End general federal research subsidies to Cornell University and other high-endowment private campuses Cornell is a private Ivy League institution with an endowment of about $11.8 billion. In fiscal year 2025 it spent about $795 million in federally sponsored research. That is a taxpayer subsidy to a wealthy private campus. I am asking Congress to stop treating an elite private brand as entitled to public money. On Cornell’s own reporting, licensing of university intellectual property generated about $22 million in fiscal year 2025. That is a few cents on each federal research dollar. Roughly one hundred U.S. patents issue in a typical year. Startups spun from campus IP raise private capital later; investors, not taxpayers, capture that upside, and most university startups fail. Papers and citations are abundant. Products, years of life saved, and farm income per federal dollar are not shown at anything like the scale of the appropriation. Faculty spend about 42 percent of their federal-grant time on administrative work: proposals, budgets, reports, and compliance. Federal research rules multiplied from 29 in 2004 to 255 in 2024!! When taxpayers buy a year of a scientist, they are buying something closer to half a year of science. This is not only a Cornell problem. National evidence shows research effort has exploded while ideas per researcher and per dollar have fallen. New-drug approvals per billion dollars of R&D have collapsed for decades. Papers and patents have become less disruptive since 1980. NIH’s budget more than doubled after the 1990s without a matching surge in transformative treatments. Extra dollars pile up at elite campuses. That is the worst place to ignore diminishing returns. Private science already exists. Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was self-funded. DNA as the molecule of inheritance was shown at the privately funded Rockefeller Institute. The March of Dimes financed polio research at a scale that dwarfed NIH at the time. Merck developed Pneumovax without a federal program driving the work. Philanthropy jump-started automated DNA sequencing when agencies would not move. Industry, not universities, develops, trials, and manufactures most approved drugs. If Congress wants public-goods research, it should buy it where the public can see the deliverables. Here is what we need: 1. Bar private institutions of higher education with endowments of $5 billion or more from new NIH, NSF, DOE Office of Science, and NASA research-project grants, other than awards that are competed solely for a defined national-security or food-security deliverable and that cap indirect costs at 10 percent. 2. Cap facilities-and-administrative recovery at 15 percent of modified total direct costs for any private campus above that endowment threshold, and require that recovered overhead be reported by expenditure category. 3. Shift a stated share of NIH and NSF extramural funds from campus project grants to prizes and milestone contracts with published success criteria. Continue Hatch and NIFA capacity funds only where the performing college publishes independent outcome metrics for farms, forests, or public health—not paper counts. 4. Public scoreboard. Require each agency, for every institution receiving more than $100 million a year in federal research funds, to publish an annual table of federal dollars, effective overhead paid, licenses executed, licensing income, independently replicated findings, and FDA or USDA products traceable to the award. If Cornell cannot show output commensurate with roughly $800 million a year, it should lose the money. 5. Prohibit agencies from restoring terminated awards to high-endowment private universities in exchange for side payments or non-scientific policy concessions. If the work is worth buying, buy it on the merits. If it is not, keep the money.