 2y ago
      Our insane spending on health care is independent from funding of scientific research, and only a small amount of your tax funds it (again - different than spending on "healthcare"). Being that country that makes scientific breakthroughs is a good thing. Name one of these "free loading" countries out there is in better shape because they don't do science and just sit back reap the benefits?

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

[flagged]

protimewaster 2y ago
As others have pointed out, this will actually require more accountants since more things will need to be itemized. It's not really about learning to be more efficient, because it's not going to be more efficient to require more accountants.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  It will require different accounting, probably. It's not really true to say that these costs are not accounted for. Every dollar a university pays out is accounted for somewhere.
gammarator 2y ago
Most colleges don’t have billion dollar endowments.

nn3 2y ago

It is hard to say what the effect will be: If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change. But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem. I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.

SoftTalker 2y ago
> I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.
- dekhn 2y ago
  Yep- when I was a PI and had several grants, when one was getting close to used up, the finops people would call me over and we'd switch people around to working on a different grant. I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done". After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.
lalaland1125 2y ago
> they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead This is not true due to the retroactive nature of this change. The problem is that the grant budgets are already fixed and will not increase. You can't move those costs to the grant budget since the grant money is already fully allocated to things like salary, etc. In order for this to work, DOGE would have to automatically increase the grant budgets for already awarded grants, which they are unlikely to do.

KikoHeit 2y ago

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ks2048 2y ago

Sean Carroll (the physicist) just did a solo podcast about federal funding for universities and what these cuts would mean, https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonus-cuts-to-science-funding-and-why-they-matter/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...

toomim 2y ago

When I was a PhD student in Computer Science, I wanted to fund my research without depending on other people. So I wrote, and won, a grant for $650,000. The University of Washington took 55% off the top in "indirect costs." Then of the direct costs, a bunch more taxes went to the department, the lab, etc. I ended up getting about $40,000 total from that grant to fund my actual research. I was told that this is just how the game works. The Lesson: There is a huge amount of waste in academic grants. The university does not need 55% indirect costs to fund my research. They gave me a laptop and an office to work in. But the laptop actually came out of direct costs. And as for the office... well, I tended not to use it. Coffeeshops were nicer places to work. So that 55% — $357,500 — was not necessary for research. It disappeared in an administrative hierarchy that kept growing. I talked to professors from 20 years before, and they said that the administration had grown 3x in their time being there. They built their reputation as scientists when everything was smaller and cheaper. Now all that reputation is generating more money, which is getting gobbled up by an administration that wasn't needed when they produced their original successes.

KennyBlanken 2y ago
"I got an office but I decided I'd rather be in a coffee shop" doesn't mean you should get a refund... I love it when people misrepresent things to people who don't know better. This happens every time research funding gets mentioned on HN, by people looking to rile up HNers who absolutely love hearing that their prejudices against the government and scientists are true and academia is robbing the dear taxpayer blind, like it's all some big shady scam. Direct costs are things that are directly and solely related to or used for the grant. Labor. Equipment. Supplies. For the research funded by the grant, within reason (nobody accounts for or cares about, say, a lab mate asking to use some of a chemical, or one of your DVD-R disks. If you have plenty of room in that incubator that was paid for with your grant and a labmate or someone in the department could really use a corner of it to try something on their experiment, or their incubator dies and you've got room? You say yes. Captain NIH does not descend and go HALT SCIENTIST! THAT EQUIPMENT WAS PAID FOR OUT OF DIRECT COSTS FOR YOUR GRANT, NOT THEIRS!" Indirect costs are all the costs necessary for "keeping the lights on." Indirect costs are like taxes because everyone's grants are "taxed" and that pays for all the things everyone uses. Maintaining the buildings, paying the electric bill, paying the salaries of the IT staff, paying for network equipment, servers, storage, UPSs. Indirect grant costs pay for the trash (and hazardous waste) to get collected, for the parking lot to get plowed in the winter, for the buildings to be cooled in the summer and heated in the winter. In a lab it pays for stuff like centralized purified water, central gas supplies, and so on. You don't get to cry about how your work doesn't need all that lab stuff those bio researchers need, or that big storage cluster so you couldn't have to pay for it. Just like you don't get to cry about how the road you live off of is very short so your taxes should be lower because the town has to pay less to pave and plow it, and since you don't have any kids your taxes should be lower still because you're not using the schools. And really, your house didn't catch on fire (and you're very careful about fire safety) so why do you have to pay for the fire department? etc. Indirect costs are negotiated between schools and the organizations that award grants. A school doesn't get to make up whatever they want. It's known by everyone involved, well ahead of time. Nobody walked into Toomim's office and said "ooo, nice shiny $650k grant you got there, Michael Toomim. We're gonna just...take...about half of that. YOINK! SUCKER! Where does everyone want to go next weekend? Bermuda, or Italy? WHY NOT BOTH!" Further, indirect costs are accounted for when grants are awarded. The awarding organization didn't think his grant proposal was worth $650k and then oooo, the Big Mean School Administration came and took half his stuff and poor Michael Toomim was left with half the money he thought he needed...frowny face :( The organization thought the work proposed in the grant application would require $300k in direct costs. They looked up what his school uses for indirect costs, and "wrote the check" for $650k. Other grant organizations award an amount and then an additional amount is added equal to whatever the school charges for indirect costs. Everyone knows this, grad students included. Nobody counts indirect costs as part of their grant. Ever. When they say "I got a million dollar grant!" they mean "a million dollars plus indirect costs charged by the organization." Third, there is no fucking way whatsoever that the school took any additional money from the grant for anything except direct costs - stuff that was used solely and exclusively for that grant. Nothing in the grant was yoinked "by the lab" or "by the department." That's called "double dipping." Every org that gives grants prohibits it, and if you're caught doing it, it is a big fucking deal.

jmyeet 2y ago

I hope people start to realize that nothing about what's going on is about eliminating waste. It's about destroying the government for the profit of the top 0.1%. But it's all so very shortsighted. The people directing all of this clearly have no idea what they're doing or why things are the way they are. Take USAID as a good example. The reality is that USAID is a wealth transfer from the government to American companies (where most of the money was spent) AND it was an expresion of American soft power on foreign regimes. Dismantling USAID just creates a power vacuum for some other power to fill, likely China. You see this with talk of a massive ethnic displacement from Gaza and the West Bank into Egypt and Jordan, an action that would likely topple what are essentially puppet regimes for US Middle Eastern interests. NIH funding is actually a massive wealth transfer from the government to Big Pharma. Why? Because Big Pharma doesn't really discover novel compounds. Federally-funded research does. A lame duck Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act [1] in a bipartisan way that was signed into law by the outgoing Jimmy Carter in 1980. This Act basically allowed Big Pharma to profit fully from federal research. Big Pharma spends money on marketing, lobbying and any research they do is pretty much limited to patent extension. We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of American power here. Certain accelerationists who would otherwise be in complete opposition to the current administration are actually celebrating what's going on for that reason. The government is setting up China to be the new big bad of the 21st century but ironically is creating a massive power vacuum for China to fill and extend its influence. This is pure short-term profit thinking and we will see over the next 4 years looting of the public purse on a scale we've never seen before. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act

abctx 2y ago

https://archive.ph/KqZLU https://archive.ph/KqZLU