While the case is not fully decided, a pair of lawsuits has for now halted Trump's attempt to block tens of billions of dollars of life-saving medical research funding provided by the National Institutes of Health, and California played a role.
There is a sense that right now, elected Democrats are being feckless in opposing Donald Trump’s onslaught of executive orders, and that only the courts are stopping Trump’s extreme government makeover. But those lawsuits in front of the courts are not made up by judges. It is Democratic local and state elected AGs and City Attorneys, and lawyers with the ACLU, who have been filing those lawsuits and doing the work to effectively hit the brakes (so far) on Trump’s reckless schemes.
NPR reports that the latest of these is a lawsuit from California and 21 other states to halt Trump’s slashing medical research funding provided by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And on Monday, a US District Court judge halted those cuts with a temporary restraining order, and that loss of tens of billions of dollars of medical funding is, for now, stopped by an injunction.
#BREAKING: Just hours after we filed suit, a federal district court has granted our request for a temporary restraining order and BLOCKED implementation of these funding cuts.
— Rob Bonta (@AGRobBonta) February 11, 2025
I will be closely monitoring to ensure that the Trump Administration follows the court’s order. https://t.co/Ub0JZYlbzm
The university research association Council on Government Relations sounded the alarm over Trump’s cuts. "This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation," that council’s president Matt Owens said in a statement to NPR. "Reimbursement of facilities and administrative expenditures are part and parcel of the total costs of conducting world class research."
"America's competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound," Owens added. "We urge NIH leaders to rescind this dangerous policy before its harms are felt by Americans."
Trump’s cuts take aim at what are described as “indirect costs” of medical research, or as what Johns Hopkins School of Medicine physician Theodore Iwashyna describes to NBC News as “research infrastructure,” that is, the staffing, hardware, and equipment maintenance needed for the research. Trump’s new policy would cap NIH indirect cost funding to 15%.
But the national average of indirect costs for medical research average is 28%. And the Bay Area News Group looks at medical research indirect costs percentages at Bay Area universities, finding that “The indirect cost rates for UC campuses was previously between 54% to 60%, according to the university system, while Stanford’s rate was 54% and San Jose State’s rate was about 46%.”
The Bay Area school with the most to lose is UCSF, which KGO reports got $789 million in federal research grants, second only to Johns Hopkins University.
Some researchers point out that those indirect costs were how we got the COVID-19 vaccine so quickly.
“That knowledge was very basic, very fundamental, and eventually fed into Operation Warp Speed and the development of vaccines against COVID. So that's one thing,” Association of American Medical Colleges president David Skorton told Scientific American. “In fact, if the facility administrative costs are cut very, very severely as was announced by the NIH, laboratories would literally go dark. The research would stop. The march of knowledge that someone, a relative, friend, neighbor, co-worker, needs to survive an illness, or to have a diagnosis or move on with their lives after an accident, whatever it might happen to be, they would suffer because the research wouldn’t be able to go on.”
“Indirect costs are not frills,” he added, “and NIH grants do not pay the full cost of doing research for just that reason.”
Hearings on the case will proceed on February 21. That's only ten days from now, but a roadblock nonetheless on the massive hobbling of US medical research.
Image: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - FEBRUARY 10: Signage on the UCSF Mission Bay campus is seen on February 10, 2025 in San Francisco, California. The Trump administration announced plans late last week to limit the amount of money the National Institutes of Health distributes for "indirect costs," that fund research labs, equipment and staff. UCSF receives an estimated $789 million in grants from the agency - second to Johns Hopkins University, which receives over $840 million. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
