A federal judge on Friday agreed to extend an order blocking the National Institutes of Health from reducing grant funding to institutions conducting medical and scientific research until she could come to a more lasting decision.
Judge Angel Kelley of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts had temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s cuts from taking effect earlier this month, with that hold set to expire on Monday. That teed up an urgent hearing on Friday in which states and associations representing those institutions urged her to consider halting the cuts more permanently.
The stakes of the lawsuit were put in stark relief during one portion of Friday’s hearing that focused on “irreparable harm,” in which the Judge Kelley asked both sides to explain whether the suspension of the funds amounted to an irreversible blow to the universities and hospitals across the country that depend on the funding.
The N.I.H. has proposed cutting around $4 billion in grants it provides for “indirect costs,” which it has described as tangential expenditures for things like facilities and administrators, and which it said could be better spent on directly funding research. The proposal envisioned reducing funding for those indirect costs to a 15 percent rate to all institutions that receive funds, which a lawyer for the government said was in line with that of private foundations.
But the coterie of lawyers representing the states and research institutions argued to the judge that the direct and indirect costs are often intertwined.
One lawyer asked Judge Kelley to consider a scenario of a researcher doing experiments directly funded through an N.I.H. grant, and a worker disposing of hazardous medical waste produced by all the experiments being run at that facility.