Junewoo Woo, University of Utah junior studying biomedical engineering, learns how to makes peptides for drug delivery and disease detection from Sake Ratnatilaka Na Bhuket, University of Utah molecular pharmaceutics Ph.D. student, in the Shepherd Lab in University of Utah’s Sorensen Molecular Biotechnology Building in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
The Trump administration’s proposal to significantly cut medical research funding at American colleges could cost the University of Utah $110 million annually — while severely impacting the school’s ability to fulfill its research endeavors.
That was the sobering report shared Friday by University of Utah Vice President for Research Erin Rothwell with the Utah Board of Higher Education.
“There will be some hits to the research enterprise,” she said.
Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health announced a 15% cap on the amount grant recipients such as the University of Utah could request for “indirect” costs — those funds that grant recipients are allowed to use on facility and administrative expenses.
The Trump administration has dismissed these expenses as “overhead.”
For now, those cuts have been blocked by the courts following a series of lawsuits from across the country challenging the NIH’s authority to impose the cap.
Presently, the proposed NIH policy regarding “indirect” caps for grants is “not being enforced because of litigation — but the situation is fluid, and we’re monitoring it,” said Katie Mazzie, the Utah System of Higher Education’s associate commissioner of strategic initiatives, community & government relations, in her Friday report to the board.
As of May, added Mazzie, the NIH had terminated almost 800 grant programs “that totaled $2 billion to higher education institutions.”
As Rothwell reported Friday, it is a historically seismic moment for the University of Utah’s vast research endeavors.
“In terms of grant cancellations, we’ve had 77 grant cancellations,” she said.
Many of those cancellations were for grants that had already expended most of their funding.
“In general, we’ve lost almost $16 million this year, taking into account a couple grants that have been reinstated.”
Additionally, said Rothwell, the university has lost $12.9 million in grant cancellations for future years.
“So we’ve had almost a $30 million loss from the grant cancellations.”
Rothwell did note that compared to Harvard University and other institutions that are being heavily impacted by the federal research cuts, “we’re weathering this very well as a state, as of now.”
The White House budget proposal for next year calls to cut the NIH budget by roughly 40%. About 40% of the University of Utah’s research awards are funded by the NIH, Rothwell reported.
“It’s about $300 million that we receive in direct costs,” she said. “On average, with all of our federal funding and industry, we employ about 7,800 individuals off of our research awards.”
Sizable NIH budget cuts, she added, would result in “significant cuts” in both local research funding — and also job cuts for individuals working in the labs.
Rothwell is also alarmed by the proposed 15% cap to the NIH’s “indirect” grant awards.
If such a proposal is executed, “it would be a $110 million loss annually to the University of Utah, and we would not be able to conduct research as we have today.
“We would significantly lower the amount of research we could conduct.”
Rothwell did allow for some optimism during her report Friday to the state’s higher education leaders.
The university, she said, is working with the Joint Association Group — a coalition of national organizations representing universities, medical schools and research institutions.
The Joint Association Group is proposing a new model to replace the current facilities and administrative cost structure that the federal government uses to fund the indirect expenses.
“We think we can come up with a compromise,” said Rothwell.
The coalition’s Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) model, according to JAG, accommodates the differing operational and research support needs, and the wide array of other characteristics, of institutions that conduct research on behalf of the federal government.
“Although no model for recovering indirect costs is perfect, I believe we have arrived at the best solution for helping maintain American global leadership in research and innovation, keeping our research enterprise strong across all types and sizes of institutions, and providing greater accountability to the American taxpayer,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, the former White House Office of Science and Technology policy director, who helped lead the Joint Association Group effort.
According to the group, the foundational elements of the FAIR model include:
Reducing confusion and misunderstanding by employing a total-project-costs calculation to determine indirect costs. This approach offers a simpler, more intuitive understanding of how costs are calculated.
Promoting transparency by providing greater accountability and transparency “to the American taxpayer, to researchers, to administrators, and to the federal government about the true costs of federally sponsored research.”
Greater efficiency by eliminating “the intensive process of negotiating university-wide indirect cost rates with specific federal oversight and accounting offices within the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Health and Human Services. This saves time and money while reducing confusion about how indirect cost rates are determined.”
