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The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. —Oscar Wilde
Two weeks ago, something extraordinary happened at Stanford. In response to federal research funding cuts, particularly from the NIH, the university announced a hiring freeze for the first time since 2003.
The reaction on campus was immediate: panic, confusion, and a growing sense of crisis. The academic community has braced for the apocalypse, fearing that new research will grind to a halt and critical academic programs will be slashed. Many of my friends working in Stanford labs have confided to me that the hiring freeze is keeping them awake at night, telling me that “I’m worried my research position will get cut and I won’t have a job for the summer.”
And yet buried five paragraphs deep in the university’s announcement is a strikingly reassuring clarification: “The freeze does not apply to faculty positions, contingent employees (temporary and casual), or student workers.” Nearly every teaching and research role is explicitly exempt from the hiring freeze.
What this reveals is the big lie of federal research funding: that it funds research. At Stanford, it’s been fueling something else entirely—bureaucratic expansion.
By the numbers, Stanford:
- Receives $628 million in NIH funding and another $560 million in other grants.
- Spends under $300 million on the direct costs of research, including lab maintenance, equipment, contractors, and energy.
- Dedicates a staggering $6 billion (!) to “compensation.”
Despite meticulously recording its sources of revenue in its reconciled budget, Stanford refuses to legibly disclose how its compensation is spent between research, teaching, and administration.
This lack of transparency is not surprising. By sheer headcount, bureaucrats—not researchers, not teachers—consume the overwhelming majority of Stanford’s payroll. Stanford now employs nearly one administrator for every student and more than seven for every faculty member.
Worse still, they are often far better compensated than the researchers who generate Stanford’s prestige. While postdocs and contingent lecturers scrape by on pitiful salaries, senior Stanford administrators can make up to a whopping $452,400 a year, excluding benefits. Even under the unlikely assumption that administrators were paid no more than faculty, less than $750 million of the $6 billion compensation budget would be going to actual teaching and research.
If these grants truly fueled cutting-edge medical research, engineering advancements, and scientific breakthroughs, then losing NIH funding would have forced Stanford to slash research budgets, or impose painful austerity measures like tuition hikes.
Instead, Stanford’s first move was to freeze administrative hiring, proving that federal research dollars were financing bureaucracy all along.
Stanford openly redirects more than half of grant money to administrative overhead. Even this understates the magnitude of this transfer to bureaucracy. Because Stanford runs a combined budget, surpluses and revenues from one department can make up for shortfalls and expenses in another, often quite subtly: Stanford’s security department posts a “surplus” funded by “revenues” from general funds.
Thus, in practice, research grants fund administrative overhead indirectly as well. For all its prestige as a “research university,” Stanford has been spending dimes on the dollar on research from its own budget, hoarding the endowment money supposed to facilitate innovation. During the early Cold War, the American taxpayer fueled Stanford’s research and prestige and received semiconductors and the Internet in return. But in recent decades, this patriotic contract broke down: Stanford ceased classified military research, inadequately guarded against Chinese espionage, and drew almost exclusively from federal research funding even after its endowment grew large enough to support its research. Instead of supplementing Stanford’s own research spending, federal research dollars were merely replacing it, allowing the University to funnel its own resources into bureaucratic expansion.
That expansion’s scope is staggering.
With this hiring freeze, Stanford has now recouped one-third of the lost NIH money; if Stanford would freeze benefits, too, it would recoup almost all of it. In other words, almost all the NIH funding was, one way or another, being funneled into expanding bureaucratic headcount and benefits. Stanford was planning to spend over $500 million on headcount and benefits increases—just this year.
Those benefits were skyrocketing:
- Pension costs were set to increase by 10.4%, reaching $540 million. (Even Social Security only increases pensions by 2.5% per annum—why is Stanford more than doubling that?)
- Healthcare costs were set to jump by 23.4%, increasing spend by $100 million in a single year.
- Before the hiring freeze, staff headcount was still projected to grow by 3.7%.
And who benefits?
Not Stanford’s core mission. By its own admission, very few administrators inhabit useful roles, like clinical staff or research coordinators. In fall 2024, 11,252 employees—representing three-fifths of all staff—were “managerial and professional,” while under a thousand were research staff. With little to do, this army of bureaucrats often gets in the way, micromanaging researchers and professors.
Not student life. Stanford bureaucrats seize prime housing from students, only to leave the spaces empty as they work from home five days a week. Their policies—onerous paperwork for organizing events, absurd constraints on club funding, aggressive litigation of opposition—have systematically eroded social life at Stanford, leaving students not only less happy but also less equipped for the self-organization and leadership key to our success in the real world.
Not even our democracy. Unaccountable administrators, hidden away in windowless offices, cook up Stalinist speech codes and run initiatives like the Stanford Internet Observatory notorious for its politically motivated online censorship. This extends even to the objective sciences—the Stanford School of Medicine, now bearing the brunt of research cuts, attempted to silence former Review staffer Jay Bhattacharya and stifle critical COVID research that challenged the prevailing orthodoxy. Who knows what other forms of political repression have been—and still are—funded by taxpayer dollars via substitution effects?
None of this touches the systemic failures in academic research: the replicability crisis, the rampant fraud (including by a former Stanford president), the millenia wasted grant-writing.
But the funding and hiring freezes are a start. They have exposed the big lie of research funding. They represent the collapse of an unsustainable and immoral status quo, where taxpayer dollars were diverted from research to fund bureaucratic bloat and political repression at Stanford.
And they make me hopeful. Hopeful that this marks the beginning of a real fight against bureaucratic excess. Hopeful that President Levin’s new administration will continue to prioritize research over bureaucracy, recognizing that Stanford’s strength comes from its scholars, not its managers. Hopeful that we can reform research, accelerate scientific progress, and save millions of lives from the invisible graveyard of lifesaving innovation delayed by bureaucratic dysfunction.
