The 2022 report includes an analysis of 82 universities, the indirect cost rate they receive from federal grants, and the indirect cost rate they receive from private funders such as the Sloan Foundation, Gates Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Ten of the schools in the Heritage Foundation analysis did not confirm their indirect cost rates for private funders, leaving 72 full entries in the report’s analysis.
Of those 72 universities, the report claimed that 67 accepted private research grants with zero percent indirect research cost coverage—exactly the same analysis and finding as in the NIH notice.
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The Heritage Foundation report concluded that just three schools in the sample refuse to accept indirect cost rates from private foundations at lower rates than those they negotiated with the federal government. Those schools are the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Massachusetts Institute for Technology, and the University of Michigan.
The NIH notice refers to the same three schools without identifying the Heritage Foundation as the source of the analysis. It mentions that Harvard required a minimum 15 percent indirect cost coverage from private funders and that California Institute of Technology required a 20 percent indirect cost coverage. These examples also appear in the Heritage Foundation report.
One of the report’s authors, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Jay Greene, says he was not involved in drafting the NIH notice but did acknowledge that one paragraph of the NIH notice “does appear to be a reference to our 2022 report.” The NIH did not respond to WIRED’s request for comments.
A plan to cut indirect cost rates in federal grants also appears in Project 2025, the nearly thousand-page Heritage Foundation policy blueprint for a second Trump presidency. “This market-based reform would help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas,” the report reads. During his presidential campaign, Trump consistently disavowed any links to the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.
On Monday, a coalition of 22 states filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the NIH’s attempt to cut indirect costs.
Universities say the cap will hamper their ability to do vital research. “The discovery of new treatments would slow, opportunities to train the next generation of scientific leaders would shrink, and our nation’s science and engineering prowess would be severely compromised,” wrote Harvard president Alan Garber in a post on the university’s website.
Some universities stand to lose more than $100 million in federal funding if the new grant cap is maintained. According to STAT, Weill Cornell Medicine brought in $107 million in indirect costs during 2022—a figure that would drop to $23 million if the rate had been 15 percent.
