The Trump administration's move to cut billions of dollars in biomedical research funding is being met with alarm from academic leaders who say the cuts will cripple research efforts underway at the nation's universities and medical centers.
The National Institutes of Health announced Friday that it is cutting funding immediately for the "indirect" costs related to research, including for facilities and academic requirements, reports The Washington Post Saturday.
"The United States should have the best medical research in the world," the NIH said in the announcement. "It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead."
The agency reports that it spent more than $35 billion in fiscal year 2023 on almost 50,000 grants for more than 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 medical schools, universities, and other research institutions, including $9 billion for indirect costs, reports NPR.
NIH said in a social media post that the cuts for indirect costs spending will save the government more than $4 billion annually, effective immediately. It singled out the endowments received at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities and implied that most universities don't need the extra federal funding.
The announcement comes while researchers are concerned about other steps taken by the Trump administration to cut costs, including restricting the NIH's communications and travel and freezing some research grants.
"This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation," wrote Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations — an association of research institutions, academic medical centers, and research institutes — in an email to the Post.
He added that the NIH funding is "part and parcel of the total costs of conducting world-class research," and said that the United States' competitors "will relish this self-inflicted wound."
Harvard Medical School Dean Dr. George Daley told NPR that "we're all reeling" after the announcement, which he said would "decimate medical research."
American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell said there are already some labs shutting down this weekend.
Mitchell said he expects organizations will file lawsuits to block the policy as soon as Monday.
But if the lawsuits don't succeed, there will be "less biomedical innovation, and that is going to contribute to higher degrees of disease and death in the country," he warned.
But Trump's allies, including Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, said the policy will save billions in "excessive grant administrative costs" and hailed the cuts on social media as an "amazing job."
NPR reports that the cuts amount to limiting funding for indirect costs to 15% of grants, far below what many institutions receive to maintain buildings and equipment and pay for support staff and other expenses.
Harvard currently receives 68%, and Yale gets 67%, the NIH says.
"Most private foundations that fund research provide substantially lower indirect costs than the federal government, and universities readily accept grants from these foundations," the NIH said in its notification.
Saturday, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, said the department also has the authority to make the changes retroactively, officials have chosen not to do so "to ease the implementation of the new rate."
"We will continue to assess this policy choice and whether it is in the best interest of the American taxpayer," HHS added.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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