Comment by goodcanadian

I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.

The fact that it is so high is a scam.

It really depends on the grant. For the larger grants, it may work somewhat like you describe. For the smaller grants, they literally do just take 60% of the money (and complain that it is not enough to administer the grant while providing absolutely no support whatsoever). In theory, it's paying for salary and office space and whatnot, but those are already covered by other budgets.