Major news out of NIH tonight, which I’m told will have a dramatic impact on all academic medical centers and research universities generally. Anyone familiar with the sciences knows that scientists bring in grant money for various research projects and the grant money is split between the grantee who might be a researcher or a lab, etc. and the host institution. So the hospital or the university, etc. The new directive limits what goes to the institution for “indirect costs” to 15%. I don’t know this area well enough to get into the precise rationales for which rates make the most sense in the abstract. But that’s not really the point. From what I can tell this directive slashes the kind of government research funding available to these institution by as much as 60% or 70%. (I want to keep those percentages vague because this isn’t my area but I think that captures at least the general scale.) So these sound like huge budget shortfalls for academic research institutions, academic medical centers and so forth. And this is above and beyond the “freezes” that are still mostly in effect, albeit in many cases unofficially.
There are parallel efforts to push through dramatic cuts in support for scientific research beyond the medical and life sciences. But this one seems like the most concrete and explicit to date. The big picture is that this is a very intentional attack on academic institutions and medical research, part of what is best seen as a culture war that the new administration is waging against half of the country. American primary in the sciences globally seems really in doubt going forward. There’s a reason scientists from all over the world come to the US. Germany owned that before World War II. The combination of the Nazi seizure of power in the 1930s and then World War II brought that primacy to the US. This and other measures follow a very clear strategy of dismantling that.
