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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody help me understand: say I have a research grant and my cap on how much university can take for its operations is 15%. Does it mean that from my 85% I can not buy/rent necessary equipment/facilities previously provided by university anymore?

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I can think of two factors. First, some direct costs could be prohibited. But more importantly, to make this work universities would need to restructure to make all of their services fee-based, and researchers would need to allocate these fees item by item in their proposals. Which seems doable, but is no way to run an efficient operation. Even if the bottom line looked the same, the value to NIH and taxpayers would be far worse due to the inefficiency.

More likely, overpriced institutions like Harvard will cease to be competitive for grants, and those which offer better value for money will be better placed to submit competitive grant proposals.

Im sure there is fat to be cut but the indirect model eliminates the need to spend so much effort accounting for the 5 minutes this grad student used this piece of shared equipment, 20 minutes that post doc used this equipment. Have you ever had to account for number of sheets of paper printed on a shared printer? Total waste of time when considering the cost of accounting and time of these expensive workers. Indirects are an imperfect solution to a real efficiency problem. I really think the solution is to identify “abusers of the commons”and hold them accountable

Harvard can pay for the indirect costs at issue with a fraction of the money its $53B endowment earns.

You get 100% of the grant in both cases, as the total sum paid is 100% + overhead. You are not allowed to use that money on major expenses you didn't mention in the grant application. If the university gets less overhead and can't find alternate funding sources, it may kick you out of your lab, because nobody is paying for it anymore.

Research grants are ripe fruit to university administrations. But the new guidelines limit the cut a sponsoring institution can take out of a federal grant to 15%.

For instance Texas medical schools/institutions would previously take as much as half the money in a US grant from the researcher and use it for whatever they wish. I believe Trump's measures are intended to cut back on such situations.

I'm fairly certain the institutions will find a way around Trump's measures, given time. It's a cat-and-mouse game.

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