I used to think I was an important person — managing programs and people to improve everyone’s healthcare.
But in the last few weeks, I’ve learned that was a lie.
I’m nothing but a big, fat case of waste, fraud and abuse — or so says Elon Musk and his DOGEbags.
I was fading away from work anyway, but Elon just gave my retirement a swift kick in the ass (maybe the first of many to come — “thank you sir, may I have another” does not seem like a fun way to enjoy my golden years).
So I was working for a small division of a giant university focused on research and clinical decision support — working on ways to pull complex data from electronic medical records and present just the right information to practitioners just when they need it to prevent prescription errors in things like heart disease, blood clots, and mental health conditions.
That kind of live saving (and cost saving shit) is usually only funded by the federal government or philanthropy. Insurance companies are a pass through and don’t care about saving money — they just pass the cost to the government or the premium payer. Hospitals and healthcare networks are too busy providing care to take risks in research — even if it “saves” them money 5 or 10 years later.
It’s on to the National Institute for Health we go. Filling out floods of applications, budgets and paperwork to beg for a small sliver of tax money (anywhere from $250k to $3 million a year) to save lives and money for all down the road.
I complete the budgets, help with the applications, manage the projects when we get them. But I’m not on them.
The faculty — the MD’s, PharmaD’s, Phd’s, Fellows and Grad students get listed as “DIRECT costs.” Or at least part of them does. NIH sets a cap on their salaries and time, so only portions of their salary get covered. They also limit the hours any single person can be on federal grants, so unlike every lawyer on earth we can only bill up to 38 or so hours a week.
Practically, everything else on the project (including me) is supposed to be covered in INDIRECT costs. That’s the rest of the actual cost of the faculty, the workers, the managers, the buildings, the labs, the computers, the equipment, the electricity — everything else it takes to make research happen.
Sounds bad on paper
Indirect costs are “negotiated” every year between the feds and the Universities. On paper, they range from 45 to 60 percent. That “sounds” like a lot.
But in reality they are much less. Take the direct costs times indirect rate.
Example at 60 percent:
$1 million direct costs
$600,000 Indirect costs.
Total grant = $1,600,000
But when you do the math for the total grant — it’s more like 38 percent for “overhead.” ($600,000 divided by $1,600,000).
DOGEbags just looked at that roughly 60 percent number and cut it to 15. On all grants — current and future. Because it takes several paragraphs to explain how the grants “work” and only this kind of shit to anger the crowd:
If you hire a lawyer, or a plumber or your car mechanic — you have no idea what their “direct” or “indirect” rates are. They just give you the total cost — which includes all the costs, the overhead and “profit”. If they charged the way the NIH pays universities, they would all go broke.
I’d love to buy a car based on only the direct costs of the engineers it takes to design it (with a salary cap of 75 percent of what they actually make and limit them to 38 billing hours a week) plus 60 percent of that portion of their salaries. I’d guess the average cost of a car would be close to $5,000 — not the $70k Tesla charges.
There is no profit in a federal grant — unless you are Elon Musk and getting 30 percent of your revenue from carbon credits for Tesla.
Endowments are one of the best ways to offset the actual costs of research, but only a few Universities have “billions” in the bank earning interest. Most research Universities like Alabama – Birmingham, University of Arizona count their endowments in millions not billions.
So yeah, Fuck you Elon and your “rip off”. You are the master at government rip offs and distracting us with your fake accusations and bullshit metrics.
With that tweet, and this plan, the NIH has thrown Universities under the financial bus. Leaving them scrambling, planning layoffs and stopping research work, contracts and grant applications.
The NIH change is under a temporary restraining order. But the chaos is enough to put many grants on hold. No one wants to keep working or apply for new grants if they are going to lose even more money on the project.
In my own case, my small group is between grants and it has made it virtually impossible for me to get back on a grant for a few hours a week. Not the end of the world for me personally — just a huge hit to all the faculty and staff I work with.
All of these “cuts” are just a small part of the “costs” to continue to pay for the huge tax credits Trump gives to the wealthiest among us. The parasite billionaire class continues to stick their mouths in the trough of government tax breaks, giveaways and credits, while Musk and his ilk continue to gut legitimate government payments to the rest of us.
Future Kicks
So Musk-Trump’s first kick in the ass to my retirement is the NIH cut. While fading off the job, I’m also on Obamacare and paying for my health insurance through the ACA marketplace.
You think they are not going after that in 2025-2026? I’ve got to make it to 2027 to go on Medicare, so we can all see this second kick coming.
How can I afford not to work on these NIH grants? Social Security — took it early. Taking back my money now before the DOGEbags delete those payments too.
Even if I make it to 2027 and medicare, there’s no guarantees there either. These fuckers won’t stop until we are all homeless serfs begging for any kind of scraps they may cast aside.
Because according to them, healthcare and social security are full of waste, fraud and abuse – so I will continue to be one big fat case of waste to them.
And he wonders why everyone wants to set his shitty cars on fire…
These Teslas just burned up all by themselves…
