The End of Science! Lives Will Be Lost!
by James A. Bacon
Don’t question university overhead costs or thousands will die!
That is essentially the message of Virginia’s big three research universities — Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University — in response to a National Institutes of Health initiative capping reimbursable overhead costs to 15% of the research grants it dispenses.
And I’m not exaggerating about the “thousands will die” part.
“Lives will be lost due to the corresponding reduction in the pace of biomedical research,” Tech President Tim Sands actually said Monday. So reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
So, what horrendous thing has NIH done at the behest of DOGE meister Elon Musk? It says that for every $100 of a research grant, only $15 can be diverted to cover the cost of university overhead: buildings, labs, IT support, a swarm of administrative staff, and the like. The rest must go to the scientist actually doing the research.
Last year, the NIH disbursed $392 million to Virginia colleges for health research, according to an estimate by the nonprofit Education Reform Now. If their “indirect” funds are reduced to 15%, UVA could lose $39 million, VCU $19 million and Virginia Tech $11 million.
The furor in Virginia is matched by the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the national level, where billions of dollars are at stake.
Higher education leaders decry NIH cuts in research funding — Politico
Researchers decry ‘disastrously bad idea’ as NIH slashes — CNN
NIH announces new funding policy that rattles medical researchers — NPR
“Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States,” laments Jo Handelsman, who runs the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.”
Read deep into the articles and you might find quotes from NIH explaining the logic behind the cap, such as…
The United States should have the best medical research in the world. It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.
Most private foundations that fund research provide substantially lower indirect costs than the federal government, and universities readily accept grants from these foundations.
How much overhead do Virginia universities charge?
According to the RTD: VCU receives 55 cents of “indirect” funding for every dollar, and UVA 60 cents. At Virginia Tech, the rate varies depending upon the grant.
Here’s the critical point: NIH isn’t taking money away from the researchers. It’s taking money away from the universities.
The RTD provides UVA’s justification for charging 60% for overhead.
UVa officials say the university cannot perform direct medical research without the buildings, advanced equipment and staff that support it. Those indirect costs “are the essential costs of conducting research,” the officials said.
These research expenses include: state-of-the art research laboratories; high-speed data processing; national security protections (e.g., export controls); patient safety (e.g., human subjects protections); radiation safety and hazardous waste disposal; personnel required to support essential administrative and regulatory compliance work, maintenance staff, and other personnel, infrastructure, and activities necessary for supporting research,” they added.
Sure, those are important functions. But 60%?
Someone needs to dig into the numbers. It won’t be the Ryan administration, and UVA’s lawyers will ensure that any effort to extract the numbers through the Freedom of Information Act is prohibitively expensive. So, that leaves the Board of Visitors.
If I served on the board, I would ask about…
Those state-of-the-art research labs. Please identify the specific labs you’re referring to. And then identify the funding sources for those labs. Use the Manning Institute of Biotechnology as a case study. Entrepreneur (and board member) Paul Manning donated $100 million toward the biotech center bearing his name. That project received matching grants from the state, UVA internal funds, and other sources. How much will UVA have to pay in utilities, janitors, landscaping fees, and tradesmen to keep the facility operating? How much would it be reasonable for Uncle Sam to pay UVA to recoup its capital costs? Should philanthropy and state aid even be reimbursed?
That high-speed data processing… UVA operates its own data center. I have never seen the cost of operating the data center broken out, although the UVA website assures us that the center is environmentally “sustainable.” The question for the BoV, though, is what is the cost of UVA’s in-house data center compared to outsourcing to the cloud, as many other universities have done?
The personnel who support research. UVA has beefed up its staff support for research to 663 employees in 2024 from 626 in 2018, according to UVA’s Institutional Research and Analysis website. Due to Covid-era belt tightening, staff support had declined to 519 in 2022. The idea is to take the burden from scientists of writing grant proposals and complying with paperwork so they can conduct more research. But how many paper pushers are needed? Are these functions featherbedded? Can AI perform some of the work?
The assets and activities associated with research support have received little or no scrutiny at UVA, certainly nothing that has come to the attention of the Board of Visitors. The administration plies the board with happy talk by scientists doing feel-good work, but the cost of the vast R&D infrastructure is never discussed.
Ideally, NIH’s 15% cap will force a reckoning with fiscal reality across higher-ed. Studies have shown a steady decline in U.S. university research productivity, marked by fewer breakthrough innovations. Some of this deterioration stems from corruption within the scientific disciplines themselves such as the replicability crisis and the increased incidence of academic fraud. The politicization of R&D funding — the steering of money to politically favored research projects — could be a factor. The declining percentage of federal R&D funding that actually goes to the scientists could be another.
“Making sure taxpayer-funded grants apply toward actual research and not administrative overhead is common sense, that’s exactly what this policy does,” said a spokesman for the governor. “Governor Youngkin appreciates that President Trump is focused on being a good steward of taxpayer dollars.”
Like so many U.S. institutions, the university-based research model is broken. The first instinct of university presidents and provosts is to defend the status quo. Citizens need to rise up and support those who would hold university administrators accountable. Ideally, NIH’s 15% cap on overhead will stimulate a positive response that leads to greater research productivity in the long run.
