A Massachusetts federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to drastically reduce federal funding for biomedical research hours after it took effect. But fears still abound over how the proposal could damage the economy and scientific progress across Massachusetts and the country.
The White House’s order, announced Friday, capped reimbursement rates from the National Institutes of Health at 15 percent for so-called “indirect costs.” The term refers to money NIH gives institutions where NIH-funded research is taking place to support overhead expenses such as electricity, maintenance staff, or lab space rent — costs that Attorney General Andrea Campbell called “wheels that keep the trains on track” after filing a lawsuit with 21 other states Monday in US District Court for Massachusetts.
“Massachusetts is the medical research capital of the country,” Campbell said. “We will not allow the Trump administration to unlawfully undermine our economy, hamstring our competitiveness, or play politics with our public health.”
Curtailing these funds would shatter the financial calculations of many hospitals and universities that power the Massachusetts economy, according to researchers, advocates, and the lawsuit.
The largest recipient of NIH funding per capita, the Commonwealth received around $3.5 billion last year to support research on topics ranging from Alzheimer’s disease to addiction to vaccine development. In all, the funding fueled more than 5,000 research projects from 219 organizations and almost 30,000 jobs, driving nearly $8 billion in economic activity, according to the research coalition United for Medical Research. But the new across-the-board cap of 15 percent sets the reimbursement rate far below what most institutions currently receive from NIH. (Harvard University, for example, last year had a reimbursement rate of 69 percent.)
Cutting all reimbursement rates to 15 percent would mean at least $550 million less annual funding for Massachusetts institutions, given their latest NIH funding awards, according to a data analysis by James S. Murphy, a higher education policy analyst at an education advocacy group. That significant drop — including the analysis’ estimated declines of $104.5 million for Massachusetts General Hospital, $77.5 million for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and $54.4 million for Boston Children’s Hospital — stoked fears that a generation of scientists will be dissuaded, or flat out unable, to conduct research that saves lives.
“This would be the biggest threat that I’ve seen in my career to biomedical research in the US,” said Dr. Michael Barnett, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who receives NIH funding to study medical care in outpatient clinics and nursing homes. The suddenness of the decision, he added, was “absolutely devastating and unnecessary.”
Trump officials and allies have framed the NIH indirect cost reimbursements as paying elite universities whose costs can be covered by large endowments — though those institutions only make up a fraction of research funding impacted by the changes.
Katie Miller, a member of the new Department of Government Efficiency seeking to slash large amounts of government spending, wrote on social media Friday that “President Trump is doing away with Liberal DEI Deans’ slush fund. This cuts just Harvard’s outrageous price gouging by ~$250M/ year.”
Also on Monday, attorneys representing groups of universities, medical schools, and public health schools also filed suit in Massachusetts’ federal court Monday seeking to preserve the funding they said supports crucial needs such as high-tech equipment, data storage, hazardous waste disposal, and radiation safety. The plaintiffs — which include the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals — said they have negotiated funding for indirect costs at varying rates based on a number of factors, including where they are located.
The Trump administration’s new cap represents a “blanket, one-size-fits-all rule that would drastically cut the rate for reimbursing these costs for virtually every institution,” added the 26-page complaint, which aimed to broadly cover NIH-funded researchers in all states. ”While these costs are ‘indirect’ with respect to any one grant, they are real costs that the grant recipient must incur in order to carry out the research.”
In the other multistate lawsuit Campbell filed, the Democratic attorneys general, including ones from every New England state except New Hampshire, asserted that Trump’s funding changes will put public health efforts at risk and harm research institutions’ abilities to operate. The lawsuit itself only seeks relief for the public institutions in the states named in the lawsuit.
In an order Monday, US District Judge Angel Kelley set a hearing in for Feb. 21 and temporarily blocked the cuts from taking effect in the plaintiffs’ states.
“The Court’s swift action provides immediate relief to research and public health institutions throughout the Commonwealth,” Campbell said. “This is an initial victory for every person and family counting on the life saving science funded by federal grants. I will not stop fighting for the people of Massachusetts, for their health care, and for the rule of law.”
The legal challenges are likely to slow the cuts’ implementation, but the consequences are already starting to surface.
In a note to staff Monday, Children’s Hospital chief scientific officer Dr. Nancy Andrews said the change should not affect the hospital’s existing grants, but it will consider halting new expenses for discretionary programs, limiting recruitment of both faculty and staff, and pausing improvements of its new research space.
Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, chief executive and president of MassBio, a biomedical trade group, cited similar fears for the state’s $35 billion biotech industry: “Sudden and drastic changes in this research funding runs the risk of destabilizing the biotech ecosystem in Massachusetts and across the country with lasting damage.”
Among the colleges affected by the funding changes, public universities without large endowments will be most harmed, said Robert Kelchen, head of the educational leadership department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Take the University of Massachusetts system, for example. Its Chan Medical School received the third-highest number of grants from the NIH in Massachusetts last year, worth around $200 million, according to the analysis by Murphy. More than $62 million — or roughly one-third — of the funding was for indirect costs. Despite its role in the advancement of research in HIV, cancer, and infectious disease, the school would be left with a yearly budget hole of $40 million to $50 million after the announced cuts, the analysis showed, potentially jeopardizing its ongoing 500-some projects.
The UMass Amherst campus also received nearly $45 million in NIH funding last year, with $13 million of that covering indirect costs.
Among the Massachusetts projects particularly vulnerable to funding cuts: the Massachusetts AI and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease, a collaboration between the Amherst campus and other hospitals and colleges aimed at using artificial intelligence to improve patients’ outcomes and quality of life. The cut would slash $4 million from the $18 million project, according to Colleen Quinn, a UMass spokesperson.
Marty Meehan, president of the five-campus UMass system, said the move will hurt medical advancements and put a pin in the funding that the institution relies on to run its new $350 million research building in Worcester.
“People will suffer as a result of it,” Meehan said. “The consequences here could be dire for patients.”
US Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Newton Democrat, said while it is worth exploring the inefficiencies that may exist in research funding, the extreme cuts to NIH funding pushed by the Trump administration will eviscerate segments of the Massachusetts economy.
“It’s the classic thing with this [presidential] administration where there is this small kernel of legitimate policy buried in a mound of cruelty, incompetence, and counterproductive behavior,” he said.
Campbell’s Monday lawsuit was one of several court fights the Massachusetts attorney general has waged against the Trump administration in the three weeks since he took office, as Democrats are increasingly relying on judges to challenge his sweeping executive orders. Campbell also co-led lawsuits against efforts to end birthright citizenship and freeze federal funds, and joined another challenge to Elon Musk’s access to government payment systems.
Jonathan Saltzman, Kay Lazar, and Robert Weisman of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Anjali Huynh can be reached at anjali.huynh@globe.com. Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.