Some of the things supported by the overhead on NIH grants: - Building and laboratory maintenance (repairs, cleaning, security, electricity, water, heating, and cooling) - IT and communications infrastructure - Grants administration - Financial, HR, legal, regulatory, tech transfer - Library services (buildings, subscriptions, institutional repos, staff) -Shared research facilities (animal facilities and core services) - Environmental/lab safety - IRB, IACUC Many of these things are pretty essential for research. All of them are inefficient. Some are gear-grindingly outdated, slow, or a straight up unconscionable waste of money (e.g. the collective insanity of paying millions per institution to read the outputs of publicly funded research that also cost millions in direct costs to publish). Also, true of everything everywhere not just this: Bureaucracy is a ratchet. Any administrative process put into place to streamline or systematize an activity becomes a bloated mess that takes on a life of its own. If left unchecked, it WILL expand its operations to maintain its own existence above all and frequently lose sight of whether it’s actually effective for its initial purpose. It gets worse if there are people whose entire job it is to make, maintain, and expand these activities. And without vigilance to beat it back… well you’re just stuck with it forever. It is simultaneously true that a massive haircut on some pretty important activities supporting some pretty important research will have some catastrophic consequences for the status quo AND that unis would just torch public cash on ever-growing inefficiency if given the opportunity. When the dust settles, even if the decree doesn’t hold up, I hope uni admin puts some dedicated effort to actively questioning things that no longer make sense or have begun to obstruct scientific progress. The stewards of public money have a responsibility to make sure those dollars go as far as possible. The goal should not be to have nothing change ever just because things are currently at a shitty equilibrium everyone is used to. It was not fine. This blunt knife will yield chaos and likely some irreparable collateral damage on important things of outstanding economic value. And all for what amounts to saving a drop in the ocean. That shouldn’t stop everyone from trying to make better use of public money.

My favorite books, 2024 by @emollick @firstadopter @anilananth @harari_yuval @carlzimmer and other great authors not on X