As a NIH funded researcher, everything here is spot on.
> The universities may have gotten “addicted” to the influx of federal funds, and adapted their operations based around absorbing more federal money.
This is an understatement. It's not "may have"; one can eliminate the "may". At many universities currently the tail wags the dog. There have been many high-profile examples of this in recent years. It used to not be this way, and the time period identified in the piece has been highlighted by many papers on the topic.
>On the other hand, there is definitely evidence that university administrators are motivated by indirect cost rates. In the most severe cases, some universities levy a “tax” on researchers for obtaining grants from non-NIH sources. In the case of Columbia University, the tax is equal to the NIH indirect cost rate minus the other institution’s indirect cost rate. That percentage is taken out of the researcher’s direct costs. This policy dramatically diminishes the value of non-NIH grants.
>For example, if a Columbia University (62.5% NIH indirect cost rate) researcher receives a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (10% indirect rate), with a direct cost of $1 million and a total value of $1.1 million, a whopping $525,000 intended for the researcher is redirected to the university, bringing the direct cost benefits to the researcher down from $1 million to $475,000. And frankly, that’s underselling the transfer, because non-profit grants tend to be much smaller than NIH grants; once the tax is paid, the remaining money might not even be worth applying for.
What else is a university to do if non-profits try to free-ride on the infrastructure paid for by NIH?
It isn't 'organic' there has been an outside forcing function.
I note this not to criticize the administration (although you can do that), but to point out that this dynamic has repercussions in terms of incentives. If you're a university president or provost and getting pressure from a conservative legislature to not depend on public funding (which really means "state funding" to them, but that's another discussion), and all of a sudden the federal government becomes this cash flow source, you're going to run to it, and leverage that as "being a good citizen" with the legislature. I think the causal directions go in both ways and have these kind of amplifying effects.
Totally agree with you on the rest.
What is interesting is the admins now finding that those same legislators won't leave you alone even if they strip all your funding. They will mess with you for cheap points and sport.
From the article: >What is relevant is how the public perceives these methods.
So much of the problem seems about political risk, but that seems to be a feature and not a bug of publicly funded programs. We generally want the public to have a say in how their tax dollars get spent and we want there to be transparency in the process. And yet those two factors combine to create many of the problems in the article.
Is it a misalignment of researchers and the general public in terms of priorities? Is it an issue of educating the public about the intent of fundamental research? Something else?