California, Massachusetts and 14 other states sued the Trump administration on Friday for withholding grant funding from public health and medical research institutions, cuts that have forced universities to curtail research and to delay the hiring of new staff.
The National Institutes of Health is the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, supporting studies on aging, substance abuse and other major issues. More than 80 percent of the agency’s $47 billion budget goes to outside researchers — grant funding that in recent weeks has been eliminated, paused or delayed by the Trump administration in a “concerted, and multi-pronged effort to disrupt NIH’s grants,” according to the lawsuit.
Cuts and delays to N.I.H. funding have crippled research teams in universities across the country and halted studies midstream, setting back work on diseases like cancer and diabetes and plunging American medical research into crisis. The attorneys general are asking the courts to restore pulled grant funding and to allow pending grant applications to be evaluated and approved fairly.
“In their unlawful withholding and terminating of medical and public health research grants, the Trump Administration is upending not only the critical work being done today, but the promise of progress for future generations,” Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, said in a statement.
Neither the National Institutes of Health nor the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the agency, responded to requests for comment.
The massive University of California system — which conducts nearly 9 percent of all U.S. academic research, through both its undergraduate campuses and academic medical centers — gets half of its funding from the federal government. The university system last fiscal year received $2 billion in N.I.H. contracts and grants, according to the lawsuit.