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NIH slashes overhead payments for research

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Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#71

Post by robwwilliams »

transcriptase wrote: post #34
the_snooze wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research overhead doesn't pay for that stuff. It pays for research-relevant infrastructure and staff. If a PI buys equipment, it's a waste to spend their own very expensive time to ensure purchase-tracking compliance. So you hire an inventory person. But it doesn't make sense to have one inventory person per research group. So you hire one to serve multiple projects and ensure their continued employment by averaging…

“Purchase compliance” with what? Arbitrary policies set by… university admin? Full disclosure I’ve dealt with this all first hand. The vast majority of universities contribute next to nothing to research programs except the space, utilities, and IT. And those costs do not need to be a % of incoming grant money. And the vast majority do just take that cut and use it as slush fund general revenue.

Arbitrary policies often set by the federal and state governments. Yes sure, there is some policy at the institutional level but the intent is usually good—-to prevent fraud and abuse and get a good price. Certainly not to slow down research.

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#72

Post by robwwilliams »

secabeen wrote: post #63
transcriptase wrote: post #26

One of the main issues with overhead on grants is that it has nothing to do with overhead on the research itself. It’s instead a tax that a university applies to money that researchers bring in, that they use as general revenue to fund, for lack of a better term, bullshit including hiring more admin instead of professors. A $8M grant doesn’t cost a university any more than a $1M grant for university admin in terms of…

> A $8M grant doesn’t cost a university any more than a $1M grant for university admin in terms of “indirect costs”. The fact that they think they’re entitled to several million of it to waste on things that shouldn’t be coming from taxpayer funded NIH grant money is obscene. Sure it does. An 8M grant is going to have roughly 8X more researchers working under it than a 1M grant. Each of those researchers needs space,…

Yes, I agree the overhead scales close to linear unless a grant is very heavily dependent on one type of cost such as bulk sequencing of 10,000 subjects. In that case the overhead is usually much lower or disallowed. And there is no overhead allowed on equipment.

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#73

Post by secabeen »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #65
secabeen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A $8M grant doesn’t cost a university any more than a $1M grant for university admin in terms of “indirect costs”. The fact that they think they’re entitled to several million of it to waste on things that shouldn’t be coming from taxpayer funded NIH grant money is obscene. Sure it does. An 8M grant is going to have roughly 8X more researchers working under it than a 1M grant. Each of those researchers needs space,…

This is such a wasteful way to think...do economies of scale not apply to universities at all? They're allowed to just bill as if there is 0 savings to be found in bulk construction and administration?

Generally, no, they don't bill at 0 savings. The rate is set on a per-institution basis. The rate setting process incorporates the documented economics of scale that that institution is achieving already. This is why schools have different rates; the more resources (instruments, facility use, computational, etc.) the university provides at no/low-cost to the researchers, the higher the rate.

If the rate wasn't set in this way, the overhead would be well above 100%, as it is in most labor-heavy businesses like consulting and law.

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#74

Post by Tadpole9181 »

patrick451 wrote: post #43
unsnap_biceps wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key issue is we're not getting audits, we're only getting indiscriminate cuts . I understand the concerns around using funds effectively, and I agree there's a lot of waste out there, but some of that is just required in the research space to learn. If we knew what to fund to do something, it's no longer research, it's engineering. Overhaul the grant system to ensure that there's additional scrutiny in getting fu…

The time for measured approaches is long gone. Any administration of the last 50 years could have done that. But they didn't. It's time to slash and burn.

This isn't a fucking game where you get to flip the table when you don't get your way, throwing a temper tantrum, this is the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the respect for basic rule of law.

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#75

Post by meetingthrower »

secabeen wrote: post #64
transcriptase wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in the case of massive projects where service providers do the wet work, your lab primarily deals with data analysis, or you don’t even do your research with university space/equipment, they still get 30-60% just because. This isn’t some conspiracy theory. Look at how much grant money a given university brings in annually and ask yourself if 30-60% of that number is being spent on overhead related to research. It…

> Look at how much grant money a given university brings in annually and ask yourself if 30-60% of that number is being spent on overhead related to research. It’s not. Look at a consulting company or law firm. Most will charge you 2-3x the salary cost of the consultant or lawyer you're getting. This limits universities to 1.15x.

Right - but as a consulting partner I take home that margin to spend on my boats, homes, and watches. What are universities getting? More university...

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#76

Post by secabeen »

meetingthrower wrote: post #75
secabeen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at how much grant money a given university brings in annually and ask yourself if 30-60% of that number is being spent on overhead related to research. It’s not. Look at a consulting company or law firm. Most will charge you 2-3x the salary cost of the consultant or lawyer you're getting. This limits universities to 1.15x.

Right - but as a consulting partner I take home that margin to spend on my boats, homes, and watches. What are universities getting? More university...

To be clear, this is not margin, it's non-direct expenses. So the consulting partners probably take home half of that multiplier as profits, and the other half goes to pay for the paralegals, AR/AP, HR, IT, office lease, janitorial .... all the things that Universities use their overhead to cover. What a surprise!

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#77

Post by citrate05 »

transcriptase wrote: post #34
the_snooze wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research overhead doesn't pay for that stuff. It pays for research-relevant infrastructure and staff. If a PI buys equipment, it's a waste to spend their own very expensive time to ensure purchase-tracking compliance. So you hire an inventory person. But it doesn't make sense to have one inventory person per research group. So you hire one to serve multiple projects and ensure their continued employment by averaging…

“Purchase compliance” with what? Arbitrary policies set by… university admin? Full disclosure I’ve dealt with this all first hand. The vast majority of universities contribute next to nothing to research programs except the space, utilities, and IT. And those costs do not need to be a % of incoming grant money. And the vast majority do just take that cut and use it as slush fund general revenue.

Compliance with policies set by Congress and the relevant funding agencies, which establish standards for things like safeguarding the private health data and safety of study participants, mandating that de-identified versions of data be made available to other labs so they can both verify and build on the research, biosecurity, preventing foreign interference, lab animal welfare, hazardous waste disposal… and ironically, making sure that money is being spent appropriately by PIs.

See e.g. https://www.cogr.edu/sites/default/files/1991%20Excel%20Data...

Re: NIH slashes overhead payments for research

#78

Post by citrate05 »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #66

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0... The original grant notice is a good thing to read. They properly justify the cuts, and I think it's something that a lot of people would agree with - why is up to 70% of grant money being sent to "administration and overhead" at giant private universities? My small LLC is currently applying for an SBIR grant, and we were capped to 40% unless we provided…

Just so everyone reading this is clear, it’s not 70% of grant money, it’s an extra 70% on top of the direct costs (41% of the total awarded). A more typical number for a large state university would be somewhere around 55%, or around 35% of the total awarded funds.

Also, indirect costs are not going to building sports centers. Funding agencies and the government audit universities in detail to make sure that the money is being spent only on research activities, down to calculating the amount of square footage per building that is being used exclusively for research, as opposed to instruction or clinical work. They have absolutely come after people and institutions, and successfully obtained multimillion dollar settlements, for using federal money to cover unrelated expenses. If NIH indirects were found to be going towards something like building a rec center or a facility for college athletes, it would be actual fraud and a national scandal, potentially on the “congressional inquiry” level.

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