UC president says cuts to key federal research funds would be ‘catastrophic’

California and 21 other states are suing the Trump administration to stop it from slashing key funding universities like UC Berkeley rely on to conduct scientific research and discovery.

Last Friday the National Institutes of Health issued a memo indicating that it would reduce the “indirect cost rates” that universities receive from the agency to 15%, nearly half the average rate that research campuses currently get. It’s money that doesn’t fund any specific research but instead helps research facilities maintain expensive labs and equipment while also paying for administrative upkeep, support staff and utility costs.

California’s universities are major recipients of research dollars from the National Institutes of Health, including the University of California, which received more than $2 billion for research in 2023-24 and $2.6 billion in the last academic year. The California State University system received $158 million in the most recent audited year, the suit said.

“These time-honored university partnerships have led to some of the most powerful and impactful research discoveries in human history,” a statement from the UC read. “Life-saving treatments for cancer, diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes, including in children, and new technologies and industries that translate into hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs are all at risk. America is first in research, but its dominance is not assured.”

The National Institutes of Health said it’d implement the rate cut Monday. In justifying the decision, the agency memo said private foundations that fund scientific research cap the rate at 15%. President Donald Trump in his first term sought to curtail the agency’s funding by 20% and force other consolidations. Those efforts, part of his first budget proposal, failed. Instead, Congress that year approved a funding increase for the storied agency.

The Association of American Universities, a coalition of top research institutions, explains that “[u]niversities – not the federal government – assume the risk of building the necessary infrastructure to support this research in anticipation that their research faculty will successfully compete for federal research grants and thus the university will be reimbursed for a part of the associated infrastructure costs.”

The suit argues that the indirect costs cut violates federal law and undermines how Congress said the institutes’ money can be used. It also notes that universities negotiate the indirect cost rates with the federal government following existing federal rules.

The attorneys general representing the states in the suit also wrote that indirect costs allow universities to support the infrastructure where federal funded research occurs. “For example, a university which is funded to conduct cancer therapy research also must fund the physical maintenance of a laboratory and pay for the staff who manage the laboratory and lab equipment, such as operational staff who are not themselves researchers.” Indirect costs support all that.

The suit is the latest state effort to challenge the Trump administration’s efforts to halt or limit federal funding, including money for research. Last week, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, helped lead a suit that resulted in another federal judge ordering the Trump administration to temporarily stop its funding freeze of trillions of dollars of federal grants to states and agencies. Bonta and his counterparts then complained that those freezes were still occurring. The same judge today ordered the federal government to again comply with the order to undo the freeze.

What effect these lawsuits will have on the White House is unclear. On Sunday Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” News outlets have pointed out that the U.S. Constitution permits judicial review of the executive branch. 

So far at least 10 judges have halted Trump’s actions.

In related federal news. U.S. senators, including Alex Padilla of California, have sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Education seeking answers to questions about whether a department led by billionaire Elon Musk is accessing records of student loan recipients.

The senators, citing news reports, said the department’s access “raises questions about potential exposures of Americans’ private data, the abuse of this data by the Trump Administration, and whether officials who have access to the data may have violated the law or the federal government’s procedures for handling sensitive information,” their letter read.

The UC Student Association, the system’s undergraduate student organization, sued the Trump administration last week over Musk’s team’s access to that data.

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