The cuts were ordered late last week by the federal health agency.
Democratic attorneys general of 22 states filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to block billions of dollars in cuts to the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) ordered last week by the Trump administration.
Filed in federal court in Boston, their lawsuit is seeking to stop cuts to the NIH, including the reimbursement rate for the indirect costs to research institutions that are not directly related to a scientific project’s goals. Indirect costs include laboratory space, faculty, equipment, and infrastructure.
The lawsuit, which accuses the NIH of exceeding its authority and violating federal law, is being led by the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan.
“The effects of the Rate Change Notice will be immediate and devastating,” the lawsuit states, referring to the Trump administration’s actions. “This agency action will result in layoffs, suspension of clinical trials, disruption of ongoing research programs, and laboratory closures.”
They argued further that NIH will lose its ability to carry out “cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease,” adding that it would also stop people from becoming “beneficiaries of research creating treatments, such as modern gene editing, vaccines such as flu vaccines, and cures for diseases like cancer, infectious diseases, and addiction.”
The state attorneys general said that if allowed to stand, the cuts would also result in layoffs, research disruptions, and laboratory closures.
The lawsuit is taking aim at an NIH directive that was issued last week that officials say would save more than $4 billion each year. The lawsuit specifically accuses the NIH of exceeding its authority by making the cuts apply retroactively to existing federal grants and of adopting the policy without following mandatory rulemaking procedures.
“The average indirect cost rate reported by NIH has averaged between 27% and 28% over time. And many organizations are much higher—charging indirect rates of over 50% and in some cases over 60%,” the NIH said in a notice published on Feb. 7.
The NIH said it had spent more than $35 billion in the 2023 fiscal year on grants awarded to researchers at more than 2,500 institutions. About $9 billion of that money went to covering overheads, or indirect costs, the NIH said.
In a post on social media on Feb. 7, the NIH said that under the previous system, three schools—Harvard University, Yale University, and Johns Hopkins University—had charged an indirect-cost rate of more than 60 percent.
Harvard released a statement on Monday that said the cuts would “slash funding and cut research activity at Harvard and nearly every research university in our nation.”
President Donald Trump and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been pushing to slash trillions of dollars in what they say are wasteful spending, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.
“Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60% of research award money for ‘overhead’?” Musk wrote in a post on X last week, responding to the NIH. “What a ripoff!”
Aside from the 22 attorneys general, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said that the NIH directive should be stopped, claiming that it would “derail major breakthroughs by forcing research institutions … to now scramble to make up this massive shortfall, almost certainly forcing layoffs across the country.” She said the NIH helps prepare the United States “for pandemics and other health threats, and ensure the U.S. continues to be the global leader in biomedical research.”
The Association of American Medical Colleges was similarly critical, claiming in a statement late last week that it would “diminish the nation’s research capacity” and that “lights in labs nationwide will literally go out” if it stands. The group urged Trump to not go through with the directive.
Reuters contributed to this report.