Trump 15% cap on grant costs will spark the reform the academy needs

For another example of how the judicial “resistance” to Team Trump reforms manages to seize the moral low ground, consider federal Judge Angel Kelley’s blocking of a 15% cap on taxpayer coverage of “indirect costs” tacked on to National Institutes of Health grants for university research.

Kelley (a Biden appointee, natch) complains this would be disruptive — yet this scam cries out for disruption.

Look at one ongoing study by Harvard prof Elizabeth Janiak, which seeks to look at “societal dynamics of power and oppression” around abortion through an “intersectional framework.”

For that, taxpayers shelled out a hair more than $495,000, of which about $168,000 was for “indirect” costs, which supposedly cover Havard’s overhead to undergird Janiak’s research.

That’s an extra 51 “indirect” cents on every “direct” dollar (i.e. the money paying for the actual science) — and indirect costs aren’t even itemized, so there’s no telling at all how Harvard actually spends the windfall. 

How much practical assistance does she need for a “framework” view of “societal dynamics”?

Maybe Harvard is buying gold-plated dream-catchers, or just maybe it’s milking the NIH because it can.

Fine, it’ll be a rude awakening for Harvard to lose out on (some) free money.

But the 15% rule shouldn’t even force it to dip into its endowment of $50 billion and growing. 

Heck, private contracts for university research typically allow nothing for “indirect costs.”

As Matt Taibbi’s recent Post column noted, these schools are mega-rich, often with billions in “cash reserves” on top of their endowments.

We’re all in favor of taxpayer funding for actual scientific research, but this system is plainly beyond broken.

And was even before the Great Awokening saw our elite scientists utterly prostitute themselves to conform with lefty politics around race, gender, COVID and everything else, incinerating the public’s trust (as witness the abortion study cited above).

Insanely, the shameless “science” bros are still at it: A rally on March 7 saw former NIH head Francis Collins and others screaming for more, more, more tax dollars even as they continued to push their DEI agenda. 

Let the sunlight in, stop soaking everyday Americans and remind our comrade academicians just whose interests they’re supposed to be using those fed bucks to advance.