University Funding Should Be Reformed, Not Reduced
Simpler accounting for administrative costs would be a step in the right direction.
Overhead is under scrutiny.
Photographer: Scott Eisen/Getty Images
Six months before World War II ended in Europe, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to his top science adviser. Could the wealth of technical knowledge developed for combat, he asked, spur the peacetime economy and improve public health? The resulting treatise, presented to Congress in 1945, established the nation’s commitment to funding university research.
Today, the federal government covers more than half of universities’ R&D spending, much of which flows through the National Institutes of Health. The agency spent more than $35 billion on almost 50,000 grants in 2023. NIH-funded research has supported lifesaving innovations from the hepatitis B vaccine and cancer therapies to MRI scans and gene-editing technology.