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The medical research world got a reprieve on Friday when a federal judge extended her temporary halt to the Trump administration’s plan to slash National Institutes of Health grant funding.
The decision by US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston spares New England universities, hospitals, and research institutes, at least for now, from an estimated $800 million in reductions to NIH reimbursement for indirect costs such as rent and utilities.
But as institutions here and across the country brace for drastically smaller NIH expense payments — as well as threatened cuts to the National Science Foundation and the Small Business Administration — they are starting to take preemptive steps to cushion the blow.
“The new and evolving regulatory environment has created economic uncertainty and potential budget pressures,” Boston University president Melissa L. Gilliam said in a campuswide email on Thursday announcing new spending controls.
Just how acute those pressures become hinges on how Kelley and other judges rule on the many legal challenges to the actions of the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
What’s happening: BU’s Gilliam said the university is slowing spending and requiring an additional layer of approval for all hires. Administrators may trim discretionary outlays and limit off-site events and meetings.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has imposed an immediate hiring freeze on “all nonessential positions,” excluding faculty.
And Columbia University’s medical school has paused hiring, travel, procurement, capital projects, and events, interim dean James McKiernan said in an email to faculty members.
Why it matters: The moves are just a preview of the financial pain that could be inflicted here. Consider:
- Massachusetts institutions received $3.5 billion in NIH funding in fiscal 2024. That’s the most per capita of any state and is pivotal to more than 5,000 research projects statewide and almost 30,000 jobs, according to United for Medical Research, a coalition of researchers.
- The National Science Foundation awarded $550 million in grants here last year, while the Small Business Administration’s two main research programs committed almost $475 million in 2023.
Nationally, if the proposed $4 billion in NIH cuts go through, “America’s biomedical research is likely to stall. Jobs will be lost, new biomedical companies will not be started, clinical trials will be canceled, and life-saving discoveries that patients and families depend on will never be made,” according to an open letter signed by more than 1,000 researchers.
Big picture: The state’s all-important education and health care sectors could be forced to retrench as Trump goes after not only science funding, but also the Department of Education and key federal agencies. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress has set its sights on cutting Medicaid’s budget, which could hit payments to hospitals that treat patients covered by the federal-state insurance program known here as MassHealth.
As The Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung reported on Friday, “eds and meds” account for 1 million jobs in Massachusetts, or more than one-quarter of total employment, and sit at the center of a knowledge ecosystem that has made us one of the wealthiest states in the nation.
State economic Secretary Yvonne Hao told Shirley: “This is going to hurt us.”
What’s next: Judge Kelley, a Biden appointee, extended a temporary restraining order against the NIH cuts as she weighs a broader injunction requested by 22 state attorneys general.
In their lawsuit, the attorneys general, including Andrea Campbell of Massachusetts, said the NIH’s plan to reduce indirect reimbursement rates to 15 percent — from as high as 70 percent for some institutions — violated a 79-year-old law that governs how administrative agencies establish and oversee regulations.
Kelley didn’t say when she would issue a decision, but one is expected within the next two weeks.
- The judge is also hearing a case filed by plaintiffs including the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy claiming that the reimbursement reductions would “wreak havoc” and lead to layoffs, lab closings, and the end of some research programs.
Final thought: The Trump administration says the NIH change is aimed at cutting “administrative bloat,” freeing up money for what White House spokesperson Kush Desai called “legitimate scientific research.”
It’s easy to claim partisan politics is at work: The three states that would lose the most money — California, New York, and Massachusetts — are Democratic strongholds.
Still, the next three states with the highest exposure — Pennsylvania, Texas, and North Carolina, which stand to lose more than $900 million combined in NIH reimbursements — went for Trump in 2024.
Federal funding of medical research “doesn’t save Democratic lives, Republican lives, independent lives,” Marty Meehan, the president of the University of Massachusetts system, told Shirley. “It saves American lives.”
The government should get the most bang for its research buck. And a smart assessment doesn’t have to drag on and on.
But it sure seems like Trump and Musk are cutting indiscriminately just for the sake of cutting.
Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.