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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NIH does crucial work but there's a lot of fat. I could cut the budget 10% today, 10% if I worked a while on it.  [/quote]
Please tell us exactly what you would cut. Inquiring minds would like to know.[/quote]

May I answer?
Top universities charge 70 - 90% overhead to NIH grants, i.e., only 55 cents on a taxpayer dollar goes to a project. 
The rest goes to general budget, including to pay a million-dollar president salary and free mansion, third to half of that to swarms of associate deans and executive VPs such as for diversity and inclusion, disability services, 
and subsidize even more obscene pay for sports coaches and the departments like gender studies that bring no grants.  
That is actually modest compared to the typical 200% overhead in DOE labs (which get much from NIH under inter-departmental agreements), where only 30 - 35 cents of taxpayer dollar  
goes to a project. Much of the rest goes to similar pay packages to multiple levels of managers, and then more to corporate profit of  managing companies like Lockheed or Battelle.  
The unis say they must get that overhead to support research, but gladly accept private grants (Wellcome Trust, Beckman Foundation, Gates Foundation, etc) that cap overhead at 10% or nothing at all. 
The corporate private funders negotiate overhead, often down to 20% or so. Only the sucker NIH pays with no negotiation. 
If we cut all overhead to 20%, even with 20% topline cut the projects will get 64 cents on present dollar - which is more than now in all places and much more than in many. 
How Harvard's Faust expressing outrage over NIH cuts while drawing a 1 M salary from overhead while postdocs make at best 3 K/month after tax in Boston (where basic rental is 2 K/month) is morally superior to Trump?

Further, NIH gave over 500 grants in FY16 to foreign institutions. That is the ONLY govt. agency in the world that funds research by foreign PIs.
Many are from Canada. But US PIs are not even eligible to apply to CIHR (he Canadian NIH equivalent).
I once applied to get some computer time (not even real money) from a Canadian program that had a call directly in my area,
with a supporting Canadian collaborator. (The call did not explicitly require the PI to be from Canada).
Next week I got an e-mail from an obviously stunned program manager saying that they NEVER gave anything to non-Canadians 
and can't fathom why one would think they should or would.

We need: 
1. Cap ALL overhead to 20% with no discussion. Saves about 30% relative to the average 70% overhead (1.2/1.7) 
2. Ban all grants to foreign PIs, unless in reciprocity where that country awards an equal amount to US PIs (saves another 1%) 
3. Require all overhead to be demonstrably spent solely for direct support of projects 
4. Eliminate all "ethical oversight boards", "diversity" requirements and such beyond basic equal rights.
The 3 and 4 are hard to quantify quickly, but clearly very substantial.

THEN ask taxpayers for more funding.[/quote]

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