WASHINGTON (States Newsroom) — A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction blocking the National Institutes of Health from implementing a policy that would cap the amount of funding research universities and medical schools receive for indirect costs.
The Friday ruling from Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts came just hours after Trump administration lawyers asked her to convert the preliminary injunction issued in March to a permanent one.
The move will likely speed up the appeals process.
Kelley wrote in her previous 76-page decision that a preliminary injunction prevented the NIH from inflicting “immediate, devastating, and irreparable” harm on research institutions.
“First, the suspension of ongoing clinical trials and the resulting threats to patients’ lives represents a dire risk of a quintessentially irreparable nature. Second, the threats to non-human, yet still essential, research subjects similarly rings in irreparability,” Kelley wrote, referring to research animals. “Finally, the potential loss of human capital and talent to virtually every Plaintiff poses yet another harm incapable of run-of-the-mill legal relief.”
Kelley added the “Court is hard pressed to think of a loss more irreparable than the loss of a life, let alone the thousands of people who are counting on clinical trials as their last hope.”
The case began in February after the NIH announced it would cap Facilities and Administrative fees for every institution receiving a grant at 15%, a significantly lower threshold than many research universities and medical schools had negotiated over the years.
That led to three lawsuits — Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. National Institutes of Health, Association of American Medical Colleges v. National Institutes of Health and Association of American Universities v. Department of Health & Human Services — all of which are before Kelley.
Facilities and Administrative fees, also referred to as indirect costs, cover expenses that are not associated with one specific research project. They can include building construction or renovations, utility bills, salaries for administrative staff, and dozens of other line items.
