Colleges, businesses, patients, students, workers, and US excellence will all suffer—and for what?
On February 7, the National Institutes of Health announced a 15 percent cap on indirect costs—an allowance that previously has averaged about 30 percent across the nation. For UNC, it meant a 40 percent research funding cut. The indirect rate, negotiated between the government and a given institution, is based on local and regional costs and various other factors.
Researchers, including biologist Mark Peifer, say cuts of this magnitude will be devastating.
“If my lab closes down, it will mean 10 people no longer have a job,” he says, and these are people “who live in my community, pay rent, go to the grocery store.”
If they stand, the reductions will create roadblocks for fledgling scientists, he says, because in many cases undergraduates will “no longer have an opportunity to engage in research.”
“It will end biomedical research in the county. That that’s what it really comes down,” Peifer says, noting that even facilities doing private biomedical and pharmaceutical research depend on public funding and the discoveries that result from it.
The NIH has existed for more than a century in the form of national labs and institutes, and to characterize the work it funds as “lifesaving” is not hyperbole, Peifer explains. Although cancer now vies with heart disease as America’s leading cause of death, “we have cancer death rates down 30 percent in the last 30 years,” he says, and “we’ve gotten even better at treating heart disease.”
The NIH cuts are part of a ham-fisted effort by the Trump administration to gut federal spending while rooting out “wokeness.” Capping indirect costs will save the $4 billion, the administration claims, but it’s easy to read between the lines. The NIH announcement cites a Heritage Foundation report titled, “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense,” which asserts that every 1 percent increase in indirect costs leads to two more “DEI employees.”
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