Over the weekend, the National Institutes of Health announced that it would be cutting the rate at which it pays universities for overhead on federal research grants from an average of about 60% to 15%. Not surprisingly, there were howls of protest from university staff and their fellow-travelers in the media. Given their professional commitment to the truth, it is surprising to see how false and misleading those objections have been.
The biggest whopper came from a Washington Post story covering the NIH announcement with the headline: “NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately.” But the NIH didn’t cut a penny from the amount it would spend. It simply limited how much of its funding could go to administrative overhead. Spending the same amount but capping overhead costs actually increases the net amount available for biomedical research….
