NEW YORK ─ A federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on Wednesday preventing the National Institutes of Health from cutting its coverage of indirect costs for research grants to 15 percent, a new policy instituted by the Trump administration on Feb. 7.
The order relates to three separate lawsuits filed on Feb. 10 by 22 state attorneys general, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Association of American Universities — two of them against the NIH, the third against the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to the order, these plaintiffs represent more than 1,400 medical institutions across all 50 states and territories of the US, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. It also notes that the NIH issues almost 60,000 grants to 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities, medical schools, and research institutions.
In her order, Judge Angel Kelley of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote that the new policy "impacts thousands of existing grants, totaling billions of dollars across all 50 states — a unilateral change over a weekend, without regard for ongoing research and clinical trials."
Further, she wrote that "the imminent risk of halting life-saving clinical trials, disrupting the development of innovative medical research and treatment, and shuttering of research facilities, without regard for current patient care, warranted the issuance of a nationwide temporary restraining order to maintain the status quo, until the matter could be fully addressed before the Court."
According to Kelley, "it is likely plaintiffs will succeed on the merits, rendering the [new NIH policy] unlawful. Therefore, the preliminary injunction would serve the public interest as NIH is forced to abide by existing law and regulations."
Besides the three lawsuits, the new NIH policy had drawn widespread criticism from researchers across the country. Precision medicine and genomics researchers have specifically pointed out how the cuts would impact foundational research projects, detract experts from entering the space, and harm precision oncology discovery and development studies. A petition against the cuts to indirect costs initiated by investigators at the New York Genome Center, for example, had garnered more than 7,400 signatures as of Wednesday morning, including from more than 50 Nobel laureates.