[addicted]

The “overhead” isn’t even overhead as most people understand it.

But the real question is why does the general public think 59% is too high? Irs an arbitrary number. Maybe an appropriate level of “overhead” is 1000%.

In reality the people who actually know anything about how this is calculated, across the board and across the political spectrum, do not think this is a major concern at all.

The only people who are complaining about it are the ones who hear the word overhead, have no concept of what it means other than taking a lay persons understanding that all overhead is unnecessary and are coming with the idea that anything above 0% is bad.

[rayiner]

Were the people at HHS who tried to reduce indirect costs in 2013 during the Obama administration also not the “people who actually know anything?” https://archive.ph/2025.01.09-171418/https://www.bostonglobe...

I bet the “people who actually know anything” at Boeing would also say their launch costs are as low as they can go and there’s nothing to cut.

[selimthegrim]

It seems like the better comparison from your article would be 1992, but really, having RFK Junior sitting there with a chainsaw is in no way comparable to 2013

[rayiner]

It’s different because RFK with a chain saw might achieve change where Obama failed.

We have had 3 populist elections in the last 5 cycles. Obama 2008 was co-opted and Trump 2016 was stymied by Russia investigations. So this time there’s RFK and Elon and Tulsi with chain saws. If the people don’t like the results they can vote for Harris in 2028. But at least sometime tried to do what the winning party voted for.

[meroes]

These are cuts to enrich the extremely wealthy, not for a lean-mean-fighting industry. Your whole conception is off. They don’t need or care if the entire country does better overall, they care about personal wealth. It’s Obama wasn’t trying anything of the sort.

[ModernMech]

This is really it. Generally they gesture vaguely toward a notion of "administrative and bureaucratic overhead", without really understanding how that overhead actually cuts waste and improves research output by removing redundancies. If we were to zero out this administrative overhead, it would mean every professor would end up doing less research and more not-research.