That’s a great question to ask. And if it were the question being asked by the new folks in charge that would be pretty great. Instead we’ve got drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat. I’m not sure that’s an improvement over the status quo.
> drunk toddlers smashing valuable things with a baseball bat
Believing your own government does such things seems extreme. Where did you hear that? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan? Have those sources pushed any other obviously false, now-debunked, partisan stories in the past?
Nowhere – I don’t follow the issue. The question was for those people who are somehow convinced that it’s complete chaos. In my experience, complete chaos is very rare, but fake reports of chaos in every field are a daily occurrence. If you believe every report of chaos that comes along, you’ll believe the world is ending every day. Which it obviously has not, yet. It follows that most reports of chaos are always false. Therefore, if you believe that some specific issue is really as chaotic as reported, you’ll have to have some pretty good sources to back that up.
I was referring to the "The US government is trying to bring back nuclear safety employees it fired on Thursday, but is struggling to let them know they should return to work, NBC News has reported. [...]An email obtained by NBC said the letters for some NNSA employees 'are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel'." part.
It's about 300 people affected. And when you apply at these types of positions they ARE aware of private contact information.
I really don’t get it. What is the story? Should the employer be shamed for not keeping home/private contact information for all employees? Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are.
>Or is the job of those employees so vital that they could never be considered for firing? The article does not state what their actual occupations are.
They build, maintain and run security for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This was, in fact, mentioned in the article.
Quote: "The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN."
Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
> They build, maintain and run security for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This was, in fact, mentioned in the article.
That’s what the department does. The article does not say what the erroneously fired employees do.
> Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
How would I know? The article does not explain it. To my uninformed ears it sounds like a pretty passive thing, which, if you assume physical security is intact, can keep just fine for quite some time. If they had fired some more vital people, like all security guards, by mistake, surely the article would have said so? But instead the article prevaricates. This makes the article sound untrustworthy.
A sign of WHAT? You still have not explained what the story actually is. When firing 10.000 people on relatively short notice, I would think it unfortunate, but completely expected, if some mistakes were made.
I have no idea. Why are you asking me? The article does not mention it.
EDIT: Or did you mean to say that the article’s story is that the firing was done too quickly? That is actually a decent point, and the article would have been much better if it actually made that point. As it is, the article talks around things, avoids giving crucial details, and relates unconnected facts and pretends to have presented some sort of point, when in fact it only presented the illusion of one.
The problems you point out are very real. Serious. Frustrating.
None of which invalidate the points you replied to in any way.
Some kind of methodical work to solve problems is still how you keep a plane flying while you fix it.
Handing bats to kids isn’t going to be better than the status quo
Even though the status quo is miserable and increasingly intolerable, it is always easier to make things worse
I would like to end this comment on an up note, a solution: be rich. Very very rich. Live in Canada or New Zealand. Carry a towel and remember: electrolytes.
We are looking at a generational loss of research talent that directly benefits public health. Every post-doc and researcher I know is looking at options outside of academia, or even outside the country. This will not solve administrative overhead, it will lead to a brain drain.
> If that worked then drunk toddlers wouldn’t win elections promising the baseball bat.
Even if one believes that overall, over a long term, democracy tends to produce more “accurate” assessments of merits of policy disputes than other systems—which, of course, is not generally the argument for democracy—that still wouldn't imply that there are no cases where the electorate just makes completely bad judgements. So, I’m not sure what your basis for the claim here is; as presented the argument seems to be the electorate never makes bad decisions, which is ludicrous on its face.
Nobody knows what the “bad judgments” and what the “good judgments” are, and we certainly can’t trust anyone with self interest to tell us. Democracy is a means for empirical truth finding that’s resistant to manipulation.
I’m 40 years old. In my lifetime, educational and healthcare overheads have exploded while outcomes have gotten worse. Nobody working within these systems understands why or is capable of fixing them.
> Democracy is a means for empirical truth finding that’s resistant to manipulation.
That's wrong in a number of ways.
1. Democracy is not, in any way, a means of truth finding. That's not simply what it does: propositons of truth are not an output of democracy.
2. Even if you create some mapping of the outputs of democracy to "truths" about anything other than "this is what this particular democracy produced at this particular time", popularity isn't empiricism.
3. Democracy is extremely sensitive, rather than resistant, to manipulation.
Democracy is an empirical way of finding policies that work, where of course what “works” reflects what a particular population values.
Democracy isn’t sensitive to manipulation. What’s really sensitive to manipulation is administrative systems run by credentialed professionals. Who invariably are captured by their petty interests and personal ideologies.
> Democracy is an empirical way of finding policies that work
No, its not. At best, it is a source of policy variation which could be the input to an empirical process of discovering what works.
> where of course what “works” reflects what a particular population values.
Even dropping the improper reference to "empirical" and steel-manning your claim into "Democracy is a manner of progressively optimizing policy for a particular population over time", no, it really isn't, for a large number of reasons, starting with the fact that the "particular population" is in constant flux, and the policy changes produced by the system are an influence on that flux, so it it does as much to shape the population to the policy as vice versa.
Democracy is a sensor type. It's implementation in a control system may vary.
You can't just wire an accelerometer to an engine and expect an autopilot to work. The code logic itself is critical. It contains the noise filtering, physics model, and the response curve.
Tooth-to-tail ratio is a useful concept if you want to think about overheads.
In modern military operations, there are usually ~10 people in various support functions (tail) for for everyone who fights (tooth). The Gulf War was exceptional, because there were only ~5 people in the tail for every primary combatant.
Civilian organizations are usually much leaner, because they exist in a functional society. There may only be 1-2 support personnel for everyone doing the actual work, and many of those are outsourced. But the same basic concerns remain.
When individual performance is critical, a high level of support is required. You can get more people doing the actual work by redirecting resources from the tail to the tooth. But then the people in the tooth are individually less effective. It's highly situational which level of overhead leads to the most efficient use of resources.
In the case for higher ed and hospitals, I don’t think people are complaining about staff (the vast majority of the “tail” in the military). Rather, they are complaining about the administrators, which would be the military equivalent of officers.
The ratio of administrators to professors in higher ed and administrators to doctors in hospitals has gone through the roof — a simple search will show the numbers.
Sometimes what these people are doing is legally necessary (e.g., compliance), but our sue-first culture has made compliance much more burdensome. Reducing the scope of necessary compliance will allow a lot of reduction of these types of folks, but it won’t be undone quickly. Title IX is a great example of a good idea that has ended up costing a ton in compliance costs.
Other times what they are doing is pure empire-building, simply because there is very little keeping them from passing on increased expenses to the customer.
If either of these industries were able to be reformed in totality, I’m guessing 50-90% of the administrators would be able to be cut. Realistically, this will only happen with a collapse of said industry (which I think is coming).
That's a common trope. People often complain about administrative bloat. Then there is a budget deficit and some administrators are cut (as it often happens in public institutions around the world). And then people start complaining how they don't have time for their actual jobs, because they have to do the work the administrators were doing.
Most of the time, compliance requirements only increase with every policy chance. Today in the US, there are new regulations on what you are allowed to do with federal grants. And those regulations are mostly on top of the existing ones. Administrators need to spend more time to ensure compliance, and the actual overheads go up.
The administrative part of grant overheads is already capped at 26%. Even if universities managed to fire every single administrator, common grant overheads would still be 30% or higher. According to the current rules, which are insufficient to cover the actual overheads. At least if you ask the people who are supposed to understand the rules.
If that worked then drunk toddlers wouldn’t win elections promising the baseball bat.
Thus is a claim that you will be unable to justify. There are lots of examples of good governance. The current actions by the administration are a very bad way of going about reform. Causing great chaos to a system that produces first rate research is not a intelligent way to go about things.
….getting better while costs are being controlled?
This is a vague enough notion so that every proposed counterexample can be denied. Of course research costs are going to increase over time as there are no more low hanging fruit.
… Governance by bureaucracy
One party has actively sabotaged most efforts at getting better outcomes. For example, Michelle Obama was criticised for wanting healthier school lunches. One party has actively labelled government as incapable of doing anything right and we voted them in. They are now demonstrating that what is really true is that a party against good governance is not good at governance.
You are wrong; it’s a local, state, and federal issue. And even if you are right it is still the case that Republicans criticised Michelle Obama for advocating for healthier school lunches. Are you incapable of admitting that it’s stupid to criticize someone for advocating for healthier school lunches?
You talk about bad outcomes and are presented with a concrete case of how it’s hard to have good outcomes when one party is opposed to even the discussion of healthier school lunches. Your response isn’t to say that the people who criticized her are morons. Your respons is: Its a state issue. Vapid.
People like you are enablers of the system you decry. A broken system results from Citizens United that lets concentrated wealth (and foreigners) spend as much as much money as they want influence elections. A broken system results from gutting the Voting Rights act and shutting down thousands of pollomg stations. You defend such lunacy and the say, “Hey, we need to destroy science fudning becuase the system has bad outcomes.”
90% of school funding is state and local. Whether or not it makes sense to criticize Michelle Obama for anything is irrelevant. “People like me” aren’t running anything in Maryland (where I live) or California, etc.
If Americans were capable of good governance blue states would have good governance. Rather, it seems that blue state people have the will to govern but not the competence to do so.
Instead of "At the current overhead spending rates, has the research been effective enough?", I think the question should be "At the current indirect rates, has the research been supported enough?". My proposed reframing is because the indirect costs are meant to cover the costs of supporting the research.
A side node: If you're interested in gauging the effect of a particular NIH grant, the NIH RePORTER site is your friend: Any publication that is grant-supported will mention this in the acknowledgments. For example, our SGI UV300 (360 CPU cores, 10TB RAM, 20TB PCIe flash, and 4 NVIVIA P100s) was funded thanks to NIH grant S10 OD023452. If you search that ID in RePORTER, you'll get https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288: Towards the bottom of the page, you'll find a list of publications (that the NIH was able to find) that used the UV300. With funding in FY17, the machine's past end-of-life and the funding's ended (it was one-time funding, with a 5-year (I think) lifespan), but publications are still coming in.
One thing that's worth noting: The grant had no indirect costs. The money went straight to SGI (they were acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in November 2016, and were still being absorbed). The UV300 is not a "set it and forget it" machine. It's not 'cattle'. So, where did the money come from to run the UV300, and answer questions of researchers who (for example) have never heard of "NUMA"?
The money to pay the supporting folks (sysadmins, etc.) came, indirectly, from the researchers: The S10 grant was structured such that the majority of time on the UV300 was for folks doing work under NIH grants. The indirect portion of those NIH grants is what helped fund the sysadmins (like me) who kept (and still keep) the UV300 up and running.
I think grant-funded research is supported enough if…
1. The facilities researchers use (buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc.) are available enough (they are online for some % of the year)
2. Researchers are able to get technical assistance (for the buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc. that they use) in a reasonable amount of time.
What values should be used for "available enough" and "reasonable amount of time"? Honestly, I'm not sure, and since I've got 'skin in the game' my guesses would probably be too generous towards me. Plus, Goodhart's law applies here.
All government spending is a waste, as it should be. Governments should not be in the business of making profit, after all they are bad at it. They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, research, ensuring fair game (by legislating and enforcing), protecting their resources with military. The more left wing folks, are also interested in providing directly for the ones in need.
As long as the spending is in these directions is good for the country, KPIs be damned.
All government spending is not “waste”. All government spending should be unprofitable (for the reasons you eloquently describe). Which is a different thing entirely.
This is really strange framing. Profit is a form of inefficiency. It's quite easy to generate profit—just take from others. How we came to view it as something that makes more sense to structure society around than zero-margin services is bewildering. There isn't a single responsibility government has I don't trust private enterprise to deliver less competently and at greater cost.
I think you used “waste” improperly. Try “net zero cash”?
> They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, […]
Absolutely. Run & improve the positive sum systems, that work best at national scale, that really do pay for themselves, by delivering greater value to citizens than the taxes taken from citizens.
When people imagine a tiny government with tiny taxes, they haven’t understood how much fewer of us could survive without those positive sums. How much more of their life’s time value it would take to pay for an egg.
(Just as the private sector organizes, and reorganizes, to create and grow a stream of positive sums, at a higher variety and speed, at less than national scales.)
Fair, I exaggerated for argument’s sake. But really the profit expectation today from the companies has a quarterly horizon. I cannot think of any government program that can yield tangible societal profit within a quarter.
Agreed. Government should stop giving silicon valley companies billions of dollars to build electric cars whose effect on climate change is debatable, or build rockets to go to Mars which won't materialize in our lifetime and when Mars itself is uninhabitable anyway. Oh wait...
Go through congress. If you don't want the Senate filibuster then lobby the senate majority to to get the rule changed. Vice president gets one vote in the Senate only, not unilateral control of the budget.
The question we must ask is why, faced with blaringly obvious evidence to the contrary, people still do not trust their eyes.
Elon Musk gets 8 million a day from your tax money and somehow he is going to save you the money elsewhere without this even being remotely in his interest. The only thing in his interest is to appear as if he did something, that's it. And all of that grifting relies on marks, who reflexively defend every action their betters take. Betters that tell them they are true, strong men that deserve power.
But ironically that is the polar opposite of what actually strong men would do..
Some believe this cut will be covered by the research universities and their associated medical centers. That may be true for a limited time, in a few institutes, for a small set of cases. However, it’s just a cut to medical research, and a deep one at that.
Indirect costs support researchers’ needs that the institution provides. For example, who ensures the researcher’s laptop is secure? For basic research, how is lab equipment obtained? Who provides infrastructure to access observational data from an electronic health record system? Categorize these services as you wish, but these services are needed, they have costs, and the expense will need to be covered for medical research to happen. If they can no longer be considered indirect, then they will become itemized and the researcher’s direct budget will have to cover them. For example, laptops permitted to access the institutional network may have a monthly fee that covers system admin time.
In the short run, it’ll mean some research simply won’t happen as the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free”. For new grants, it means a greater part of the research budget will have to be itemized with these costs, eg less funding for researcher or graduate assistant effort. Either the overall grant direct costs will have to go up, or less research happens.
Indeed the status quo is that these costs are spread over the research projects without having to itemize each expense. Now every research lab, from small to large, will need to hire an accountant to keep track of expenses. Or the grad students spending their time filling out spreadsheets. That strikes me as probably being a lot less efficient.
Lets not pretend efficiency had anything to do with this. It’s all part of an ordinary power grab by the cronies of Trump and Musk, with the only goal the looting of America.
> eg the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free”
I think many people don’t realize this point.
The universities made it easy with large indirect costs that also covered a lot.
The biggest research universities will just be able to take a lower indirect cost and start charging for things that used to be included in indirect costs.
This may sound more “transparent” or “efficient”, and it is in some ways, but adding admin work to track stuff like this is its own form of inefficiency.
It will be like moving from an AYCE model to an a la carte model, but the grant writer will need to know the orders and special requests needed by everyone many months (or more) before the grant is scheduled to start. This is not the strong suit of researchers and/or grant writers.
> The biggest research universities will just be able to take a lower indirect cost and start charging for things that used to be included in indirect costs.
That's not how that works. You can't change what's direct vs indirect. Direct means the cost is directly (and solely) for what the grant was written for. Indirect means all the stuff everyone uses.
Violating those rules will get you in a lot of trouble if you're caught, and since a lot of this stuff is audited, you will likely get caught.
And yes, the audit process costs money and adds to indirect costs. Just like all the paperwork and audits and so on done for programs like food stamps often dwarfs the
I may have incorrectly used a term of art there. That said…
I am certain that universities will not come out on the short end of this deal for very long, if at all.
There are myriad ways they can do this that will pass an audit. Some games I’ve seen played before the current nonsense:
- put requests from unfavored grants at the bottom of the priority list
- move unfavored grants to crappy and/or inconvenient locations (my favorite was when they split one “group” into four different buildings, basically giving them everyone else’s space scraps)
- cut rotations for things like cleaning staff to the absolute contractual minimum
- stop providing free QoL perks
- the worst case scenario is where they just provide a lower level of service to everyone
University administrations are pros at being petty tyrants — it’s their superpower. The question is in what ways will they use these powers when their cut from certain grants is reduced.
The real cost will play out over years after Trump's term. When funding cuts like this hit, researchers and programs decide to find homes elsewhere with better funding. Cuts like this cause current and future talent loss that is very slow to reverse.
We had nearly a century of the best scientists in the world wanting to come to the US to study, teach, and work. To view this as America loosing and the rest of the world getting a "free ride" is pretty crazy.
how else would you prefer to frame America footing a bill for a benefit to everyone? we benefited, sure, but everyone else received the same benefit for zero cost.
we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. when you amortize your R&D costs across a small population instead of your whole market, that will mean charging everyone in that small population much more.
my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others. i am pretty comfortable at a fundamental level with public support for medical research.
i am not comfortable with failing to protect the results of that research and ensuring that if anyone outside the borders of our country wants a scrap of benefit from those, we enforce payment for that benefit.
Our insane spending on health care is independent from funding of scientific research, and only a small amount of your tax funds it (again - different than spending on "healthcare").
Being that country that makes scientific breakthroughs is a good thing. Name one of these "free loading" countries out there is in better shape because they don't do science and just sit back reap the benefits?
Have you tried calculating what your tax bill is going to be when the US can no longer run a deficit after USD is no longer the world reserve currency? Funding scientific research isn't a zero-sum "charity project", rather it's spending some of the proceeds from our demurrage currency on maintaining the leadership position that makes it still be considered a good store of value.
Whether the US can or cannot run a deficit has nothing to do with the dollar being a reserve currency. It being a reserve currency means it probably will run a deficit but that's just a reflection of foreigners wanting to save US dollars, which is true for many country's currency.
The deficit is just a reflection of the sectoral balances[1], which governments don't realistically influence through normal policy. They obviously can change them, but it generally results in significant undesirable outcomes.
US will have to prove that these big changes are a sogn towards more stability, for others to keep saving in USD. Gold markets are pretty insane nowadays, which makes me think of my own savings.
Sure, "deficit" is crappy political term that mostly serves as a martingale and rallying cry for kayfabe austerity politics. Forgive me for stooping.
I'm really talking about monetary creation/inflation - the part of the budget deficit that is new "loans" from another branch of government (Federal Reserve), plus "loans" from the Federal Reserve into the financial industry to do things like grow the housing bubble.
The belief that USD will continue to be redeemable for best in class future goods (technological widgets, military hardware, trade and military alliances, etc) combined with the stickiness of transaction costs (especially at nation-state scale) is what allows that ongoing monetary inflation without commensurate price inflation.
There's certainly a reasonable concern about what happens when China stops accepting IOUs in return for piles of actual stuff. That doesn't influence though the ability of the US to create what it needs, which is just a function of what resources it can draw on. As Keynes pointed out, anything we can actually do, we can afford.
I'm not actually American, but you get the gist. I've taken the liberty of posting the full passage here since it's so good:
For some weeks at this hour you have enjoyed the day-dreams of planning. But what about the nightmare of finance? I am sure there have been many listeners who have been muttering: “That’s all very well, but how is it to be paid for?”
Let me begin by telling you how I tried to answer an eminent architect who pushed on one side all the grandiose plans to rebuild London with the phrase: “Where’s the money to come from?” “The money?” I said. “But surely, Sir John, you don’t build houses with money? Do you mean that there won’t be enough bricks and mortar and steel and cement?”
“Oh no”, he replied, “of course there will be plenty of all that”.
“Do you mean”, I went on, “that there won’t be enough labour? For what will the builders be doing if they are not building houses?”
“Oh no, that’s all right”, he agreed.
“Then there is only one conclusion. You must be meaning, Sir John, that there won’t be enough architects”. But there I was trespassing on the boundaries of politeness. So I hurried to add: “Well, if there are bricks and mortar and steel and concrete and labour and architects, why not assemble all this good material into houses?”
But he was, I fear, quite unconvinced. “What I want to know”, he repeated, “is where the money is coming from”.
To answer that would have got him and me into deeper water than I cared for, so I replied rather shabbily: “The same place it is coming from now”. He might have countered (but he didn’t): “Of course I know that money is not the slightest use whatever. But, all the same, my dear sir, you will find it a devil of a business not to have any …”
Had I given him a good and convincing answer by saying that we build houses with bricks and mortar, not with money? Or was I only teasing him?
…
For one thing, he was making the very usual confusion between the problem of finance for an individual and the problem for the community as a whole …
The first task is to make sure that there is enough demand to provide employment for everyone. The second task is to prevent a demand in excess of the physical possibilities of supply, which is the proper meaning of inflation. For the physical possibilities of supply are very far from unlimited. Our building programme must be properly proportioned to the resources which are left after we have met our daily needs and have produced enough exports to pay for what we require to import from overseas …
Where we are using up resources, do not let us submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income, with no other denominator of values but this. I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population …
Assuredly we can afford this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford. Once done, it is there. Nothing can take it from us.
> As Keynes pointed out, anything we can actually do, we can afford
And what if we're currently affording more than what we can actually do? And what of going forward when a lot of what we can do gets afforded by other countries calling in those IOUs (which won't end up being fully repudiated for a bunch of reasons) ?
What does it actually mean to "call in an IOU" in this case? It means use the dollars to buy stuff - so export. Well, that's bad if it extracts too much real value from the economy, but then the economy and the government have various tools at their disposal, from outright banning exports, through export tariffs to importing the stuff to export from another country that has a surplus. It's only a claim insofar as the claimee will deliver; there's no credible higher authority to whinge to that the US isn't playing fair, and the US government is only really answerable to its population.
Except that before we get to the opposite side of excluded-middle situation you're describing, there's a long transition period where the US government doesn't repudiate the IOUs because it wants to remain "business friendly", is dependent on some imports, wants to trade with some countries, its elites want to be able to go to other countries and spend their wealth, etc. You're basically asserting we can always resort to strict economic controls, when that's essentially the opposite of this country's foundation.
You also didn't address my first point that we're likely currently affording more than we can do, especially in the short term. So shutting down foreign trade would result in a straightforward standard of living decrease. Like yes it is important to remember that finance and money are abstractions on allocating real resources, but currently those abstractions are supremely benefiting the US.
What do you mean by "affording more than we can do"? The measure of affordability is whether something is possible or not. If anything, a non-zero unemployment/under-employment means more can be afforded. By definition, in real terms, you can never afford more than you can do.
Accepting the IOUs means more exports, which is what everyone seems desperate for at the moment. In fact, Trumpism seems to be all about shutting down imports and increasing exports, which happened jolly fast and wasn't in any way related to an inability to import.
And as I said, the simple response to export demands exceeding capacity is normal - increase capacity through efficiency, import stuff to sell. A good post on exactly this stuff: https://new-wayland.com/blog/savings-are-an-export-product/
I was using the framing of your Keynes quote, with the context that Keynes was generally for increasing the monetary supply (making it possible to afford what can be done).
It is possible to afford more than you can do yourself when you buy things from other countries. That quote is arguing for ignoring the financial abstraction when it becomes limiting, and focusing on the economic realities of what can be done. But my point is that the financial abstraction is currently benefiting the US. Eschewing the financial abstraction, balancing imports and exports, and no longer being a reserve currency means that we will be able to afford less.
That may be fine if the goal is to achieve other results (eg stable manufacturing jobs that support a middle class, supply chain security). But it's still something to be acknowledged, rather than written off. Effectively the worldwide use of USD to facilitate international trade and as a store of future value is itself an export, the use of which is paid for by ongoing monetary inflation. Reducing the desire of other countries to hold USD means ending that export.
That's not what he means by afford. I think the rest of the quote makes it clear that affordability is a statement about whether the thing can be delivered in real terms.
There's no financial abstraction happening here. Exports and imports always balance, it's just that financial assets are an export product that foreigners may wish to hold. If they do, then great, because you can swap financial assets for real stuff. This is not unique to the US; plenty of countries run like this.
Of course you should acknowledge that the situation might change, but there's nothing to indicate that's happening. It's not like there's a ready supply of customers waiting to buy all the stuff the Chinese rely on selling for their domestic employment.
Edit: it's worth noting that the decisions here are largely made by the private sector. The government runs a deficit or a surplus because it has to to balance the sectoral flows [1]. If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit.
I don't really know what point you're trying to make beyond reframing the situation into different terms where different things are assumed constant, and then not actually examining what happens when those things are not constant.
I tried to meet you there with the terminology of the Keynes quote and you argued definitions rather than address the translated point.
In the general framework you're pushing, if the government does not run a deficit by being a place to park money, then that money remains in the economy regardless - private savings is generally in terms of loans to banks which then propagate the money elsewhere, not simply holding vast quantities of Federal Reserve Notes. (And frankly FRNs should really be considered part of the debt/deficit too)
I'm a bit puzzled what you're saying about private savings. You can certainly consider deposits/savings as loans to a bank, is that what you mean?
I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population. As long as the country remains capable of producing useful stuff, everything is going to be fine, since that's what _actually_ matters.
> I'm a bit puzzled what you're saying about private savings. You can certainly consider deposits/savings as loans to a bank, is that what you mean?
Yes, in a previous comment you said this:
> If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit
My point is that the private sector saving does not itself starve the economy of money. Savings is generally done into banks, which then choose where to invest that money onwards. What makes it possible to starve the economy of money from this is precisely that the government takes loans from a private sector looking to save - either through banks that buy Treasuries, or even Treasuries bought directly - which forms [part of what is currently considered] the deficit.
> I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population
My original argument had an even stronger implicit point - being able to run a deficit without the consequence of significant price inflation is an extremely beneficial situation. It implies an ever growing value of the ecosystem of that currency, sustaining the new money. We can certainly debate how that value should be realized and what it should be spent on. But pulling back from the world stands to destroy that value creation.
Ah, I see. The problem is that banks can't really invest their reserve holdings because they need them to balance the deposit. The best they can do is shuffle it around the vertical circuit, that is, they can buy government bonds. They could also take a deposit at another bank (indeed, the whole system can run on that basis without reserves), but that would be strictly on less beneficial terms than a deposit at the central bank (because the corresponding bank would need to balance the deposit made to _it_). The mainstream idea is that swapping a fixed price floating interest financial asset (reserves) for a floating price fixed interest financial asset (bonds) somehow locks it up, but that's just wishful thinking.
I'm not sure if in your final point your implying something about the quantity theory of money, which is something I reject (flows being the important measure). Perhaps you can clarify what you mean by destroying the value creation? Is this a statement about closed economies being less valuable than open ones?
> America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone).
By what measure? Life expectancy? Happiness? Wealth? We have the highest economic stratification of almost any nation in the developed world, by a longshot. We're the only developed nation that does not provide universal healthcare, does not guarantee sick time and does not guarantee parental leave. We have the most barriers to unionization of any developed nation We have the highest number of incarcerated people, by both total number and percentage of our population, of any developed nation.
We're also among the worst countries in terms of alignment between what the populace wants for policies and what they get from their elected representatives, so we're failing pretty hard at the whole "democracy" thing, too.
> i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that
Great news! I have the cure. All you need to do is google "federal budget percent foreign aid" and you'll feel so much better. It's just one percent of the federal budget.
Since we're on the subject of "paying more than we get back" and our tax bills...what state do you live in, dear commenter who feels ripped off by his tax bill?
“just” one percent is quite a lot given how many things the feds do. i’ll take the hundreds of dollars back on my taxes over paying for transsexual operas in south america or food for people who chant “death to America”
you are, of course, correct, we urgently must also end social security and medicare, as they represent large proportions of the budget.
> we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. ...
> my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others.
Man, spoken like a true Brexit voter - absolutely sure that they're tired of how the EU is just leaching off the backs of the unappreciated UK. Placing the blame on those foreigners for all the problems at home, and cutting them off will show them how much they needed us all along.
Some storylines are just too tantalizing to looking into the details of. They must be correct because they feel correct to me.
As the UK so bluntly and drastically learned, getting suckered by those storylines sucks when reality comes calling.
the only thing this suggests that brexit was the wrong way to extract adequate value from the leech nations of europe.
it doesn’t negate the basic point that the EU consists of many countries relying on net contributions from only a few. britain’s point wasn’t wrong.
thankfully, America is a much larger and more important nation so we should be able to do a better job of it.
As others have pointed out, this will actually require more accountants since more things will need to be itemized. It's not really about learning to be more efficient, because it's not going to be more efficient to require more accountants.
It will require different accounting, probably. It's not really true to say that these costs are not accounted for. Every dollar a university pays out is accounted for somewhere.
If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change.
But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem.
I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.
> I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes
They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.
Yep- when I was a PI and had several grants, when one was getting close to used up, the finops people would call me over and we'd switch people around to working on a different grant.
I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done".
After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.
> they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead
This is not true due to the retroactive nature of this change. The problem is that the grant budgets are already fixed and will not increase. You can't move those costs to the grant budget since the grant money is already fully allocated to things like salary, etc.
In order for this to work, DOGE would have to automatically increase the grant budgets for already awarded grants, which they are unlikely to do.
There is a difference in the required granularity.
Today there are usually only a handful of overhead rates for the entire university. Accounting only needs to be precise enough to attribute the spending to the right categories. Nobody needs to know which departments or labs benefit from that particular spending.
But if everything needs to be attributed not just to a specific department and a lab, but to a specific grant, things get complicated. Maybe one lab in a department only uses offices and meeting rooms. Another runs a bunch of servers somewhere on the premises. And a third has a wetlab and works with hazardous materials. Sometimes things go wrong and the entire building needs to be evacuated. Which means there is a need for all kinds of protocols and trainings and responsible personnel. And maybe also for more security guards at night.
Expect fun department politics when the PIs argue who needs to pay what for the infrastructure and who gets to spend more on actual research.
When I was a PhD student in Computer Science, I wanted to fund my research without depending on other people. So I wrote, and won, a grant for $650,000.
The University of Washington took 55% off the top in "indirect costs." Then of the direct costs, a bunch more taxes went to the department, the lab, etc. I ended up getting about $40,000 total from that grant to fund my actual research.
I was told that this is just how the game works.
The Lesson: There is a huge amount of waste in academic grants.
The university does not need 55% indirect costs to fund my research. They gave me a laptop and an office to work in. But the laptop actually came out of direct costs. And as for the office... well, I tended not to use it. Coffeeshops were nicer places to work.
So that 55% — $357,500 — was not necessary for research. It disappeared in an administrative hierarchy that kept growing. I talked to professors from 20 years before, and they said that the administration had grown 3x in their time being there. They built their reputation as scientists when everything was smaller and cheaper. Now all that reputation is generating more money, which is getting gobbled up by an administration that wasn't needed when they produced their original successes.
Just yesterday I watched a video by a disgruntled former academic physicist about the state of modern physics research. [0] Not sure of its credence, I don't really understand physics. In the fields I do have a bit of understanding, there does seem to be an amazing amount of fluff and bloat, but also still a significant amount of good and useful knowledge creation.
The bloat isn't really surprising: Largely inoculated from market forces, the way modern research is conducted has enormous amounts of inefficiencies, which in turn creates plenty of ways to game the system. Without university accreditation it is very hard to publish research, get grants or invites to conferences, so there is little reason for universities to take less of your grant. Why should journals not be super profitable? It is one of the very few "objective" metrics of success in academia, Nature could probably introduce expensive publishing fees tomorrow, and people would still fall in line. And universities don't really have to adapt, because going to one is basically required to get a good paying job.
I don't know how to fix that, it seems like a very hard problem. Just shutting everything down and leaving it to the private market as the Trump administration is aiming to do seems overkill, but sometimes it might also be necessary to break a stagnating system before rebuilding it better.
"I got an office but I decided I'd rather be in a coffee shop" doesn't mean you should get a refund...
I love it when people misrepresent things to people who don't know better. This happens every time research funding gets mentioned on HN, by people looking to rile up HNers who absolutely love hearing that their prejudices against the government and scientists are true and academia is robbing the dear taxpayer blind, like it's all some big shady scam.
Direct costs are things that are directly and solely related to or used for the grant. Labor. Equipment. Supplies. For the research funded by the grant, within reason (nobody accounts for or cares about, say, a lab mate asking to use some of a chemical, or one of your DVD-R disks. If you have plenty of room in that incubator that was paid for with your grant and a labmate or someone in the department could really use a corner of it to try something on their experiment, or their incubator dies and you've got room? You say yes. Captain NIH does not descend and go HALT SCIENTIST! THAT EQUIPMENT WAS PAID FOR OUT OF DIRECT COSTS FOR YOUR GRANT, NOT THEIRS!"
Indirect costs are all the costs necessary for "keeping the lights on." Indirect costs are like taxes because everyone's grants are "taxed" and that pays for all the things everyone uses. Maintaining the buildings, paying the electric bill, paying the salaries of the IT staff, paying for network equipment, servers, storage, UPSs. Indirect grant costs pay for the trash (and hazardous waste) to get collected, for the parking lot to get plowed in the winter, for the buildings to be cooled in the summer and heated in the winter. In a lab it pays for stuff like centralized purified water, central gas supplies, and so on.
You don't get to cry about how your work doesn't need all that lab stuff those bio researchers need, or that big storage cluster so you couldn't have to pay for it. Just like you don't get to cry about how the road you live off of is very short so your taxes should be lower because the town has to pay less to pave and plow it, and since you don't have any kids your taxes should be lower still because you're not using the schools. And really, your house didn't catch on fire (and you're very careful about fire safety) so why do you have to pay for the fire department? etc.
Indirect costs are negotiated between schools and the organizations that award grants. A school doesn't get to make up whatever they want. It's known by everyone involved, well ahead of time. Nobody walked into Toomim's office and said "ooo, nice shiny $650k grant you got there, Michael Toomim. We're gonna just...take...about half of that. YOINK! SUCKER! Where does everyone want to go next weekend? Bermuda, or Italy? WHY NOT BOTH!"
Further, indirect costs are accounted for when grants are awarded. The awarding organization didn't think his grant proposal was worth $650k and then oooo, the Big Mean School Administration came and took half his stuff and poor Michael Toomim was left with half the money he thought he needed...frowny face :(
The organization thought the work proposed in the grant application would require $300k in direct costs. They looked up what his school uses for indirect costs, and "wrote the check" for $650k. Other grant organizations award an amount and then an additional amount is added equal to whatever the school charges for indirect costs.
Everyone knows this, grad students included. Nobody counts indirect costs as part of their grant. Ever. When they say "I got a million dollar grant!" they mean "a million dollars plus indirect costs charged by the organization."
Third, there is no fucking way whatsoever that the school took any additional money from the grant for anything except direct costs - stuff that was used solely and exclusively for that grant. Nothing in the grant ...
Overheads are expressed as a fraction of direct costs, not of the total grant. If the total grant was $650k, 55% overhead would be $230k. If the direct costs were $650k, the total grant was $1M.
Universities rarely have significant amounts of money they can use freely. Most of the time, if they want to do something (such as training a PhD), someone must pay specifically for that. And if the PhD student needs a supervisor, someone must pay for the time the supervisor uses supervising the student.
Your grant was not supposed to give you a huge pile of loose money to use as you see fit. It was supposed to pay your stipend and tuition (and benefits, if there were any). And give you a small amount for research expenses on top of that. You gained independence (by not being dependent on your supervisor's funding) and credibility (by winning a competitive grant). You may have also gained the ability to continue your PhD (if your supervisor was about to run out of money). But often the biggest winner with grants like that is the supervisor, who can now use their grant money to hire another PhD student.
You aren't clear with what I supposedly "misunderstood."
The entire grant was $650k. 55%, or $357k were used for indirect costs. I don't know how you multiplied 650 * .55 and got 230, or why you're thinking about a $1M grant.
Assuming the entire award was subject to the 55% indirect rate (not always true), and the total award was $650K, then the direct award amount was about $420K and the indirect amount was ~$230K.
1. Universities do not typically allow graduate students to be PIs on grants. This is for liability reasons. Even for postdocs it would be highly unusual to have full, solo PI status on a grant.
2. Federal funding agencies, and the panels that review grants, would be highly dubious about a graduate student as the sole PI on a grant.
"Graduate students are not encouraged to submit research proposals but should arrange to serve as research assistants to faculty members."
NIH is even more constrained w/respect to graduate students. Even pre-doctoral fellowships (F31) at NIH to support a specific graduate student are submitted by a faculty member.
I can't speak to DOE or DARPA policies off the top of my head on this point.
So what did the 40k for your research cover? It sounds like you are probably discounting the cost of your own salary as a graduate student supported by the grant, which is usually the bulk of the direct cost for NSF grants like this and probably runs 100k/year, with the grant covering maybe 3 years of your time.
There's a single publication listed as resulting from this award (NB: I'd guess there's probably additional papers stemming from this grant; NSF award search only lists what has been published at the time of the annual report for the FY referenced).
That publication includes 4 co-authors:
Michael Toomim, Travis Kriplean, Claus Portner, and James A. Landay "Utility of Human-Computer Interactions: Toward a Science of Preference Measurement" ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) , v.May , 2011
This doesn't sound like a "research without depending on other people" type situation, unless you're suggesting your co-authors didn't contribute meaningfully to the research.
We can't pull up the detailed budget, but let's do some quick math for what such a grant would typically fund for a CS type project.
Assuming a 3-year grant ($140K/year) the directs would have looked like this:
* 2 graduate students - 12 months of stipend, fringe, and tuition/fees. This will be the largest portion of the grant; Total: ~$95K/year (Note: 2010 grad student support costs; would be lot more now):
* 2 PIs -- probably 0.5 or 1 month summer salary ([1] see below) for each PI each plus fringe; Total: $40K/year
* A small travel budget to pay for partipants to attend a conference or meeting (like the ACM conference this paper was presented at); Total: $5K/year
[1]: Faculty in most schools of arts and sciences schools at major universities are only guaranteed a 9-month salary (paid out over 12 months). Note this can differ even within a University. For example, A&S faculty might have one standard; the School of Medicine another; etc.
I hope people start to realize that nothing about what's going on is about eliminating waste. It's about destroying the government for the profit of the top 0.1%.
But it's all so very shortsighted. The people directing all of this clearly have no idea what they're doing or why things are the way they are.
Take USAID as a good example. The reality is that USAID is a wealth transfer from the government to American companies (where most of the money was spent) AND it was an expresion of American soft power on foreign regimes. Dismantling USAID just creates a power vacuum for some other power to fill, likely China.
You see this with talk of a massive ethnic displacement from Gaza and the West Bank into Egypt and Jordan, an action that would likely topple what are essentially puppet regimes for US Middle Eastern interests.
NIH funding is actually a massive wealth transfer from the government to Big Pharma. Why? Because Big Pharma doesn't really discover novel compounds. Federally-funded research does. A lame duck Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act [1] in a bipartisan way that was signed into law by the outgoing Jimmy Carter in 1980. This Act basically allowed Big Pharma to profit fully from federal research.
Big Pharma spends money on marketing, lobbying and any research they do is pretty much limited to patent extension.
We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of American power here. Certain accelerationists who would otherwise be in complete opposition to the current administration are actually celebrating what's going on for that reason. The government is setting up China to be the new big bad of the 21st century but ironically is creating a massive power vacuum for China to fill and extend its influence.
This is pure short-term profit thinking and we will see over the next 4 years looting of the public purse on a scale we've never seen before.
116 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadBelieving your own government does such things seems extreme. Where did you hear that? Is that source (or sources) believable, and non-partisan? Have those sources pushed any other obviously false, now-debunked, partisan stories in the past?
They build, maintain and run security for the US nuclear weapons stockpile. This was, in fact, mentioned in the article.
Quote: "The nuclear security officials who were laid off on Thursday helped oversee the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN."
Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
That’s what the department does. The article does not say what the erroneously fired employees do.
> Would you agree that this is a job of pretty vital importance?
How would I know? The article does not explain it. To my uninformed ears it sounds like a pretty passive thing, which, if you assume physical security is intact, can keep just fine for quite some time. If they had fired some more vital people, like all security guards, by mistake, surely the article would have said so? But instead the article prevaricates. This makes the article sound untrustworthy.
The fact that they turned around and tried to rehire them before even 24 hours had passed should probably be a sign.
EDIT: Or did you mean to say that the article’s story is that the firing was done too quickly? That is actually a decent point, and the article would have been much better if it actually made that point. As it is, the article talks around things, avoids giving crucial details, and relates unconnected facts and pretends to have presented some sort of point, when in fact it only presented the illusion of one.
Why are you commenting if you have no interest in informing your self?
None of which invalidate the points you replied to in any way.
Some kind of methodical work to solve problems is still how you keep a plane flying while you fix it.
Handing bats to kids isn’t going to be better than the status quo
Even though the status quo is miserable and increasingly intolerable, it is always easier to make things worse
I would like to end this comment on an up note, a solution: be rich. Very very rich. Live in Canada or New Zealand. Carry a towel and remember: electrolytes.
Even if one believes that overall, over a long term, democracy tends to produce more “accurate” assessments of merits of policy disputes than other systems—which, of course, is not generally the argument for democracy—that still wouldn't imply that there are no cases where the electorate just makes completely bad judgements. So, I’m not sure what your basis for the claim here is; as presented the argument seems to be the electorate never makes bad decisions, which is ludicrous on its face.
I’m 40 years old. In my lifetime, educational and healthcare overheads have exploded while outcomes have gotten worse. Nobody working within these systems understands why or is capable of fixing them.
This is obviously not true.
…educational and healthcare overheads have exploded while outcomes have gotten worse.
Ther topic is medical research. What is the basis for the belief thar medical research outcomes have gotten worse?
That's wrong in a number of ways.
1. Democracy is not, in any way, a means of truth finding. That's not simply what it does: propositons of truth are not an output of democracy.
2. Even if you create some mapping of the outputs of democracy to "truths" about anything other than "this is what this particular democracy produced at this particular time", popularity isn't empiricism.
3. Democracy is extremely sensitive, rather than resistant, to manipulation.
Democracy isn’t sensitive to manipulation. What’s really sensitive to manipulation is administrative systems run by credentialed professionals. Who invariably are captured by their petty interests and personal ideologies.
No, its not. At best, it is a source of policy variation which could be the input to an empirical process of discovering what works.
> where of course what “works” reflects what a particular population values.
Even dropping the improper reference to "empirical" and steel-manning your claim into "Democracy is a manner of progressively optimizing policy for a particular population over time", no, it really isn't, for a large number of reasons, starting with the fact that the "particular population" is in constant flux, and the policy changes produced by the system are an influence on that flux, so it it does as much to shape the population to the policy as vice versa.
So I guess Russia, China, Iran, etc., have been wasting their time and money in seeking to manipulate elections.
And the thousands of political consultants around the globe have been just scamming the candidates for whom they work.
You can't just wire an accelerometer to an engine and expect an autopilot to work. The code logic itself is critical. It contains the noise filtering, physics model, and the response curve.
In modern military operations, there are usually ~10 people in various support functions (tail) for for everyone who fights (tooth). The Gulf War was exceptional, because there were only ~5 people in the tail for every primary combatant.
Civilian organizations are usually much leaner, because they exist in a functional society. There may only be 1-2 support personnel for everyone doing the actual work, and many of those are outsourced. But the same basic concerns remain.
When individual performance is critical, a high level of support is required. You can get more people doing the actual work by redirecting resources from the tail to the tooth. But then the people in the tooth are individually less effective. It's highly situational which level of overhead leads to the most efficient use of resources.
In the case for higher ed and hospitals, I don’t think people are complaining about staff (the vast majority of the “tail” in the military). Rather, they are complaining about the administrators, which would be the military equivalent of officers.
The ratio of administrators to professors in higher ed and administrators to doctors in hospitals has gone through the roof — a simple search will show the numbers.
Sometimes what these people are doing is legally necessary (e.g., compliance), but our sue-first culture has made compliance much more burdensome. Reducing the scope of necessary compliance will allow a lot of reduction of these types of folks, but it won’t be undone quickly. Title IX is a great example of a good idea that has ended up costing a ton in compliance costs.
Other times what they are doing is pure empire-building, simply because there is very little keeping them from passing on increased expenses to the customer.
If either of these industries were able to be reformed in totality, I’m guessing 50-90% of the administrators would be able to be cut. Realistically, this will only happen with a collapse of said industry (which I think is coming).
Most of the time, compliance requirements only increase with every policy chance. Today in the US, there are new regulations on what you are allowed to do with federal grants. And those regulations are mostly on top of the existing ones. Administrators need to spend more time to ensure compliance, and the actual overheads go up.
The administrative part of grant overheads is already capped at 26%. Even if universities managed to fire every single administrator, common grant overheads would still be 30% or higher. According to the current rules, which are insufficient to cover the actual overheads. At least if you ask the people who are supposed to understand the rules.
Thus is a claim that you will be unable to justify. There are lots of examples of good governance. The current actions by the administration are a very bad way of going about reform. Causing great chaos to a system that produces first rate research is not a intelligent way to go about things.
This is a vague enough notion so that every proposed counterexample can be denied. Of course research costs are going to increase over time as there are no more low hanging fruit.
… Governance by bureaucracy
One party has actively sabotaged most efforts at getting better outcomes. For example, Michelle Obama was criticised for wanting healthier school lunches. One party has actively labelled government as incapable of doing anything right and we voted them in. They are now demonstrating that what is really true is that a party against good governance is not good at governance.
You talk about bad outcomes and are presented with a concrete case of how it’s hard to have good outcomes when one party is opposed to even the discussion of healthier school lunches. Your response isn’t to say that the people who criticized her are morons. Your respons is: Its a state issue. Vapid.
People like you are enablers of the system you decry. A broken system results from Citizens United that lets concentrated wealth (and foreigners) spend as much as much money as they want influence elections. A broken system results from gutting the Voting Rights act and shutting down thousands of pollomg stations. You defend such lunacy and the say, “Hey, we need to destroy science fudning becuase the system has bad outcomes.”
You are the problem.
If Americans were capable of good governance blue states would have good governance. Rather, it seems that blue state people have the will to govern but not the competence to do so.
Instead of "At the current overhead spending rates, has the research been effective enough?", I think the question should be "At the current indirect rates, has the research been supported enough?". My proposed reframing is because the indirect costs are meant to cover the costs of supporting the research.
A side node: If you're interested in gauging the effect of a particular NIH grant, the NIH RePORTER site is your friend: Any publication that is grant-supported will mention this in the acknowledgments. For example, our SGI UV300 (360 CPU cores, 10TB RAM, 20TB PCIe flash, and 4 NVIVIA P100s) was funded thanks to NIH grant S10 OD023452. If you search that ID in RePORTER, you'll get https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9273288: Towards the bottom of the page, you'll find a list of publications (that the NIH was able to find) that used the UV300. With funding in FY17, the machine's past end-of-life and the funding's ended (it was one-time funding, with a 5-year (I think) lifespan), but publications are still coming in.
One thing that's worth noting: The grant had no indirect costs. The money went straight to SGI (they were acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in November 2016, and were still being absorbed). The UV300 is not a "set it and forget it" machine. It's not 'cattle'. So, where did the money come from to run the UV300, and answer questions of researchers who (for example) have never heard of "NUMA"?
The money to pay the supporting folks (sysadmins, etc.) came, indirectly, from the researchers: The S10 grant was structured such that the majority of time on the UV300 was for folks doing work under NIH grants. The indirect portion of those NIH grants is what helped fund the sysadmins (like me) who kept (and still keep) the UV300 up and running.
I think grant-funded research is supported enough if…
1. The facilities researchers use (buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc.) are available enough (they are online for some % of the year)
2. Researchers are able to get technical assistance (for the buildings, equipment, network, compute, etc. that they use) in a reasonable amount of time.
What values should be used for "available enough" and "reasonable amount of time"? Honestly, I'm not sure, and since I've got 'skin in the game' my guesses would probably be too generous towards me. Plus, Goodhart's law applies here.
As long as the spending is in these directions is good for the country, KPIs be damned.
This is really strange framing. Profit is a form of inefficiency. It's quite easy to generate profit—just take from others. How we came to view it as something that makes more sense to structure society around than zero-margin services is bewildering. There isn't a single responsibility government has I don't trust private enterprise to deliver less competently and at greater cost.
> They are in the business of creating the “raw materials” for wide development like infrastructure, educated citizens, […]
Absolutely. Run & improve the positive sum systems, that work best at national scale, that really do pay for themselves, by delivering greater value to citizens than the taxes taken from citizens.
When people imagine a tiny government with tiny taxes, they haven’t understood how much fewer of us could survive without those positive sums. How much more of their life’s time value it would take to pay for an egg.
(Just as the private sector organizes, and reorganizes, to create and grow a stream of positive sums, at a higher variety and speed, at less than national scales.)
Elon Musk gets 8 million a day from your tax money and somehow he is going to save you the money elsewhere without this even being remotely in his interest. The only thing in his interest is to appear as if he did something, that's it. And all of that grifting relies on marks, who reflexively defend every action their betters take. Betters that tell them they are true, strong men that deserve power.
But ironically that is the polar opposite of what actually strong men would do..
Indirect costs support researchers’ needs that the institution provides. For example, who ensures the researcher’s laptop is secure? For basic research, how is lab equipment obtained? Who provides infrastructure to access observational data from an electronic health record system? Categorize these services as you wish, but these services are needed, they have costs, and the expense will need to be covered for medical research to happen. If they can no longer be considered indirect, then they will become itemized and the researcher’s direct budget will have to cover them. For example, laptops permitted to access the institutional network may have a monthly fee that covers system admin time.
In the short run, it’ll mean some research simply won’t happen as the researcher doesn’t have budget for new fees the institution charges for equipment/services that were previously “free”. For new grants, it means a greater part of the research budget will have to be itemized with these costs, eg less funding for researcher or graduate assistant effort. Either the overall grant direct costs will have to go up, or less research happens.
I think many people don’t realize this point.
The universities made it easy with large indirect costs that also covered a lot.
The biggest research universities will just be able to take a lower indirect cost and start charging for things that used to be included in indirect costs.
This may sound more “transparent” or “efficient”, and it is in some ways, but adding admin work to track stuff like this is its own form of inefficiency.
It will be like moving from an AYCE model to an a la carte model, but the grant writer will need to know the orders and special requests needed by everyone many months (or more) before the grant is scheduled to start. This is not the strong suit of researchers and/or grant writers.
This will end up being a shit show.
That's not how that works. You can't change what's direct vs indirect. Direct means the cost is directly (and solely) for what the grant was written for. Indirect means all the stuff everyone uses.
Violating those rules will get you in a lot of trouble if you're caught, and since a lot of this stuff is audited, you will likely get caught.
And yes, the audit process costs money and adds to indirect costs. Just like all the paperwork and audits and so on done for programs like food stamps often dwarfs the
I may have incorrectly used a term of art there. That said…
I am certain that universities will not come out on the short end of this deal for very long, if at all.
There are myriad ways they can do this that will pass an audit. Some games I’ve seen played before the current nonsense:
- put requests from unfavored grants at the bottom of the priority list
- move unfavored grants to crappy and/or inconvenient locations (my favorite was when they split one “group” into four different buildings, basically giving them everyone else’s space scraps)
- cut rotations for things like cleaning staff to the absolute contractual minimum
- stop providing free QoL perks
- the worst case scenario is where they just provide a lower level of service to everyone
University administrations are pros at being petty tyrants — it’s their superpower. The question is in what ways will they use these powers when their cut from certain grants is reduced.
we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. when you amortize your R&D costs across a small population instead of your whole market, that will mean charging everyone in that small population much more.
my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others. i am pretty comfortable at a fundamental level with public support for medical research.
i am not comfortable with failing to protect the results of that research and ensuring that if anyone outside the borders of our country wants a scrap of benefit from those, we enforce payment for that benefit.
Being that country that makes scientific breakthroughs is a good thing. Name one of these "free loading" countries out there is in better shape because they don't do science and just sit back reap the benefits?
Science doesn't really care about borders and making sure its a winner take all mentality will mean you just wont be included in the game.
The deficit is just a reflection of the sectoral balances[1], which governments don't realistically influence through normal policy. They obviously can change them, but it generally results in significant undesirable outcomes.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances
I'm really talking about monetary creation/inflation - the part of the budget deficit that is new "loans" from another branch of government (Federal Reserve), plus "loans" from the Federal Reserve into the financial industry to do things like grow the housing bubble.
The belief that USD will continue to be redeemable for best in class future goods (technological widgets, military hardware, trade and military alliances, etc) combined with the stickiness of transaction costs (especially at nation-state scale) is what allows that ongoing monetary inflation without commensurate price inflation.
I'm not actually American, but you get the gist. I've taken the liberty of posting the full passage here since it's so good:
And what if we're currently affording more than what we can actually do? And what of going forward when a lot of what we can do gets afforded by other countries calling in those IOUs (which won't end up being fully repudiated for a bunch of reasons) ?
You also didn't address my first point that we're likely currently affording more than we can do, especially in the short term. So shutting down foreign trade would result in a straightforward standard of living decrease. Like yes it is important to remember that finance and money are abstractions on allocating real resources, but currently those abstractions are supremely benefiting the US.
Accepting the IOUs means more exports, which is what everyone seems desperate for at the moment. In fact, Trumpism seems to be all about shutting down imports and increasing exports, which happened jolly fast and wasn't in any way related to an inability to import.
And as I said, the simple response to export demands exceeding capacity is normal - increase capacity through efficiency, import stuff to sell. A good post on exactly this stuff: https://new-wayland.com/blog/savings-are-an-export-product/
It is possible to afford more than you can do yourself when you buy things from other countries. That quote is arguing for ignoring the financial abstraction when it becomes limiting, and focusing on the economic realities of what can be done. But my point is that the financial abstraction is currently benefiting the US. Eschewing the financial abstraction, balancing imports and exports, and no longer being a reserve currency means that we will be able to afford less.
That may be fine if the goal is to achieve other results (eg stable manufacturing jobs that support a middle class, supply chain security). But it's still something to be acknowledged, rather than written off. Effectively the worldwide use of USD to facilitate international trade and as a store of future value is itself an export, the use of which is paid for by ongoing monetary inflation. Reducing the desire of other countries to hold USD means ending that export.
There's no financial abstraction happening here. Exports and imports always balance, it's just that financial assets are an export product that foreigners may wish to hold. If they do, then great, because you can swap financial assets for real stuff. This is not unique to the US; plenty of countries run like this.
Of course you should acknowledge that the situation might change, but there's nothing to indicate that's happening. It's not like there's a ready supply of customers waiting to buy all the stuff the Chinese rely on selling for their domestic employment.
Edit: it's worth noting that the decisions here are largely made by the private sector. The government runs a deficit or a surplus because it has to to balance the sectoral flows [1]. If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_balances
I tried to meet you there with the terminology of the Keynes quote and you argued definitions rather than address the translated point.
In the general framework you're pushing, if the government does not run a deficit by being a place to park money, then that money remains in the economy regardless - private savings is generally in terms of loans to banks which then propagate the money elsewhere, not simply holding vast quantities of Federal Reserve Notes. (And frankly FRNs should really be considered part of the debt/deficit too)
I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population. As long as the country remains capable of producing useful stuff, everything is going to be fine, since that's what _actually_ matters.
Yes, in a previous comment you said this:
> If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit
My point is that the private sector saving does not itself starve the economy of money. Savings is generally done into banks, which then choose where to invest that money onwards. What makes it possible to starve the economy of money from this is precisely that the government takes loans from a private sector looking to save - either through banks that buy Treasuries, or even Treasuries bought directly - which forms [part of what is currently considered] the deficit.
> I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population
My original argument had an even stronger implicit point - being able to run a deficit without the consequence of significant price inflation is an extremely beneficial situation. It implies an ever growing value of the ecosystem of that currency, sustaining the new money. We can certainly debate how that value should be realized and what it should be spent on. But pulling back from the world stands to destroy that value creation.
I'm not sure if in your final point your implying something about the quantity theory of money, which is something I reject (flows being the important measure). Perhaps you can clarify what you mean by destroying the value creation? Is this a statement about closed economies being less valuable than open ones?
By what measure? Life expectancy? Happiness? Wealth? We have the highest economic stratification of almost any nation in the developed world, by a longshot. We're the only developed nation that does not provide universal healthcare, does not guarantee sick time and does not guarantee parental leave. We have the most barriers to unionization of any developed nation We have the highest number of incarcerated people, by both total number and percentage of our population, of any developed nation.
We're also among the worst countries in terms of alignment between what the populace wants for policies and what they get from their elected representatives, so we're failing pretty hard at the whole "democracy" thing, too.
> i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that
Great news! I have the cure. All you need to do is google "federal budget percent foreign aid" and you'll feel so much better. It's just one percent of the federal budget.
Since we're on the subject of "paying more than we get back" and our tax bills...what state do you live in, dear commenter who feels ripped off by his tax bill?
you are, of course, correct, we urgently must also end social security and medicare, as they represent large proportions of the budget.
> my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others.
Man, spoken like a true Brexit voter - absolutely sure that they're tired of how the EU is just leaching off the backs of the unappreciated UK. Placing the blame on those foreigners for all the problems at home, and cutting them off will show them how much they needed us all along.
Some storylines are just too tantalizing to looking into the details of. They must be correct because they feel correct to me.
As the UK so bluntly and drastically learned, getting suckered by those storylines sucks when reality comes calling.
thankfully, America is a much larger and more important nation so we should be able to do a better job of it.
If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change.
But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem.
I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.
They absolutely are. The salaries of faculty and postdocs, student stipends, and administrative support staff are apportioned to each grant they work on.
I told the finops people this seemed weird especially because people kept working on the original grant, so it sounded... fraudulent (I didn't put this in email, just verbally) and they said "that's how it's done".
After that I asked the finops people if I could manage my own grants directly and they didn't allow me. It was around this time I started planning my move to industry.
This is not true due to the retroactive nature of this change. The problem is that the grant budgets are already fixed and will not increase. You can't move those costs to the grant budget since the grant money is already fully allocated to things like salary, etc.
In order for this to work, DOGE would have to automatically increase the grant budgets for already awarded grants, which they are unlikely to do.
Today there are usually only a handful of overhead rates for the entire university. Accounting only needs to be precise enough to attribute the spending to the right categories. Nobody needs to know which departments or labs benefit from that particular spending.
But if everything needs to be attributed not just to a specific department and a lab, but to a specific grant, things get complicated. Maybe one lab in a department only uses offices and meeting rooms. Another runs a bunch of servers somewhere on the premises. And a third has a wetlab and works with hazardous materials. Sometimes things go wrong and the entire building needs to be evacuated. Which means there is a need for all kinds of protocols and trainings and responsible personnel. And maybe also for more security guards at night.
Expect fun department politics when the PIs argue who needs to pay what for the infrastructure and who gets to spend more on actual research.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
The University of Washington took 55% off the top in "indirect costs." Then of the direct costs, a bunch more taxes went to the department, the lab, etc. I ended up getting about $40,000 total from that grant to fund my actual research.
I was told that this is just how the game works.
The Lesson: There is a huge amount of waste in academic grants.
The university does not need 55% indirect costs to fund my research. They gave me a laptop and an office to work in. But the laptop actually came out of direct costs. And as for the office... well, I tended not to use it. Coffeeshops were nicer places to work.
So that 55% — $357,500 — was not necessary for research. It disappeared in an administrative hierarchy that kept growing. I talked to professors from 20 years before, and they said that the administration had grown 3x in their time being there. They built their reputation as scientists when everything was smaller and cheaper. Now all that reputation is generating more money, which is getting gobbled up by an administration that wasn't needed when they produced their original successes.
The bloat isn't really surprising: Largely inoculated from market forces, the way modern research is conducted has enormous amounts of inefficiencies, which in turn creates plenty of ways to game the system. Without university accreditation it is very hard to publish research, get grants or invites to conferences, so there is little reason for universities to take less of your grant. Why should journals not be super profitable? It is one of the very few "objective" metrics of success in academia, Nature could probably introduce expensive publishing fees tomorrow, and people would still fall in line. And universities don't really have to adapt, because going to one is basically required to get a good paying job.
I don't know how to fix that, it seems like a very hard problem. Just shutting everything down and leaving it to the private market as the Trump administration is aiming to do seems overkill, but sometimes it might also be necessary to break a stagnating system before rebuilding it better.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg
I love it when people misrepresent things to people who don't know better. This happens every time research funding gets mentioned on HN, by people looking to rile up HNers who absolutely love hearing that their prejudices against the government and scientists are true and academia is robbing the dear taxpayer blind, like it's all some big shady scam.
Direct costs are things that are directly and solely related to or used for the grant. Labor. Equipment. Supplies. For the research funded by the grant, within reason (nobody accounts for or cares about, say, a lab mate asking to use some of a chemical, or one of your DVD-R disks. If you have plenty of room in that incubator that was paid for with your grant and a labmate or someone in the department could really use a corner of it to try something on their experiment, or their incubator dies and you've got room? You say yes. Captain NIH does not descend and go HALT SCIENTIST! THAT EQUIPMENT WAS PAID FOR OUT OF DIRECT COSTS FOR YOUR GRANT, NOT THEIRS!"
Indirect costs are all the costs necessary for "keeping the lights on." Indirect costs are like taxes because everyone's grants are "taxed" and that pays for all the things everyone uses. Maintaining the buildings, paying the electric bill, paying the salaries of the IT staff, paying for network equipment, servers, storage, UPSs. Indirect grant costs pay for the trash (and hazardous waste) to get collected, for the parking lot to get plowed in the winter, for the buildings to be cooled in the summer and heated in the winter. In a lab it pays for stuff like centralized purified water, central gas supplies, and so on.
You don't get to cry about how your work doesn't need all that lab stuff those bio researchers need, or that big storage cluster so you couldn't have to pay for it. Just like you don't get to cry about how the road you live off of is very short so your taxes should be lower because the town has to pay less to pave and plow it, and since you don't have any kids your taxes should be lower still because you're not using the schools. And really, your house didn't catch on fire (and you're very careful about fire safety) so why do you have to pay for the fire department? etc.
Indirect costs are negotiated between schools and the organizations that award grants. A school doesn't get to make up whatever they want. It's known by everyone involved, well ahead of time. Nobody walked into Toomim's office and said "ooo, nice shiny $650k grant you got there, Michael Toomim. We're gonna just...take...about half of that. YOINK! SUCKER! Where does everyone want to go next weekend? Bermuda, or Italy? WHY NOT BOTH!"
Further, indirect costs are accounted for when grants are awarded. The awarding organization didn't think his grant proposal was worth $650k and then oooo, the Big Mean School Administration came and took half his stuff and poor Michael Toomim was left with half the money he thought he needed...frowny face :(
The organization thought the work proposed in the grant application would require $300k in direct costs. They looked up what his school uses for indirect costs, and "wrote the check" for $650k. Other grant organizations award an amount and then an additional amount is added equal to whatever the school charges for indirect costs.
Everyone knows this, grad students included. Nobody counts indirect costs as part of their grant. Ever. When they say "I got a million dollar grant!" they mean "a million dollars plus indirect costs charged by the organization."
Third, there is no fucking way whatsoever that the school took any additional money from the grant for anything except direct costs - stuff that was used solely and exclusively for that grant. Nothing in the grant ...
Overheads are expressed as a fraction of direct costs, not of the total grant. If the total grant was $650k, 55% overhead would be $230k. If the direct costs were $650k, the total grant was $1M.
Universities rarely have significant amounts of money they can use freely. Most of the time, if they want to do something (such as training a PhD), someone must pay specifically for that. And if the PhD student needs a supervisor, someone must pay for the time the supervisor uses supervising the student.
Your grant was not supposed to give you a huge pile of loose money to use as you see fit. It was supposed to pay your stipend and tuition (and benefits, if there were any). And give you a small amount for research expenses on top of that. You gained independence (by not being dependent on your supervisor's funding) and credibility (by winning a competitive grant). You may have also gained the ability to continue your PhD (if your supervisor was about to run out of money). But often the biggest winner with grants like that is the supervisor, who can now use their grant money to hire another PhD student.
The entire grant was $650k. 55%, or $357k were used for indirect costs. I don't know how you multiplied 650 * .55 and got 230, or why you're thinking about a $1M grant.
Assuming the entire award was subject to the 55% indirect rate (not always true), and the total award was $650K, then the direct award amount was about $420K and the indirect amount was ~$230K.
$420K direct
$420K * 0.55 = ~$230K indirect
Total: $650K
1. Universities do not typically allow graduate students to be PIs on grants. This is for liability reasons. Even for postdocs it would be highly unusual to have full, solo PI status on a grant.
2. Federal funding agencies, and the panels that review grants, would be highly dubious about a graduate student as the sole PI on a grant.
For example, NSF's Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 24-1; https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-1-pre-submission#...) explicitly states:
NIH is even more constrained w/respect to graduate students. Even pre-doctoral fellowships (F31) at NIH to support a specific graduate student are submitted by a faculty member.I can't speak to DOE or DARPA policies off the top of my head on this point.
3. Could you provide a grant/award number to lookup on NSF Award Search (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch), NIH Reporter (https://reporter.nih.gov/) or the award search page of whatever federal agency awarded this grant?
I wasn't the PI, and never said I was. My PhD advisor was the PI. I wrote the grant as a graduate student, and did the research.
It was an NSF grant, with a title on something about Social Computing Systems, in like 2010 or 2011 or so. You can search for it if you want.
James Landay (Principal Investigator)
Claus Portner (Co-Principal Investigator)
Interaction Economics: Instruments that Measure Social-Computational Systems
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1110965
There's a single publication listed as resulting from this award (NB: I'd guess there's probably additional papers stemming from this grant; NSF award search only lists what has been published at the time of the annual report for the FY referenced).
That publication includes 4 co-authors:
Michael Toomim, Travis Kriplean, Claus Portner, and James A. Landay "Utility of Human-Computer Interactions: Toward a Science of Preference Measurement" ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) , v.May , 2011
This doesn't sound like a "research without depending on other people" type situation, unless you're suggesting your co-authors didn't contribute meaningfully to the research.
We can't pull up the detailed budget, but let's do some quick math for what such a grant would typically fund for a CS type project.
Assuming a 3-year grant ($140K/year) the directs would have looked like this:
* 2 graduate students - 12 months of stipend, fringe, and tuition/fees. This will be the largest portion of the grant; Total: ~$95K/year (Note: 2010 grad student support costs; would be lot more now):
* 2 PIs -- probably 0.5 or 1 month summer salary ([1] see below) for each PI each plus fringe; Total: $40K/year
* A small travel budget to pay for partipants to attend a conference or meeting (like the ACM conference this paper was presented at); Total: $5K/year
[1]: Faculty in most schools of arts and sciences schools at major universities are only guaranteed a 9-month salary (paid out over 12 months). Note this can differ even within a University. For example, A&S faculty might have one standard; the School of Medicine another; etc.
But it's all so very shortsighted. The people directing all of this clearly have no idea what they're doing or why things are the way they are.
Take USAID as a good example. The reality is that USAID is a wealth transfer from the government to American companies (where most of the money was spent) AND it was an expresion of American soft power on foreign regimes. Dismantling USAID just creates a power vacuum for some other power to fill, likely China.
You see this with talk of a massive ethnic displacement from Gaza and the West Bank into Egypt and Jordan, an action that would likely topple what are essentially puppet regimes for US Middle Eastern interests.
NIH funding is actually a massive wealth transfer from the government to Big Pharma. Why? Because Big Pharma doesn't really discover novel compounds. Federally-funded research does. A lame duck Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act [1] in a bipartisan way that was signed into law by the outgoing Jimmy Carter in 1980. This Act basically allowed Big Pharma to profit fully from federal research.
Big Pharma spends money on marketing, lobbying and any research they do is pretty much limited to patent extension.
We are witnessing the wholesale destruction of American power here. Certain accelerationists who would otherwise be in complete opposition to the current administration are actually celebrating what's going on for that reason. The government is setting up China to be the new big bad of the 21st century but ironically is creating a massive power vacuum for China to fill and extend its influence.
This is pure short-term profit thinking and we will see over the next 4 years looting of the public purse on a scale we've never seen before.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act