No they’re cutting payments for indirect costs down to 15%. They’re not requiring money be spent on research instead of admin, they’re just giving out less money.

This is not and was never supposed to increase American research productivity. Just the opposite actually, they want less science done in America, and as a bonus they “save” about $5 billion, that is, approximately one half the cost of a single aircraft carrier

This sounds great in theory, until you start looking at the actual things that overhead covers. Things like the cost of my office space, my lab space, electricity, heating, building maintenance, telephone, computer network, IT and tech support, the photocopier machine we share, my admin assistant that handles travel and purchases, the admins in my department that handle grant budgets and compliance (which quite frankly I don't want to personally deal with), and more.

I mentioned Chesterton's Fence in another post here, about really understanding a problem and why things are done in a certain way, before tearing everything down. I'd really encourage people to try to understand things better before jumping to conclusions, it's not all that different from the engineer's disease that often gets mentioned on HN.

I empathize, but you're wasting your time. Half of the accounts in this thread and the similar recent threads are bots, not Americans, or so deeply entrenched in their blind partisanship that they abdicated thinking for themselves long ago.

I wonder, am I a bot, or an American...

Technically they want to limit indirect costs to 15%. This currently ranges from 50%-100%. Indirect costs have two components, facilities and administration.

Facilites are the cost of buildings, electricity, janitorial service, etc. Think of this as things that might be included in the rent if you were renting a place to do the research.

Administration costs are mostly salaries for people, administrative and clerical staff. Not the people directly doing the research (that's a direct cost), but the people in charge of safety/compliance/legal, etc.

Administrative costs have been capped at 25% for a few decades. Facilities costs are not capped.