Perry Wilson: NIH has announced a cut in the “indirect rate” to 15% across the board
Perry Wilson, Director of Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator at Yale University, shared a post on X:
“NIH has announced a cut in the ‘indirect rate’ to 15% across the board, in a move that appears to be retroactive to even existing grants. This is a bloodbath for research institutions throughout the country.
Brief explainer for those not in this world.
If I am awarded a grant for the NIH, it covers my budget for the research study. It also awards a percentage of that budget (over what I need for the study) to Yale, my institution. That overage is called the indirect rate.
This money is used to pay for office space, electricity, internet, library, journal subscriptions, administrators, printer paper, etc. This stuff is explicity not allowed in the main budget for a research study. I can’t budget for printer paper. That is all in the ‘indirects’.
Standard indirect rates for research institutions are from about 60-75%. If I get a grant for $100,000 to run a research study, Yale gets an additional $70,000 or so to pay for all the stuff that makes research work.
For big research centers, indirects are a major chunk of their revenue. Slashing the rate by 80% or so will lead to budget shortfalls in he 30-40% range potentially.
This is not ‘trimming the fat’. This is cutting right to the bone. It will lead to mass layoffs at Academic research centers. These are places where fundamental science is done – science that industry won’t always fund because the ROI isn’t immediately clear.
But it is from those very centers that discoveries that are changing the world began. RNA synthesis, GLP-1 agonists, Hepatitis C cure – all came from Academics first through government support. Science for the sake of science.
I am not a lawyer. I don’t know if this is legal. But I know it is an attack on one of the pillars of American Exceptionalism – our unrelenting advancement of science.
Industry will not pick up this slack, because industry has to answer to investors who want ROI in the short term. Philanthropy won’t pick up the slack because the gap is simply too large to fill with donations.
Yes, the US government has been subsidizing science. That is not a weakness of our system. It is one of our greatest strengths. Turning our back on NIH and the institutions who do science for the sake of science, not profit, debases us all.”
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