Washington state, UW join lawsuit over Trump order cutting funding for medical research

The Trump administration wants to drastically cut what the federal government will reimburse universities for overhead. That includes the cost of things like administrative staff, keeping the lights on, biohazard waste removal, and Wi-Fi, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

Now, UW and Washington state are joining nearly two dozen states in suing the federal government over the change in funding from the National Institutes of Health. On Monday, in response to that lawsuit, a federal judge in Massachusetts placed a temporary restraining order on the order.

The judge's order blocks the federal government from implementing the change “within Plaintiff States until further order is issued by this Court,” seemingly leaving out states that had not joined the suit.

The order also requires the government's attorneys to “file a status report with the Court within 24 hours of the entry of this Order, and at biweekly intervals thereafter, confirming the regular disbursement and obligation of federal financial assistance funds and reporting all steps that NIH, HHS and their officers, employees, servants, agents, appointees, and successors have taken to comply with the Court’s temporary restraining order.”

“These funds cover critical infrastructure, including buildings, payroll services, and compliance departments, that are vital to conducting research, including active clinical trials,” said Victor Balta, assistant vice president for communications at UW.

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UW alone could lose $100 million a year if the order were to be fulfilled, Balta said in an email. For the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, the loss could be more like $125 million, a spokesperson said in an email.

“It will keep us from doing science. It will lead to people being laid off,” said Dr. Marion Pepper, who runs The Pepper Lab at UW, which studies how the immune system responds to diseases.

Pepper said every research project they’re working on is funded by the NIH in some way.

“What is amazing about basic biomedical research is we don't always know which of these discoveries is going to end up being the next blockbuster drug that's going to cure cancer,” Pepper said. “And all of those studies are funded by the NIH.”

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Massachusetts, Illnois, and Michigan are leading the suit in which a judge granted a temporary restraining order.

The funding change was announced Friday in a memo from the office of the director of the National Institutes for Health. It argued many funders of research, such as the Gates Foundation, reimburse at far lower rates than the federal government – and some don’t reimburse at all.

“NIH is obligated to carefully steward grant awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people and improve their quality of life,” the memo said.

But Project 2025, a right-wing manual the administration appears to be using to guide its sweeping change of the federal government, recommended this change. Though these indirect costs reimburse the universities for facilities and administration costs, the Project 2025 playbook insinuates on page 355 that money could “cross-subsidize leftist agendas” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, efforts.

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Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary and computational biologist at UW, said NIH-funded basic research grants provide training and a “constant flow of novel discoveries in basic science” that are the bedrock for the U.S. biotech industry.

“There's a whole ecosystem that allows us to be leaders in biotechnology here in the United States, and that involves the funding for the basic research that's being done,” Bergstrom said. “But it's [also] simply having a university system that's producing highly skilled, highly trained graduates at the bachelor's, master's, PhD, and MD levels who are essential in the biotech workforce.

"You cut off the flow of people, you cut off the flow of basic science results, you've destroyed your biotech industry."