[tempnow987]

All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't too big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain a pretty big funding line) life is better all around?

My own indirect experience is not NIH, but gov lab related work. This is I think more bureaucratic because the labs have funding streams, and the key goal can be not to f it up. That might move things to a somewhat heavier compliance model.

I'm not against indirect costs rates, they are a HUGE efficiency winner to avoid needing to push paper at the individual level. That said, the system it funds is not itself that efficient.

UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there though.

So if you get $400K in the door you get to "keep" $160K of it.

[Fomite]

`All good points. My own sense is that if your carry isn't too big (you are not feeling a ton of pressure to maintain a pretty big funding line) life is better all around?`

Absolutely. The standard in my field is somewhere between a 50% and 100% soft money position. Mine is only 25%, and while I could probably fish around for a position at a more prestigious university, it's a big boost to my ability to go "Yeah, that seems neat, lets do it" and thus a major quality of life boost.

`UC Berkeley I think is going to be 60%+ indirect rate for 22-23 as a local point of reference - I don't work there though.`

This is not how you calculate indirect rates.

Indirect rates are a percentage of your direct rates. If X is the money you get for your lab (i.e. direct costs) and the indirect rate is 60%, then the actual calculation is 1.6X = 400,000, so X = $250,000.

If you want to point a finger at the thing that's probably the most harmful to the funding of science, it's not indirect rates. IMO, it's that the NIH budget cap for a modular R01 was set at $250,000 in direct costs in *1999* and has never moved from that.

[tempnow987]

25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting projects range! Do you have responsibility for other positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know someone who was very stressed because their proposals "carried" a fairly large group of folks.

Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y (indirect) = total award?

[Fomite]

Answering this bit first:

`Good point on indirect rates - I was being too quick there. Salary costs can be lower because you have to layer on fringe as well (which can be a separate pool or just a direct calc). So salary * 1.X (fringe) * 1.Y (indirect) = total award?`

Yeah, this is how that math works, at least at my institution, with some rare exceptions.

`25% sounds awesome - that's in cool and interesting projects range! Do you have responsibility for other positions. Not sure how it works where you are, I know someone who was very stressed because their proposals "carried" a fairly large group of folks.`

It really is awesome, and I'm tremendously privileged to be in that position. It's especially nice in my field (infectious disease epidemiology) because in basically all outbreaks, the work we do is uncompensated for ~ 6 months or so and then you sort of hope for grants to back fill it (I had, for example, done my best work on the pandemic prior to getting any funding for it).

You have however nailed the primary source of my stress - keeping "my" people funded. Graduate students (the downside of my position is its in a place where TA lines are functionally non-existent), postdocs, etc. are my responsibility, and keeping them funded is most of the reason I write grants.

We're experimenting for some staff positions (because 100% funding a staff scientist on grant money is daunting and terrifying for a single PI) with using a pool of funding, to address that while four of us may be able to pay 25% of a data analyst, none of us can pay 100%, with gaps in that backfilled by some institutional resources.