Wake Up, America. Cutting Health and Science Funding Costs Lives
Protesters for science. Vlad Tchompalov
A Nobel Prize-winner, a Johns Hopkins doctor, and a university leader on why billions of dollars in NIH funding is worth the price.
Article By Carol Greider, Argye Hillis and Todd Wolfson
This week’s Bethesda Declaration, signed by hundreds of current and former staff members at the National Institutes of Health and more than 10,000 scientists and researchers – including Nobel Prize winners like one of us – is a watershed moment in the fight to preserve our nation’s ability to treat and cure disease.
The letter speaks out against moves by the NIH to terminate 2,100 research grants totaling $9.5 billion, plus an additional $2.6 billion in contracts, since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20. The declaration condemned the moves to “undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” and was addressed to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who testified Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee about the 2026 NIH budget.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, spoke for many of us when he asked Bhattacharya on Tuesday, “For God's sake, we lead the world in medical research. Why would we give up on it?”
The administration’s slash-and-burn approach to cutting “government waste” includes ending or delaying thousands of NIH grants that support vital scientific and medical research that benefits all Americans. The White House also wants to cut $18 billion, or 40%, from this year's NIH budget. We call on senators to demand that the administration reverse these devastating cuts that will cause unnecessary deaths, cost billions in economic activity, and have already resulted in tens of thousands of jobs losses.
In April, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against the Trump administration’s efforts to dramatically reduce federal grant funding the NIH can use to cover overhead, or the institutional costs associated with medical research.
Unfortunately, the injunction may not in fact be permanent, and the administration continues to hack at the agency’s – and the nation’s – research and development capacity. The Trump administration pushed to appeal as soon as possible, and last Friday announced that the same reductions would apply to research grants from the Department of Energy.
It might be easy to write these cuts off as numbers on a thousand-page budget sheet, but they affect the lives and health of everyday, ordinary people, like a 48-year-old woman who suddenly developed weakness on one side and lost the ability to speak. Her terrified husband called 911, and when she arrived at the Johns Hopkins Hospital emergency room in Baltimore, where one of us treated her, she got an intravenous clot-busting drug that broke up the clot causing the stroke. Later that night, she was speaking again and using her right side – all because of a single drug.
That drug, tissue plasminogen activator, was proven effective through a trial supported by NIH research funds. Since its approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1996, more than 35,000 people in the U.S. alone have seen rapid improvements after a stroke.
Advances in science and medicine depend on federal funding. The NIH awards grants to universities across the country that pay for researchers’ salaries, equipment and materials to develop therapies for cancer, heart disease, dementia, emphysema and other fatal conditions.
Equally important are “indirect costs” that are being cut – the portion of every grant that pays for laboratories and the people who keep them clean, safe, lighted and heated. Without that spending on “overhead,” we’d have no data and no scientific breakthroughs.
The Trump administration has announced it would cap indirect costs for research overhead at 15%, even though the cost is much higher. At most universities, 30% or more of a grant is needed to cover the critical indirect costs that enable our research. The administration’s funding cuts will decimate lifesaving biomedical research, shut down scientific studies and cause harm to millions of ordinary Americans. Capping indirect costs will make it impossible for universities to pay essential staff needed for cutting-edge research.
NIH has funded tremendous innovations in health over the last 70 years. NIH-funded discoveries include treatment to delay the onset of type 1 diabetes, interventions that slow the progression of childhood blindness and macular degeneration and new interventions to treat heart disease, the leading killer of Americans. All of these and other breakthroughs require indirect costs to carry out the research. The Trump administration’s cuts to NIH funding would halt critical research on cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease and other lifesaving scientific advances.
Training the next generation of scientists is one of the most important parts of our jobs. Our research labs, supported by the NIH over the last 35 years, have trained over 150 young scientists who have gone on to make important contributions to science and education in America. In other words, the draconian cuts to NIH budgets won't just hurt scientific progress today, they will have devastating – and potentially irreparable – effects on American science for generations to come.
Discoveries that have come from-NIH funded research are the building blocks that spawned the biotech industry, which today is worth more than $460 billion dollars in the U.S.
When research labs shut down, there will be massive lay-offs of maintenance and custodial workers, clerical staff, research assistants and the technicians who keep lab buildings functioning safely. Universities are anchors in their communities, providing jobs and opportunities. The economic fallout of these cuts will hit millions.
When a loved one is critically ill, families often ask, “Is there anything else we can try?” It's NIH-funded research that provides families with a glimmer of hope, delivering revolutionary treatments for all diseases, potential miracles for someone's mother, father, child or spouse.
We call on members of Congress from both parties who care about their constituents to defend NIH’s critical role in lifesaving research.
Carol Greider, a 2009 Nobel Laureate, studies telomeres and their role in age-related disease and cancer at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Argye Hillis treats patients at Johns Hopkins University, which receives more federal grant funding than any other university in the country. She runs clinical trials aimed at improving people’s ability to speak after having a stroke.
Todd Wolfson, who is on the faculty at Rutgers University, is president of the American Association of University Professors, representing 40,000 higher education workers affected by billions of dollars in Trump administration cuts to research funding for higher education.