NEW YORK – A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the National Institutes of Health from putting a cap on costs paid to institutions to support research.
The order, issued late Monday by US District Judge Angel Kelley, was granted at the request of a coalition of state attorneys general, which has sued NIH, hoping to block a recent directive that would reduce total grant spending by billions of dollars.
The order prevents NIH from "taking any steps to implement, apply, or enforce the Rate Change Notice within plaintiff states until further order is issued by this court." The court also scheduled a hearing on the matter for Feb. 21.
Separately, a coalition of universities has launched its own lawsuit, also in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, against the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services. Like the other lawsuit, it alleges that NIH's actions violate the Administrative Procedure Act. The coalition seeks an injunction as well as a declaratory judgment that the NIH guidance was "procedurally invalid, arbitrary, and capricious."
"This action is ill-conceived and self-defeating for both America's patients and their families as well as the nation as a whole," the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, Association of American Universities, and the American Council on Education — co-plaintiffs in the second suit — said in a joint statement.
"Besides harming the ability of research universities to continue doing critical NIH research that seeks out new and more effective approaches to treating cancer, heart disease, and dementia, among others, and translating basic science into cures, this cut would also undermine universities' essential training of the next generation of biomedical and health science researchers. The loss of this American workforce pipeline would be a blow to the US economy, to American science and innovation, to patients and their families, and to our nation's position in the world as a leader in medical research," they wrote.