Tag Archives: politics

Research Grants and Overhead Caps

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Two letter writers to The Wall Street Journal‘s Wednesday Letters section disputed Harvard Professor’s Maya Sen’s “defense” of Harvard’s 69% “overhead” cut of any Federal research grant sent Harvard’s way. One noted that Sen had chosen to elide any actual facts regarding

the [overhead] costs that the reimbursement was intended to cover to support her claim that the 15% rate is insufficient.

He noted Sen’s disingenuousness in her expectation that we taxpayers should just trust the school’s managers to do the right thing. His view was that, in light of this attitude, research grants should be discontinued altogether.

The other letter writer cited Yale’s condition as a typical case:

Yale has a $6 billion annual budget with 8% coming from tuition and room and board, and 20% from grants and contract income. It has a $41 billion endowment and pays little in tax.

As he put it, this is Yale crying wolf.

No to Sen, almost entirely yes to the letter writers.

There’s no reason to believe the amount of money for research in a grant would fall as a result of lowered caps for grant overhead. The only thing that would be limited is that overhead; the money in the research part of the grant isn’t affected in the slightest—except by university managers who confiscate that research money for their overhead chimera.

I don’t entirely disagree with the first letter writer’s position regarding ceasing grants altogether, but I think it would be sufficient, instead of capping the overhead cut at 15%, to cap it at 0.00%, and the schools can accept that or get no grant at all. They can take their claimed overhead costs out of their endowments or jack their tuition further. Instead of us taxpayers paying for these confiscations, let the schools’ investors/donors or their students (parents) pay for them.

For those schools that have such puny endowments or that have properly low tuitions that they truly can’t hack the overhead costs on their own—rather than viewing the whole grant as income the way Sen confessed Harvard does—the relevant State government can make up the shortfall. The State’s taxpayers should be the only ones paying the costs of the schools in their State. That would magnify the voice of those taxpayers and perhaps lead to tightening up on school managers’ fraud, waste, and abuse.

Another Precinct Pipes Up

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The Merit Systems Protection Board has ordered the Department of Agriculture to

temporarily reinstate all of its nearly 6,000 probationary employees, who were fired by the Trump administration last month.

Probationary employees are just that—in trial periods of their employment—and they can be fired for any reason at all during their probationary period. Merit, or its lack, need have nothing to do with their termination.

This board is an independent quasi-judicial agency whose three members are Presidential nominees subject to Senate confirmation. As such, the board is an arm of the Executive Branch and so subject to the control of the President, as the Supreme Court ruled in the matter of firing the chairman of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This is another “independent” agency that’s out of control and needs to be brought to heel.

Defeated?

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Transgender track and field athlete Sadie Schreiner likely thinks he’s a big deal for having finished first in some USA Track and Field Open Masters Championships running events. Lots of girls chose to sit out those events, considering it a waste of their time to run against a boy.

I have some…quibbles…about the news writer’s characterization of those events’ outcomes. In the 200 meter dash,

Schreiner defeated 14-year-old runner-up Zwange Edwards, 16-year-old third-place finisher Zariah Hargrove, 15-year-old Leah Walker, and 18-year-old Ainsley Rausch.

Defeated? Nah. He finished ahead of those girls because he ran faster than they did.

Nor were Edwards, Hargrove, Walker, or Rausch runner-up, third-place finisher, or lower down. Among the girls who were competing in that race, they were first, runner-up, third-place, and fourth-place respectively.

“Defeating” requires there to have been a contest in the first place. There was none of that here, and there nearly universally is no contest in which a boy competes against girls.

Why It’s Useless…

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…to look for, much less work toward, bipartisanship with the Progressive-Democratic Party. Party is spending millions on an ad campaign targeted at a number of Republican Congressmen that centers on Party’s claim that

Last week, Republicans betrayed the American people—breaking their promise and paving the way to strip millions of men, women, and children of their health insurance[.]

Of course, this is a straight up lie by Party. While the Republican caucus is working overtime to find the billions to trillion-and-a-half dollars to cut in order to balance the tax reductions on offer, not a single red cent from Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security is included in those cuts or potential cuts. Indeed,

GOP lawmakers have consistently pointed out that Medicaid and other federal aid programs are not mentioned in the text of their framework for that legislation.

Beyond that, President Donald Trump (R) has made it clear that he will not accept cuts whatsoever to any of those programs, full stop.

But since Party has no alternative solutions to offer—they don’t even accept that a problem exists, so married and consummatory are they to their taxing and spending Big Government ideology—all it has is knee-jerk opposition (House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) is already bragging that not a single Party member will work with Republicans on the current budget outline or on any subsequent allocation bill) and outright lies.

That dishonesty and automatic, unthinking, opposition makes it a wasted enterprise to try to seek bipartisanship or any form of compromise with the party that emphasizes opposition in its loyal opposition role.

When it comes to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY), in particular, nothing that he says or writes can be relied upon, including any “and” and “the.”

Progressive-Democratic Party Version of Free Speech

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A Conservative legislator in Maine spoke against boys competing in girls’ sports, and she posted the image of the State’s Class B girls high school pole vault champion—a boy competing against girls and who as a boy competing against boys the prior year who could do no better than fifth.

Maine’s Progressive-Democratic Party legislators promptly voted 75-70 to censure the Conservative, Congresswoman Laurel Libby (R, 90th District). Nor does Maine do an ordinary censure: under the Maine constitution, by censuring Libby, they have denied her any right to speak on the Maine House of Representatives floor, or even to vote on any legislation before the Maine House. As the WSJ editors noted, that also denies her constituents any representation, disenfranchising them.

Of course, Party knows that, too. Party politicians claim that speaking and voting would be restored to Libby were she to apologize. But for what would she apologize? Having done nothing wrong, apologizing would both be dishonest intrinsically, and it would be cowardly appeasement.

Libby is made of sterner stuff, and she has said she will not apologize.

Those WSJ editors also posited a warning:

Democrats should be considering whether they really want to go down the road of regulating posts on social media.

But that’s what the Progressive-Democrats have been doing for some years already—see Twitter and Facebook during the first Trump administration and throughout the Biden administration.

This is the censorship which we can expect to be inflicted nation-wide if Party ever regains control over our nation. Speech is free when Party permits it.