Speaking of taxpayer ripoffs. We’ve never heard of a foundation grant that includes 60%+ for overhead, but that was the norm for federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health until this week:

Of course, the health establishment and the media howled in protest and misreported this as a cut to critical medical research – even though, for any given amount of funding, spending less on overhead means spending more on research.

Jay Greene of Heritage noted that “the biggest whopper came from a Washington Post story covering the NIH announcement with the headline: ‘NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately’ … A more accurate headline would have been, ‘NIH cuts billions in administrative expenses, allowing more to be spent on biomedical research.'”

Critics of the 15% cap do have one valid point – some of the spiraling overhead has been driven by federal regulations.

The good news is that Trump has already ordered the greatest deregulation in American history – and making universities sensitive to regulatory compliance costs instead of forcing taxpayers to absorb them can only help in that effort.