NIH slashes overhead payments for research
50 comments
·February 8, 2025divbzero
transcriptase
They 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
Research 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
“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.
exmadscientist
Reforming 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.
transcriptase
One 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
I 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
jeffbee
You 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.
donaldmusk
[flagged]
elontrump
[flagged]
elontrump
[flagged]
scirob
no 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
Swiss 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.
zmgsabst
This 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
Schools 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
> 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%.
arcmechanica
well, pharma companies are screwed. They aren't going to do their own research, so no new drugs
refurb
It 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?
null
jordanpg
The 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.
null
Dalewyn
>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.
unsnap_biceps
The key issue is we're not getting audits, we're only getting indiscriminate cuts .
I understand the concerns around using funds effectively, and I agree there's a lot of waste out there, but some of that is just required in the research space to learn. If we knew what to fund to do something, it's no longer research, it's engineering.
Overhaul the grant system to ensure that there's additional scrutiny in getting funding, focus on outcomes we want, audit the past research, but burning it all down doesn't help and just wastes what's currently in flight and we'll have to rebuild eventually, duplicating effort and thus wasting money.
I understand the emotional reaction, but it would do everyone a lot of good to take a step back, take a deep breath, and approach things in a measured and focused way.
patrick451
The time for measured approaches is long gone. Any administration of the last 50 years could have done that. But they didn't. It's time to slash and burn.
zmgsabst
They’re not “burning it all down”, they’re cutting indirect expenses from 30%+ to 15% — and administrators who were grifting are whining because their slush funds got cut.
addicted
Ah 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
Trump'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.
ralph84
[flagged]
null
refurb
Precisely.
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
That'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.
refurb
Sorry, that argument falls flat.
We're talking about schools with multi-billion dollar endowments, new sports stadiums, branded new facilities, fat tuition fees from international students and a ton of pet projects by the university.
But no, the NIH needs to "subsidize" general fund through NIH grants?
> The university is free to spend them as it sees fit, rather than according to what some big important outsider says.
That's fine, but let's not pervert the research funding mechanism by puffing up indirect costs to pay for things that have nothing to do with research.
That seems reasonable to me?
dyauspitr
Exactly. Research is overrated, we have progressed enough. The Chinese can do the rest. Everyone should join the trades.
ggm
Degrees 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.
> 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.