The 2022 report contains an analysis of 82 universities, the indirect cost rate they receive from federal grants, and the indirect cost rate they receive from private fundraisers such as the Sloan Foundation, Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Ten of the schools in the Heritage Foundation Analysis did not confirm their indirect costs for private funders, leaving 72 complete entries in analyzing the report.
Of the 72 universities, the report claimed that 67 private research grants accepted with zero percent indirect research costs -exceptionally the same analysis and finding as in the NIH notification.
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The Heritage Foundation report concluded that only three schools in the sample refuse to accept indirect cost rate of private foundations at lower rates than those they negotiated with the federal government. Those schools are the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Massachusetts Institute for Technology and the University of Michigan.
The NIH notification refers to the same three schools without identifying the Heritage Foundation as the source of the analysis. It is mentioned that Harvard required a minimum indirect cost cover of 15 percent of private funders and that the California Institute of Technology requires an indirect cost coverage of 20 percent. These examples also appear in the Heritage Foundation report.
One of the authors of the report, Heritage Foundation, senior research fellow Jay Greene, says he was not involved in the NIH notification, but admitted that one paragraph of the NIH notice was a reference to our report of 2022. “The NIH did not respond to Wired’s request for comment.
A plan to reduce indirect cost figures in federal grants also appears in project 2025, the nearly thousand pages of Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump presidency. “This market-based reform will help reduce the federal taxpayer subsidy of leftist agendas,” the report states. During his presidential campaign, Trump consistently deprived any ties with the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.
On Monday, a coalition of 22 states filed a lawsuit that challenges the legality of the NIH’s attempt to cut indirect costs.
Universities say the cap will impede their ability to do important research. “The discovery of new treatments would delay, opportunities to train the next generation of scientific leaders would shrink, and our country’s science and engineering skills would be in danger,” Harvard president Alan Garber in a post written on the university’s website.
Some universities will lose more than $ 100 million to federal funding if the new award capacity is upheld. According to Stat, Weill Cornell medicine brought $ 107 million into indirect costs during 2022 – a figure that would fall to $ 23 million if the rate was 15 percent.