NIH and Research Grants

Court Rules Harvard Gets To Keep Skimming 69.5% Of Every NIH Grant Dollar

What's with our courts?

The United States, with a national debt that now rivals its GDP, continues to borrow money to subsidize a research industrial complex that serves less to advance science than to enrich America’s most gilded academic institutions.

The NIH, responsible for distributing almost $50 billion in research grants annually, has morphed into a pipeline not for discovery, but for institutional profiteering. It is a model that is both economically unsustainable and morally indefensible.

Let us begin with the grotesque mechanism through which these funds are distributed: Facilities and Administrative (F&A) reimbursement rates.

Every university negotiates its own rate with the NIH, a bureaucratic haggle that produces outcomes so inflated they would make a defense contractor blush. Harvard University, the wealthiest academic institution on the planet, with an endowment surpassing $50 billion, extracts 69.5% in F&A costs on every NIH grant dollar.

That means when the NIH sends Harvard $100 million for research, nearly $70 million is siphoned off for campus operations and administrative overhead, none of it tied to any specific scientific inquiry.

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