Trump’s 15% cap on grant costs will spark the reform the academy needs

For different illustration of however the judicial “resistance” to Team Trump reforms manages to prehend the motivation low ground, see national Judge Angel Kelley’s blocking of a 15% headdress connected payer sum of “indirect costs” tacked connected to National Institutes of Health grants for assemblage research.

Kelley (a Biden appointee, natch) complains this would beryllium disruptive — yet this scam cries retired for disruption.

President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to the assemblage during the Division I Men’s Wrestling Championship connected March 22. IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

Look astatine 1 ongoing survey by Harvard prof Elizabeth Janiak, which seeks to look astatine “societal dynamics of powerfulness and oppression” astir termination done an “intersectional framework.”

For that, taxpayers shelled retired a hairsbreadth much than $495,000, of which astir $168,000 was for “indirect” costs, which supposedly screen Havard’s overhead to undergird Janiak’s research.

That’s an other 51 “indirect” cents connected each “direct” dollar (i.e. the wealth paying for the existent science) — and indirect costs aren’t adjacent itemized, truthful there’s nary telling astatine each however Harvard really spends the windfall. 

How overmuch applicable assistance does she request for a “framework” presumption of “societal dynamics”?

Maybe Harvard is buying gold-plated dream-catchers, oregon conscionable maybe it’s milking the NIH due to the fact that it can.

Fine, it’ll beryllium a rude awakening for Harvard to suffer retired connected (some) escaped money.

But the 15% regularisation shouldn’t adjacent unit it to dip into its endowment of $50 billion and growing. 

Heck, backstage contracts for assemblage probe typically let nothing for “indirect costs.”

As Matt Taibbi’s caller Post column noted, these schools are mega-rich, often with billions successful “cash reserves” connected top of their endowments.

We’re each successful favour of payer backing for actual scientific research, but this strategy is plainly beyond broken.

And was adjacent earlier the Great Awokening saw our elite scientists utterly prostitute themselves to conform with lefty authorities astir race, gender, COVID and everything else, incinerating the public’s spot (as witnesser the termination survey cited above).

Insanely, the shameless “science” bros are inactive astatine it: A rally connected March 7 saw erstwhile NIH caput Francis Collins and others screaming for more, more, much taxation dollars adjacent arsenic they continued to propulsion their DEI agenda. 

Let the sunlight in, halt soaking mundane Americans and punctual our comrade academicians conscionable whose interests they’re expected to beryllium utilizing those fed bucks to advance.