NIH Grants Slashed
The Trump administration just slashed NIH grants. I think this terrible policy shift is entirely constitutional and legal. I think it is also a severe (entirely deliberate) blow to US Universities and a possibly fatal blow to biomedical research institutions.
The new policy limits funds for overhead to 15% of the amount directly granted to the principal investigator. Existing overhead payments are much larger. They finance the cost of research to the institution. This is a huge reduction in funds to research institutions.
For commentary I am too shocked to provide, look to Josh Marshall, also here, and here
Anyway, anyone interested in the less relevant than ever thoughts of an amateur biologist can find the 6th in my series CAR VI here, which I wrote before I learned that my (unrequested) advice is much more irrelevant than ever.
There is a new boss. The new boss pretty much always tells us the old boss did not run things as well as possible…even in cases that the old boss hand-picked the new one. “Go get these unreasonable improvements.” “Yes,sir!” Whispers: “This is nuts.” A year later none of the unreasonable improvements happened, but all moved significantly in that direction. NIH knows 15% won’t work as a final ceiling and research groups got the message that they won’t get their current levels. Yelling is a part of the process. There will be badges thrown on tables and hurt feelings galore. But the finance leaders of research institutes doing a lot of NIH grant work are right now getting details on all indirect spending and an assessment of just how indirect these are to getting the grant work done properly. Facility costs would be high, indirect travel budget lower, contribution to a university celebration of 150 years of the College of Natural Science, lower still and so on. The institute normally at 50% will think they can do 42% and the director will say ‘we go with 40% and you guys find that’. Then the pressure is on NIH and they have a similar process….’Do we need this? When do we need this? Is there some other supplier that will do a good job on time for appreciably less?’ Then it will be ‘Hey, looks good, just make that 38% and let’s do it!’ Six months later, everyone thinks they won. ‘We got more than +100% of their demand. Yea!’ ‘We got them down nearly 25%. Yea!’ The big celebration wasn’t near as nice as originally planned and non-direct travel is down 30%, but everyone survived.
Eric:
I am not going to sort through your commentary to make heads or tails of it. If you do not start using paragraphs to make your points. I will start deleting your lengthy blathering’s. I asked you before to do this. Otherwise. make your points in a few, short sentences.
Government grants are contracts. You’d think that this would only affect upcoming grants where the contract has yet to be signed.
Of course, the “sanctity of contracts” is highly conditional among the most devout believers.
@Kaleberg,
Those contracts only exist when they’re enforced. To the best of my knowledge, neither my medical school (Saint Louis University) nor the big medical school down the street (Washington University) have sued to enforce the contracts. Both seem to be engaged in “watchful waiting,” an approach recommended for non-metastatic prostate cancer. The Trump/Musk agenda is virulently metastasizing.