endowment

In announcing the cuts, the NIH implied on a social media post and on its website that universities with large endowments were spending too much taxpayer money on overhead costs.

In its X post on the change Friday, the NIH shared a graphic that compared the indirect funding rates for Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins with their multibillion-dollar endowments.

"Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for 'overhead'?" Musk wrote on X. "What a ripoff!"

With Midas-size endowments and a Supreme Court that equates political contributions with free speech, they can shout while most of the rest of us can only whisper.

In two historic federal endowments, the EPA awarded about $910 million in grant money to Southern California to reduce smog-forming emissions from trains, trucks and cargo-moving equipment at the Port of Los Angeles.