Congress nixes Trump research funding cuts, easing fears among Mass. scientists and lawmakers
In a sharp rebuke to the Trump administration’s campaign to slash medical research, Congress passed legislation Tuesday that bolsters funding for the National Institutes of Health while preventing the administration from cutting billions of dollars in support for research overhead.
In a package of spending bills, the National Institutes of Health will see its budget increase by $415 million, in sharp contrast to the $20-billion cut sought by the administration last April, a nearly 40 percent decrease.
The legislation, signed into law late Tuesday by Trump, also contains strict language meant to block the administration’s efforts to limit federal payments of so-called “indirect costs” on research grants – a critical source of research funding that pays for laboratory upkeep and other expenses not directly tied to a specific project. Early last year, the Trump administration proposed capping indirect costs at 15 percent of any given grant - far below what many institutions had been getting. Universities and research hospitals warned the cuts would cost them billions and eviscerate studies into treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and a range of other ailments.
Even so, the risk of further cuts to scientific research loom. At times over the past year, the Trump administration has shown that it is willing to slash federal grant funding with impunity, sometimes in defiance of court orders and acts of Congress. Trump has also used federal funding as a cudgel in an attempt to force elite universities to change what he says are left-wing and antisemetic policies. On Monday, Trump resumed his on-and-off-again feud with Harvard, demanding that the university pay the federal government $1 billion.
But in Massachusetts, the state with the most NIH funding per capita, scientists and lawmakers are breathing sighs of relief now that federal funding levels have largely returned to the status quo after months of turmoil.
Trump’s proposed cuts attracted fierce pushback from an extraordinary coalition of academic institutions, hospitals, major disease advocacy groups like the Alzheimer’s Association and the American Cancer Society, nearly two dozen state attorneys general, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle with NIH-funded research institutions in their districts. These opponents got help from federal courts in Massachusetts, which ruled that the intended cap on indirect costs was unlawful and violated congressional language meant to block changes to these payments.
“NIH is an example of how to beat back Trump,” said US Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Newton and a persistent critic of the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research funding. “It’s a combination of civil society, of litigation and of `quiet Congress’... the secret productivity of Congress, away from the headlines.”
The intensity of that opposition was on full display last December, when NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya made a series of stops around Boston at the invitation of Auchincloss and US Representative Richard Neal. More than 100 scientists, biomedical executives and doctors turned out for events with Bhattacharya. While the meetings were cordial, some attendees confronted Bhattacharya directly about the funding cuts. They described clinical trials into new medications that had been paused for lack of funding, and universities that were afraid to hire new faculty. Others warned that turmoil at the NIH would have reverberations for years to come – potentially affecting an entire generation of young scientists.
Neal, a Springfield Democrat, was so determined to convey his concerns about the funding cuts that he punched extra buttons on a building elevator to steal more time with Bhattacharya.
“It wasn’t us screaming at him. It was more like, let’s look at the facts here,” Neal said of the December visit. “We tried to convey that we already have this system here we have built over decades... and we don’t believe you should abandon it for political reasons.”
While the impact of Bhattacharya’s visit to Massachusetts remains unclear, several leaders in the state’s biomedical industry viewed it as a turning point — and a hopeful sign that the Trump administration was reconsidering its assault on federal science funding.
“It was a very important inflection point,” said Kendalle Burlin O’Connell, CEO and president of MassBio, a trade and lobbying organization for the life sciences industry. “It was a sign that the NIH director wanted to work collaboratively – and the messages were heard and resonated."
Soon after Bhattacharya’s visit, Trump administration officials began to relent on key sticking points of an appropriations package that includes funding for the NIH and other health agencies, according to lobby groups for the life sciences industry.
Among these sticking points was a controversial funding strategy advocated by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. Under the strategy, the administration has shifted toward making more multi-year grants with a single, upfront lump sum payment – rather than making the money available to researchers on a year-by-year basis. Without an increase in the pot of funding available, the strategy results in fewer grants being funded. In 2025, the strategy resulted in at least 2,000 fewer NIH grant awards, according to Grant Witness and Senate Democrats’ summary of the bill.
The Trump administration initially sought to expand the strategy (known as “forward funding”) – even threatening to veto the appropriations bill – before reaching a compromise. The final bill limits the amount of money for multiyear funding to the 2025 level. The compromise means the total number of new awards will again decline, but not by as many as the administration sought, according to Eleanor Dehoney, senior vice president of Policy and Advocacy at Research!America, a nonprofit advocacy group for biomedical research.
“Now there are important guardrails” around the use of forward funding, Dehoney said.
Still, lawmakers and biomedical groups cautioned against complacency, noting that it took a year of lobbying and a flurry of lawsuits to turn back the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts. Only last spring, laboratories across the region were scrambling for alternative funding sources, and some universities were forced to lay off staff and rescind offers of admission to graduate and postdoctoral programs.
“Hope is not a strategy,” Auchincloss said, when asked if he was hopeful that research funding would hold steady this year. “The strategy is linking potential dissenters within the administration to civil society and Congress. That’s the strategy, and that is a work in progress.”
By: Chris Serres
Source: Boston Globe