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The entire academic industry is in turmoil, the uncertainty on how bad things could get is probably the worst of it as Universities are having to plan for some

• rayiner 2y ago
  > For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this. This was an overnight (likely illegal!) change made with no warning and no consultation. Why should the public believe that procedures that produced 59% overhead rates in the first place can be trusted to fix those overhead rates now? Sounds like a demand for an opportunity to derail needed reform by drowning it in red tape. Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress.
  • mlyle 2y ago
    > Also, what would be illegal about the change? Are the overhead rates in a statute somewhere? The grants certainly aren’t individually appropriated by Congress. 2024 appropriations (and it showed in many years before then-- Public Law 118-47. Statutes at Large 138 (2024): 677. SEC. 224. In making Federal financial assistance, the provisions relating to indirect costs in part 75 of title 45, Code of Federal Regulations, including with respect to the approval of deviations from negotiated rates, shall continue to apply to the National Institutes of Health to the same extent and in the same manner as such provisions were applied in the third quarter of fiscal year 2017. None of the funds appropriated in this or prior Acts or otherwise made available to the Department of Health and Human Services or to any department or agency may be used to develop or implement a modified approach to such provisions, or to intentionally or substantially expand the fiscal effect of the approval of such deviations from negotiated rates beyond the proportional effect of such approvals in such quarter.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      That says the indirects must be based on the existing regulations. The memo purports to rely on the existing regulations. It relies on 45 CFR §75.414(c)(1), which states: > The negotiated rates must be accepted by all Federal awarding agencies. An HHS awarding agency may use a rate different from the negotiated rate for a class of Federal awards or a single Federal award only when required by Federal statute or regulation, or when approved by a Federal awarding agency head or delegate based on documented justification as described in paragraph (c)(3) of this section. Subsection (c)(3), in turn, says: > (3) The HHS awarding agency must implement, and make publicly available, the policies, procedures and general decision making criteria that their programs will follow to seek and justify deviations from negotiated rates. Just based on a quick perusal it seems like the administration has a decent argument that the agency head can approve the 15% indirect by fiat as long as he or she comes up with a documented justification.
      • mlyle 2y ago
        https://goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-costs-at-nih https://goodscience.substack.com/p/indirect-costs-at-nih This reads that argument in the exact opposite direction: > So, an HHS division like NIH can use a different rate only for a “class” of grants or a “single” grant, and only with “documented justification.” > There is nothing that says NIH could, in one fell swoop, overturn literally every negotiated rate agreement for 100% of all grants with all medical and academic institutions in the world, with the only justification being “foundations do it” rather than any costing principle whatsoever from the rest of Part 75 of 45 C.F.R. Further, this doesn't allow a blanket adjustment to existing awards.
  • skwb 2y ago
    > Also, what would be illegal about the change? At the *very* least you should be following the administrative rules act (requiring you to solicit 45 days for comments by effected parties) before making such a dramatic change in policy. Courts absolutely love striking down EOs (of both Dems and Reps Admins) when they should have been following the administrative rules act.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      You can file an APA lawsuit about anything. Nobody really calls APA violations “illegal.” It’s a “show your work” and “don’t be drunk or crazy” procedural law.
      • skwb 2y ago
        The fact that courts do strike down admins on violating the APA does, in fact, make it illegal.
      • jhp123 2y ago
        DACA repeal was blocked on APA grounds
  • colincooke 2y ago
    1. Why should the public believe that they can fix it. Perhaps they can't, that's not entirely my point. My point is that if the government firmly believes that a change is necessary there are _simple_ ways of acheiving such a change without causing such chaos, waste, and hardship. Perhaps a phased in approach, or other mechanisms. Overnight shock therapy offers very little economic benefits while having very harsh personal and insitutional cost. 2. What is illegal about the change. The NIH overhead rate is actually negotiated directly between the institution and the NIH, following a process put into law. This is why a federal judge has blocked this order [1]. I'm far from a lawyer, but my read of this is that this is a change that would need to come through congress or a re-negotiation of the rates through the mandated process. [1]: https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-results-nationwide-temporary-restraining-order-proposed-drastic-cuts-nih-funding https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/aamc-lawsuit-result...
  • BenFranklin100 2y ago
    You seem to be unfamiliar with how indirect rates work. First some basic math: if a project is budgeted at a direct cost of $500,000, the indirect rate of 60% applies to the $500,000, i.e. $300,000. The total grant is thus $500K + $300K = $800K. The $300K indirect costs are thus 37.5% of the total. This is an upper limit, as many direct costs such as equipment do not get indirect rates applied to them. Second, these rates are painstakingly negotiated with the NSF and NIH. Yearly audits to ensure compliance must be passed if funding is to continue. Third, these indirect cost go towards to items such as electricity, heat, building maintenance, safety training and compliance, chemical disposal, and last by not least laboratory support services such as histology labs, proteomics core, compute infrastructure, and some full time staff scientific staff. Only a relatively small portion goes to administration. Finally, scientists generally would welcome review and reform of indirect costs to ensure they get the maximize benefit from the indirect rates. However, DOGE is not interested in reform. They are interested in raze and burn destruction. If DOGE gets its way, it will knock the Unites States off its perch as the world’s technological leader.
    • a2tech 2y ago
      You can tell people the truth all day long. They don’t want to hear it. They’re convinced that academia is rotten to the core and none of your facts and figures will dissuade them. For example I know at my institution every dollar, every piece of effort, is painstakingly tracked and attributed to funding sources. We have extensive internal checks to make sure we aren’t misusing funds. Audits happen at every major milestone. All of that effort is reported. It’s exhausting but the government requires it because we have to be good stewards of the funds we have been granted. No one believes it.
      • BenFranklin100 2y ago
        We must keep trying. It’s frustrating but we can’t give up. Scientific progress depends on us.
      • addicted 2y ago
        I’m not part of academia but was heavily involved in funding because of my position in student government while still in college. While I won’t argue there isn’t waste (what endeavor doesn’t have waste?) it’s an incredibly tiny percentage (except in cases where there was actual fraud, which we also discovered and the Feds prosecuted and convicted people for). The irony is that academia is so afraid of “waste” that I wouldn’t be surprised if colleges spend more money on the auditing and the compliances, etc than the actual waste they prevent.
  • addicted 2y ago
    The “overhead” isn’t even overhead as most people understand it. But the real question is why does the general public think 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an appropriate level of “overhead” is 1000%. In reality the people who actually know anything about how this is calculated, across the board and across the political spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all. The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means other than taking a lay persons understanding that all overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that anything above 0% is bad.
    • ModernMech 2y ago
      This is really it. Generally they gesture vaguely toward a notion of "administrative and bureaucratic overhead", without really understanding how that overhead actually cuts waste and improves research output by removing redundancies. If we were to zero out this administrative overhead, it would mean every professor would end up doing less research and more not-research.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      Were the people at HHS who tried to reduce indirect costs in 2013 during the Obama administration also not the “people who actually know anything?” https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/17/harvard-mit-and-other-research-schools-thwart-obama-administration-effort-cap-overhead-payments/Nk5PT0Mc8MQZihFVNs5gNK/story.html https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe... I bet the “people who actually know anything” at Boeing would also say their launch costs are as low as they can go and there’s nothing to cut.
      • selimthegrim 2y ago
        It seems like the better comparison from your article would be 1992, but really, having RFK Junior sitting there with a chainsaw is in no way comparable to 2013
        • rayiner 2y ago
  • johnnyanmac 2y ago
    >Also, what would be illegal about the change? Besides the president screwing with the budget agreed upon by Congress that kicked all this off?
  • amluto 2y ago
    I’m not convinced that the rate, per se, is actually a problem. What is a problem is the structure. If a contract said “you get $1M to do X and your university gets $590k, paid pro rata by time until completion”, fine, and one could quibble about the rates. Instead, the grant is for $1.59M, and each individual charge to the grant pays an extra 59% to the university, conditionally, depending on the type of charge and the unbelievably messed up rules set by the university in concert with the government. Buying a $4000 laptop? Probably costs your grant balance $6360. Buying a $5000 laptop? Probably costs $5000 becuase it’s “capital equipment” or “major equipment” and is thus exempt. Guess who deliberately wastes their own and this also the university’s and government’s money by deliberately buying unnecessarily expensive stuff? It gets extra fun when the same research group has grants from different sources with different overhead rates: costs are allocated based on whether they are exempt from overhead! And cost-plus disease is in full effect, too. If the research group doesn’t use all their awarded money because the finish the project early or below estimated cost, the university doesn’t get paid their share of the unspent money. This likely contributes to grantees never wanting to leave money unspent. Of course, DOGE isn’t trying to fix any of the above.
  • plantwallshoe 2y ago
    If they can’t be trusted to fix the problem themselves with a 5 year phase in period they most definitely can’t be trusted to fix the problem immediately…so I don’t get your point.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      Everyone involved in the current process has an incentive to not change anything. If you go through the existing process with some five year target, the universities and bureaucrats will bleed you to death with procedures and lawsuits and lobbying, as they did with prior efforts under Obama. It’s the same way NIMBYs kill development projects. The only way to change it is shock and awe.
      • plantwallshoe 2y ago
        What article are we taking about? The response to “shock and awe” was rescind offers to students, not cut down on administrators or address inefficiencies.
        • rayiner 2y ago
          That’s a temporary measure. The universities know that in he long run they need students but can cut administrators. But at least the immediate reaction is controlling costs rather than geering up to lobby and litigate their way out of it.
          • sudosysgen 2y ago
            The US has a peculiar culture where elite academic institutions are very much willing to limit their numbers of students, so it's not clear to me that they will in the long run control costs. Large, prestigious US universities have historically preferred funding more administrators over more students.
            • ModernMech 2y ago
              Those elite universities are less like schools and more like towns, so the focus is not just on teaching students but on maintaining a community. Sometimes that means protecting the people you have at the expense of people you haven't met yet. In many cases, "more administrators" translates to "better town services", so it's nor surprising to me the preference to cut enrollment.
  • no-thank-you 2y ago
    I'm curious about where you would draw the line on government workforce/spending reductions. What specific cost-cutting measures would go too far and make you withdraw support from Trump/MAGA-related initiatives? For example: - Complete elimination of federal workforce (RAGE) - Full military withdrawal from NATO/Europe - Dramatic cuts to essential services (eg, Social Security) What potential actions would make you feel the downsides outweigh any benefits? I'm curious what your threshold is for acceptable vs. unacceptable changes.
• blindriver 2y ago
  Elon proved with Twitter that large corporations can survive drastic, chaotic and insane levels of cuts/layoffs (80%+) and still survive. If DOGE waited to do things less drastically, nothing would ever get done. The cuts that are going through are nothing as drastic as what Twitter endured (except USAID) so I guess he is willing to risk short term disruption for long-term spending cuts and that the organization will reorganize and restabilize pretty quickly.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • duxup 2y ago
    > and still survive Twitter hardly ever made money before and after is in the same state now. Its contribution (anything?) to this country is far different than a government institution. The comparison here isn’t encouraging and makes no sense.
    • antman 2y ago
      Amazon made almost no profits for many many years others too. They follow a reinvest or expansion strategy and if investors believe it the stock goes up. It is not encouraging that Twitter lost 80% of its value under Musk's leadership and not something pne wants for the US Government which also does not work on a for profit basis. Ofcourse Musk fakes that he doesn't know that and promotes his unsubstantiated wins stories daily.
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Amazon offered very obviously valuable and profitable services. I think we're starting to realize ad-based monetization is not how to maintain a billion dollar corporation anymore. I wouldn't have much aspects for Twitter even if Musk never took over. But he sure did accelerate things.
        • Fade_Dance 2y ago
• fooker 2y ago
  I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this. There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year. This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.
  • colincooke 2y ago
    Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run. You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.
    • fooker 2y ago
      I disagree. The kind of reform you are talking about does not work against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of small countries. It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then it'll be a game of whack a mole. There's a reason things got so bad.
      • vkou 2y ago
        Yes, the rule of law is incredibly inconvenient. Why be bound by it, when you can just do anything that you want?
        • fooker 2y ago
          Yes, that's why countries are not just run by courts and judges.
          • vkou 2y ago
            If you want to change the law, the legislature is right there. All it needs to do is pass a bill. If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to follow it. This is generally how civilized people are expected to behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to do away with the rule of law.
• ars 2y ago
  > it should be phased in to allow This NEVER works. It just doesn't. Bureaucracies are self perpetuating, it's just their nature. Each person at the bureaucracy is 100% certain they are essential. The only way to shrink them is to force them.
  • costigan 2y ago
    The federal workforce, as a percentage of all jobs in the U.S. was 4% in the 50's, decreased steadily to 2% in 2000 and has held roughly steady since then. (The source is https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-federal-government/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f... second figure, and I'm taking total jobs as a proxy for the population that the workforce serves.) The end of that period of reduction was Clinton's Presidency. Clinton's National Performance Review (NPR) started at the beginning his term in '93. It had goals very similar to the stated goals of this efficiency effort, but it was organized completely differently. He said, "I'll ask every member of our Cabinet to assign their best people to this project, managers, auditors, and frontline workers as well." GPT4o: The NPR's initial report, released in September 1993, contained 384 recommendations focused on cutting red tape, empowering employees, and enhancing customer service. Implementation of these recommendations involved presidential directives, congressional actions, and agency-specific initiatives. Notably, the NPR led to the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, which required federal agencies to develop strategic plans and measure performance outcomes. Additionally, the NPR contributed to a reduction of over 377,000 federal jobs during the 1990s, primarily through buyouts, early retirements, natural attrition and some layoffs (reductions-in-force or RIFs). Source: https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/brief.htm https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/library/papers/bkgrd/bri...): The recommendations that involved changes to law, the GPRA, were passed in both houses of Congress by unanimous voice vote. I don't think the stated goals of the current efficiency drive are controversial. The problem is the method. I want to understand the basis for people supporting those methods, the "we've got to break some eggs" crowd, when the example of the NPR exists. In my opinion, it didn't cause conflicts between branches of government, didn't disrupt markets, and was wildly successful. It also caused much less disruption in people's lives, because the changes were implemented over several years with much more warning. I, personally, don't think the real goals of this effort are the stated goals, but that's a different issue.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• eezurr 2y ago
  >For those who are unfamiliar with how career progress works in Academia, it is so competitive that even a year or two "break" in your career likely means you are forever unable to get a job. Honest question. If the job market is that competitive, why are we guiding people down this path that requires investing their entire young adult life? To me, it seems you've inadvertently made a case for cutting funding.
  • gizmo686 2y ago
    We aren't really. We are guiding people to get college degrees. However, undergraduate education and professional research are both done by the same institution. Further, that institution likes to have those professional and apprentice professional researchers work as teachers. The result of this is that undergraduates get a lot of exposure to professional Academia, so they naturally have a tendency to develop an interest in that profession. Given how small the profession actually is, even a small tendency here saturates the job market.
    • johnnyanmac 2y ago
      At this point, what profession isn't "small"? It feels like jobs are declining across all industries except for the most exploitative ones they can't easily outsource.
  • jltsiren 2y ago
    The big question is how should the government allocate the funding for basic research between career stages to maximize the benefit to the society. If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating. If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia, but it happens in a later career stage. If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of their ability to contribute.
  • yodsanklai 2y ago
• epolanski 2y ago
  > you are forever unable to get a job In academia*
• khazhoux 2y ago
  > For those who are questioning the validity of a 59% (or higher for some other institutions) overhead rate, your concerns are worth hearing and a review could be necessary, but oh my please not like this This comment encapsulates a big part of why people like Trump. They are sick of inaction in the name of careful consideration and nuance. And I kinda understand it. By analogy, I've see this many times at different companies I've worked at. Whether it's a 20-year scripting engine or a hastily put together build system that barely works but the entire project depends on, whenever someone suggests to replace it you just get reason after reason for why you have to move slowly and consider all the fine details. Months and years pass and the core system never improves because an "old guard" shuts down every attempt to change it. Finally, someone new comes in and calls bullshit and says enough's enough, and rallies a team to rebuild it. After a difficult process, you finally have something that works better than the old system ever could. Yeah, I understand the story doesn't always end well, but the analogy above helps me understand Trump's appeal.
  • josho 2y ago
    Let’s ask ourselves what happens when the story doesn’t end well and it’s a service that government has been providing. The answer may be lives are lost, the economy breaks, enemies win victories, etc. Move fast and break things is fine in a competitive marketplace. It’s asinine for the government to do. The answer is to elect better politicians who can nominate better heads and those department heads can drive the necessary change without succumbing to the old guard.
• _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  The people in charge don't want good action, they just want action and now. They want to damage these institutions. They have published and spoken extensively on this. That we keep letting their defenders change the narrative to pretend anything else and continue to give good faith WHEN THEY HAVE TOLD US THEY ARE NOT ACTING IN GOOD FAITH in insane to me. BTW, interesting thinking on the action for action's sake governing style: "The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation." https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the... If that action also hurts liberals working at traditionally liberal aligned institutions, all the better in their minds.