Outside Lafayette, La. on October 27, 2018

By Leslie Bary, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

I just wrote a mini-grant for $858, to cover flight and hotel for a speaker. To justify the choice of speaker and the validity of event, I composed a few hundred words, to explain to an audience out of field and possibly outside of academia why one invites speakers from other institutions to share their expertise. My speaker is a full professor and department chair at a major research institution. They are a noted scholar in our field of Latin American Studies. Their appropriateness as a speaker is not in the slightest doubt. 

In the past, the $858 would have come out of a departmental speaker budget. I would not have to spend the afternoon explaining in words of one syllable why the event was being held and who the person was, nor creating documentation to prove I really had looked up and compared flight costs. But that was how I spent a lot of time today that would otherwise have been dedicated to research and teaching. 

I have been a professor for many years and before that, I was a graduate student with a teaching role. I have written many small internal grants. Initially, it was only one every couple of years, for special activities like summer research travel. Now almost every routine activity requires a mini-grant. The five-year vita I recently prepared listed ten in a category I now call “Selected Internal Funding.” A complete list would have crowded the document, since as departmental budgets shrink, funding requests for everyday operations are needed more and more often.

I have never been turned down for a funding request. Never. I suspect the reason is that the institution funds all legitimate proposals. I repeat, these grants are for amounts that in the past department chairs or deans would have controlled and would have simply authorized. They would do this not out of corruption or favoritism, but because they were familiar with the field and could exercise good judgment about it.

When I raise this issue, some faculty say they have given up writing mini-grants and only apply for major external grants. I am also a good writer of these, but major grants, at least in my field, do not fund everyday operations. And by major grants I mean grants from national research organizations like the NEH or ACLS. I do not mean fundraising. I also lobby civic organizations to support campus projects, but such fundraising covers different kinds of activities than do research grants to the Guggenheim Foundation. 

The mini-grants address needs not covered by other mechanisms. That is why I continue to apply. I do have some better paid and wealthier colleagues who dispense with the mini-grants and support university activities with personal funds, but they are few. Others take consulting gigs to substitute for the mini-grants, pointing out that if it takes five hours to write and then administer a mini-grant for $750, and they can raise $750 in three hours’ consulting, they’ll do the consulting. 

My research office suggests that applying for mini-grants helps us to reflect and articulate our research programs to ourselves. The fact is it doesn’t. Writing a book proposal or a major external grant can do that, just as updating and reformatting a vita can help rethink a career trajectory. But explaining basic things like why we go to conferences or, as I did for one mini-grant, why professors read books, does not help me clarify my ideas. At the outside, it might help explain what I am doing to an uninformed auditor. But that kind of explanation to such a person makes a negative contribution to my scholarly life.

The formulae for the mini-grants typically imitate those of major grants in the sciences, as does the idea that everything done should be grant funded. But in these fields, people spend as much as half of their work time applying for the funds they need to do their jobs. Rather than address that impractical situation, universities now replicate it at every level. The exercise seems particularly absurd when we are asked by our university to defend our job positions, or to explain that conducting research is part of our contract with them, and we are complying. 

But what is happening here? Every time there is a new, allegedly competitive, centralized internal funding opportunity, it is presented as new funding intended to help us, yet simultaneously, money disappears from regular departmental budgets and the regular library budget. A central committee reviews all the proposals, and individual units across campus lose autonomy. The university says this reduces “siloing.” In some cases it can be fairer since there are always people involved who do not know the applicants. But overall, it seems to be about a reduction in shared governance.

That is to say that every mini-grant application is a symptom of a department without a budget and, in the case of many of mine, a library without materials. When departments do not have budgets for research and libraries do not have them for materials, and faculty instead apply for funding to a mysterious committee in Academic Affairs, that committee has taken over functions that multiple department chairs, librarians, and others would have shared in the past. This is a concentration of power in a rather faceless group. Even if there were a Senate committee administering such things, the atmosphere would be less corporate. 

I note further that Human Resources nowadays is not a department of my university, but a service we have outsourced to a corporate “partner.” People who have increasing power over us are not colleagues or university employees. I wonder when the same will happen to the committee that judges the mini-grants.

What should be happening instead? Universities should restore department budgets for routine scholarly activities that are central to university education, central for undergraduate students as much as for everyone else. This would increase the use of decentralized academic expertise, lodged in departments, which would in turn increase the efficiency of the overall system. And it would reduce the excessive administrative labor of the many, many scholars in my position.

University of Louisiana, Lafayette on October 25, 2018

Yonsei University, Seoul on February 11, 2025

I’ll give this to Trump.  He makes more and bigger mistakes faster than any politician in US history. And his mistakes are also more angry, insulting, and destructive than those of other politicians.  He is the GOAT in these areas. But we need to see this as a weakness more than a strength.

 

I was half-way through a post refuting the Muskian project’s claim to knowledge when I saw that the Post’sPhilip Bump had written it for me.  There’s been a lot of progress in the past two weeks about the Trumpian project as knowledge destruction, particularly through Musk’s military wing. 

 

A lot of good knowledge work has been degrading Musk’s research credibility. For many people, it’s basically over. The Bump Rule is now widely in effect: “The safest approach to Musk’s rhetoric  . . . might be the one he wants to apply to government funding: reject it all as dubious until there’s reason to think it isn’t.”

 

The most famous example is that Musk’s big X announcement of widespread Social Security fraud, concealed by bureaucrats and exposed by DOGE, was based on ignorance of an old software program’s convention for dates.  A twitter swarm of experts posted about his COBAL knowledge gap.

 

 

Journalists wrote fact-checked stories. Others offered Musk advice about how to conduct actual research.  Many said that Musk should have some evidence of his claim before POTUS holds a press conference about it.

 

Journalists have been checking DOGE work in the way research colleagues would normally check work inside an academic research team before it is released.  They find low standards. “DOGE’s Only Public Ledger is Riddled with Mistakes,” the New York Times finds, having previously exposed basic mistakes with decimal points.

 

 

Bump laid out the conclusion about Muskian knowledge:

Musk isn’t very interested in the truth. His interests are in slashing government funding, undermining the political left and, where possible, both. So he kept at it, sharing numbers over the weekend that suggested the Social Security Administration had 1.5 million people aged 150 or older in its database, a subset of the nearly 21 million aged 100 or older.

 

Trumper error combined with brutality—fuelled by the stated desire to traumatize workers—depends on a multi-dimensional lack of knowledge.  It also depends on making followers think knowledge is irrelevant and opponents think knowledge completely powerless.

 

I’ll discuss some strengths of this machine before going on to say why they are vulnerable.

 

It intimidates people to watch Trumpism makes war on knowledge, civil service, skilled employees, general competence, non-corruption, constructive government itself, and of course independent expert authorities. Friday night, while firing the Black head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to replace him with a less qualified white man, and removing the first female head of the Navy, Trump also fired the senior lawyers in three military branches.     

 

It intimidates people to think about Musk’s treasure chest and the power to threaten every single elected Republican in the US with political extinction if they stray out of line. 

 

It intimidates people to think about the orc army of knowledge refusers known as MAGA.  

 

It intimidates people to think about civil service employment law being categorically voided through sheer arrogant executive belligerence. It’s designed to make people think, “no one is safe, including me.” And it does.

 

There’s Trumpism’s control of 2.5 of the 3 branches of government (it doesn’t quite command the lower courts). 

 

There’s Trump’s claim to be dictator and king, his unlimited aggression in the display of total power, his casual destruction of all relationships, and the apparent ease with which he intimidates even billionaire oligarchs through threats of retaliation.  

 

Trumpism draws power from its anger and violence, coupled with its confusion and ignorance.  Violence that cannot be addressed with facts, arguments, or other elements of reason is the most frightening kind.  Trumpism channels the political version of the culture of casual abuse, masquerading as a special vitalism, and carrying a head on a pike.

 

This nexus of threat turns wrongness itself is a power, as Bump notes about DOGE’s repeated bungling. 

The result is a weird variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which Musk and his lackeys appear to know too little about how government systems work to understand what they don’t know. Instead of then realizing the gaps in that knowledge and tempering future comments, Musk builds a defensive position around his claims, constructed of partisan tropes and attacks on his critics. It unfairly reinforces skepticism in the government. But that’s entirely the point.

 

All this is true.  Wrongess in the pursuit of power is no weakness.  It proves the power. 

 

And yet all of this is not working as well as one might expect.

 

We should take stock of the fact that the reign of (t)error is revealing the limits of Trump’s mandate. Here’s a recent Post-Ipsos poll.

 

 

Trump has famously split the country, but the result is widespread revulsion for his policies.  Non-Republicans—the country’s numerically dominant group—give him majority support on only one of these 33 policies.  Three-quarters of his policies receive 25% non-Republican support or less. 

 

That’s a base to build on. It can assume majority rejection of Trump’s policies and decline of the status of Trump’s superstar Musk.  

 

Anti-Trump lawfare continues to expand and is doing well in the courts. For example, on Friday a judge extended the injunction on the NIH cuts. (The Lawfare tracker can help you keep score.)  

 

We’re seeing wide circulation of stories of the pointless immiseration of good workers, posing the biggest public test ever to Republican claims to care about working people as more than human shields for their tax cuts and giveaways of public resources to business.

 

The core premises of Trumpism can be readily undermined, sometimes in one image, from US history’s most repressive effort to erase words referring to women and people of color to the DOGE war on government bloat that doesn’t exist.

 

 

Then there’s the sheer repetition of the unending everyday Trumpian offensive: it signals that its victories depend on lying, cheating, and stealing, including public resources and people’s careers.  

 

Concealed weakness is also the meaning of the extremely belligerent treatment of Europe in the Munich meetings, or the escalating craziness of the CPAC conference, which brought a new Nazi salute—this one from Steve Bannon—and Elon Musk wielding a chain saw like the federal government’s serial killer. 

 

It’s important for strategy to stay clear about the weakness signalled by these things. Oppositional strategy has to be clear about the hidden meanings of the show. As Trumpist spectacle requires an ever grander ritual sacrifice, Trumpism will remind more people of the end of Dr. Strangelove on a loop, and see its destructiveness as an anti-knowledge project.

 

 

 

This brings me to the position of the anti-Trump opposition. To succeed, it has to bind expertise to a new narrative project, not move away from expertise in search of affective power.  

 

I mention this because so much critical theory and social science has decided that argument and evidence are relics of our failed Enlightenment and are no longer relevant to mass politics.  To put it more subtly, though the professional-managerial class (PMC) may still prefer rationality the masses do not, and this is why the PMC backstabs social movements and is despised by everyone.  

 

William Davies’ Nervous States(2018) made a good systematic case that affect has replaced reason as the medium of politics.  On this model, we are in the period of what the philosopher Brian Massumi (2015) called “ontopower,” operating through the intuitive and the speculative, leading to pre-emption, or Deleuze’s control.  Or in Carolyn Pedwell’s terms, understanding current technological society requires that we “relinquish our persistent attachment to human-centric notions of will, agency, and intentionality” (unpublished ISRF AI Group Paper). Trump’s rise, in its dependence on affective spectacle and bullshit of every kind, seems to confirm the need to cling no longer to fact-checking, argument and evidence. 

 

Many people have pointed out that the right beats the left in the department of grand narratives and affective attachments to them. But what does this really mean about the role of expertise in the overall ensemble?

 

The historian John Ganz has taken this issue up in his important history of the U.S. right, particularly his book on the Bush I period that produced Pat Buchanan and the culture warriors that prequelled Bannon and Trump. He’s come back to this issue a lot, most recently in a post about Republican mythic politics.  But to repeat the question, what is the relation between knowledge and narrative in a leftist mythic politics?

 

I completely agree that the left needs a positive narrative about the society it wants and why it would be so much better than what we have. It has to involve pleasure and liberation, and freedom from oppression, from the shattering of hatreds, and from the depredations of contempt.  I’ve written a cumulative and positive left narrative around higher education—many many posts of the 2010s on this blog, the “recovery cycle” in The Great Mistake, etc.  Some phases of this narrative seem reformist, some more radical, and all have fallen outside the Hallin spheres  of consensus and of legitimate controversy as policed by academic administration. (I like the Hallin spheres better than the Overton window.)  This kind of narration has to be built out for the whole range of institutions and communities.

 

This can and must be done.  It overcomes the endless distraction of playing defense, of being trapped in the unending series of critiques that have to be levelled at bad ideas coming from inside the house—from university admin for example—as well as out.   To build the alternative narrative takes discipline and sustained collaboration.  Both are really hard. 

 

And yet, to ask the question again, does the new narrative achieve mythic power only when it overcomes the limitations of intentional knowledge and critique? Ganz seems to be saying yes. He invokes a passage from George Sorel, quoting Sorel as follows:

The idea of the general strike, engendered by the practice of violent strikes, entails the conception of an irrevocable overthrow. There is something terrifying in this – which will appear more and more terrifying as violence takes a greater place in the mind of the proletarians. But, in undertaking a serious, formidable and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world. 

 

I agree that expert analysis has to join with and become a movement for it to change society or point out the new road towards it.  But I don’t agree with the opposition between fact-checking and the sublime strike in which the latter is the source of the new mythic narrative.  Ganz elevates Musk and DOGE to the level of myth, and writes, 

 

This mythic nature of these notions makes the liberal attempts to fact-check or dispute their contents piecemeal a futile exercise. The positivistic approach of liberal pundits, as expressed most characteristically in the unimaginative vox.com mentality, is completely out of its depth when it tries to deal with the policy merits or demerits of these new right-wing myths

 

We are indeed sick of our pathetic liberalism—and its enablement of the worst projects like Israel’s annihilation of Gaza.  But that does not include Vox’s fact-checking and other earnest and learned effects to expose lies as an essential part of the defusion of violent Trumpian control. 

 

The left absolutely needs to keep and to rebuild knowledge as such. That means radical knowledge and social movement knowledge and also very much knowledge based on professional expertise—on electrical engineering and ethnic studies alike.  

 

The appeal to the imagination has to arrive on this basis of knowledge if it is to arrive from the left.  The left is not about regeneration through violence, to recall Richard Slotkin’s great title incarnating the meaning of the US as a permanent frontier.  The right is about that.  The left is about the end of that myth, to misstate the title of Greg Grandin’s excellent book analyzing and debunking. the long violence of US national history.  

 

So Musk must be fact -checked.  We know that Musk is bullshitting us in the Henry Frankfurt sense of lying in order to control of the audience, and we know this because of some experts in things like COBAL and some medical statisticians on social media and because of reporters like Makena Kelly at Wired, whose editor set up a unit dedicated to tech in government in anticipation of the need to report out on a crusade.  

 

“Imagination” in the new myth cannot skip data, analysis, argument, persuasion, or organization on the basis of all these things.  It’s where the left’s new narratives will come from.

 

Seoul National University on Feb14, 2025

It’s increasingly clear that knowledge destruction is not a side effect of Trump’s regime but its central mission. 

A four-year presidential campaign based on lies, disinformation, and abusive accusations was the means. The elimination of knowledge—because it competes with power--is the end. 

This project has a number of branches.  One is to make corruption great again. This involves the suspending or dismantling of business law.  The law, for all its problems, encodes a long history of social knowledge that its practice always considers.  That’s why Trump lost a civil suit to E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse. That’s why U.S. corporations have lost cases for bribery of officials of foreign governments under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  The law knows and uses understandings of sexual abuse and of bribery that emerge from culture over generations and are then applied through dynamic legal processes.  This knowledge places real constraints on executive power. Trump’s war on the law is a war on legal knowledge. 

The nuclear war on DEI is another.  This has exploded from criticizing specific course requirements and administrative policies to seeking the erasure of the words, the practices, the offices, and the people involved with any whiff of it. It has become one of the most repressive political crusades in modern US history. It engages in censorship and erasure as a proxy for thought control.  

It goes beyond McCarthyism in the 1950s, which created a climate of fear by rooting out some finite number of Communists in the US government, to creating a climate of fear by defining the entire government workforce as the woke enemy. Woke is “gender ideology,” trans rights, civil rights, all the raced, gendered, sexual things not plainly supporting white patriarchal order.  Woke is the commonplace “belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”  The project is self-evidently ridiculous, understood literally as replacing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Uniformity, Hierarchy, and Exclusion. It is that, but also extremely damaging, since it aims at the destruction of the knowledge that underlies the banal procedures manged by DEI offices and personnel—knowledge from feminist studies, the sociology of race, biology and cognitive psychology and many many other fields and movements whose discoveries imposes constraints on the will to power. 

I have three points about this. It’s a total war on knowledge. The point is to eliminate interpretation, discussion, dispute, litigation, and debate, and to create reality with assertion as an act of power.  This was also the Bush II strategy, but Bannon, Trump et al. have brought it to a new stage of universal application.  

Trump doesn’t (and can’t) debate. He goes for the knock-out one liner, which is why his assertions are so often absurd. Saying “the U.S. will own” Gaza annihilates discussion of all the central issues about self-governance and right of return, which is the point; infuriating delusion is a feature not a bug: the only response is total rejection of the premise, which also stalls debate and Trump gets his way again.

You’ll remember all the decades in which we had to rebut right-wing arguments that professors were brainwashing students into political correctness by teaching Toni Morrison novels in humanities survey courses, down to the argument that the purpose of critical race theory was to make white students ashamed of their identities. 

The new Trump regime doesn’t argue. It eliminates the knowledge people who would do the arguing.  The purpose of Elon Musk’s DOGE is not to study the information systems and admin structures of the federal government to make them, say, 15% cheaper.  The purpose is to fire people who know things—the empiricists with data—so they can no longer participate, complicate, expose, or propose alternatives.  The purpose is not to fire some of them but all of them. Hence the lack of numerical goals – “we’ll reduce costs 18%, or the workforce 12% or 31% through the introduction of AI,” whatever.  Efficiency isn’t the point; destruction is. 

Second, the purpose is to harm people. Certainly they want to hurt poor people and people of color in order to silence them or to drive them off. It’s also very much to harm the government’s knowledge people. Trumpers explicitly seek to traumatize them.  The idea is to make them quit, take them out of the action, thus paralyzing the knowledge function and makes it go away.  

Ditto the attacks on the infrastructure of academic research at NIH and  (here, and at Inside Higher Ed)—starve the beast, hurt the scientists. The new head of Health and Human Services to which NIH reports, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is widely described as anti-vaccine.  But more deeply he is anti-knowledge—ignorant of and hostile to the collaborative system of millions of professional researchers who study, test, debate, circulate, challenge, and revise knowledge. All of this is to be overruled by his own impressions.  

Same goes for the destruction of the Department of Education's Institute for Education Sciences, which includes the National Center for Education Statistics.   “It basically literally means we are stepping back in time decades,” one scholar said. That’s the idea.  Strip knowledge people of their knowledge and you control them absolutely. No data, no backtalk.   It’s the end of knowledge’s intrinsic constraint on power—and all that attitude. 

Musk sets the pace: he manages his conflicts of interest by eliminating the people who have knowledge of them. Again, this is not only to eliminate the rules that use the knowledge, but to eliminate the knowledge itself, at its root, by harming or purging the people that have the knowledge. 

My third point is that Trumpism is a total war on culture. Culture is the source of all the offending knowledges. It is the place where the multitudes abound and clash. It generates radically multifarious knowledges by its very existence, and also diverse methods of adjudicating these.  Some of the most settled of these wind up as law, but most remain in solution in the society, to use Raymond Williams’ metaphor. They are embodied in structures of feeling, where identity, experience, and more abstract political questions and economic questions exist indissociably together. They interact with each other sometimes in political movements and debates, and routinely in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts—poetry, commercial filmmaking, music, criticism, everything. 

Trumpism hates culture, starting with its innate diversity—culture is always a relation among plural cultures, as Fredric Jameson among many others have insisted across the decades. Trumpism also hates culture for its complexity and its power. It is too multitudinous and also simply intelligent to be assimilated or destroyed. It is rooted in millions of concrete experiences that cannot and will never be dispatched with the great man’s abusive assertion or his claim to ownership. One example is the unfathomable courage of Palestinians living in the ruins of their deliberately destroyed cities, homes, schools, universities, shops, and hospitals. Among other things, that is will as culture, in all its power.

The dumb stuff Trump does, like firing the board of the Kennedy Center in D.C. and replacing it with one that then appointed him chairman, shows the anxiety that lies behind his contempt for culture outside of television.  Apparently the Kennedy Center once had a drag show.  One can imagine Trump’s lifetime of offhand comments about culture, history, and feelings, that never fail to displease the listener. Same with Musk, a terrible bungler outside his core expertise of capitalizing tech monopolies. Culture delivers these men that little jolt of humiliation.  It’s their zone of confusion and weakness. Hence their attempts to establish the one knowledge to rule all others—the “deal” for Trump, some physics of social Darwinism for Musk. But it never works outside its own self-defined terrain.

The hatred behind all this will cause widespread suffering and death.  The default is move fast and kill folks.  Destroy their workplaces, labs, clinics, food distribution networks, institutes.  Fire everyone, burn everything.  If you don’t like it, try and sue me.    

Because of the abuse and the violence and the hostility baked into every statement and announcement and goal, it’s easy for us to see this engine of knowledge destruction as tremendously powerful.  It’s point is to make us too afraid to fight. It’s easy to take the bait. 

It’s made easier still by the total capitulation of the country’s corporate and tech elite to Trump’s lifelong practice of extortion through abuse of counterparty.  We were right to be alarmed when billionaire overlords Bezos and Soon-Shiong blocked Kamala Harris endorsements at the Washington Post and LA Times papers that they own: if these supremely powerful people are afraid of Trump, and appeal to him by stepping on their knowledge professionals, then shouldn’t I be too?

The right answer is no.  Trump’s hatred flows from anxiety, shame, and fear in the face of the general culture. It has often detested him but more importantly is indifferent to him and will proceed in its infinite variety and unpredictable directions on its winding course.  Trump’s sociopathology expresses his experience of his own weakness, which no success has ever overcome. He focuses on exterminating internal enemies because absolutely everyone is a threat. 

We should see ourselves that way, as what we actually are—a mortal threat to Trumpism.  We should side with the culture, because it is going to win.

 

Mississippi River Outside the MLA New Orleans on Jan 10 2025

by Bruce Robbins

I didn’t sign the pledge not to renew my MLA membership. (Mine is a lifetime membership, so in any case the organization would not miss out on any money from me). The pledge says, “I refuse to be affiliated with or financially support an organization that both silences its members and is complicit in genocide.” As an American, I am paying taxes that have been financially supporting the genocide, and though sorely tempted, I am (literally) unprepared to resign from the United States. Complicity with genocide is not something I can pledge away. The MLA’s silencing of its members is another story.

You can resign without signing the pledge.

The craven illogic of the Executive Council’s decision not to allow discussion of BDS has been laid out in scrupulous detail by Rebecca Colesworthy, Anthony Alessandrini, David Palumbo-Liu, and Matt Seybold, among others. Anyone who has not yet found time to read their resignation letters is passing up on an indispensable moral archive, and a very good-bad story. Anyone who does not see the power of their case-- well, I suppose all I can say is that you and I probably don’t have much to discuss with each other. But things have changed in the last month. There is a fragile ceasefire. Donald Trump is in office. Adding insult to atrocity, he is threatening to take over Gaza and displace its population permanently.

The once unimaginable things Donald Trump has been doing since he took office put the cravenness of the MLA leadership in a new light.

The leadership has demonstrated that it is afraid to listen to its members. What it has not demonstrated is a willingness to lead.  Leadership, amid the flurry of Trump’s threats and closures, blockages and executive orders, will require something other than obeying Trump’s Republicans in advance. Obeying in advance is exactly what the MLA’s Executive Council did when they claimed fiduciary responsibility and closed down debate. 

As the new McCarthyism expands, much the same anticipatory obedience is to be anticipated from university administrations. That is what Harvard offered up to Trump when it accepted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which allows vocal critics of Israeli violence to be classified as anti-Semitic (including Jews like me) and menaced with legal action. At other universities, apparently including mine, that definition is already in use behind closed doors to shut down freedom of speech and, it seems, to get student protesters deported.  

The MLA leadership did not start all this, but it certainly did nothing to stand apart from what was coming, let alone stand up to it. What we need from our leaders is principled integrity and a willingness to fight on behalf of the university’s principles and mission, if only in court (where MLA could have pledged to go), if only to defend freedom of speech. The MLA has meant a lot to me, and I don’t rule out the possibility that if it were under different leadership, I might want to participate in it again.  But that leadership would have to show that it’s leading.

And it would have to do so before Trump leaves office. No credit for waiting and seeing. As Omar El Akkad puts it, one day everyone will always have been against this. Some of us will be there to remind you that when it mattered, you weren’t.

Columbia University 

February 11, 2025

Bosphorous from Boğaziçi University on February 5, 2010

I've written two dozen posts on this blog about indirect cost recovery (ICR), going back at least to 2009. But this is my first when the topic has made national news, unfortunately as part of Trump's total war on professional knowledge (that series started here). 

ICR seems like a boring, technical budget subject.  In reality, it is a major source of the long-running budget crises of public research universities. Misinformation about ICR has also confused everyone about the university's public benefits.  

These paired problems--concealed shortfalls and midirection--didn't cause the ICR cuts being implemented by Trump's man at NIH,  one Matthew J. Memoli, M.D. But they are the basis of Memoli's rationale. 

Trump's people will sustain these cuts unless academics can create an honest counter-narrative that inspires wider opposition.   I'll sketch a counter-narrative towards the end of this post. 

The sudden policy change is that the NIH is to cap indirect cost recovery at 15% of the direct costs of a grant. This will apply to all grants to all institutions, regardless of the existing negotiated rate for each.  Memoli's Notice has a narrative that is wrong but internally coherent and plausible.

It starts with three claims about the $9 billion of the overall $35 billion budget that goes to indirect costs: 

• Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of direct research.
• Indirect costs are "difficult for NIH to oversee" because they aren't entirely entailed by a specific grant.
• "Private foundations" cap overhead changes at 10-15% of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.

Memoli offers a solution:  

• Define a "market rate" for indirect costs as that allowed by private foundations (Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg, some others). He then claims that 
• this foundation-set market rate is equal to the share of indirect costs that are valid. The foundations' rate "discovers"  real indirect costs rather than inflated or wishful costs that universities skim to pad out bloated administrations. (Many scientists share this latter view: see UCSF's Vinay Prasad's points 3 & 4.)
• On this analytical basis, currently-wasted indirect costs will be reallocated to useful direct costs, thus increasing rather than decreasing scientific research. 

There's a logic here that needs to be confronted.  How are we doing so far? 

The current strategy is to focus on outcomes rather than on the logic of the claims or the underlying budgetary reality of STEM research in the United States.  This continues a longtime, standard response to cuts (these are by no means the first)--to call the new ICR rate cap an attack on US scientific leadership and on public benefits to U.S. taxpayers (childhood cancer treatments that will save lives, etc.).  Most current coverage feature these arguments  (Science, NYTimes, WaPo, APLU). 

For example, one scientist wrote, "The NIH cap on indirect costs will kneecap biomedical research in the US." "It will mean shuttering labs across the country, layoffs in red and blue states, & derailing lifesaving research on everything from cancer to opioid addiction," wrote Sen. Patty Murray.  The University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom put together a good BlueSky thread: 

This is all good stuff.  The next step is to file lawsuits claiming illegality and seek a court injunction.  

And yet these claims don't refute the NIH logic. Nor do they get at the hidden budget reality of academic science. 

 

On the logic: NIH-Memoli's first two points as stated above misdescribe indirect costs. They aren't in competition with direct costs because direct and indirect costs pay for different categories of research ingredients.   

Direct costs apply to the individual grant: chemicals, graduate student labor, waste disposal, that are only consumed by that particular grant.

Indirect costs support "infrastructure" used by everybody in a department, discipline, division, school, or university.  Infrastructure is the library that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to just one important journal that is consulted by hundreds or thousands of members of that campus community annually. Infrastructure is the accounting staff that writes budgets for dozens and dozens of grant applications from across a department or schools. Infrastructure is the building, new or old, that houses multiple laboratories: if it's new, the campus is still paying it off; if it's old, the campus is spending lots of money keeping it running.  These things are the tip of the iceberg of the indirect costs of contemporary STEM research.

In response to the NIH's social media announcement of its indirect costs rate cut, Bertha Madras has a good starter list of what indirects involve. 

Good list! Then there are people who track all these materials, reorder them, run the daily accounting and payroll, etc etc.--honestly people who aren't directly involved in STEM research have a very hard time grasping its size and complexity, and therefore its cost.  (Memoli is a NIH lab director and surely knows this.) 

As part of refuting the first claim--that NIH can just not pay for this and therefore pay for more research--the black box of research needs to be opened up, Bertha Madras-style, and properly narrated as a collaborative (and exciting) activity.

This matter of human activity gets us to the second NIH-Memoli claim, which involves toting up the processes, structures, systems, and people that make up research infrastructure and adding up their costs.  The alleged problem is that it is "difficult to oversee."  

Very true, but difficult things can and often must be done, and that is what happens with indirect costs. Every university every year compiles indirect costs as a condition of receiving research grants.  Specialized staff (more indirect costs!)  use a large amount of accounting data to sum up these costs, and use expensive information technology to do this to the correct standard. (They do routinely the very thing Elon Musk and DOGE claim to be bringing for the first time to the federal government, which is advanced IT applied to complex systems.) University staff then negotiate with federal agencies for a rate that addresses their particular university's actual indirect costs.  These rates are set for a time, then renegotiated at regular intervals to reflect changing costs or infrastructural needs.  

The fact that this process is "difficult" doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it. This claim shouldn't stand--unless and until NIH identifies flaws would need to be identified. As stated, the NIH- Memoli claim that overhead cuts will increase science is easily falsifiable.  (And we can say this while still advocating for reducing overhead costs, including ever-rising compliance costs imposed by federal research agencies. But we would do this by reducing the mandated costs, not the cap.)

The third statement --that private foundations allow only 10-15% rates of indirect cost recovery--doesn't mean anything in itself.  Perhaps Gates et al. have the definitive analysis of true indirect costs that they have yet to share with humanity. Perhaps Gates et al. believe that the federal taxpayer should fund the university infrastructure that they are entitled to use at a massive discount. Perhaps Gates et al. use their wealth and prestige to leverage a better deal for themselves at the expense of the university just because they can.  Which of these interpretations is correct?  NIH-Memoli assume the first but don't actually show that the private foundation rate is the true rate.  (In reality, the second explanation is the best.)

However, the cuts to 15% depend entirely on the private status of these foundations insuring that 15% is the true and valid ICR rate. Since they don't and  it isn't, the solution of 15% isn't right either (the second set of bullets above).  

This kind of critique is worth doing, and it can be expanded. The NIH view reflects right-wing public-choice economics that treat teachers, scientists et al. as simple gain maximizers producing private not public goods. This means that their negotiations with federal agencies will reflect their self-interest, while in contrast the "market rate" is objectively valid. (See Nancy McLean's book on James Buchanan, etc.) However, critique is only half the story.

The other half is the budget reality of large losses on sponsored research, all incurred as a public service to knowledge and society. 

Take that NIH image above. It makes no logical sense to put the endowments of three very untypical universities next to their ICR rates: they aren't connected. It makes political narrative sense, however: the narrative is that fat-cat universities are making a profit on research at regular taxpayers' expense, and getting even fatter. 

The only way to deal with this very effective, very entrenched Republican story is to come clean on the losses that universities incur.  The reality is that existing rates of ICR recovery do not cover actual indirect costs, but require subsidy from the university that performs the research.  ICR is not icing on the budget cake that universities can do without. ICR buys only portion of the indirect costs cake, and the rest is purchased by each university's own "institutional funds."  

For example, here are the top 16 recipients of NIH funds (under HHS- Heath and Human Services). The second largest is UC San Francisco, winning $795.6 million in grants in 2023. (The Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey tables for FY 2023 are here.)

UCSF's negotiated indirect cost recovery rate is 64%. This means that it has shown HHS and other agencies detailed evidence that it has real indirect costs in something like this amount (more on "something like" in a minute).  It means that HHS et al. have accepted that UCSF evidence of their real indirect costs as valid.

If the total of UCSF's HHS $795.6 million is received with a 64% ICR rate, this means that every $1.64 of grant fund has $0.64 in indirect funds and one dollar in direct.  The math-- x=(795.6/1.64)0.64 -- estimates that UCSF receives about $310 million of its HHS funds in the from of ICR.

Now, the new NIH directive cuts UCSF from 64% to 15%. That's a reduction of about 77%. Reduce $310 million by that proportion and you have UCSF keeping $71.3 million of its ICR, or losing $238 million in one fell swoop. 

There's no mechanism in the directive for shifting that into the direct costings of UCSF grants, so let's assume a full loss of $238 million.  That's over 10% of UCSF's research budget.

In Memoli's narrative, this $238 million is the Reaganite's "waste, fraud, and abuse." The remaining $71 million is legitimate overheads as measured (wrongly) by what Gates et al have managed to force universities to accept in exchange for the funding of their researchers's direct costs.  (To repeat, this is quasi-free riding on the federal government by private foundations, not a measure of real vs. fake indirect costs. We do need to make this critique.)

But the actual situation is even worse than this.  It's not that UCSF now will lose $238 million on their NIH research.  In reality, even at (allegedly fat-cat) 64% ICR rates, they were already losing tons of money. Here's another table from the HERD survey.

There's UCSF in the No. 2 national position again, a major research powerhouse.  It spends over $2 billion a year on research.  However, moving across the columns from left to right, you see federal government, state and local government, and then this category "Institution Funds." As with most of these big research universities, this is a huge number.  UCSF reports to the NSF that it spends over $500 million a year of its own internal funds on research.  

The reason? Extramurally sponsored research, almost all in science and engineering, loses massive amounts of money even at current recovery rates, day after day, year in year out. This is not because anyone is doing anything wrong.  It is because the infrastructure of contemporary science is very expensive. 

Here's where we need to build a full counter-narrative to the existing one. The existing one, shared by university administrations and Trumpers alike, posits the fiction that universities break even on research.  UCSF states, "The University requires full F&A cost recovery."  This is actually a regulative ideal that has never been achieved.  

The reality is this:

For every million dollars in research expenditures at UCSF, the university spends $250,000 of its own money. That adds up to half a billion dollars of its own funding spend to support its $2 billion in research.  That money comes from the state, from tuition, from clinical revenues, and some, less than you'd think, from private donors and corporate sponsors.  If NIH's cuts go through, UCSF's internal losses on research--the money it has to make up--suddenly jump from an already-high $505 million to $743 million in the current year.  This is a complete disaster for the UCSF budget. It will massively hit research, students, the campuses's state employees, everything.

The current strategy of chronicling the damage from cuts is good: the best MSM coverage so far is Kaleem & Watanabe.  But it isn't enough. We also need the critique of NIH and this true story of the already existing negative research budget reality.  I'm pleased to see the American Association of Universities, a group of high-end research universities, stating plainly that "colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs." All university administrations need to shift to this kind of candor.

Unless the new NIH cuts are put in the context of continuous and severe losses on university research, the public, politicians, journalists, et al. cannot possibly understand the severity of the new crisis.  And it will get lost in the blizzard of a thousand Trump-created crises, one of which is affecting pretty much every single person in the country.

Finally, our full counter-narrative needs a third element: showing that systemic fiscal losses on research are in fact good, marvelous, a true public service. A loss on a public good is not a bad and embarrassing fact.  Research is supposed to lose money: the university loses money on science so that society gets a long-term gain from it.  Science has negative return on investment for the university that conducts it, so that there is a massively positive ROI for society, of both the monetary and non-monetary kind. Add up the eduction, the discoveries, the health, social, political and cultural benefits: the university courts its own endless fiscal precarity so that society benefits.

We should also remind everyone that the only people who make money on science are in business. And even there ROI can take years or decades. Commercial R&D, with a focus on product development and sales, also runs losses.  Think of "AI": Microsoft alone is spending $80 billion on it in 2025, on top of $50 billion in 2024, with no obviously strong revenues yet in sight.  This is a huge amount of risky investment, --it compares to $60 billion for federal 2023 R&D expenditures on all topics in all disciplines.  I'm an AI skeptic, but appreciate Microsoft's reminder that new knowledge means taking losses and plenty of them.

These up-front losses generate much greater future value of non-monetary as well as monetary kinds. We can remind people of these abundant future benefits as we insist that they confront the size of these research losses (here, here, here, here Stage 2). Look at Penn, Madison, Ann Arbor, Harvard, Pitt in Table 22 above. The sector spent nearly $28 billion of its own money generously subsidizing sponsors' research, including subsidizing the federal government itself. 

There's much more to say about the long-term social compact behind this--how the actual "private sector" gets 100% ICR or significantly more, how state cuts have screwed up the university's lower rate, how student tuition now subsidizes more of STEM research than is fair, how research losses have been a denied driver of tuition increases. There's more to say about the long-term decline of public universities as research centers that, when properly funded, allow knowledge creation to be distributed widely in the society. (See this 2011 post on UCSD losing a major research team to Rice University, when one of the departing scientists broke the silence on the role of public cuts in his departure.)

But my point here is that opening the books on large everyday research loses, especially biomedical losses of the kind NIH creates, is the only way that journalists, politicians, and the wider public will see through Memoli's Trumpian lie about these "no problem" ICR "efficiencies." It's also the only way to move towards the full cost recovery that universities deserve and that research needs. 

UPDATE FEBRUARY 11: (Washington Post)

'Judge Angel Kelley, in federal district court in Massachusetts, ordered the National Institutes of Health not to implement a funding change the agency had announced Friday night, which would dramatically reduce funding to universities and other research organizations for indirect costs related to research.

'Twenty-two Democratic attorneys general sued the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health on Monday, charging that the action is in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

'In their complaint, the attorneys general said the impact would be immediate and result in layoffs, suspension of clinical trials, disruption of research and laboratory closures. It sought the temporary restraining order only in the 22 states that brought the action, Andrea Joy Campbell, the attorney general of Massachusetts, said in a news conference Monday. The cuts affect everyone in the country, but only Democratic attorneys general stepped up, she said.

'Later Monday, three higher-education associations representing colleges and universities nationally — the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the American Council on Education — also sued in federal district court in Massachusetts.'