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They are not changing this rate to cut taxes. They clearly actually believe that research budgets were being swindled. Were they? Your comment doesn’t address it. I have no idea.

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You’d think if they were being swindled someone in academia would have been pissed about it and sounded the alarm. These are smart people after all who fight tooth and nail for every dollar of grant money they are awarded. They don’t like paying indirect costs either. But it turns out, you kind of need a functioning research building in order to do research. Now admins at universities are trying to figure out how they can get the damn toilet paper paid for as a direct cost because that is actually where we are at with this stuff today.

Absolutely not. DOE faculties charge way more overhead for work that they perform for universities—-up to 100%. And DOE lab postdocs are almost 2X as well paid as comparable university postdocs. And their senior leadership in science are way way above GSA scale since they are formally not in the government but work for contractors like Battelle.

If sustained this policy This would put reciprocal contracts and collaborations between major DOE facilities and universities on total hold. Not a good thing if you think progress in science is even vaguely useful.

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