WASHINGTON – Colleges and universities nationwide are outraged over a new policy from the National Institute of Health that would decrease overall grant funding nationwide.

Last Friday, 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%. This cut of funds has left 2,500 universities scrambling to re-evaluate the fiscal costs of their research.

Hundreds of OU and OSU  employees could be at risk because of the decision by the Trump administration.

Indirect costs can be anything from the maintenance of space 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% of the total cost of research.

Last year, the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center received over $50 million in NIH grants, 43% of which went to indirect costs. The university expected these grants to continue into the next fiscal year, however, with these cuts, it is unlikely that the University will receive the same amount. The HSC relies on NIH grants as the primary source of funding for all of its research.

Universities fear that the NIH move is 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 Science Center, the major concern that the University has is retroactive cuts. The Friday memo cutting funding 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. The HSC may have to cut salaries for faculty, decrease the expansion of their research, and halt the replacement of some equipment and technology, she said. She said it was too early to tell what impact the cuts could have.

This memo is unprecedented in NIH history. Budget cuts have happened for grants previously but never to indirect costs. “This is a totally new experience…it didn’t cut everything across the board to 15%,” Humphrey said.

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% increase in federal grants in 2023 across the board with the Norman campus also receiving nine individual NIH grants.

OU President Joe Harroz said in a statement Monday, “The OU enterprise across our campuses is assessing budget implications and continues to be engaged and thoughtful about best ways forward.”

In the same statement, Harroz offered support to the OU health system’s patients who will be directly affected by these cuts. The clinical trials the university conducts have regulatory requirements that these funding cuts would limit.

Humphrey said, “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.”

Across the country, university agriculture research programs funded by the USAID, which the Trump administration targeted because of its association with foreign aid, are being shuttered effective April 15 and employees 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-Moore) a graduate of OU with a PhD in history said that 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. Cole was the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that handled federal education grants.

 At the time Cole said, “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.”

The White House also pushed back against the backlash saying that 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,” the administration claimed in a statement on Monday.

However, according to Humphrey, this policy will drastically affect research institutions with smaller endowments that do not have the finances to fall back on. The University of Oklahoma 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% on federal expenditures. This, as a part of the “Lead on University” plan helped the university student population to grow by 11%.

But, according to Humprey, the decrease in federal research funds will impact the HSC’s enrollment. She said,  “This is really going to affect our recruiting.”

On Monday, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the NIH funding cuts after 22 state attorneys general sued arguing in the suit 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.”

Gaylord News is a reporting project of the University of Oklahoma Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication.  For more information by Gaylord News go to GaylordNews.net.