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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>I was told that this is just how the game works.<p><i>The Lesson:</i> There is a huge amount of waste in academic grants.<p>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.<p>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.
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%.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Big Pharma spends money on marketing, lobbying and any research they do is pretty much limited to patent extension.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act</a>
Sean Carroll (the physicist) just did a solo podcast about federal funding for universities and what these cuts would mean,<p><a href="https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonus-cuts-to-science-funding-and-why-they-matter/" rel="nofollow">https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...</a>
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.
It is hard to say what the effect will be:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.