MIT, Brandeis, Tufts and other universities sue to block federal slicing of research funding

Three local research universities and other private and public universities across the country this evening sued the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services over the way they suddenly slashed federal funds for research, including money they had already agreed to pay.

Like suits filed earlier in the day by 22 states and by hospitals and medical schools, the university suit was filed in US District Court in Boston. And like the other suits, it seeks a court order to bar the Musk administration from blocking funds appropriated by Congress.

Noting that Musk's junior partner tried to pull the same stunt in his first administration, only to be overruled by Congress, the schools argue against the "flagrantly unlawful action" by NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services and the way it "will devastate medical research at America’s universities:"

Cutting-edge work to cure disease and lengthen lifespans will suffer, and our country will lose its status as the destination for solving the world’s biggest health problems. At stake is not only Americans' quality of life, but also our Nation's enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation.  ...

Even at larger, well-resourced institutions, this unlawful action will impose enormous harms, including on these institutions' ability to contribute to medical and scientific breakthroughs. Smaller institutions will fare even worse - faced with more unrecoverable costs on every dollar of grants funds received, many will not be able to sustain any research at all and could close entirely. In a public statement, the Council on Governmental Relations has already called this brazen act "a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation."

The money at issue is not direct grants to researchers, but money the government provides along with that to cover the shared costs of overhead required to do cutting-edge research, the schools say:

Biocontainment laboratories needed for pathogenic research; blood banks and animal facilities for clinical testing; computer systems to analyze enormous volumes of data; information-technology and utility systems providing the backbone for those efforts; and researchers and administrative staff who keep the systems running—all are critical to cutting-edge research, but their costs typically cannot be allocated to any single project. Because of caps on administrative costs, moreover, universities contribute a significant amount of their own funds to cover such costs, thereby subsidizing the work funded by grants.

The suit charges the abrupt change in funding - cutting indirect reimbursement that in some cases was more than 60% above the cost of a basic grant to a standard 15% _ violates the federal Administrative Procedures Act by withholding money appropriated by Congress, illegally changes funding contracts for individual universities for money the government had agreed to pay, and is just completely arbitrary and capricious, in part because it was put into effect without a required period for people to comment on the change, but also because the government just can't make retroactive changes like that. It also charges the change violates a federal public-health law that will harm millions of Americans. 

More fundamentally, the Supreme Court has underscored that agencies may not enact sweeping rules of this sort without express congressional authorization. 

The suit asks a judge to rule the edict illegal and to order the government not to cut off any of the funding - which assumes the government would listen to a judge who ruled that way.