AFTER NIH MOVE, DOGE HYSTERIA SPREADS. There was an alarmist report in the Washington Post over the weekend about the Trump administration and the National Institutes of Health. Beneath the headline, “NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effectively immediately,” the paper cited various sources who said a new way of calculating medical grants, imposed by the Trump administration, would be a “devastating” move that would “imperil … universities and medical centers,” “cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” result in “higher degrees of disease and death in the country,” and “imperil clinical research,” for which Americans would “pay the price with their lives.”

Wow. Here is the issue: When a university or research institution receives a grant from NIH, it charges the government for “indirect costs,” that is, for administrative and overhead costs. The amount charged can vary, but it’s a lot of money. “The average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27 percent and 28 percent over time,” NIH wrote in a statement announcing the new policy. “And many organizations are much higher — charging indirect rates of over 50 percent and in some cases over 60 percent.”