NIH announced on Twitter Friday night after the close of business and every one had gone home a blockbuster announcement to cut off funding to all medical and health research universities in the United States.
*** Folks, this is a “RED ALERT” every major medical school, public health research university will be affected immediately. ***
The NIH new policy goes into effect on Monday and affects all new NIH grants but also, all existing grants.
Health research universities use the famous US Treasury payment portal that DOGE and Musk have been messing with every week to draw down the previous weeks expenditures to pay their university payroll, building rents, light bills, lab supplies, scientists salaries, gas and heating bills, nurses salaries, research techs salaries, IT department payroll, building maintenance crew paychecks.
This new NIH policy will result in layoffs at the medical centers and public research institutions such as MD Anderson, John Hopkins, Harvard Medical School, UCLA.
The NIH memo is dated February 7, 2025 and contains many inaccuracies and appears to be drafted and written by someone newly appointed to NIH that doesn’t approve of science research.
The very inaccurate talking points have been used for many years by detractors. And looks like it has been copy and pasted from articles by detractors who don't like or support university science and health research.
* Here's the official memo which is open reading to anyone:
*Indirect research costs are what it takes to house all the research labs - electricity, (payroll staff, procurement, sponsored projects administration, information technology), maintaining buildings and grounds, building and equipment depreciation, and providing security, and utilities. Everything that happens outside a research lab to keep the research labs open.
*The actual NIH grants only pay the salary of the principal investigators and their staff doing the actual research plus the lab supplies and equipment used just for the research.
*All other expenses at a research institute are considered indirect costs or overhead. It's a very innocuous term but it includes the IT staff needed to support the labs. Another example is the utilities needed to keep the lights on. The buildings that actually house the labs have to be paid for.
*There is talk online that these multi-billion research cuts are being pushed by Musk and the DOGE team.
*Most of the clinical trials for pharmaceuticals companies are ran by public health medical school research labs. Including the COVID vaccine clinical trials.
***** Here’s an excerpt from
Reddit with my comments in parenthesis: *****
“Paras 1,2&3 . We at the NIH hand out a lot of money in the form of research grants. These grants include a lot of “indirect costs” to pay for things that support research. We pay indirect costs at a negotiated rate for each grant recipient, however we can change the rate if we want to for both future and current grants.
Para 4. We are changing the way we handle indirect costs, and as of now all NIH grants will come with a fixed indirect cost rate of 15% (Most universities receive between 40% to 50% indirects from NIH to pay mortgage on buildings, the light bill, IT staff, .
Para 5 & 6 Our job at NIH is to support research to improve human health, and we spend a lot of money on this, including a lot on indirect costs. But we can’t directly oversee how indirect costs are spent.
Para 7 & 8 Other granting institutions pay a much lower rate of indirect cost than NIH usually pays, and most universities will accept grants that pay low or zero indirect costs. (Not true. Even pharmaceutical companies pay at least 30%.)
Para 9 Money for research should not go to administrative overhead. To help ensure this is the case we are fixing the indirect cost rate at 15%. We would have been allowed to make it as low as 10% but we decided not to.
Para 10 For all current and new grants, the indirect cost rate is fixed at 15%. This should be ok for universities. We will not apply this grant retroactively to the start date of current grants, but we could have if we wanted to.”
****** Comments from Reddit bulletin boards online ******
- “On changes to NIH indirect rates, there is a law in place that prohibits NIH from making such changes without the approval of Congress. See Division D, Title II Section 224 of The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 (Public Law No: 118-47)“
- “This is a huge cut. Back of the envelope calculations for UCLA (a big research university with public finance information): $200M cut in operating revenue.
- In 2023, UCLA had $270M in indirect costs [1] and they negotiated a rate of 57% with the NIH [2]. So, they had about $473M in direct costs. The new rate would be 15%, which is ~$71M. $270M-$71M = $200M.“
- “These resources go toward things like construction, utility costs, and lab operation — if NIH cuts off this support, the research will come to a halt,” Murray said in a statement. “This funding helps produce breakthroughs that change patients’ lives, prepare us for pandemics and other health threats, and ensure the U.S. continues to be the global leader in biomedical research.”
- “In a statement, the heads of the Association of American Medical Colleges called the decision “harmful and counterproductive,” warned that it would “diminish the nation’s research capacity” and urged the Trump administration to rescind it.“
- “Lights in labs nationwide will literally go out,” they wrote. “Researchers and staff will lose their jobs.”
- “This is essentially catastrophic for NIH-funded research labs at universities. It's one thing if this was just going forward, but to apply it to current grants is completely insane. It's just damaging to be damaging.“
- “I am a postdoc and it has been my dream to have my own lab for over a decade. I have done everything I can to put myself in the best possible position and there isn't going to be a university system left when I'm due to go on the market in ~2-3 years.“
************** Articles about the enormous NIH budget cuts ********
