Tag: controversial

  • Judge extends block on controversial NIH cuts

    Judge extends block on controversial NIH cuts

    A federal judge Friday extended a temporary block on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash funding for universities’ indirect research costs amid a legal battle over the policy change.

    The nationwide block, which U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley put in place Feb. 10 soon after a coalition of state attorneys general, research advocates and individual universities sued the agency, was set to expire Monday. But it will now remain in place until Kelley has time to consider the arguments the plaintiffs and NIH presented at a hearing Friday morning.

    It’s unclear when Kelley will rule. But after the two-hour hearing, she said she certainly “has a lot of work to do” to before making a decision.

    “This case is not about whether as a policy matter the administration can target waste, fraud and abuse,” Katherine Dirks, an attorney for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, told the judge during the hearing. “It’s contrary to the regulations which govern how these costs are determined and how these payments are disbursed. If there were an intention on the administration’s part to change the mechanism by which those occur, there’s a process for it—a statutory process and a regulatory process. Neither of those were followed here.”

    But the NIH’s legal team said the agency has the right to unilaterally cap reimbursements for costs related to research—such as hazardous waste removal, facilities costs and patient safety—at 15 percent. 

    “This is not cutting down on grant funding,” said Brian Lea, a lawyer for the NIH, said at Friday’s hearing. “This is about changing the slices of the pie, which falls squarely within the executive’s discretion.”

    Counsel for the plaintiffs, however, argued that the policy is unlawful and, if it’s allowed to move forward during a protracted litigation process, will cause “irreparable harm” to university budgets, medical breakthroughs and the patients who may not be able to enroll in clinical trials as a result. 

    “A clinical trial is for a lot of people a last hope when there’s not an FDA–approved medicine that will treat their condition. Any minute that they’re not enrolled in that trial brings the risk of irreparable harm,” said Adam Unikowsky, an attorney for the plaintiffs. “Part of these institutions’ mission is serving these patients, and this cut will irreparably harm their ability to fulfill that mission.” 

    Since 1965, institutions have been able to periodically negotiate their reimbursement rates directly with the federal government; university rates average about  28 percent. However, rates can vary widely depending on factors such as geographic cost differences and the type of research, and some institutions receive indirect reimbursement rates of more than 50 percent of their direct grants. 

    Although the NIH argued in court that indirect costs are “difficult to oversee” as a justification for cutting them, the plaintiffs refuted that claim, pointing to a complex negotiation process and regular audit schedule that’s long been in place to ensure the funds are being used to support NIH research. 

    In fiscal year 2024, the NIH sent about $26 billion to more than 500 grant recipients connected to colleges—$7 billion of which went to indirect costs. 

    Saving or Reallocating $4B?

    This isn’t Trump’s first attempt to cap indirect costs, which Elon Musk—the unelected billionaire bureaucrat overseeing the newly created Department of Government Efficiency—recently characterized as a “rip-off” on X, the social media site he owns.  

    In 2017, Congress rebuked President Trump’s attempt to cap indirect costs, and it has written language into every appropriations bill since specifically prohibiting  “deviations” from negotiated rates. Given that, Kelley asked the Trump Administration’s legal team, how in his second term, Trump “can unilaterally slash these previously negotiated indirect cost rates which Congress prevented him from doing previously?” 

    “The money that is saved—it’s not being saved, it’s being reallocated—will be taken from indirect costs and filed into new grants that will be using the same funding formula,” said Lea, who told the judge he was using air quotes around the word saved. “The money is not being pocketed or being shipped somewhere else. It’s being applied back into other research in a way that best fits NIH and what will best serve the public’s health.”

    But Lea’s claims that the money will simply be reallocated contradicted the NIH’s own social media post from Feb. 7, which said the plan “will save more than $4B a year effective immediately,” and Kelley asked for an explanation.  

    In response, Lea said the NIH’s “tweet was at best sort of a misunderstanding of what the guidance does.” 

    The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, did not immediately respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on whether it plans to issue a widespread public correction on social media and its other platforms to clarify its policy and inform taxpayers that their plan to cap indirect costs is not intended to save them any money. As of Friday afternoon, the post was still up on X.

    Layoffs, Canceled Clinical Trials

    But Unikowsky, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that funneling money away from indirect costs would still harm the nation’s esteemed scientific enterprise, which is grounded in university research. 

    “Indirect costs are real costs associated with doing research,” said Unikowsky, pointing to the California Institute of Technology as an example. The institute spent $200 million to build a state-of-the-art laboratory and is counting on indirect cost reimbursements from the NIH to help pay off the debt it incurred to construct it. 

    “There’s going to be a hole in Cal Tech’s research budget” and the “money is going to have to come from somewhere else,” Unikowsky added.

    Unikowsky also listed nine different institutions, including the Universities of Florida, Kansas and Oregon, that have said they will have to lay off skilled workers who support medical research, including nurses and technicians, if the cap goes into effect. 

    Lea, the lawyer for the Trump Administration, countered that destabilizing university budgets doesn’t amount to immediate and permanent harm warranting injunctive relief on the rate caps. 

    “That’s not an irreparable thing, or else every business that’s in a money pinch could just come in and get an injunction,” he said. “I understand that many institutions would prefer to use endowments and tuition for other purposes, but unless they’re barred from doing so—and the inability to do so would cause some non-monetary harm—that’s not irreparable harm.”

    Although Kelley gave no indication on when or how she plans to rule, some university leaders who listened to the hearing came away optimistic that she’ll favor the plaintiff’s arguments. 

    “We look forward to the judge’s ruling,” said Katherine Newman, provost at the University of California which is one of the universities suing the NIH. “[We] maintain our position that the Administration’s misguided attempt to cut vital NIH funding is not only arbitrary and capricious but will stifle lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and ultimately jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation.”

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  • Looking back at HEPI’s most controversial reports – including an unexpected one from 2024

    Looking back at HEPI’s most controversial reports – including an unexpected one from 2024

    HEPI Director, Nick Hillman, starts 2025 by looking back at some HEPI controversies from the last decade.

    New Year’s Day marked the first day of my twelfth year at HEPI. Over that time, I’ve had a hand in publishing (and writing) over 200 reports. None has stoked controversy for the sake of it, but neither have we shied away from publishing things that people feel need to be said even if they might be deemed by some to be controversial.

    Fortunately, just four (that’s under 2%) of these pieces have flared into major rows. That’s about one report every three years or so on average, which doesn’t feel too bad a record for think-tank land. If we were in the business of stoking controversy for the sake of it, then it would be fair to say we are not very good at it.

    Most people understand the role of think tanks is to make people think, whether they agree with them or not. Indeed, HEPI was founded as an offshoot of HEFCE in the early 2000s because it was felt there were things that should be said but which an official arms-length body could not easily say, with the overarching goal of speeding up the policymaking process

    Some reports we were initially a little nervous about putting out have been accepted at face value without getting anyone too hot under the collar. (A recent one of this ilk looked at the experience of trans and non-binary students.) But more intriguingly, those HEPI reports that have been deemed controversial have not generally been the ones I thought in advance would be.

    And each one is now seared on my mind.

    A UKIP Licence

    The first of these, published back in 2015, proposed a National Licence to give everyone with a UK Internet Protocol address access at no upfront charge to past and present academic research. The associated backend costs were designed to be covered by government payments to publishers.

    FE lecturers and some health professionals welcomed the idea wholeheartedly, as they tended to think better access to the latest and past research would help them do their jobs. However, the more headbanger-ish element of the open-access world thought it outrageous that free access might be limited, at least initially, only to those in the UK. They also disliked the fact that publishers would continue to receive material payments.

    As you would have needed a UK IP address to benefit from the National Licence and as the UK Independence Party was then riding high, the critics amusingly caricatured the paper as a ‘UKIP’ idea. Less amusingly, one academic called for it to be withdrawn, only to rescind this when it was suggested that this might be illiberal – before changing his mind once more and calling again for a ban.

    The paper is still available but the National Licence idea has not made any progress and the major challenge of poor access to academic output for those without institutional log-ins (including policymakers, not to mention think-tank staff…) remains. 

    Boys to Men

    The second controversial piece – produced in 2016 – was on the education of boys, who fall far behind girls in our education system. This, sadly, also remains a big problem that no government has gripped (though it’s not too late for the current Government to do so). Our paper was condemned, for example by the then leadership of the National Union of Students (NUS), for emphasising sex rather than class.

    At the time, I said the report seemed to have been treated like an embarrassing relative who sits in the corner at family gatherings spouting politically incorrect nonsense.

    In response to such condemnation, we pointed out that it is possible to be worried about more than one issue at a time and that, as disadvantaged girls tend to do a little better than disadvantaged boys, sex seems one important factor to consider alongside all the others when assessing outcomes.

    The challenges in this area are perhaps a little better understood these days than they were a few years ago – thanks to excellent work from people like Richard Reeves, a Brit who is now the President of the American Institute for Boys and Men and who has written an whole book on the topic and who recently spoke at a really good Bright Blue event on the issue). So when we return to the topic, as we would like to do early in 2025, perhaps it will be less fraught.

    Grammar schools for all

    The third row was predictable. It occurred six years ago, on the back of a HEPI piece by the right-of-centre policy wonk Iain Mansfield. He defended grammar schools and their impressive record in getting BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) pupils into the most selective universities, such as the University of Cambridge.

    This paper (like the one on the National Licence) appeared in HEPI’s Debate Paper series, which is more polemical in its approach than HEPI’s other papers, for we knew it might stoke a row. Yet after publication of Iain’s paper, which had gone through our regular peer-review process as with all full-length HEPI papers, one well-respected expert in the sociology of education working at a Russell Group university declared HEPI should ‘disband’.

    However, most of the opposition to Iain’s paper was classier. Unlike other – more ideological – think tanks, we invariably encourage people who disagree with something we have published to write for us too. So we encouraged the critics to gather together under two Oxford academics to produce a strong HEPI paper of their own that responded to Iain’s work in the form of a series of essays. 

    In their respective pieces, Iain and his critics were largely focusing on different issues – Iain looked mainly at access to selective higher education on leaving grammar school and the collection of essays concentrated mainly on how grammar school systems tend to work against the interests of those who are shut out from them. While the debate was angry in parts, it was properly evidence based and therefore very illuminating.

    As someone who lives in part of the country where nearly all children still take the 11+, I found the discussion usefully educational and took something from both sides. Iain as the initial protagonist and someone who thrives on intellectual debate certainly welcomed it.

    Helping postgraduate parents

    The row in 2024, in contrast, came as a complete surprise. It was prompted by a HEPI Policy Note on the lack of childcare support for parents who are early career researchers.

    The paper, written for HEPI by the GW4 group of universities in England and Wales, was based on the personal testimonies of postgraduate parents. It argued that postgraduate parents should become entitled to the same support that is available to undergraduate parents:

    the current approach does not provide the right incentives to support social mobility through education. Extending the current undergraduate Childcare Grant to postgraduate students would seem a logical first step to support the most economically disadvantaged.

    The paper also explained that the authors knew their proposals would not solve all the problems faced by postgraduate parents:

    While GW4 acknowledges that this would not be a panacea for all postgraduates, extending the support to those with the greatest need would be a welcome first step to ensure parity of policy.

    So the authors also floated going further:

    A future step such as expanding the 30 free hours, so that childcare does not continue to be a barrier to the reskilling and career progression opportunities that postgraduate studies can provide, is worthy of consideration if the ambitions of the R&D People and Culture Strategy are to be delivered.

    This seemed a relatively uncontroversial conclusion, not least because it was in tune with HEPI’s earlier uncontested work pointing out how postgraduate researchers often fall through the gap between student support and employee benefits. Moreover, all our other work on improving the lives of early career researchers had been widely welcomed; in 2024 alone, this included a collection of essays with the British Academy and a study of the career progression of Black early-career academics with the Society of Black Academics and GatenbySanderson.

    So we assumed that, if only we could secure engagement with its contents, then the HEPI / GW4 Policy Note calling for modest improvements in the support for postgraduate parents in England would also land on fertile soil. Yet the outcry from a small number of those who read it and who thought it did not go far enough was extraordinary.

    Playing the ball not the person

    The process for putting a paper of this sort together takes months and, during this time, we had lots of fascinating conversations about whether the proposals should be bolder, whether or not we should argue that England should simply and immediately copy the generous arrangements in Wales (even though Wales is better funded thanks to the Barnett formula) and which arm of the state should have responsibility for childcare support for postgraduates. The wording about better short-term arrangements only being a ‘first step’ reflected these discussions.

    Although the Policy Note was not my work, I used my social media channels to help publicise it and so drew much of the ire from academics on X / Twitter. Initially, I was asked why we wanted to block people from ‘feeding our families’. Later, and after I had pointed out this criticism seemed not to be based on a close reading of the actual paper, I was called ‘unhinged’ and accused of ‘misogyny’ and ‘everyday sexism’. One message about the report was tagged with ‘VAWG’, which I learnt stands for ‘violence against women and girls’. Remember, our paper proposed introducing – not restricting or abolishing – childcare support for postgraduate parents, and with a focus (initially) on the poorest ones most in need.

    Anyone serious about helping postgraduates should surely avoid the sort of attack that only serves to deter people from becoming involved in policymaking in the first place. At HEPI, we will always have the back of anyone who writes for us (irrespective of whether individual members of HEPI staff personally agree with them or not), but people are still bound to be put off if they find their peers prefer to play the person not the ball the minute they arrive on the pitch.

    Put simply, not everyone is able to respond to attacks in the wonderful way that the Cambridge academic Dr Ally Louks has been doing so effectively in recent weeks. Perhaps we could all learn something useful from her.

    Policymaking is hard…

    Successful policymaking is hard. It relies on lots of people putting their heads above the parapet to light a better way. HEPI wants to encourage debate across the whole range of higher education policy issues, but that needs a conducive environment in which to flourish. If we really are serious about producing a better environment for postgraduate students – and as our work consistently shows, HEPI certainly is – then we need a constant stream of new ideas, persuasive papers and open debate.

    At HEPI, we remain committed to encouraging a positive environment and, as a think tank publishing 35+ reports a year plus a daily blog, we rely on sourcing lots of good content, ideally from those at the coalface – and irrespective of whether they have written for policymakers before.

    So just as we have encouraged those who want to go further than we proposed in the GW4 / HEPI report on postgraduate parents to write an alternative piece for us (currently without success), we also encourage others to make it their New Year’s Resolution to write for HEPI. If you are even mildly tempted, our Instructions for Bloggers can be found here and our Instructions for Authors are here.

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