Lost Funding - Part 2

In an earlier post, we provided some numbers on the proposed NIH cuts to UC.* Further background on the NIH cuts (the 15% cap on overhead) can be found in The Atlantic:

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.

The memo announced a new policy that, for many universities and other institutions, would hamstring scientific research. It said that the NIH planned to cap so-called indirect costs funded by grants—overhead that covers the day-to-day administrative and logistical duties of research. Some NIH-grant recipients had negotiated rates as high as 75 percent; going forward, the memo said, they would now be limited to just 15 percent. And this new cap would apply even to grants that had already been awarded…

Over the next several days, the memo sparked confusion and chaos at the NIH, and across American universities and hospitals, as researchers tried to reckon with the likely upshot—that many of them would have to shut down their laboratories or fire administrative staff. A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the cap on indirect costs…

Typically, a memo communicating a major decision related to grants would take months or years to put together, sometimes with public input, and released six months to a year before being implemented… Substantial changes are generally vetted through HHS leadership, and NIH officials have always “very much abided by the directives of the department,” the former official said. But in the past, drafting those sorts of directives has been collaborative…

But [Stefanie] Spear [HHS principal deputy chief of staff] and Heather Flick Melanson, the HHS chief of staff, insisted that the memo was to go live that evening. Officials immediately began to scramble to post the notice on the agency’s grants website, but they quickly hit some technical snares. Fifteen minutes passed, then 15 more. The two HHS officials began to badger NIH staff, contacting them as often as every five minutes, demanding an explanation for why the memo was still offline. The notice went live just before 5:45 p.m., and finally, the phone calls from HHS stopped. Almost immediately, the academic world erupted in panic and rage…

Full story at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/02/nih-indirect-cost-memo-hhs/681736/.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

…U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley blocked the proposed NIH cuts Friday until she can rule on an injunction, which would be a more permanent decision. Several organizations plus 22 states — including California — sued to block the cuts from taking effect, saying they would cause “irreparable harm.” 

But the judicial hold can’t contain the chaos that the potential cut has wrought, said Gina Banks Daly, the director of federal relations at UC Berkeley. “NIH funding at this moment, even with the temporary restraining order, is essentially frozen…

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/uc-berkeley-lab-federal-cuts-20175918.php.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/02/lost-funding.html.