This is hilarious if you know what universities pay DOE facilities for indirects. Their charges are up to 100%%.
I have a good feel for this working with ORNL.
I hope this means they will be dropping their indirect rates to 15%. Yeh, right.
If you want a laugh, find out how much the people who actually do the work (grad students and postdocs) are paid out of a typical university research grant.
Typically grad students are also only paid for 20 hours of work per week; the other 20+ hours are considered "training" and are uncompensated (though the tuition/registration fee may be covered and paid directly to the university.)
There was a guy who was hired to pull all the data and setup from the hands of a University of Oregon grant administrator who would not give anyone access to the database system. The grant program was more than $150k per year? more? they had no more then eight students working at any given month, often half that, so four students and the admin for example. The students were paid about $10/hour IIR for up to 30 hours a month? So back of the envelope is that the labor costs were at most $4k per month, but the grant paid more than $10k per month. This went on for years and the sponsoring agency, a County government in California, was having trouble stopping the whole thing.
At the University of Oregon grad students are paid a minimum rate of $24 per hour plus full tuition, fees, and health insurance. They are limited to .49 FTE though. Overhead pays for facilities rent, computers, and payroll plus administrative costs like grant proposals, human subjects regulations and tracking adherence to all of the federal regulations on grants. 15% wouldn’t even cover the facilities (electrical costs, equipment maintenance, etc.) The Principal Investigators salaries are usually the highest expense, at .20 FTE for someone who can make upwards of $150,000 a year not including retirement, health insurance, etc.
the story below is true, about 15 years ago.. I think they hired undergrads, not staff graduate students. The undergrads did data entry mostly.. they did not pay the undergrads very much but in Oregon, most were content to get any money at all?
I used to think it was all about money. As it turns out it's all about power. The rich will "pay any amount of money to avoid taxes" as long as their relative power and influence increases.
They are not changing this rate to cut taxes. They clearly actually believe that research budgets were being swindled. Were they? Your comment doesn’t address it. I have no idea.
You’d think if they were being swindled someone in academia would have been pissed about it and sounded the alarm. These are smart people after all who fight tooth and nail for every dollar of grant money they are awarded. They don’t like paying indirect costs either. But it turns out, you kind of need a functioning research building in order to do research. Now admins at universities are trying to figure out how they can get the damn toilet paper paid for as a direct cost because that is actually where we are at with this stuff today.
Absolutely not. DOE faculties charge way more overhead for work that they perform for universities—-up to 100%. And DOE lab postdocs are almost 2X as well paid as comparable university postdocs. And their senior leadership in science are way way above GSA scale since they are formally not in the government but work for contractors like Battelle.
If sustained this policy This would put reciprocal contracts and collaborations between major DOE facilities and universities on total hold. Not a good thing if you think progress in science is even vaguely useful.
The federal govt is estimated to be bankrupt in 10 years. If by "ideologue" you mean people who not only recognise this but are ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING to address the problem (for the first time ever) then yes you may be right.
First time ever? We had a budget surplus with hitting paying off the national debt in the 90’s. First thing Bush Jr did was giant tax cut for the rich which ended that.
None of those things are documented. No fraud has been brought to the courts by then as far as I know. None of the cuts were massive. Any published cuts so far are a rounding error of the total, some are disputed as savings at all. Meanwhile the debt is being extended even further. And that's before considering how many of the attempted cuts were illegal themselves.
What you mean by doing it isn't actually happening.
I hope this means they will be dropping their indirect rates to 15%. Yeh, right.
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