22 States Sue to Block Trump Cuts to Medical Research Funding

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.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the chairwoman of the chamber’s Appropriations Committee, strongly objected to what she called “these arbitrary cuts.” Ms. Collins, a Republican, said that when she called President Trump’s nominee for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to complain, he promised to “re-examine this initiative” if confirmed.

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and loans, including from the N.I.H., that had been frozen under a sweeping directive the president issued, and later rescinded, late last month.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 president’s, 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,” Dr. Drake said in a statement Monday. “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 in announcing the suit, adding, “We will not allow the Trump administration to unlawfully undermine our economy, hamstring our competitiveness, or play politics with our public health.”

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.

Last year, the N.I.H. said, $9 billion of $35 billion — or about 26 percent — of grant dollars it distributed went to overhead, or indirect costs. Some academic institutions devote 50 percent or more of their grant dollars to such costs. But the new policy would cap these “indirect funds” at 15 percent, saving $4 billion, the administration said.

Slashing indirect funds was a goal of target 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.”

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.

“President Trump is doing away with Liberal DEI Deans’ slush fund,” Katie Miller, a member of the Elon Musk-led effort to slash the size of the federal government, wrote Friday on social media. “This cuts just Harvard’s outrageous price gouging by ~$250M/ year.”

But Lawrence O. Gostin, an expert in public health law at Georgetown University, said that many smaller academic institutions, including historically Black colleges and universities, do not have extra funds to cover those…