Dave... and Elon

All this week, as Donald Trump and Elon Musk lay waste to the federal government, I have been thinking about the silly comedy film Dave, from 1993. Its plot is entirely ridiculous. When the President (Kevin Kline) suffers an incapacitating stroke, his conniving chief of staff (Frank Langella) desperately wants to preserve his own power. So he persuades a presidential look-alike who does comedy acts (also Kline, of course) to step in and pretend to be chief of state. Soon, however, the look-alike, Dave, starts to get his own ideas about how to run the country. In one particularly far-fetched scene he invites an accountant buddy to come to the Oval Office to help review the federal budget. And guess what? The buddy quickly identifies lots of easily corrected waste and mismanagement, allowing the fake president to save a beloved social program. Here is a clip: Dave (6/10) Movie CLIP - Balancing the Budget (1993) HD.

Unfortunately, it seems like the men currently at the helm of the federal government are taking inspiration from this comedy. Of course we can balance the budget! It would be easy! Just look at all the obvious waste and mismanagement! Just apply some common sense! The problem is that, first, they have only a very superficial understanding of government operations, with no sense of the reasons why things are done in certain ways, or the constraints imposed by legislation, treaties, and long tradition. And second, they are looking at the government the way a consultant would look at a failing business, taking nothing but profits and shareholder returns into consideration. It should go without saying that government is not a business, and that the sort of risk-taking and bulldozing of entire sectors of employment that goes on all the time in the business world is utterly unacceptable when the common good is at stake.

One imagines that a sweet, well-intentioned fellow like Dave, when presented with arguments of this sort about why he couldn’t simply fix the budget with a swipe of the pen, would have reluctantly concurred. Trump and Musk, however, are neither sweet nor well-intentioned, and if their blind sledgehammer blows at crucial government functions causes great pain and suffering, well, so much the better as long as it is their enemies who are doing most of the suffering. And therefore, to justify these sledgehammer blows, they simply lie, most often taking a single budget item, twisting it to make it look ridiculous, and then claiming that it forms part of a sinister agenda on the part of the “deep state” or the “woke.” Musk has been tweeting out such lies about USAID all week.

A case in point is the announcement Friday evening that the National Institutes of Health would stop paying universities “indirect costs” on research grants at current rates (often around 65%) and only pay what they pay to private foundations (15%). The official NIH announcement, amplified on X by Elon Musk, made it sound as if this was a simple cost-cutting measure, and one that would end a long history of the universities ripping off the government with inflated charges. Musk’s acolytes have been busy posting mendacious or distorted stories about the absurd or harmful things that NIH funds. Even if all the stories were true, which they are not, the projects in question still only amount to a tiny fraction of the NIH research budget.

The basic talking point here might sound convincing—to anyone who knows nothing about the subject. Why should universities get away with charging the government so much more than they charge private foundations? The answer is actually pretty simple. NIH funds much larger, more ambitious, long-term, large-scale research projects than most private foundations do. These projects often require substantial infrastructure and other fixed cost and related investments that it makes little sense to pay for out of individual research grants. In the past, universities have abused the system – most famously at Stanford, where some indirect research funds were used to pay for the president’s yacht, among other things. But that was more than thirty years ago, and since then the NIH has kept a much closer watch and carefully negotiated indirect rates to ensure that the funds go to support research.

If the order cutting the indirect rate to 15% stands, Musk and Trump might as well send their thugs into research labs with real sledgehammers. Johns Hopkins, for instance, currently receives some $842 million per year in NIH grants. As much as $332 million of that is indirect costs. The new rule would cut that amount to about $76 million—an immediate and catastrophic loss of $256 million per year in revenue. That money does not pay for a presidential yacht. It pays the salaries of researchers, techs and administrators, many of whom would now have to be laid off. It pays for equipment and supplies, and its loss could easily send some of the companies involved into bankruptcy. It pays for construction costs and renovations, carried out by local companies that may themselves have to lay off workers or even declare bankruptcy as a result. Taking $256 million per year out of a local economy, especially in a poor city like Baltimore, is like throwing a very large rock into a pond. The effects ripple out. And Johns Hopkins is just one university. The same thing will happen at scores of others.

And that’s just the economic costs. The United States leads the world in biomedical research, with many more key advances taking place here than anywhere else (and many more Nobel prizes). That is all threatened by the administration’s move, along with all the benefits to health that this research will provide.

In short, the move is ignorant, stupid, cruel, short-sighted and counter-productive. But that string of adjectives seems to describe nearly everything the Trump administration has done since January 21, and done at breakneck speed.

In the movie, Dave soon realized that, as an unelected imposter, he had no right to run the government, no matter how good his intentions. Elon Musk is likewise something of a pretend co-president, who has no real understanding of how the government works. He is also doing incalculable damage to it. But unlike Dave, he shows no sign of stopping.