How Universities Divert Federal Science Grants To DEI And Administrative Bloat

The federal government awards research grants to universities to make scientific breakthroughs, but for every dollar that it has spent on science, up to 70 additional cents is diverted to administrators, a new study found. That allows the universities to essentially extort the federal government by claiming that the funding is necessary for public health, while gobbling up a large portion for DEI, hiring more deans, and unrelated campus programs. Current policy provides an overhead rate of a whopping 50 to 70%, paid on top of the actual scientific grant, dramatically ballooning the cost to taxpayers and creating a college industrial complex, watchdog group Open the Books said in a new report. The costs are a “black box” that is absorbed by taxpayers, but has no public accounting, the group said. The findings come as the Trump administration seeks to rein in the partisanship of universities and find ways to reduce waste without impacting important scientific research. The Trump administration has proposed reducing the overhead rate to 15%, but the move has been stalled by a court ruling after university groups sued. The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, one of four universities that Open the Books examined, had a negotiated overhead rate of 55 to 56%. It received $9.4 billion in federal research funding between 2013 and 2023, up to $2.3 billion of which was siphoned off for “overhead,” the report - first obtained by The Daily Wire - found. During that time, the university’s administrative staff, but not professors, swelled, and DEI staff climbed from 27 to 179. One grant was for $2.5 million to take a curriculum from the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center and turn it into a middle school anti-racism program about “white supremacy” and “solidarity.” That project alone brought in a whopping $1,173,910 in additional money for the university thanks to its 56% overhead rate. Rutgers had an overhead rate as high as 57%. Of $3.8 billion in science grants, as little as $2.4 billion was left for direct costs. Concurrent with the influx of funding, its staff grew by 10,000 - only a quarter of whom were teachers. The high overhead rates give universities a financial incentive to apply for grants even if the research is not useful or high-quality. Recent reports found that only 46% of 53 cancer studies could be replicated, and most research in psychology journals did not replicate. That means the conclusions are so dubious that when someone else took the same steps, they didn’t get the same results. Christmas Sale - Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships A National Association of Scholars report described the perverse incentives: “While scientists pursue research funding for discovery, institutions want research grants to generate revenue. Because scientists are employees, and administrations are employers, administrations’ interests will always have the upper hand. This is the means whereby academic scientists are reduced to being generators of revenue, not agents of discovery.” That group said that in 2023, the federal government gave universities $60 billion in...

Preview: ~500 words