On Tuesday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “The Record,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated that universities “do some very critical research” that is used by the government and “a lot of good work comes out of that research.” But it’s fair to wonder why the schools don’t fund a lot of it themselves from their endowments.
McMahon said, “[T]he total amount to a lot of these universities is about 50 to $60 billion in grants today. So, a lot of what we do get out of universities is a lot of the research that they do. They do some very critical research. DOD uses them, HHS uses them for a lot of their clinical research, etc. So, a lot of good work comes out of that research.”
She continued, “But your question is valid, why aren’t they funding a lot of the research out of their endowments? And it’s one of the questions that the president has asked, why should taxpayer dollars be going to do that?”
McMahon added, “[A] lot of the grants do go to non-science things. That’s right. But primarily, the grants that we’ve been looking at for these universities and the biggest amounts that have been held up have been from HHS, and a lot of that funding is through NIH.”
She added that she is mostly looking at the “elite universities” at the moment.
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