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Nearly two dozen states sued the Trump administration and the National Institutes of Health on Monday to block a $4 billion cut to research funding that scientists say would cost thousands of jobs and eviscerate studies into treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and a host of other ailments.
The funding cuts were to take effect Monday. The attorneys general of Massachusetts and 21 other states filed the suit, arguing the Trump administration’s plan to slash overhead costs – known as “indirect costs” – violates a 79-year-old law that governs how administrative agencies establish and administer regulations.
Without relief from N.I.H.’s action, these institutions’ cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt, the lawsuit said.
The filing is the latest in a string of lawsuits challenging Mr. Trump’s policies. Also on Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to “immediately restore” trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, including from the N.I.H., that had been frozen under a sweeping directive the president issued, and later rescinded, late last month.
Scientists, medical researchers, and public health officials have felt under siege since Mr. Trump became president. In addition to freezing grant dollars and slashing overhead costs, the administration has blocked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from publishing scientific information on the threat of bird flu to humans.
The lawsuit filed Monday involves a change, announced Friday by the N.I.H., in the formula that the government uses to determine the share of grant dollars that can go toward overhead costs. Those expenses include lighting, heating, and building maintenance, but also the upkeep of sophisticated equipment that is too expensive for any single laboratory to buy on its own.
The plan would cost the University of California system hundreds of millions annually, the system’s president, Dr. Michael V. Drake, said. A cut this size is nothing short of catastrophic for countless Americans who depend on U.C.’s scientific advances to save lives and improve health care, he said. This is not only an attack on science, but on America’s health writ large. We must stand up against this harmful, misguided action.
State officials are also concerned that the cuts could harm their economies. Massachusetts prides itself on being the “medical research capital of the country,” the state attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, said. We will not allow the Trump administration to unlawfully undermine our economy, hamstring our competitiveness, or play politics with our public health, she said.
The N.I.H. awarded $4.5 billion in research funds in Massachusetts in recent years, including for research on pancreatic cancer, hypertension, and severe asthma. The N.I.H. also sent about $5 billion to New York. The cut is expected to cost the state about $850 million, the lawsuit said.
Slashing indirect funds was a goal of Project 2025, a set of right-wing policy proposals put forth by the Heritage Foundation as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. The project’s report said the cuts “would help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”
The administration officials and their allies cast the indirect costs as a taxpayer giveaway to elite universities whose large endowments or outside funding from private foundations could easily cover those costs.
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