President Donald Trump’s proposal to limit National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant money directed to non-research functions would save taxpayers billions of dollars while increasing the funds applied towards research, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) told Breitbart News.
Trump has proposed capping grant indirect costs not directly contributing to research – “what’s generally considered overhead, so it’s expenses and administrative expenses,” Harris said – at 15 percent. The government previously negotiated with institutions on those rates, with the share going towards indirect costs reaching 50 percent or more.
Those rates, an outlier among government grants, have turned NIH grants into a slush fund for wealthy liberal universities.
“The vast majority of these institutions have large endowments, and they could easily fund indirect costs out of those endowments,” Harris, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
“The federal government should not be doing this,” he added. “This has gotten — this has gone out of control.”
Harris knows this issue as well as anyone in Congress. He earned undergraduate and medical degrees at Johns Hopkins University and worked as an anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital for three decades, where he performed NIH-funded research.
“I understand the system entirely,” he told Breitbart News.
Democrats and the establishment media have framed Trump’s executive order as devastating cuts to life-saving medical research, but the policy will benefit research, Harris says.
“Let’s take some of those savings from paying exaggerated, exorbitant indirect costs, and actually fund more research grants but not with huge indirect costs, so we’re actually funding the researchers and the cost of doing research.”
Democrats and their establishment media allies have attacked Trump’s proposal with what Harris calls “fearmongering,” and he knows why.
Many of these institutions have been “brainwashing” students “toward liberal dogma” for decades, he said, “so [leftists] view the academic institutions as their last line of defense against Trump’s democratic election by a majority of Americans who disagree with the liberal dogma.”
A federal court has temporarily blocked Trump’s order while lawsuits work their way through the system. But Harris, who previously led legislative efforts to lower the cap, said Trump “absolutely has the ability to do it through executive order.”
“I’ve attempted to do this through some of the language and appropriations bills in the past,” he said, but Democrats won’t cut off funding for “one of their sacred cows, the academic institutions who thrive on feeding at the government trough with indirect costs.”
NIH in recent years has come under increasing fire from Republicans who have portrayed the agency as a hotbed of leftist scientists and academics who have benefited from overly generous outlays of taxpayer dollars to further liberal causes.
“Even the most generous agriculture grant coming out of the federal government is capped at a 30 percent indirect cost,” said Harris, who chairs the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee. “So this strange dichotomy existed within the federal government, where if you’re doing a very important research project, but it involves agriculture and not the NIH, then you were capped. Whereas if you did the NIH, you were not capped.”
Trump’s policy would ensure institutions receiving NIH grants are not treated more generously than other recipients of federal grants, while at the same time furthering the purpose of the grants – advancing medical research. Harris believes that’s a win for taxpayers and researchers.
“I think this levels the playing field within the federal government,” he said, “and I think it’s the right position to take.”
Bradley Jaye is Deputy Political Editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter and Instagram @BradleyAJaye.
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