Jaryn Crouson
Contributor
Several universities and higher education associations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Department of Energy (DOE) over a new policy capping indirect research funding cost rates at 15%.
The DOE announced April 11 it would limit support for indirect costs, or money that is used for administrative and other non-research related expenses, to 15% for all research funding. The Association of American Universities (AAU), American Council on Education (ACE) and schools such as Cornell, Brown and the University of Michigan claim in the suit that the department’s decision is “flagrantly unlawful” and “will devastate scientific research,” according to the lawsuit.
“[I]f DOE’s policy is allowed to stand, it will devastate scientific research at America’s universities and badly undermine our Nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation,” the lawsuit argues.
The lawsuit alleges several vital projects, such as “the development of advanced nuclear and cybersecurity technologies, arms control verification mechanisms designed to reduce the risk of nuclear war, novel radioactive drugs to diagnose and treat cancer, and upgrades for the electrical grids that keep the lights on in rural communities,” would be impacted by the cuts.
“These actions are part of a continuing and dangerous effort to erode federal support for university-based research,” AAU, ACE and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) said in a joint statement announcing the lawsuit. “The proposed DOE cap would have an immediate and damaging impact on critical energy, physical sciences, and engineering research at more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide.”
ACE and APLU did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. AAU referred the DCNF to the group’s public statement.
The DOE’s move aimed to save taxpayers $405 million annually, the agency said in its announcement of the decision, stating “The purpose of Department of Energy funding to colleges and universities is to support scientific research – not foot the bill for administrative costs and facility upgrades.” The cut did not apply to direct research funding.
A spokesman for the DOE told the Daily Caller News Foundation it “does not comment on ongoing litigation.”
The indirect costs typically go towards expenses such as “facility costs,” which include “depreciation on buildings, equipment and capital improvements, and operations and maintenance expenses,” and “general administration and [other] general expenses,” which includes funding for “the director’s office, accounting, [and] personnel,” according to the DOE.
Some universities, such as the University of Illinois, a plaintiff listed in the lawsuit, receive as much as 58.6% in indirect funding, the suit says. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), another plaintiff, estimates it would lose as much as $16 million in funding if the DOE cut is allowed to take effect.
Neither university immediately responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February was also met with backlash after it similarly capped indirect research funding costs at 15%. Many universities have also negotiated their funding rates with NIH previously, with Harvard receiving upwards of 69% in indirect funding. (RELATED: Trump Administration Questions US-Funded Researchers Abroad For ‘Anti-American Beliefs’)
A federal judge has since permanently blocked NIH’s cut due to improper procedure in initiating the cuts.
The Trump administration pulled a similar move in 2017, proposing a rule capping NIH indirect grant costs at 10%.
Cornell, Brown and the University of Michigan did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
What a strange reaction by the universities. Surely, if they have to cut, they would make the least important cuts first.
Look at what “services” get cut first every time there is a budget battle in congress.
Got to keep those Vice Presidents of DIE feed. The grad students and adjunct faculty who keep the place running can cut back to two meals per day.
That’s not the strategy of bureaucrats and parasites on taxpayer largesse, the cuts must be made to the most highly visible, tangible and important to get media and opposition politicians’ attention and fuel public outcry.
Objective: the evil people taking their candy away will be embarrassed, brow-beaten, repent, and just go away and let the gravy-train carry on, on its way.
Universities have been getting away with this shit for years. They get a building that outlasts the original grant it was meant for. Cut their funding completely. They can get money from donors. I remember when I enquired about research on something, years ago. I had to fund it, and they would get the royalties. Fuck you.
You imply that there is no possibility for serious reform. I, rather, hope that there could be real reform if the squeeze is enough. Is it possible to reduce “Administration” by half, get rid of teaching evaluations that link to academic salarys, get rid of DEI. If this is possible, the Ivy League will be the last to change.
One pen pusher per five productive employees sounds about right to me.
The ratio is more than that. The pen pusher is paid a lot more than the graduate students who do the majority of the work.
You left out the /s
Overhead should be capped at 15%? Sounds about right. Now do K-12 public education.
A large number of federal grants have limits on administrative expenses. Government grants for research should be no different. The universities don’t want to go back to the old way when industry funded research but required some “royalties” from any productive products.
Just get the federal government out of all funding for universities for any reason. If needed, let the states do it.
Or industry.
One possible exception might be military related research. Still mulling that idea over, so do not over-react.
Right- there will be exceptions- but billions for ivy league lefty universities? I think what it does it help them jack up salaries for the tenured elites. They don’t pay the adjuncts more though- my wife was one for 20 years- the pay for them was absurdly low.
Some of that G&A pays the fees to get papers peer reviewed and published.
Publish a paper a day. 250 work days a year. $1500 per paper. $375,000 per year just to publish or perish and NONE of that is research.
Yes. To all you said, yes.
For military research, there is usually a need for security clearances. That necessarily involves the government.
Lots of military research at government labs, e.g., Lawrence Livermore & Oak Ridge.
My Cal Poly SLO Comp. Sci spawn got his LL security clearance nearly 20 years ago. It took months, and he freelanced it after graduation, before starting work. Still there, HMF’ing..
My first experience with research grants was back in 2011. My company partnered with Duke University to develop a software program to reduce people going to the Emergency Room and direct them to local clinics or better yet adopt a more healthy lifestyle. It was ~$2M+- and Duke tacked on 55% for “administration”. All they did was do some paper shuffling. Funny that we couldn’t tack anything on for administration.
Duke had a full blown bureaucracy doing administration of grants and it had to be a big profit center for them. A few years later they finally got audited and ended up paying quite a bit of money back. Of course that didn’t stop them getting new grants and it continues today.
I worked with a professor at UC Davis on a research proposal submitted the federal government in the early 2000’s. Since I was the lead investigator, it was my duty to control the funding cost so that the proposal could be approved.
Proposal budgets out of line never get funded. The UC Davis professor’s budget was the most out of line so I asked if there was any way he could reduce his costs. He told me that the University took 75% of all research funding and the 25% would only pay for one graduate student for one year of the 3-year research finding.
So, I had to submit the proposal with his budget. The proposal was rejected.
It is well known that university overhead/administration takes the lion share of research funding at many universities.
“Some universities, such as the University of Illinois, a plaintiff listed in the lawsuit, receive as much as 58.6% in indirect funding, the suit says.”
They say that like it’s a good thing. It is not a stretch to say that self-awareness is something a would-be ivory tower finds antithetical.
They say it to justify suing for the loss. That’s the only reason. The correct response is “Boo Hoo, how much does it cost you to sharpen pencils?”
Two issues here:
1) what is the appropriate cap on indirect expenses … all organizations have to deal with that matter, but clearly when indirects eat up more than half of the funding that is clearly off base
2) what is the appropriate procedure to use to cap indirect costs. If that is something already delegated by Congress to the President under existing law, then the universities have no case. But if not, then the way to address issue #1 is to go to Congress and enact legislation that either sets a specific limit, or authorizes the President to set a limit (probably within some bounded range of %).
We’ve all seen repeatedly in the last three months that Trump acts as if he personally IS the law, and routinely bypasses Congress and assumes legislative powers that simply do not belong to the President. His modus operandi it to try to bring about immediate radical changes to how the Federal government operates. But our Constitution says otherwise – i.e., that Congress sets all policies and the role of the President is to administer those policies.
That is the basis on which SCOTUS recently overturned the Chevron doctrine, stating clearly that “major questions” are to be determined by the Congress not the President. Most of us here at WUWT celebrated the overturning of Chevron when it overturned the EPA’s policies. Well, it’s a two edge sword and applies equally to Trump. When these cases eventually make it to SCOTUS for a ruling based upon substantive issues, Trump will lose.
Trump would be far better served by attempting to work through Congress with its pending “one big beautiful bill” (i.e, 2025 budget reconciliation act) than trying to go it alone on virtually everything, which not only sets up inevitable judicial reverses but also tends to spark fears of dictatorship amongst all of us.
Trump “routinely bypasses Congress and assumes legislative powers …”
I assume that is part of the plan to get the issues investigated and spur solutions by Congress and the Courts. Trump doesn’t have time to work all these initiatives through the swamp. Likely, he has (now) only 21 months to force such issues.
Ah yes. Lets do nothing, which the Democrats in Congress really mean. As their allies in the permanent bureaucracy do their bidding, with Congressional Democrats taking no public responsibility for the diverted funds. We really need the jobs programs for holders of unsalable degrees!
“But our Constitution says otherwise – i.e., that Congress sets all policies and the role of the President is to administer those policies.” Duane, you should go back and read our Constitution; the President has many executive powers that are routinely used by all Presidents, such as setting contract overhead limits. We at the Department of Energy had many different contract overhead limits, set by the Contracting Officer at his discretion, depending on the nature of the work. And the levels of contract overhead certainly do not rise to SCOTUS’s “major questions” ruling.
Ah yes, let’s start a trade war with China to bring back American innovation while simultaneously hamstringing our largest research institutions to fight the imaginary woke monster. Trump is an unparalleled economic genius making 238D chess moves.
‘Trump is an unparalleled economic genius making 238D chess moves.’
Close enough. Kidding aside, at some point we’re going to have to either acquiesce to, or pullback from, the un-Constitutional reality that the Federal government has four branches, one of which is unaccountable to the People through the will of any duly elected or appointed officials outside of those fully aligned with the collectivist goals of the Democrat Party.
The monster in America is the $36.5 trillion dollar debt, which is not imaginary. As long as you continue to excuse that as a direct result of poor policy, then you will never wake up anyway and your only salvation is to hope you die before the inevitable monetary collapse.
I actually think (one of) the monsters in America is China, but I think Trump is the wrong solution. China is fundamentally outcompeting us on innovation and technological progress. We are way, way behind. And Trump wants to combat it by starting a trade war with the entire planet and doing more coal mining and dismantling research institutions for being woke.
Except Trump isn’t starting a trade war, he is trying to stop one that has been waged against the US for decades.
Glad you love the CCP so much, and accept their theft of US patents and industry as “innovation” and their use of slave labour as “technological progress”.
The US has not been in a trade war with the entire rest of the planet for centuries, that is absurd.
I have no love for the CCP, nor did I say that technological progress equates to social progress. I am stating an objective fact, one we ignore at our own peril (and a fact that your god emperor Trump fully agrees with, so I’m not sure why you are taking an adversarial stance except that you’re an eternal contrarian). It doesn’t matter how China got where they are, they are there, and we are not. And Trump’s solution is a global trade war and coal.
How wrong you are.. again.
USA has been charge huge imports tariffs by many countries for decades, barred from exporting to some countries, while having second rate goods flooded onto their own markets and US technology stolen..
That is a trade war.
What Trump is doing is NOT a trade war, it is trade equalisation.
Coal has always been a really good cheap and reliable source of energy, Trump is doing the right thing to try to use it to support American industry.
Your far-left pro-CCP, anti-American bent is again noted.
The mere existence of tariffs does not constitute a trade war. This view is economically ignorant. What we are in now is a trade war. With the entire planet.
Trump’s stated goal is trade equalization – the removal of trade deficits. But this is an idiotic and economically ignorant goal not supported by a single economic scholar on planet earth.
What is true and undeniable is that China is an immense economic threat because they are moving quickly on technological innovation that Trump is actively trying to hamstring. A return to coal is not the jumpstart American dominance needs.
It sounds like you’ll be a good little soldier when the time comes.
indirect research funding
That is basically general and administrative costs that are not directly related to the research itself.
It comes down to how many does it take to put in a light bulb.
not foot the bill for administrative costs and facility upgrades.” The cut did not apply to direct research funding.
Industry has a G&A cap, especially on government contracts.
So why is it evil to constrain university to the same sets of rules?
I know! DoE can take it down to 10%, and file suits against administrators for fraud over the massive amounts of money they have been taking for “administrative” purposes. Lawfare, it is how we drive leftists OUT of our educational systems nationwide.
The growth of administrative bloat at universities. “Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.”
Meanwhile, notice among the peer-reviewed: “What’s that smell? Bullshit jobs in higher education“
The 1976 – 2018 timeline seems about right to me – the first thing you do when you’ve ‘marched through the institutions’ is to reward the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’.
I understand “indirect costs” and have a gut feeling that 10% is too low. But I always object to what I term “stealth taxes”. My first realization of the problem was when the State of Washington was sued for high license plate fees that supported a number of unrelated (to transportation) activities.
In the case of universities, the “depreciation on buildings” is of the stealth category. A good review of the calculations for indirect costs is warranted.
I used to work with an agency that received federal funds under the Head Start program. As I recall, Head Start overhead funding paid for all sorts of extra “administrative” stuff. The agency lost the program for failure to meet basic requirements, and all that extra money disappeared (I will add this all happened before I got involved.) Had they just put that money toward the requirements (interpreters), they might still have the program, kids in that community might still have access to it, and lots of people might still have jobs.
Paying the salaries of deputy assistant adjunct deans of Social Outreach should not be charged off to energy research.
What Universities don’t want you to know is that 80% or more of their staff is not directly involved in managing research. So, limiting overhead to 15% makes complete sense. When I was a Grad Student, overhead was maybe 20% of the budget with the remainder going directly to the research project. Now they want 70% for administration and that is ridiculous. This sounds exactly like USAID where most of the funds are funneled to those that do nothing to benefit society or even the government..
What is needed is an actual accounting of University costs for all aspects of their operations. Per Victor David Hanson, 51% of employees at Stanford are administrators. What do they do that benefits the education of students? Oversee Transgender participation in sports and manage DEI activities?
I know that Harvard and other ‘elite’ universities have absolutely MASSIVE ‘endowments’, in the BILLIONS of dollars, $16M being cut from MIT funding for ‘administrative staff’ is a pittance to them. If it was me I wouldn’t pay them 1 dime for ‘administrative staff/work effort’ that can come out of their own funds. The money for research should go to the researchers, the administrative work effort would need to be there anyway for running the primary function of a University…educating the students.
The whole concept of government funded research is fraught with largesse, political motivation and waste. Other than for things the government may directly need e.g. space flight, military etc. that the government is in the ‘business’ of providing it should be left to private industry to do the investing. Don’t get me wrong, I have an M.Sc in Physics and have seen some very good basic research done with funding from government but there’s no reason it had to be.
Consider the BILLIONS spent on the Cern Supercollider simply to find 1 more particle so physicists could feel good about themselves. Again a lot of interesting technology including the Web/Browser came from Cern (I like to say I was in the first 50K people to ever use the Mosaic browser…likely true given I was lucky in where I was getting my M.Sc.) so I’m not saying it was a total waste. But even so there were billions wasted on the one in Texas before it was shutdown and if it’s that important to the world private industry could have funded it.
I fundamentally believe in the importance of funding ‘basic research’ (research with maybe no obvious direct impact on a daily life) but what I’m seeing these days doesn’t give me the ‘warm and fuzzies’ that its money well spent.
!5% maximum for administration within research grants seems perfectly reasonable to me. Perhaps those universities could seek advice from their business faculty on how to run their empires more efficiently first before demanding the taxpayer cough up the money.
I don’t understand how indirect research funding works. Let us say that a professor from the physics department was awarded a 1000 dollar grant. Does that mean the professor gets 850 dollars and the school gets 150 dollars or that the professor gets 1000 dollars and the government chips in another 150 to the school for administrative purposes?
Don’t understand the issue. The impact is immaterial. It’s up to the DOE whether they want to continue the research if universities to not agree to the terms. I would think this would be purely a contractual issue. Do existing contracts allow for such changes or early termination? New contracts would simply make the overhead limit part of the contract. We have money, we will pay for research if you are interested, and these are our Ts and Cs.