The NIH Memo That Undercut Universities Came Directly From Trump Officials

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.

The memo announced a new policy that, for many universities and other institutions, would hamstring scientific research. It said that the NIH planned to cap so-called indirect costs funded by grants—overhead that covers the day-to-day administrative and logistical duties of research. Some NIH-grant recipients had negotiated rates as high as 75 percent; going forward, the memo said, they would now be limited to just 15 percent. And this new cap would apply even to grants that had already been awarded.

The announcement was written as if it had come from the NIH Office of the Director. It also directed all inquiries to the Office of Extramural Research’s policy branch. And yet, no one at the NIH had seen the text until that Friday afternoon, several current and former NIH officials with knowledge of the situation told me. “None of us had anything to do with that document,” one of them said. But the memo was dressed up in a way clearly intended to make it look like a homegrown NIH initiative. (Everyone I spoke with for this story requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. HHS did not respond to requests for comment.)

Over the next several days, the memo sparked confusion and chaos at the NIH, and across American universities and hospitals, as researchers tried to reckon with the likely upshot—that many of them would have to shut down their laboratories or fire administrative staff. A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the cap on indirect costs. But the memo’s abrupt arrival at the NIH, and the way it bulldozed through the agency, underscores how aggressively the Trump administration is exercising its authority and demanding compliance. “Their approach seems to be We go in; we bully; we say, ‘Do this; you have no choice,’” and shows little regard for the people or research affected, one former official told me.

Typically, a memo communicating a major decision related to grants would take months or years to put together, sometimes with public input, and released six months to a year before being implemented, one current NIH official told me—earlier, even, “if the impact will be more substantial.” In this case, though, Stefanie Spear, the HHS principal deputy chief of staff, told officials in the Office of Extramural Research, which oversees the awarding of grants, that this new memo needed to be posted to the NIH website no later than 5 p.m. that afternoon—within about an hour of the agency receiving it. Soon, the timeline tightened: The memo had to be published within 15 minutes. “It was designed to minimize the chance that anyone within an agency could even have time to respond,” another former NIH official told me.

Substantial changes are generally vetted through HHS leadership, and NIH officials have always “very much abided by the directives of the department,” the former official said. But in the past, drafting those sorts of directives has been collaborative, a former NIH official told me. If NIH officials disagreed with a policy that HHS proposed, a respectful discussion would ensue. Indirect-cost rates are controversial: The proportion of NIH funding that has gone to them has grown over time, and proponents of trimming overhead argue that doing so would make research more efficient. A cut this deep and sudden, though, would upend research nationwide. And to grant recipients and NIH officials, it seemed less an attempt to reform or improve the current system, and more an effort to blow it up entirely. Either way, a unilateral demand to publish unfamiliar content under the NIH’s byline was unprecedented in the experience of the NIH officials I spoke with. “It was completely inappropriate,” the former official told me.

But Spear and Heather Flick Melanson, the HHS chief of staff, insisted that the memo was to go live that evening. Officials immediately began to scramble to post the notice on the agency’s grants website, but they quickly hit some technical snares. Fifteen minutes passed, then 15 more. The two HHS officials began to badger NIH staff, contacting them as often as every five minutes, demanding an explanation for why the memo was still offline. The notice went live just before 5:45 p.m., and finally, the phone calls from HHS stopped.

Almost immediately, the academic world erupted in panic and rage. At the same time, the news was blazing through the NIH; staff members felt blindsided by the memo, which appeared to have come from within the agency but which they’d known nothing about. The notice’s formatting, tone, and abruptness also led many within the agency to suspect that it had not originated there or been vetted by NIH officials. “I’ve never seen anything so sloppy,” the current NIH official, who has written several NIH notices, told me. “We also don’t publish announcements after 5 p.m. on Friday, ever … I checked multiple times to be sure it was real.”

The NIH had already been caught in the Trump administration’s first salvo of initiatives. On January 27, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget froze the agency’s ability to fund grants. (In the following week, multiple federal judges issued orders that should have unpaused the funding halt, but many grants remained in limbo.) And in 2017, during Donald Trump’s first term, his administration went after indirect costs, proposing to cap them at 10 percent. That prompted the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to introduce a new provision that blocked the administration from altering those rates; Congress has since included language in its annual spending bills that prevents changes to indirect costs without legislative approval. On February 10 of this year—the Monday after the memo restricting those rates went up—yet another federal judge issued yet another temporary restraining order that again instructed the NIH to thaw its funding freeze.

Last week, the NIH told its staff to resume awarding grants, with prior indirect-cost rates intact. But “the damage is done,” the former NIH official said. Scientists across the nation have had their funding disrupted; many have had to halt studies. And at the NIH—where roughly 1,000 staff members recently received termination notices, amid a mass layoff of federal workers that stretched across HHS—those who remain fear for their job and the future of the agency. The nation’s leaders, NIH officials told me, seem entirely unwilling to consult the NIH about its own business. If the administration remains uninterested in maintaining the agency’s basic functions, the NIH’s purpose—supporting medical research in the United States—will crumble, or at least deteriorate past the point at which it resembles anything that the people who make up the agency can still recognize.