I can see I've hit a nerve here. But it's ok. I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against. It's understandable that you would resort to appeals to authority and ad hominems when you can't present a logical argument.

> I understand that the fact that private research grants contain indirect percentages less than half of the federal rate and yet still the universities not refuse them is a very difficult thing for you to argue against.

Here's an easy approach to a counterargument.

Private foundation grants account for less than 10% of all research funding in the sciences [1]. The fact that researchers apply for and receive private grants has _nothing_ to do with whether their funding restrictions would be sustainable when scaled up.

https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24332

There are fixed costs associated with running research labs and facilities. Just because private funding can (sometimes) come with lower allocations for overheads doesn't mean that research can continue at pace without the public grant overheads. The vast bulk of research money is public not private.

While I will happily concede that there is always room for improvement with how we fund research, your suggestions are impractical and would heavily handicap existing efforts.

A couple things:

1) We refuse them when we can. Like if you have a lower indirect rate, my institution's policy is that has to be located somewhere that's documented, you can't just do it. I did have one where the sponsored programs folks just said no.

2) As mentioned, they're sort of a drop in the bucket, and also important to junior faculty, so they're a little bit accepted as loss leaders.

3) At several institutions, it was made clear to me that if you relied on these, and not "full fat" grants, by the time you came up for tenure, things would be bad.

The great irony is every research administrator I know (and I know a lot) sort of hates these. If they had wanted to, "You cannot charge a private organization a indirect rate lower than your negotiated federal rate of the same type" (there are different rates depending on the nature of the project) would probably have been met with "Yeah, that tracks."

Instead, they're trying to use it as an excuse to absolutely gut research.

There it is again. Private research grants are often taken at loss, subsidized by the actual scientific funding infrastructure that has made the US the world superpower of science.