Last year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) paid the University of California more than a million dollars to study whether specialized cellular immunotherapies can extend the lives of cancer patients who are otherwise out of options. To date, cellular immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment. Naturally, taxpayers across the country would think allocating a million dollars to study a potential cure for cancer is well within reason.

At least that is what they think.

What taxpayers might not know is that nearly 40 percent of this research funding won't be used to find a cure for cancer at all. Instead, it will fund the "indirect" expenses of the research—an undefined term even NIH admits there's no real way to track .

And this isn't an isolated incident. While direct costs are easy to quantify, indirect costs are not. What qualifies as the "indirect cost" of research grants is so vague that universities can use these "overhead expenses" to justify funding salaries for professors who aren't involved in research projects, office parties, administrative activities, entire research facilities, or the formation of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and staff.

In 1946, taxpayers began subsiding scientific research at higher education institutions. In some cases, the indirect cost a university charges the federal government were as high as 75 percent , which means the university can receive hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements that it can use for whatever purpose it chooses.

Last year, NIH spent more than $35 billion on almost 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions. Approximately $26 billion went to direct costs, while a staggering $9 billion went to "overhead" as an indirect cost.

A simple Google search will show the most common indirect reimbursement rate paid by private foundations is 0 percent—meaning many foundations do not fund indirect costs at all. Even the wealthy Gates Foundation pays a maximum indirect cost rate of only 10 percent. As I've said for years on Capitol Hill, if we could only bring the indirect costs paid by the federal taxpayer down to the levels that the Gates Foundation pays, we could fund thousands more research projects.

One could reasonably argue that the federal government should reimburse for lights, equipment, and other essentials needed to conduct critical research. But why should the American taxpayer pay inflated "indirect costs" for NIH research in universities while nonprofits, private companies, foundations, and even other federal agencies invariably pay much less?

For years, I asked the NIH this question in hearings on Capitol Hill. Never once was I given a solid explanation.

That changed this year when the Trump administration capped the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government at 15 percent—a more generous rate than nearly every nonprofit or private foundation. This announcement was met with fury and fear among media and academic researchers—but praise among those of us who had watched this taxpayer rip-off continue for decades. To this day, headlines are heralding the impending demise of critical cancer, heart disease, and terminal research, but these headlines are fearmongering at their finest. On the contrary, the Trump administration's new indirect cost rate will allow more funding to go towards direct scientific research costs rather than bloated administrative overhead.

The Trump administration's decision raises another question: Why aren't universities with multi-billion-dollar endowments funding the overhead costs in their own research organizations?

Institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale are among the largest recipients of NIH funding. Last year, the Harvard endowment fund grew by around $5 billion —it now stands at more than $52 billion. The indirect costs of Harvard's research grants come to around $200 million per year—an amount that could be easily funded by the university's endowment income alone.

Yale's endowment grew by a remarkable 2.3 billion last year . Its indirect costs came to around $250 million per year. So, let's be clear about what we are seeing: Ten years of indirect costs that Yale charged to the American taxpayer that could actually be paid for by the growth of its own endowments. The federal taxpayer in effect is growing private university endowments in what amounts to a pass-through scheme.

It's no secret that many of these academic institutions are no friends to free speech. Many of them tolerated blatantly antisemitic protests on their campuses last year and use administrative funds to pay for DEI offices. Why should taxpayers fund the growth of exaggerated indirect costs that these institutions could provide for themselves?

The Trump administration is actually protecting and allowing the expansion of critical research. Capping indirect costs at 15 percent is fair, generous, and will allow more funding to go directly to critical research. By removing bloated administrative costs and forcing large money-making endowments to pay their fair share, the Trump administration can now take some of the $9 billion the NIH spent on "overhead expenses" last year and increase the number of research grants to cure cancer, fight heart disease, and establish nutritional research so the next generation of Americans is not plagued by obesity.

Thirty years ago, I was a physician-scientist at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, conducting research funded by NIH. As a physician, I understand how important research funding is. But for years, the American taxpayer has paid greatly inflated "indirect costs" for research in universities while endowments, nonprofits, private companies, and foundations don't pay their fair share. The fact remains that NIH's new indirect cost rate of 15 percent is more generous than what research institutions receive from private foundations, and this new rate could allow more NIH funding to go directly to critical scientific research, instead of funding bloated university bureaucracies—including DEI offices.

The United States has best medical research in the world. It is vital that as many funds as possible go directly towards scientific research rather than administrative overhead.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.