Tag: NIH

  • Abrupt Pause, Unpause of Grants Doesn’t End NIH Funding Woe

    Abrupt Pause, Unpause of Grants Doesn’t End NIH Funding Woe

    The Tuesday night news quickly sowed alarm among researchers: Media outlets reported that the Trump administration had stopped the National Institutes of Health from funding any new grants. The Wall Street Journal wrote that “certain grants that are up for renewal” were also cut off, and STAT, along with other outlets, later confirmed that reporting.

    The newspaper reported that the Office of Management and Budget was blocking these billions of dollars in research funding for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. After that, the dollars would return, unspent, to the Treasury. This nationwide halt to grants stemmed from an OMB footnote in a budget document, the Journal reported, adding that “the fourth quarter of the fiscal year is typically the busiest for grant-giving institutes at the NIH.”

    Inside Higher Ed reviewed screenshots of an email from an NIH employee saying, “Research grant, R&D contract, or training awards cannot be issued during this pause.” The funding halt would’ve meant an end to new research to help find and improve cures and treatments for diseases as well as stanched the flow of federal dollars to already financially beleaguered universities and labs nationwide.

    “This is undeniably an unforced error, since this will not only harm current and future American patients, but the disruptive and chilling effect of this sudden holding back of promised funds will further jeopardize the future of the American medical research enterprise,” Association of American Universities president Barbara R. Snyder said a statement Tuesday.

    But before the night was over, the Trump administration appeared to reverse course. In an updated article citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported that unnamed “senior White House officials intervened.” (OMB is part of the executive branch.) The Journal said officials at the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, fought the pause for days, but OMB only relented after the newspaper published its initial story Tuesday.

    In response to Inside Higher Ed’s written questions and interview requests about the situation Wednesday, the White House and HHS both sent the same statement from an HHS spokesperson: “The programmatic review is over. The funds are out.”

    One OMB spokesperson posted on X that OMB had been “waiting for more information from NIH” before releasing the funds.

    The NIH is one of the largest sources of funding for research at colleges and universities, and it touts itself as the “largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world.” Tuesday night’s controversy wasn’t the first—and likely won’t be the last—upheaval that this crucial agency has faced under the Trump administration.

    From grant cancellations to the White House proposal to slash the agency’s budget by 40 percent for the next fiscal year, institutions and researchers have seen the flow of NIH grant money stymied. Atop all this, the reportedly now-abandoned move by OMB to stop grant awards highlights continuing concerns about the fate of the grant dollars that the NIH still hasn’t given out this current fiscal year.

    Since Trump took office, the NIH has awarded fewer grants compared to previous years, multiple analyses have found. A former NIH official estimated to Science that at least $6 billion of the agency’s $48 billion budget could be sent back. In a higher estimate, Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that what OMB reportedly tried to do before reversing course Tuesday “would choke off approximately $15 billion in funding that would otherwise go to institutions across the country.”

    A nongovernment official familiar with the NIH appropriations process told Inside Higher Ed that, within a sample of major universities surveyed, institutions are down 20 to 48 percent in NIH award and renewal funds compared to the same time last year.

    The official, who requested anonymity to maintain relationships with people within the administration, said Wednesday that there’s been “a very, very slow spend at NIH, even prior to last night’s fire drill.” The official said they don’t think NIH has ever had to push out so much remaining money in such a short time, and there’s “a very small amount of NIH staff left to allocate those funds.”

    Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Inside Higher Ed that Tuesday’s news “caused a real concern across the research enterprise very quickly. This is a community that has seen not just threats but actual damaging changes to the typically stable federally funded research grants take place overnight, or even faster.

    “By any measure, the pace of grant funding is a fraction of what it has been in any other year, and that includes grant renewals, that includes new funding opportunities,“ Pierce added. “And the pace with which grant applications are reviewed and awarded is far below what we’ve seen in the past, and that includes applications that were submitted a long time ago that have already been scored and gotten very competitive scores that would be expected to be funded.”

    Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the reported freeze “just reinforced the current mood among researchers that the future of scientific research at NIH is still in question and could change at a moment’s notice, but also that this isn’t just about NIH. This cloud of uncertainty hovers over other agencies as well, such as the National Science Foundation.”

    Carney added that “the head of the Office of Management and Budget has made public his interest in reducing spending and reducing the size of government and using what tools that he is able to use to do that.”

    Russell Vought, head of OMB, hasn’t sworn off using rescission legislation, which can be passed with a simple majority in both chambers of Congress, to take back already appropriated funds during a fiscal year. NPR also reported that he’s called Congress’s spending bills “a ceiling … not a floor.”

    Murray, who represents Washington State, previously warned that the Trump administration’s use of such legislation to claw back funds already appropriated for this fiscal year—like it recently did for public broadcasting money—could scuttle consensus on the budget for next fiscal year.

    Carney attributed the slowdown in NIH grants to multiple factors, including the regular change in presidential administrations, Congress adopting a continuing resolution instead of a budget for this fiscal year and the Trump administration’s executive orders and other actions.

    “It’s like throwing sand into the machine,” Carney said. She said her association is pleased “that the funding will continue to flow, but it’s still unknown whether that flow of funds will be in drips or will be full stream, and we only have two months left until the end of the fiscal year.”

    Some Senate Republicans recently called on NIH and OMB to send more money out the door, as directed in the continuing resolution Congress passed in March.

    “We are concerned by the slow disbursement rate of [fiscal year 2025] NIH funds, as it risks undermining critical research and the thousands of American jobs it supports,” the senators wrote in a letter to OMB. “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science. It also risks inadvertently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results.”

    Tuesday night’s controversy came as some Republican members of Congress have joined Democrats in opposing the president’s proposal to gut the NIH’s funding for fiscal 2026. The Senate Appropriations Committee is meeting today, and it’s set to unveil how much it plans to send NIH next fiscal year.

    Carney said, “The U.S. is considered a global leader in biomedical research and medical discoveries, and we can’t afford to lose opportunities for advancing new discoveries and therapies and treatments for diseases that affect millions all over the world.

    “So when it comes to Alzheimer’s or cancer or infectious diseases, this is about hope,” she said. “It shouldn’t be about politics.”

    Source link

  • Lawsuit Over NIH Grant Funding Heads to Supreme Court

    Lawsuit Over NIH Grant Funding Heads to Supreme Court

    The NIH has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding that it says is used to conduct illegal DEI and gender identity-related research.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Adam Bartosik and Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock/Getty Images

    The Trump administration has taken its fight over grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Supreme Court, requesting permission Thursday to finalize millions of dollars in award cuts, CBS News reported.

    President Trump began slashing research funding shortly after he took office in January, targeting projects that allegedly defied his executive orders against issues such as gender identity and DEI. By early April, 16 states and multiple academic associations and advocacy groups had sued, arguing the funding cuts were an unjustified executive overreach and bypassed statutory procedures.

    Since then, a federal district court ordered a preliminary injunction requiring all grants to be reinstated, and a court of appeals denied the Trump administration’s request to halt the decision. Now, executive branch legal officials are taking the case to the highest court.

    In an emergency appeal, Solicitor General John Sauer wrote that the NIH is attempting to “stop errant district courts from continuing to disregard” presidential orders.

    The solicitor also pointed to an April ruling from the Supreme Court allowing the Department of Education to terminate some of its own grants for similar reasons. In that case, the justices said the Trump administration would likely be able to prove that the lower court lacked jurisdiction to mandate the payment of a federal award.

    The court system does not allow a “lower-court free-for-all where individual district judges feel free to elevate their own policy judgments over those of the Executive Branch, and their own legal judgments over those of this Court,” Sauer wrote.

    Source link

  • Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Months after individual researchers, advocacy groups and a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed two lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health for terminating hundreds of active research grants misaligned with the Trump administration’s ideologies, some scientists are hopeful that the agency will soon restore the grants and allow them to resume their research.

    Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the NIH to restore the roughly 900 grants named in the lawsuits, including many focused on studying vaccine hesitancy, LGBTQ+ health and diversity, equity and inclusion in the medical field. U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, ruled the terminations void and unlawful, stating during a hearing that in all his years on the bench he’d “never seen” discrimination by the government to this extent.

    Although Science reported Thursday morning that the NIH has internally communicated plans to restore those grants “as soon as practicable”—and also cease further grant terminations—researchers say they still don’t know when they can expect to get the money they were promised.

    “Since the ruling, we are really encouraged,” said Heidi Moseson, a plaintiff in one of the cases and a senior researcher at Ibis Reproductive Health. “But we haven’t heard anything from the NIH about our grants being reinstated, and we don’t have a window into what that process looks like.”

    Back in March, Moseson received a letter from the agency terminating her grant, which was aimed at improving the accuracy of data collected in sexual and reproductive health research for all people, including those who identify as transgender and gender diverse. The award “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter said. “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

    The NIH did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on its specific plans for restoring the terminated grants.

    Appeal Anxiety

    Moseson said each week that goes by with the grant on pause “is another week where people are not being appropriately screened into clinical care and research that would be relevant for their bodies, leading to missed preventative care or, conversely, unnecessary preventive care.”

    While her team is ready to resume their research as soon as the NIH restores the funding in accordance with the judge’s ruling, she’s bracing for further disruptions ahead, depending on what happens with the appeals process.

    On Monday, the NIH filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It also filed a motion to stay the judge’s order to restore the grants while pending the appeal, but Young denied that motion on Tuesday, noting that a stay “would cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs.”

    “This is a case in equity concerning health research already bought and paid for by the Congress of the United States through funds appropriated for expenditure and properly allocated during this fiscal year,” the judge wrote. “Even a day’s delay further destroys the unmistakable legislative purpose from its accomplishment.”

    The following day, Michelle Bulls, a senior NIH official who oversees extramural funding, told staffers in an email that the agency must restore funding for the hundreds of projects identified by the plaintiffs, Science reported. “Please proceed with taking action on this request as part of the first phase of our compliance with the court’s judgment,” Bulls wrote, noting that “additional information is forthcoming.”

    Noam Ross, executive director at rOpenSci, a nonprofit that supports reproducible open research, and co-founder of the website Grant Watch, which is tracking grant terminations, put out a call for information on LinkedIn Wednesday about any grants the NIH has restored. But he told Inside Higher Ed Thursday afternoon that he has yet to receive any verified reports of restored NIH grants.

    Shalini Goel Agarwal, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on combating perceived authoritarian threats, and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said Thursday morning that she also had not yet heard of any researchers getting grant money the NIH previously terminated.

    Though it’s not clear what could come of the government’s effort to appeal Young’s ruling, “at this moment the judge’s order is in effect and the NIH should be returning money to the researchers whose grants were terminated,” she said. “NIH should right now be undoing the effects of its directives.”

    ‘Cautiously Optimistic’

    Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan and a plaintiff in one of the cases, said that as of Thursday afternoon, she had yet to receive any communication from the NIH about its plans to restore her numerous multiyear grants.

    Edwards, whose research focuses on Indigenous and LGBTQ+ youth, said that delaying the grants much longer will undermine the research she’s already started, to the detriment of public health research.

    “For some of our studies, it’s just a matter of weeks before they’ll be really hard if not impossible to restart. I’m feeling a lot of anxiety,” she said. “We’re in a waiting phase, but I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic.”

    Despite the uncertainty of what’s ahead, she did get some reassuring news from the NIH on Thursday. The agency notified her that it approved her bid for a new three-year, $710,000 grant to develop and evaluate a self-defense program for adult women survivors of sexual violence. Like many other applications for new grants, the application had been in limbo for months. “So something (good??) is going on there!” she said in an email.

    Other cases moving through the courts also look promising for federally funded researchers eager to get their grants restored.

    On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities had also unlawfully terminated grants that had already been awarded to researchers in the University of California’s 10-campus system. The judge, a Biden appointee, ordered the government to restore them, adding that she is weighing extending the order to 13 other federal agencies, including the NIH.

    “Many of the cases that are making their way through the courts share claims that are being made about the illegality of the federal government’s actions,” said Olga Akselrod, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in one of the suits against the NIH. “Any time we have a win in one of these cases it’s an important statement of the applicable law, and that’s relevant for all of the cases that are proceeding.”

    Source link

  • NIH Staff Lambaste Agency Head for Censorship of Science

    NIH Staff Lambaste Agency Head for Censorship of Science

    More than 300 NIH employees criticized their director, Jay Bhattacharya, in the letter published Monday.

    Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

    Hundreds of staff at the National Institutes of Health are publicly condemning the agency’s actions in recent months, including firing thousands of workers and canceling research grants for projects that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. 

    In a letter sent Monday morning to Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump-appointed NIH director who gained notoriety for his criticism of the NIH’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 300 employees from across the agency called on him to deliver on his promise to embrace dissent, which he has called “the very essence of science.”

    “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” states the letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (Bethesda, Md., is the location of the NIH’s main campus) and modeled after Bhattacharya’s own Great Barrington Declaration, which condemned the NIH in 2020 for ignoring his calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions.

    “This censorship is incompatible with academic freedom, which should not be applied selectively based on political ideology.”

    In addition to accusing Bhattacharya of politicizing research, the letter published Monday also criticized the agency for “undermining” peer review, unilaterally capping indirect costs and firing NIH staff. 

    Bhattacharya is scheduled to appear before the Senate appropriations subcommittee today to discuss Trump’s proposal to cut $18 billion or about 40 percent from the NIH’s budget.

    Source link

  • A Michigan research professor explains how NIH funding works − and what it means to suddenly lose a grant – Campus Review

    A Michigan research professor explains how NIH funding works − and what it means to suddenly lose a grant – Campus Review

    In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has terminated more than US$2 billion in federal grants, according to a public source database compiled by the scientific community, and it is proposing additional cuts that would reduce the $47 billion budget of the US National Institutes of Health, also known as the NIH, by nearly half.

    Please login below to view content or subscribe now.

    Membership Login

    Source link

  • NIH Speeds Up Implementation of New Public Access Policy

    NIH Speeds Up Implementation of New Public Access Policy

    The National Institutes of Health is accelerating a Biden-era plan to make its research findings freely and quickly available to the public, the agency announced Wednesday.

    The 2024 Public Access Policy was set to take effect Dec. 31, 2025, but will now take effect July 1 of this year. It updates the 2008 Public Access Policy, which allowed for a 12-month delay before research articles were required to be made publicly available. The 2024 policy removed the embargo period so that researchers, students and members of the public have rapid access to these findings, according to the announcement. 

    NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, who took over last month, said the move is aimed at continuing “to promote maximum transparency” and rebuilding public confidence in scientists, which has waned in recent years. 

    “Earlier implementation of the Public Access Policy will help increase public confidence in the research we fund while also ensuring that the investments made by taxpayers produce replicable, reproducible, and generalizable results that benefit all Americans,” Bhattacharya said in the memo. “Providing speedy public access to NIH-funded results is just one of the ways we are working to earn back the trust of the American people.”

    Although the scientific research community is supportive of the policy itself, some are calling on the NIH to reinstate the original implementation date to give researchers time to effectively comply with this and other new agency regulations. 

    “This new effective date will impose extra burdens on researchers and their institutions to meet the deadline,” Matt Owens, president of COGR, which represents research institutions, said in a statement Wednesday. “Ironically, at the same time NIH is accelerating implementation of this policy, the agency is adding new burdensome certification and financial reporting requirements for grant recipients. This runs counter to the administration’s efforts to reduce regulations.”

    Source link

  • NSF, NIH Slash Support for Early-Career Scientists

    NSF, NIH Slash Support for Early-Career Scientists

    Both the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are slashing funding support for graduate students and early-career researchers as President Donald Trump continues dramatic federal budget cuts. 

    Since Trump took office in January, the two agencies—which send billions in funding to research universities each year—have stalled grant reviews, fired scores of workers and terminated or flagged hundreds of active grants that conflict with the administration’s ideological goals.

    On Tuesday, Nature reported the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awarded 1,000 fellowships—fewer than half of the record-setting 2,555 fellowship offers it made in 2023, and the second-smallest number of awards since 2008. 

    Prior to this year, the fellowship program’s stated goal was to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce,” though the Trump administration has since replaced the word “diversity” with “strength.” 

    Since 1952, the NSF’s fellowship program has funded more than 75,000 master’s and Ph.D. students pursuing science degrees. Fellows receive five years of funding, which includes a $37,000 annual stipend and the cost of tuition. The fellowships are highly competitive; of the more than 13,000 applicants who apply each year, only about 16 percent typically get an award. While the cuts made it even more competitive this year, a record 3,018 applicants also received “honorable mentions,” which don’t come with an award but can boost a CV nonetheless. 

    Over the past two weeks, the NIH has also canceled numerous institutional and individual training grants, including many that support scientists from underrepresented communities, according to The Transmitter. 

    The outlet reported that a chemistry professor at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras Campus received a letter from the NIH terminating funding for the Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement because the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

    That justification is now central to a federal lawsuit researchers and advocacy groups filed against the NIH last week, which among other points argues that the Department of Health and Human Services (the NIH’s parent agency) hasn’t yet adopted rules that would allow it to terminate an award for not effectuating agency priorities. 

    Other terminated NIH training programs, according to The Transmitter, include the Maximizing Access to Research Careers program, which funded undergraduate researchers; the Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program; the Bridges to the Doctorate program, which trained master’s students; the Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, which supported graduate students; and the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, which aided postdoctoral researchers.

    Source link

  • NIH Freezes Millions More in Funding for Columbia

    NIH Freezes Millions More in Funding for Columbia

    Columbia University was dealt another blow to research funding this week.

    DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

    The Trump administration has frozen all U.S. National Institutes of Health funding for research grants at Columbia University, Science reported, cutting off the flow of $250 million to the private institution mere weeks after it yielded to sweeping demands related to pro-Palestinian campus protests.

    The federal government had already clamped down on $400 million in research funding for Columbia last month. But after the university agreed to enact various reforms the Trump administration demanded to address alleged antisemitism on campus, it appeared a reprieve was in order. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said last month that she believed Columbia was “on the right track” toward final negotiations to unfreeze the research funds.

    Instead, the Trump administration has gone in the opposite direction, cutting off even more research funding. According to Science, the NIH froze Columbia’s funding Monday at the direction of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is reportedly not only blocking new funding but also ceasing payments for work on existing projects. In addition, the agency will require prior approval to tap existing disbursements.

    “HHS strongly condemns anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish students on college campuses,” a department spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed by email. “In line with President Trump’s mission to combatting discrimination and promoting fairness, HHS is partnering with other federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive review of grants awarded to universities that have failed to protect students from discriminatory behavior. We will not tolerate taxpayer-funded institutions that fail to uphold their duty to safeguard students from harassment.”

    Critics assailed the move.

    “It’s shocking, but not surprising, as with so many previous developments in this matter,” said Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor and vice president of the institution’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “And it shows that the Trump administration just has an animus against American universities.”

    Thaddeus called the actions “so patently unlawful” that litigation against the Trump administration would have a strong chance of success—yet Columbia hasn’t sued. The AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers union, with which the AAUP is affiliated, have filed a lawsuit over the prior $400 million cut.

    “If what you’re dealing with is threats from an extortionist, then capitulating to the threats of an extortionist is not a wise move,” Thaddeus said. “What’s happening is not an enforcement action, it’s a political vendetta.”

    Reinhold Martin, president of the Columbia AAUP chapter and an architecture professor, said “the defunding of science” reflects a structural pattern: “the movement of public funding out of the nonprofit sector into, eventually, we can fully expect, the for-profit sector. So that’s what this is about.”

    A Columbia spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the university has not yet been notified of the freeze. “At this time, Columbia has not received notice from the NIH about additional cancellations,” the spokesperson said via email. “The University remains in active dialogue with the Federal Government to restore its critical research funding.”

    Columbia would not be the first university to learn about the loss of federal funding indirectly. The Trump administration also froze $790 million in federal research funding at Northwestern University earlier this week, which officials learned about via media reports. Cornell University was also dealt a $1 billion blow to its federal funding this week.

    Elsewhere in the Ivy League, the Trump administration has frozen $510 million at Brown University, $175 million at the University of Pennsylvania and $210 million at Princeton University. The funding freezes mainly come in response to allegations of antisemitism related to pro-Palestinian campus protests, though federal investigations into the claims are ongoing.

    Outside of Columbia, scholars noted that even though the university gave in to Trump’s demands, the administration still seemed unsatisfied.

    “The NIH just froze ALL grant funding owed to Columbia University, meaning that the university’s concessions to the Trump administration clearly didn’t go far enough to satisfy the federal government,” Robert Kelchen, a professor of education and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a BlueSky post.

    Source link

  • Researchers sue NIH over mass cuts to DEI grants

    Researchers sue NIH over mass cuts to DEI grants

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • Researchers, unions and others sued the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday over the agency’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion-related research activity that has resulted in lost grant funding and career opportunities. 
    • Plaintiffs, including dozens of academic scientists, alleged that the agency’s leaders, starting in February, “upended NIH’s enviable track record of rigor and excellence, launching a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.”
    • They are asking a federal court to block NIH from enforcing its anti-DEI directives both in the short term and permanently and to restore grants to researchers that the agency has cut under the Trump administration. 

    Dive Insight:

    The complaint counts at least 678 research projects that have been terminated by NIH, some of them potentially by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency rather than NIH staff. 

    The recently cut grants amount to over $2.4 billion, the lawsuit noted. Of that, $1.3 billion was already spent on projects “stopped midstream that is now wasted,” and $1.1 billion has been revoked.

    Plaintiffs argue that grant terminations “cut across diverse topics that NIH is statutorily required to research,” many of which involve life-threatening diseases. Specifically, they argue that NIH’s actions violate the Administrative Procedures Act and constitutional limits on executive branch authority, and are unconstitutionally vague. 

    In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Massachusetts, plaintiffs detailed how their lives, careers and potentially life-saving research have been thrown into turmoil by the NIH’s attack on DEI under President Donald Trump.

    Among them is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico’s medical school who studies alcohol’s impact on Alzheimer’s risk. The researcher, the first in her family to graduate college, sought a grant created to help promising researchers from underrepresented backgrounds transition to tenure-track faculty positions. 

    According to the lawsuit, the researcher “satisfies the eligibility criteria for the program and invested months into assembling her application,” but NIH refused to consider it “solely because the program is designed to help diversify the profession.”

    Another plaintiff, a Ph.D. candidate at a private California university, had received a high score on a research funding application for a dissertation proposal that would have studied suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. 

    But the candidate learned that new restrictions on LGBTQ-related research meant the NIH would not likely fund the project. The turn of events will harm the researcher’s “ability to progress through their PhD program,” the complaint said. 

    Others include a University of Michigan social work professor whose research focuses on sexual violence in minority communities. The NIH has cut at least six grants supporting her research because the agency said it “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” according to the complaint. 

    Setting the various cuts in motion was internal NIH guidance, most of it revealed by the news media and cited in the complaint, that directed agency staff to terminate and deny DEI-related grant proposals. One memo instructed NIH officials to “completely excise all DEI activities.”

    Staff guidance included research topics for grant terminations. One document forbade three research activity topics: China, DEI and transgender issues. A later document, the complaint alleges, effectively banned research grants around vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.

    NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

    The scale of impact by both DEI cuts and other funding chaos at NIH is broad, cutting across much of the higher ed world. The United Auto Workers, one of the plaintiffs, counts tens of thousands of members who depend on NIH grants for their work and training, according to the lawsuit. It also noted 18,000 full-time graduate students who received their primary federal funding support through NIH in 2022.

    Source link

  • Researchers, Higher Ed Union Fight NIH Grant Terminations

    Researchers, Higher Ed Union Fight NIH Grant Terminations

    Brittany Charlton (right), a plaintiff in the lawsuit and founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard University, has lost multiple NIH grants amid the Trump administration’s ideological overhaul of the agency.

    Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    Individual university researchers, a public health advocacy organization and a union representing more than 120,000 higher education workers are suing the National Institutes of Health after the agency terminated more than $2.4 billion in grants it claims support “non-scientific” projects that “no longer” effectuate agency priorities.

    “Plaintiffs and their members are facing the loss of jobs, staff, and income. Patients enrolled in NIH studies led by Plaintiffs face abrupt cancellations of treatment in which they have invested months of time with no explanation or plan for how to mitigate the harm,” according to a complaint of the lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon. “As a result of Defendants’ Directives scientific advancement will be delayed, treatments will go undiscovered, human health will be compromised, and lives will be lost.”

    It’s the latest in a mounting series of legal challenges against the Trump administration’s blitz of executive actions aimed at rooting out so-called gender ideology; diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and alleged waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds. Some of those lawsuits have already resulted in federal judges ordering injunctions and restoration of canceled grants.

    But this is one of the first to directly challenge the NIH’s grant cancellations; more legal challenges are expected.

    The lawsuit was filed by the American Public Health Association; the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers and NIH-funded medical researchers from Harvard University; the Universities of Michigan and New Mexico; and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which have all lost their grants. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the plaintiffs.

    A NIH spokesperson said that the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

    ‘Erosion of Scientific Freedom’

    The plaintiffs want the Massachusetts district court to declare the actions of the NIH “unlawful,” restore funding for at least the plaintiffs’ terminated grants and prevent the agency “from terminating any grants based on allegedly no longer effectuating agency priorities, or withholding review of applications.”

    The majority of the terminated grants focused on topics related to vaccine hesitancy, climate change, diversifying the biomedical research workforce, “countries of concern” (including China and South Africa), and the health of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community, according to the lawsuit.

    One of the plaintiffs, Brittany Charlton, who is the founding director of Harvard University’s LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence, has had five NIH grants terminated since President Donald Trump took office in January and launched a crusade to root out so-called gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

    Charlton said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that she’s lost nearly $6 million in NIH grants as a result of the agency’s directives, signifying “a potential end to my academic career.”

    But her motivation for signing on to the lawsuit extends beyond concern for her own livelihood.

    “This isn’t just a fight for my professional survival but a stand against the erosion of scientific freedom,” Charlton said. “[The grant cancellations set] a worrying precedent where scientific inquiry becomes vulnerable to political rhetoric. The concern here is not merely academic; it affects the very foundation of public health policy and the health of vulnerable communities.”

    Another plaintiff, Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan who researches violence prevention in minority communities, has had six NIH grants pulled this year. And a third plaintiff, Nicole Maphis, a first-generation college student and postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine who researches the link between alcohol use and Alzheimer’s, is no longer in consideration for an NIH grant designed to help underrepresented researchers become faculty members.

    ‘Arbitrary and Capricious’

    The lawsuit argues that NIH didn’t have the authority to cancel those or any of the other grants the agency claims no longer effectuate agency priorities. That’s because the “no longer effectuates agency priorities” regulatory language the NIH has cited to justify its termination of particular grants won’t go into effect until October.

    Additionally, canceling the grants disregards “Congress’s express mandate that NIH fund research to address health equity and health disparities, include diverse populations in its studies, improve efforts to study the health of gender and sexual minorities, and enhance diversity in the bio-medical research profession,” according to the complaint.

    The lawsuit also says that the government violated numerous aspects of the Administrative Procedure Act—including a provision prohibiting agency action considered “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law”—when it terminated the grants. It further asserts that the agency usurped Congress’s “exclusive power over federal spending” and violated the Fifth Amendment by offering “vague” justifications for terminating grants, including involvement with “transgender issues,” “DEI” or “amorphous equity objectives.”

    “Defendants have failed to develop any guidelines, definitions, or explanations to avoid arbitrary and capricious decision-making in determining the parameters of the agency’s prohibitions against research with some connection to DEI, gender, and other topics that fail Defendants’ ideological conformity screen,” the suit alleges.

    That leaves grantees “unsure, for example, which areas of study they can pursue, which populations they can focus on as study subjects, what they might argue to appeal grant terminations, and what the demographics of study participants must be” and “makes it impossible to determine how to reconfigure future research to stay within the bounds of NIH’s newest ‘priorities.’”

    Source link