Trump's National Institutes of Health (NIH) imposed a change in their grants schedule. Going forward, only 15% of the grant can be used for "administrative overhead", meaning travel & entertainment for "conferences", rent charged to the research, equipment & supplies, and secretaries, etc.
The UW System immediately blasted the change, claiming that millions of Third World inhabitants will die, tens of millions of children will be disfigured, and medical research will halt immediately. Plus all those talented secretaries and all those 5-star hotels for conferences will go bankrupt! (We made up some of those claims.)
As it turns out, even the researchers couldn't take that bullshit.
...some researchers see the new 15% cap on "negotiated indirect cost rate agreements" – paused Monday by a President Biden-nominated judge in 22 states that sued to block it – as welfare reform for colleges and a shot across the bow to administrators to stop pilfering from their researchers, who can get bigger grants with lower NICRAs.
"Cutting indirects might even mean more science," epidemiologist Vinay Prasad, who runs an eponymous research lab at the University of California San Francisco, wrote on his website among a slew of recent posts on NICRA in theory and in practice.
"Less money spent on the administration is more money to give out to actual scientists," the self-described liberal Democrat said. "I am shocked to see researchers crying about how much money the university gets – it means more grants can be given per cycle."
But but but you peasants have to understand this correctly, after all:
...He specifically called out the president and medical dean at Johns Hopkins University, which is private, for suing NIH while earning $4 million together on the backs of taxpayers....
See? It's OUR MONEY, say Johns Hopkins Poohbahs. OURS. YOU CANNOT TAKE IT.
See Article Two, first sentence, jagwads.
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