Saving Money Is One Thing. Trump’s NIH Cuts Are Another.

I’m a student researcher at Harvard. And while the recent commotion over the National Institutes of Health’s grant cuts is justified — take University President Alan M. Garber’s ’76 recent email as an example — there’s far more to the issue than meets the eye.

As of Monday, the NIH’s new policy to cap indirect cost reimbursement rates to 15 percent of a given grant, regardless of institution location, scale, or initiative, is in effect.

These changes will disrupt the research landscape, stifling important progress while failing to address underlying problems with indirect costs — and diverting funds that could otherwise go directly toward research.

President Trump’s justification for drastically lowering these indirect costs is to save funds. And the NIH cap is, in fact, anticipated to save the government $4 billion annually. But at what cost?

As much as the current administration has tried to ambush elite higher education institutions by withholding funding and resources, it is not Harvard that will be hurt the most by the new provisions. With a $53.2 billion endowment, the University is more than prepared to weather this storm.

Though the national changes are unlikely to dramatically alter our research capacity, small and public research institutions in rural areas will suffer immensely. These research centers are less likely to receive grants and lack access to other sources of revenue, such as wealthy donors and alumni, massive endowments, and steep tuition.

When NIH funding goes, so can their ability to pay rent. And it is not just research institutions in blue states that will be hurting. In fact, 10 red states — those where Donald Trump won over 55 percent of the 2024 presidential vote — are expected to lose a cumulative $1.1 billion in funding.

Last year, the NIH had a budget of $47.1 billion, making it the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research. They fuel a wide variety of research projects, including those focusing on heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and beyond. Through a competitive grant process, 300,000 of the United States’ best researchers across over 2,500 institutions vie for a piece of the pie.

What role do indirect costs play in all of this? Indirect costs fund the behind-the-scenes of research. They will not fund the immediate resources for a proposal; rather, they go towards spending like administrative expenses and salaries or maintenance costs for buildings and equipment. They are distinct from direct costs, which go toward equipment, researcher salaries, travel, and supplies.

The announcement that NIH will cut funding for these costs has sent a ripple through the research community, prompting a statement of condemnation by President Garber. And 22 states have already sued to block the cuts, citing the threat to ongoing medical research.

But despite the rightfully directed outrage, it would be naive to insist that all indirect costs are necessarily well-calculated. Bloat does exist. Consider an example: A lab performing advanced research requiring multi-million dollar microscopes surely requires higher indirect maintenance costs than a bioinformatics lab that relies on their university for simple compute support. Yet, surprisingly, the NIH negotiates indirect cost rates on an institution-by-institution basis rather than a grant-by-grant one.

Furthermore, NIH indirect rates are not set directly by institutions — the federal government negotiates with universities via an auditing process to set them. And since indirect costs are still funded by taxpayer dollars, we ought to care about how that money is being spent, and about the process by which these rates are calculated.

If a transparent review process reveals that Harvard’s 69 percent indirect cost rate for on-campus research is too high – the average indirect rate across the country is between 27 and 28 percent – then it is worth revisiting how that money is spent and if these overhead costs are truly improving research.

As we push back against the restrictive cap on indirect costs, let us not make the mistake of claiming that the existing system is flawless: There are ways to save the American people money without endangering world-class lifesaving research and the credibility of the world’s leading institution in biomedicine.

But that won’t happen when we cut costs by cutting corners.

Ambika Grover ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Chemical and Physical Biology concentrator in Leverett House.