Energy Department cuts university overhead rates to 15% on research grants

This is hilarious if you know what universities pay DOE facilities for indirects. Their charges are up to 100%%. I have a good feel for this working with ORNL.

I hope this means they will be dropping their indirect rates to 15%. Yeh, right.

Nobody tell them what the wrap rate they’re paying contractors is. The universities were a deal at only 60% indirect costs.

If you want a laugh, find out how much the people who actually do the work (grad students and postdocs) are paid out of a typical university research grant.

Typically grad students are also only paid for 20 hours of work per week; the other 20+ hours are considered "training" and are uncompensated (though the tuition/registration fee may be covered and paid directly to the university.)

There was a guy who was hired to pull all the data and setup from the hands of a University of Oregon grant administrator who would not give anyone access to the database system. The grant program was more than $150k per year? more? they had no more then eight students working at any given month, often half that, so four students and the admin for example. The students were paid about $10/hour IIR for up to 30 hours a month? So back of the envelope is that the labor costs were at most $4k per month, but the grant paid more than $10k per month. This went on for years and the sponsoring agency, a County government in California, was having trouble stopping the whole thing.

At the University of Oregon grad students are paid a minimum rate of $24 per hour plus full tuition, fees, and health insurance. They are limited to .49 FTE though. Overhead pays for facilities rent, computers, and payroll plus administrative costs like grant proposals, human subjects regulations and tracking adherence to all of the federal regulations on grants. 15% wouldn’t even cover the facilities (electrical costs, equipment maintenance, etc.) The Principal Investigators salaries are usually the highest expense, at .20 FTE for someone who can make upwards of $150,000 a year not including retirement, health insurance, etc.