From THE DAILY CALLER

Jaryn Crouson
Contributor

Several universities and higher education associations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Department of Energy (DOE) over a new policy capping indirect research funding cost rates at 15%.

The DOE announced April 11 it would limit support for indirect costs, or money that is used for administrative and other non-research related expenses, to 15% for all research funding. The Association of American Universities (AAU), American Council on Education (ACE) and schools such as Cornell, Brown and the University of Michigan claim in the suit that the department’s decision is “flagrantly unlawful” and “will devastate scientific research,” according to the lawsuit.

“[I]f DOE’s policy is allowed to stand, it will devastate scientific research at America’s universities and badly undermine our Nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation,” the lawsuit argues.

The lawsuit alleges several vital projects, such as “the development of advanced nuclear and cybersecurity technologies, arms control verification mechanisms designed to reduce the risk of nuclear war, novel radioactive drugs to diagnose and treat cancer, and upgrades for the electrical grids that keep the lights on in rural communities,” would be impacted by the cuts.

“These actions are part of a continuing and dangerous effort to erode federal support for university-based research,” AAU, ACE and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) said in a joint statement announcing the lawsuit. “The proposed DOE cap would have an immediate and damaging impact on critical energy, physical sciences, and engineering research at more than 300 colleges and universities nationwide.”

ACE and APLU did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. AAU referred the DCNF to the group’s public statement.

The DOE’s move aimed to save taxpayers $405 million annually, the agency said in its announcement of the decision, stating “The purpose of Department of Energy funding to colleges and universities is to support scientific research – not foot the bill for administrative costs and facility upgrades.” The cut did not apply to direct research funding.

A spokesman for the DOE told the Daily Caller News Foundation it “does not comment on ongoing litigation.”

The indirect costs typically go towards expenses such as “facility costs,” which include “depreciation on buildings, equipment and capital improvements, and operations and maintenance expenses,” and “general administration and [other] general expenses,” which includes funding for “the director’s office, accounting, [and] personnel,” according to the DOE.

Some universities, such as the University of Illinois, a plaintiff listed in the lawsuit, receive as much as 58.6% in indirect funding, the suit says. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), another plaintiff, estimates it would lose as much as $16 million in funding if the DOE cut is allowed to take effect.

Neither university immediately responded to the DCNF’s request for comment.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in February was also met with backlash after it similarly capped indirect research funding costs at 15%. Many universities have also negotiated their funding rates with NIH previously, with Harvard receiving upwards of 69% in indirect funding. (RELATED: Trump Administration Questions US-Funded Researchers Abroad For ‘Anti-American Beliefs’)

A federal judge has since permanently blocked NIH’s cut due to improper procedure in initiating the cuts.

The Trump administration pulled a similar move in 2017, proposing a rule capping NIH indirect grant costs at 10%.

Cornell, Brown and the University of Michigan did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

Back on March 1, President Trump fired a double-barrel shotgun at the long-held preservationist U.S. mantra that for nearly a century has dealt heavy blows to American forests, forest animals, and the humans whose homes abut government forest lands.

They first addressed what the White House calls “the threat to national security from imports of timber and lumber.” Even though the U.S. has ample timber resources, the nation has been a net importer of lumber since 2016. “Wood products,” said the President, play “a vital role in key downstream civilian industries, including construction.”

Reliance on imported lumber became critical during the COVID pandemic when the producer price of softwood veneer and plywood manufacturing over tripled from $205 in January 2020 to $702 in June 2021; the December 2024 price was still higher than the pre-COVID peak.

That upward jerk devastated the home-building industry. Contractors who had hoped construction prices would return to pre-pandemic levels are still waiting, and the short-term effects of the Trump tariffs could keep prices high for months to come.

On the other hand, Trump’s second order, a call for the immediate expansion of U.S. timber production, provides hope to the logging and construction industries and home buyers. The order also returns to the wisdom of indigenous communities, who managed American forests with fire for millennia.

Logging and controlled burns have been under attack since the Wilsonian “Progressive” Era. Progressive federal and state government policies restricting common-sense logging and fuel breaks led to overgrown forests that quickly burn out of control. The result is ever-increasing threats to property, human and animal lives, and environmental damage, including air pollution, water pollution, and loss of habitat and species.

The market-focused environmental nonprofit PERC urges the nation to “Fix America’s Forests,” which are “in trouble” thanks to a century of fire suppression that has disrupted natural fire cycles and impaired forest health.. Trees die in national forests from insect infestations, drought, and disease caused by overly dense forests.

To “fix” our forests, PERC (Property and Environment Research Center) called for active forest management, including prescribed fires and mechanical thinning. Overlapping regulations, litigation, and inadequate funds for proper management have left our forests vulnerable. PERC’s solution is to reduce existing regulatory hurdles and find more creative funding approaches.

Keith Schneider of the water newsroom Circle of Blue says Trump’s forest management plan boosts logging on federal lands, increases tariffs on Canadian lumber, and expedites timber approvals to reduce wildfire risks and support the U.S. timber industry.

“The White House,” says Schneider, contends, “Our inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply has impeded the creation of jobs and prosperity, contributed to wildfire disasters, degraded fish and wildlife habitats, increased the cost of construction and energy, and threatened our economic security.”

To oversee this dramatic change in federal forest policy, Trump appointed widely respected forestry expert Tom Schultz to head the Forest Service. One of his tasks will be to enable shorter timeframes for evaluating logging plans for their impact on endangered species.

Well-funded environmental groups immediately claimed that the Trump policy increases the human imprint on “sacred” forest lands. Inside Climate News called the order “an assault on the nation’s public forests” that “removes protections” and will surely destroy massive swaths of older, fire-resilient trees.

Danna Smith, executive director at North Carolina’s Dogwood Alliance, called the Trump order “absolutely the wrong direction and a devastating blow.” Even as wildfires raged in the Carolinas, killing trees and wildlife, Smith claimed that selective logging and removal of dead trees would harm “standing forests” that are vital to fighting the climate crisis.

The irony appears lost to those clinging to the failed federal policy of yesteryear’s progressives.

This is not Trump’s first rodeo with forest management. His January 2019 order required the Interior and Agriculture Departments to collaborate with state, tribal, and local partners to create a comprehensive wildfire strategy to prioritize highest-risk lands. That order sought to reduce hazardous fuel loads, mitigate fire risk, and ensure the safety and stability of local communities.

The mantra – then as now – was “active forest management.”

Two years later, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announced that Interior had reduced wildfire risk across 1.5 million acres in fiscal year 2020. The four-year total of 5.4 million acres was 49% higher than during Obama’s second term.

The Department of the Interior’s record included offering 763 board feet of timber for sale, addressing non-native and invasive species across over a million acres, protecting water quality and mitigating flooding and erosion risks from wildfires on 1.7 million acres, and reducing fuel loads on 1.5 million acres. They also maintained public access roads to provide access for emergency services and restoration work across 20,000 miles.

In April 2020, Bernhardt signed a final decision to construct and maintain a system of up to 11,000 miles of strategically placed fuel breaks to control wildfires within 223 million acres of federal lands in Western states. The Bureau of Land Management had assessed more than 1,400 fuel breaks since 2002 and determined that 79% were effective in controlling wildfires and 84% helped change fire behavior for the better.

An early test of the Trump forest policy is playing out in fire-ravaged San Bernardino, thanks to an emergency order issued by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to increase timber quotas in America’s national forests by 25%. Opponents scoffed that “they are after timber.” Still, according to the U.S. Forest Service, charred portions of the forest burned in the Eaton Fire remain at “significant” risk of debris flows, flooding, and mudslides.

Rollins says that streamlining permits for increased logging will help “achieve relief from threats to public health and safety, critical infrastructure, and/or mitigation of threats to natural resources.” The result will be improved durability, resilience, and resistance to fire, insects, and disease within national forests and grasslands.

And maybe increasing domestic logging will help revive an American industry as old as America itself.

This article originally appeared at Townhall

By Jo Nova

“Follow the science” they say, right up until they destroy it

In August 2021, as the masses were being coerced and cajoled into vaccinations, the government announced a gigantic long term study with 10,000 Australians that would run for five years. They promised they would include the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and generate 100,000 samples, and 11 million datapoints. No stone would be left unturned to make sure the vaccines were safe and effective. “The Science” was being used to reassure the people.

Less than two years later the data must have looked terrible, because they suddenly stopped the study. They muttered something about archiving the data until more funding was available. (Sure, sure). Now,  they want to quietly destroy the data and make sure no one can ever use it, or find out the secrets it hides with an FOI application. The cost of the entire project was $20 million, a pitifully small fraction of the $18 billion we spent on Australia’s Covid 19 treatment experiments, and it’s nothing compared to the human cost of suffering involved. Now, we’re trying to save a few dollars because the National Archives can’t afford to buy another 8 Tb hard drive from Officeworks or spend 0.1% of the Covid budget renting a cool room in a warehouse. Does anyone believe these excuses any more?

Tell the children, “Government Science^TM” is nothing more than a tool of persuasion and marketing. It’s just a brand-name abused for profit and power.

A cynic might say those who set this study up did it purely for the purpose of  “radiating confidence” in vaccines, and they never intended to finish it. But we know that if a miracle happened and the results had turned out well, they’d be running adverts, going on talkshows and sending a star recruit with a QoVax badge on a spaceflight with Katy Perry.

Destroying data is always a travesty. This experiment can never be redone:

By Rebecca Barnett, Canberra Daily and at Dystopian Downunder

Experts and participants have since been calling for the resurrection of the QoVAX project, but in a letter to study participants last month, Metro North Health confirmed that the study will be permanently shuttered, with all samples and data to be destroyed.

“Metro North Health has determined that, for a range of reasons including the many mutations of the COVID-19 virus and similar studies from Australia and worldwide, there is no longer a scientific and public health need to retain these biological samples for future study,” said the letter, sent 19 March 2025.

“Therefore, these samples will be appropriately sterilised and disposed of. All study data collected as part of the QoVAX-SET study will be archived for the specified time-period as required by law however, it will not be accessed or used for any future purpose.”

The excuse that the virus has mutated now and that there are “similar studies” elsewhere doesn’t wash. There is probably no other dataset like this one in the world, because for the first four or five months there was almost no Covid transmission in Queensland to complicate the analysis. If people got “long covid-like symptoms” we’d know it wasn’t from Covid. Elsewhere Pfizer and others “unblinded” the tests, making sure the unvaccinated got vaccinated, so there were no ethical concerns about them missing out. But that didn’t need to happen in Queensland.

Professor Davies called the decision, on which she was not consulted, “incredibly disappointing.”

“It’s a terrible example of research wastage and loss of a globally significant opportunity to realise benefits and generate knowledge through research based on the unique samples provided by the 10,000 Queenslanders who gave consent and participated,” Professor Davies, who heads up the Allergy Research Group at QUT, told Canberra Daily.

Indeed, QoVAX was unique in that it was one of the only real-world studies to have access to a ‘comparison set’ of participants who had been vaccinated, but had not been infected with the Covid virus, which only took off in Queensland after the state borders opened in December 2021.

Who knows what new assays or techniques we might come up with in the next ten years to reanalyze those samples (if they were not destroyed). The answers to questions like: “Who will benefit the most” from vaccines and who is at the greatest risk of side effects are probably hidden in that data. We might realize a certain gene puts some people at more risk of neuropathy, or clots, or allergic reaction after vaccination, but we won’t be able to confirm that if the data is incinerated.

As Rebecca Weiser explained two years ago, this data collection is extraordinary:

The QoVax team didn’t just collect the standard data. Participants provided information on environmental and social determinants of health and biospecimens of blood and saliva that have been used to derive genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets that will shed light on how the novel vaccines impact the immune system.

The secure digitally integrated biobank has 120,000 biospecimens: serum, saliva and peripheral blood mononuclear cells, in three -80 degrees Celsius freezers and three liquid nitrogen dewars. The linked data repository has four million linked data points and more than 500 whole genomes.

In addition, the biobank has access to real-time electronic medical records. With 70 per cent of hospitals in Queensland storing medical records electronically, the study was intended to allow long-term digital surveillance of health outcomes related to Covid-19 vaccinations, and intersections between vaccine responses and Sars-CoV-2 infection.

14,000 Australians died of some mystery we can’t explain in 2022, and the side effects and deaths continue to this day. Likewise, all over the world.

The people who want the data destroyed are always the ones covering something up.

Ht Matthew L

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay