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Comment by nn3 | Hacker News Reader

It is hard to say what the effect will be:

If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change.

But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem.

I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.

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There is a difference in the required granularity.

Today there are usually only a handful of overhead rates for the entire university. Accounting only needs to be precise enough to attribute the spending to the right categories. Nobody needs to know which departments or labs benefit from that particular spending.

But if everything needs to be attributed not just to a specific department and a lab, but to a specific grant, things get complicated. Maybe one lab in a department only uses offices and meeting rooms. Another runs a bunch of servers somewhere on the premises. And a third has a wetlab and works with hazardous materials. Sometimes things go wrong and the entire building needs to be evacuated. Which means there is a need for all kinds of protocols and trainings and responsible personnel. And maybe also for more security guards at night.

Expect fun department politics when the PIs argue who needs to pay what for the infrastructure and who gets to spend more on actual research.

> they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead

This is not true due to the retroactive nature of this change. The problem is that the grant budgets are already fixed and will not increase. You can't move those costs to the grant budget since the grant money is already fully allocated to things like salary, etc.

In order for this to work, DOGE would have to automatically increase the grant budgets for already awarded grants, which they are unlikely to do.

> I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes

They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.

Yep- when I was a PI and had several grants, when one was getting close to used up, the finops people would call me over and we'd switch people around to working on a different grant.

I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done".

After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.

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