These rates are negotiated with the government, and aren't exceeding the actual costs. Indeed, someone I know crunched the numbers for my institution, and the "margin" is exceedingly tight, and for some projects, negative.

I am faculty, and while yes, we are incentivized to bring in money, we also have output too. And believe me, when talking to funders, "gee, I didn't do any work because I was bringing in more grants" is a pretty dangerous strategy.

Indirects also cover important things. On my current grants, the following are covered by indirect costs, just as examples.

- The data center and networking infrastructure where my particular nodes on our cluster live.

- My actual office, including things like the facilities folks that keep it clean, lighting and heating, IT infrastructure again, as well as things like paper for the printer because I prefer to read on actual paper.

- The library and journal subscriptions that provide me the material I actually need to read.

- The admins who are helping shepherd a position I'm hiring for through the process of doing that, posting the position descriptions on the relevant sites, etc. The one who put in a bunch of orders for me for an international project where it's cheaper to buy the stuff here, set it up, and then carry it with me than it is to get it there. The one who knows the reporting requirements I don't. The IRB admin who helped us figure out some human subjects issues around doing research that involves university employees in their capacity as employees. The admin that helped me actually prepare and submit the proposal.

- The attorney that helped review and sort out several fairly complex agreements, as well as a whole host of fairly simple ones that still needed to be checked.

- The senior level administrator (the usual boogeyman in these things) who is spearheading an effort to consolidate several of individual-level efforts into something that's coherent at the university level, so we can actually act on things that don't require individual-level researchers like me to have the bandwidth to keep a relationship alive, and which persists past turnover either at the university or the organizations we are working with.

- The startup funding for a new disease ecologist before I can put them on some new grants.

All of these help propel my research forward. My indirects pay for my share of these people's time and expertise. And importantly, they help cover things that I can't foresee, or are enough layers of removed from me that I don't even really know who we're paying as much as "This thing gets done".

Is there waste in our indirects? Sure. There's waste everywhere. But it's both hardly the terribly oppressive burden HN seems to think it is (even leaving aside that HN consistently does the math wrong) and something that exists in industry as well - it's just hidden in the total price.

Incidentally, my institution is also perfectly happy to just quote folks a fully burdened price.

What happens when we don't charge full indirect costs?

The taxpayers of my state end up making up the difference, because the lights, and the reporting bits, and the IRB, etc. still have to exist to get the work done. And for some projects one might be able to justify that, but for some others (waves at industry) I have a problem with it.