The thing that annoys me is… even if they genuinely want to save money (and that’s a big if), this is barely even “saving” much money. NIH has historically been a very good return on investment for the US government despite running on a shoestring budget, and that is probably not even accounting for the various downstream applications (like all the pharma industry) that relies on NIH-funded research.

Part of the issue with indirect costs are due to the NIH never getting much of a budget raise and the ballooning bureaucracy… Yes, there are people wanting change for the better, but the current administration decided to wake up to violence by dealing with this in the worst way possible