Court Rules Harvard Gets to Keep Skimming 70% of Every NIH Grant Dollar

Imagine walking into a university laboratory expecting to see scientists peering into microscopes, decoding the mysteries of the universe. Instead, you find a labyrinth of administrators, diversity officers, and luxury campus gyms funded in the name of "science." This, more or less, is the current state of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant system, a financial edifice so distorted that it warrants not just skepticism but outright indignation.

The United States, with a national debt that now rivals its GDP, continues to borrow money to subsidize a research industrial complex that serves less to advance science than to enrich America’s most gilded academic institutions. The NIH, responsible for distributing almost $50 billion in research grants annually, has morphed into a pipeline not for discovery, but for institutional profiteering. It is a model that is both economically unsustainable and morally indefensible.

Let us begin with the grotesque mechanism through which these funds are distributed: Facilities and Administrative (F&A) reimbursement rates. Every university negotiates its own rate with the NIH, a bureaucratic haggle that produces outcomes so inflated they would make a defense contractor blush. Harvard University, the wealthiest academic institution on the planet, with an endowment surpassing $50 billion, extracts 69.5% in F&A costs on every NIH grant dollar. That means when the NIH sends Harvard $100 million for research, nearly $70 million is siphoned off for campus operations and administrative overhead, none of it tied to any specific scientific inquiry.

Harvard is not alone. MIT and the University of Michigan claim 56%. The University of Minnesota, Stanford, and the University of Utah all pocket 54%. These F&A funds are not subject to audit tied to individual research projects. They disappear into the general budgets of these universities, effectively subsidizing growing armies of administrative staff and ideological expansion under the guise of supporting science.

The University of Michigan offers a case study in this academic grift. According to internal audits and public reports, Michigan employed over 1,100 individuals in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles, including 167 embedded across colleges, 90 in the central Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and another 123 in amorphous positions like "coordinator" or "intern." When NIH sends a grant to a lab in Ann Arbor, half of the money is underwriting an ideological bureaucracy that often stands orthogonal to the pursuit of empirical knowledge.

And what are American taxpayers actually funding under the name of "science"? The parade of absurdities is long and shameful. The NIH awarded $419,470 to study cocaine use in lonely rats. But only $209,735 went to the actual research, the rest was skimmed by New York University. Cornell received $2.24 million to infect and euthanize cats with COVID-19, of which over $1.4 million vanished into the school’s administrative coffers. $1.5 million was spent on putting fish on treadmills. $3 million went toward a study examining the impact of music on shark behavior, which included licensing the theme from Jaws. Most farcically, a $10,000 NIH grant funded a climate-themed drag show on ice. The good news? At least that one didn’t include an administrative surcharge.

As shocking as these examples are, they are not the exception. They are a feature of a broken system. The average NIH grant allocates 28% to F&A expenses. Extrapolated across $50 billion in annual funding, that means American taxpayers are sending $14 billion each year not to research but to institutional overhead. To be clear: these billions are borrowed. The US government does not have the money; it prints it or borrows it, effectively taxing future generations to fund today’s university bloating.

Other nations do not tolerate this kind of institutional largesse. The UK ties overhead reimbursements to actual, verifiable project costs and requires that institutions fund 20% of these costs from existing budgets, creating a disincentive to inflate bureaucracy. Canada does not provide F&A reimbursements at all. Institutions are expected to pay for overhead from their own funds. Germany caps all such reimbursements at 20%, creating a uniform and predictable standard. In contrast, the US allows a grotesque form of academic rent-seeking, negotiated behind closed doors, with zero transparency or accountability.

The problem is not limited to domestic waste. The NIH also funds research abroad, in over 50 countries. Sometimes this occurs directly, and sometimes indirectly through sub-grants issued by US universities. This is the precise mechanism by which gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was funded, a fact that should have led to sweeping reforms. Instead, the spigot remains open. We borrow money, often from rivals like China, to fund research in China. If this sounds insane, it is because it is.

The Trump administration tried to address this madness. On February 7, 2025, the NIH, under directive from the Department of Government Efficiency, issued a policy to cap F&A rates at 15% across all institutions, new and existing. It was a rational reform, aligning the US with international best practices. But within days, 22 states and powerful research lobbies sued. On April 4, a federal court issued a permanent injunction against the policy, claiming it violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The judge ruled the policy was "arbitrary and capricious," ignoring the global context and the urgent financial reality of a nation drowning in red ink.

Here we arrive at the apex of dysfunction: not only is NIH spending economically reckless and scientifically dubious, but attempts to reform it are stymied by legal obstruction. A single district judge now stands between fiscal sanity and $14 billion in annual grift. Lawfare, once the tool of social activists, now shields elite institutions from even the mildest accountability.

President Trump should act decisively. Until the courts resolve the matter, all new NIH funding should be paused. Schools that wish to continue receiving grants may do so voluntarily under the 15% cap. Let them opt in. Otherwise, let the funding stop until a proper notice-and-comment period is completed and a uniform standard is reissued under full statutory compliance.

Moreover, NIH should immediately suspend all direct and indirect funding of research conducted overseas. The US is running an annual budget deficit north of $1.5 trillion. We have no business funding research in Johannesburg, Beijing, or Sao Paulo until our own fiscal house is in order. We must also end funding for ideological performance masquerading as science. Drag shows, musical experiments on sharks, and cocaine-laced rat mazes are not national priorities.

We are not anti-science. But the American people are being sold a lie. What we call "research funding" is, in truth, an elaborate system of wealth transfer from federal taxpayers and their grandchildren to elite institutions that already sit atop vast financial empires. In this ecosystem, science is the fig leaf, not the fruit.

It is time to prune the tree.

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