If you want the public to believe that was wrong, you’ll need to make that case.
They looked at a handful of cherry picked charities that love to donate to high profile projects. Universities subsidize these grants internally to get other donations!
When I get money from say the Gates foundation, they are almost always topping up existing research not doing something new. On a high profile topic donors are attracted to.
These cherry picked foundations also give very little money; well under 1% of what we bring in. So the lack of indirect costs has a minor effect on the system that gets balanced by other well meaning donors.
Had they looked at other grants they would have seen that the indirect costs are in line with what NIH was paying. The bulk of other grants includes NSF, DARPA, ONR, etc.
Or they could have asked, when a corporation gives a university money, what do they think is a reasonable overhead rate? Because we don't accept money from for profit entities at anything less than the full overhead rate. And corporations pay it because it's reasonable. That's because they fund a lot of research and because they aren't a charity we would subsidize with other donations.
Or they could ask. When a corporation gets an NIH grant, what are their indirect costs? Are university indirect costs in line? After all everyone needs to keep the lights on.
Corporations are not subject to the cap at all! They can get a grant and charge 100% overhead. This only applies to universities. The government could not give a biotech company a grant with 15% overhead, no company would ever take it.
I have seen the indirect costs that some major corporations charge. 100% is low for them! And the government pays it. In every single contract with industry.
Except for universities. That they single out to dry to drive into insolvency.
So no. They didn't look at other grants. They could have computed countless statistics against tens of millions of grants for hundreds of billions of dollars. They picked the most elite nice small charities that give out a few hundred grants that we fund ourselves for the most bleeding heart projects.
You only listed peer government grant agencies — which people believe have similar problems to NIH.
> And the government pays it. In every single contract with industry.
And the same people generally believe that’s also full of fraud and waste. So what’s your argument?
> They could have computed countless statistics against tens of millions of grants for hundreds of billions of dollars.
So why don’t you do that, to prove them wrong? It sounds really easy.
Is there actual evidence that shows there was an issue that needed to be immediately addressed the way it was? Some evidence of "fraud" perhaps ?
