This is a good post, and I’m glad to see someone knowledgeable commenting. Other federal agencies do tend to award in fixed amounts, so the intricacies of indirect can get very complicated. Foundation indirects aren’t a debate worth having. They make the choice to pay indirects, the recipients will happily accept them.

My main response to the author, though, is what exactly does he expect the grant to cover? It’s paying for his time, infrastructure used, and the cost of supporting a grad student who’s likely generating the bulk of the data. These are the very real expenses of his research…