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Michael Buratovich, Ph.D's avatar

As someone who went through the whole funding rat-race and opted to be a science educator rather than a bench scientist, I can testify to the hours and hours and evenings away from family and friends to prepare grants that had little to no chance of getting funded because what I worked on was not sexy enough or benefited the right social class enough. That world was not for me. The people who were successful had wrecked marriages and were strangers to their children. I could not, in good conscience, continue down that road. Writing the grant was bad enough. The paperwork that went with it was soul sucking and a waste of time.

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Erik Westlund's avatar

I think most scientists, including R01 funded researchers, would agree with many of your critiques of the grants process. Particularly those doing less lab-intensive work, whose grants subsidize basic science and clinical trial infrastructure.

However, the administration's attempts to do this with no phase-in were anything but sensible. It was reckless. If it goes through, it will cause unnecessary chaos, job loss, and interruption. Chaos is not sensible.

Likewise, while I emphatically share the concerns about lack of transparency into the negotiated rates and what happens to the indirect funding after receipt, to claim it's all waste -- as many polemics have -- is disingenuous. It is in fact true that money pays for a lot of physical infrastructure and labor that is not line-itemed in each grant. And it is true that those facilities are required for research to continue. And it is true that in certain parts of the country providing those resources is more expensive.

The problem to me is that it's not at all clear that every dollar is required. We are asked to trust that the negotiation process is fair. I'm inclined to believe it mostly is. But the whole process is confusing to outsiders and often to insiders and now proves to be a massive liability. I think it's largely been an effective system, but even effective systems can be improved, and overall-effective systems can still produce perverse incentives that cause inefficiency, pain, and sometimes fraud.

15% seems to me a reasonable number, but only if time is allowed to reorganize the grant process. This can't be done in months or a year, but it could be done over the life cycle of current awards and perhaps faster.

To me, the obvious big picture answer is to make the indirects direct, but not on individual grants. We don't want scientists wasting time learning about refrigerator acquisition and maintenance costs, and we don't want a massive bureaucracy to arise where people figure out what share of the indirects they need to lobby for on their grant. There's a real risk in trading one bureaucratic mess for another.

Rather, universities and hospital systems should lay out their facilities and maintenance costs to support NIH-funded research in a direct and transparent way, and the federal government should be obliged to pay those costs. This should include every dollar needed to support active grants. Then you can save the 15% for discretionary spending to build capacity for future work. Moreover, non-NIH funded researchers at the institution will benefit from these facilities. 15% on billions of dollars of grants is still a lot of money for capacity building and should incentivize organizations to continue participating in the competitive process. But you can't do 15% without making sure the ability to truly keep up with facilities and maintenance is sustained. Making sure this goes smoothly is going to take good faith, transparent negotiations.

I am, to say the least, skeptical of the current administration's willingness to engage in this process in good faith. It is evident that many right-wing polemicists and culture warriors do not care about these details. They want to inflict pain on the universities, who they see as part of the cultural left to be destroyed, even if it means damaging valuable research along with DEI policies and cultural studies departments they despise. And similar critiques go to those in the universities who, under siege, refuse to look inward and blindly defend systems that do in fact need reform, and do in fact generate fraud and waste in a small but non-trivial amount of cases. (See the the Alzheimers debacle.) No part of this back and forth is sensible.

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