Almost 20 states sued the Trump administration and the National Institutes of Health on Monday, with scientists investigating thousands of jobs costing them and treating cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease and many other hosts. It has blocked a $4 billion cut to research funding, which stated. disease.
The funding cuts were to take effect Monday. The Massachusetts Attorney General and 21 other states have filed lawsuits claiming the Trump administration's plan to reduce overhead costs known as “indirect costs.”
“Without saving the NIH's actions, these agencies will have their cutting edge work to cure and treat human illnesses,” the lawsuit said.
In Capitol Hill, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who chairs the Chamber of Commerce's Approval Committee, strongly opposed what she called “these arbitrary cuts.” Republican Collins promised to “review this initiative” if confirmed when she sued President Trump's health secretary candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He said.
The submission is the latest in a series of lawsuits challenging Trump's policies. On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island said he had given the Trump administration trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans from the NIH that were frozen under a cleaning order issued by the president and later retracted. He ordered him to recover. last month.
Since Trump became president, scientists, medical researchers and public health officials have felt under siege. In addition to freezing grants and reducing overhead costs, the administration has blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from releasing scientific information about the human threat of avian influenza.
The lawsuit filed Monday includes changes announced by the NIH on Friday. This is the formula that the government uses to determine the share of grants that can meet the overhead cost. These costs include not only lighting, heating and building maintenance, but also maintaining sophisticated equipment that is too expensive for a single lab to purchase on its own.
The plan costs the University of California system hundreds of millions of people a year, said Dr. Michael V. Drake, the system's president.
“Cutting this size is nothing but devastating for countless Americans who rely on UC's scientific advancements to save lives and improve healthcare,” Dr. Drake said on Monday. I mentioned it in. “This is not only an attack on science, it is an attack on the American health warrant. We must stand up to this harmful and misguided behavior.”
State officials are also concerned that cuts could harm the economy. Massachusetts is proud to be the “national medical research capital,” Democrat Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell announced the lawsuit, saying, “The Trump administration is illegally damaging our economy.” Don't allow hamstrings to politics in our competitiveness, or our public health.”
NIH has recently awarded a $4.5 billion research fund in Massachusetts, including studies on pancreatic cancer, hypertension and severe asthma. The NIH also sent around $5 billion to New York. The lawsuit is expected to cost the state around $850 million, the lawsuit said.
Last year, the NIH said $9 billion (about 26%) of the $35 billion was distributed in grants or overheads. Some academic institutions spend more than 50% grants on such costs. But the new policy will limit these “indirect funds” to 15%, saving $4 billion, the administration said.
Cutting indirect funding is the goal of Project 2025, a set of right-wing policy proposals presented by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for the Second Trump Administration. The project's report said the cuts would “help reduce federal taxpayer grants on the left agenda.”
Administrators and their allies cast indirect costs as taxpayer giveaways to elite universities where large donations or external funds from private foundations can easily cover these costs.
“President Trump is abolishing the liberal Day Deans slash fund,” said Katie Miller, a member of Elon Musk-led efforts to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, on Friday, and social media. I wrote it in. “This will cut Harvard's outrageous prices by $150 million a year.”
However, Georgetown University's public health law expert Lawrence O. Gostin said many small academic institutions, including historically black universities and universities, had no additional funding to cover those costs. said there is a need to reduce medical research. The 15% cap was still intact.
A NIH spokesperson introduced the questions to the parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. This has also been appointed as a defendant in the suit. The department declined to comment, citing the pending lawsuit.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has moved to cut funds. In 2017, during Trump's first term, a similar proposal reduced overhead payments to 10% of the award, according to a lawsuit on Monday. The effort shaking.
Congress then acted to “drove” future efforts, passing a budget bill that barred federal officials and research institutions from changing fees from levels negotiated between federal officials and research institutions, according to the lawsuit.
Those familiar with negotiations said these deliberations are complex and long-term issues, including costs for items such as bills and personnel, backed by binders filled with support records. The lawsuit argues that the administration cannot make indiscriminate changes to lawsuits filed by Congress. He also said that the notice announcing the rate change was a violation of the Management Procedure Act in multiple ways.
The proposed changes have been listening to universities that had already finalized their budgets, assuming the funds arrived. The changes were announced on Friday and came into effect on Monday.
“There's no more discretionary money anywhere than you can see floating around,” said Jeremy Berg, former NIH director who oversaw general medical research. “The only thing a university can do is to start doing less research and firing staff and faculty. And that's devastating.”
The biggest effect of the cut would be to collide with the University of California system. The lawsuit has won $2 billion in NIH research funding from many universities and cancer treatment centers. The funding supports groundbreaking research, including the invention of gene editing and the first radiotherapy of cancer, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuits against the Trump administration tended to be ruled by democratically-led states, but in this case there are places Trump has recently supported in elections.
North Carolina has earned approximately $3.7 billion in NIH research funding awarded to schools such as Duke, the University of North Carolina and Wake Forest. “Many research needs to just stop,” Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, a Duke professor of medicine and Nobel Prize in chemistry, said in a weekend interview.
“We can't imagine a better use of taxpayers' money,” he said of the funds.
Michigan sued, stating that the presidential swing that Trump carried in November could undermine $181 million in funds alone. The university has 425 NIH-funded exams ongoing, focusing on several illnesses “including 161 trials aimed at saving lives,” according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also included the battlefields of presidents in Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. The cuts would cut $65 million from Madison's budget, according to the lawsuit.
