WASHINGTON — Employees of colleges and universities nationwide are outraged over a new policy from the National Institute of Health that would decrease overall grant funding nationwide.
On Feb. 7, the NIH shocked research universities — including the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Tulsa — with a new policy requiring all current and future grants to reduce their indirect costs to 15 percent. The announcement has left 2,500 universities scrambling to reevaluate the fiscal costs of their research.
This story was reported by Gaylord News, a Washington reporting project of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma.
On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the NIH funding cuts after 22 state attorneys general sued, arguing that “NIH’s extraordinary attempt to disrupt all existing and future grants not only poses an immediate threat to the nation’s research infrastructure, but will also have a long-lasting impact on its research capabilities and its ability to provide life-saving breakthroughs in scientific research.”
Still, hundreds of OU and OSU employees could be at risk if the cuts are eventually allowed to move forward.
Indirect costs can be anything from the maintenance of facilities to the administrative costs needed to apply for more grants. The long-standing philosophy in the research world has been that indirect costs should sit around 30 percent of the total cost of research.
Last year, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center received more than $50 million in NIH grants, 43 percent of which went to indirect costs. The university expected these grants to continue into the next fiscal year. However, if the cuts take effect, it is unlikely the university would receive the same amount. The HSC relies on NIH grants as the primary source of funding for all of its research.
University leaders fear the NIH move may be the first of others that will impact federal research programs ranging from defense, atmospheric and oceanic sciences and other medicine-related federal grant programs led by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to Mary Beth Humphrey, vice president of research at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, the major concern the university has is retroactive cuts. The Feb. 7 memo announcing the funding change also included allusions to the universities that have received grants in the past having to pay back some of their indirect costs from previous years and grants.
“That money is going to come from other sources on campus,” Humphrey said.
If the funding reduction takes effect, OUHSC may have to cut salaries for faculty, decrease the expansion of research and halt the replacement of some equipment and technology, Humphrey said. She added it was too early to tell what impact the cuts could have.
“This is a totally new experience,” Humphrey said. “[Past cuts] didn’t cut everything across the board to 15 percent.”
In 1986, the NIH cut direct cost grants by a total of $236 million. This proposed grant cut could exceed $8 billion.
Overall, the University of Oklahoma saw a 50 percent increase in federal grants in 2023 across the board, with the Norman campus also receiving nine individual NIH grants.
“The OU enterprise across our campuses is assessing budget implications and continues to be engaged and thoughtful about best ways forward,” OU President Joe Harroz said in a statement Monday. “We are also working in collaboration with OU Health, as its patients’ access to our life-altering clinical trials may also be affected. In fact, OU College of Medicine executive dean Ian Dunn spent the weekend in Washington, D.C., meeting with other deans and leaders from the Association of American Medical Colleges, discussing strategies in response to the NIH action. These discussions are being shared with our executive leadership, who are proactively considering next steps should the administration seek to generalize the NIH action to other federal agencies.”
Humphrey further elaborated on how the cuts could impact patients.
“If you don’t have money to pay for the people who are doing the regulatory piece, you’re going to have to limit the number of studies you can do, which will impact the health of Oklahomans by limiting their access to clinical trials,” she said.
USAID reduction causing similar concerns
Across the country, university agriculture research programs funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration has targeted because of its disbursement of foreign aid, are being shuttered effective April 15, and employees are being laid off.
Oklahoma State University had a longstanding connection to USAID going back to the 1940s under the Truman administration. Since then, OSU has helped to introduce agricultural innovations to foreign nations through this partnership.
Representative Tom Cole (R-OK3), a graduate of OU with a doctorate in history, said there is a great misunderstanding over how the NIH grants work and how the funding cuts will actually be implemented.
“I don’t see colleges as having scammed the system,” Cole said.
Cole also referenced legislation from 2017 that he had written and passed that included protections for NIH grants. The year prior, he also railed against proposed discretionary cuts to the NIH. At the time, Cole was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that handled federal NIH funding.
“Sadly, if we’re going to actually do what needs to be done at NIH and continue on this path of reinvigorating biomedical research and having a sustainable growth pattern, we’re going to have make some difficult decisions elsewhere in the budget,” Cole said in 2016.
The Trump administration has pushed back against the backlash, saying other private sources of funding for universities have a much lower threshold for indirect costs built into their grants.
“Many foundations do not fund indirect costs whatsoever,” a statement issued Monday by the NIH’s Office of the Director said.
However, according to Humphrey, the new pending policy will drastically affect research institutions with smaller endowments that do not have the finances to fall back on. OU is a top-100 research university with a total endowment of $1.6 billion. But compared to Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of $50.87 billion, OU has a fraction of the funds to fall back on without NIH grants.
In 2022, OU spent a total of $416 million on research expenditures with an increase of 11 percent on federal expenditures. This, as a part of the “Lead on University” plan, helped the university student population to grow by 11 percent. According to Humprey, however, the decrease in federal research funds will impact the HSC’s enrollment.
“This is really going to affect our recruiting,” she said.
