Photo: Faith Ninivaggi
In a follow-up memo to the UMass Chan Medical School community on Tuesday, Feb. 11, Chancellor Michael F. Collins explained the status of the new National Institutes of Health indirect costs rate cap.
Yesterday the attorneys general in 22 states, co-led by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Boston claiming that the directive issued Friday by the National Institutes of Health to cap the indirect cost rates at 15 percent is unlawful. The new cap would apply to all existing and new research grants and was set to take effect yesterday, Feb. 10.
Last evening, just hours after the 22-state lawsuit was filed, the judge to whom the case was assigned granted an ex parte temporary restraining order submitted in conjunction with the 22-state suit. In her decision, the federal judge wrote that the federal administration and its employees “are hereby enjoined from taking any steps to implement, apply, or enforce the Rate Change Notice (NOT-OD-25- 068) within Plaintiff States until further order is issued by this Court.” A hearing with all parties to the lawsuit has been scheduled for Friday, Feb. 21, and a decision will later be issued, which will be subject to potential appeals.
As we communicated over the weekend, our leadership team has been working around the clock in partnership with the University’s Office of General Counsel and are grateful for their expertise and advocacy in ensuring that the University of Massachusetts system and our medical school, specifically, is well represented in efforts to stop the NIH’s harmful action.
While the U.S. District Court’s order in response to the emergency motion for a temporary restraining order is certainly welcome news, it is not a resolution. In the days and weeks ahead, this and other legal challenges will unfold. Furthermore, even if the current litigation is completely successful, the debate over indirect costs on NIH grants will almost certainly be revisited by the Congress in the coming year’s NIH budget appropriation. Therefore, for some period, we and the thousands of other organizations that receive NIH grant funding will remain in an unavoidable period of uncertainty.
We commit to continuing to do all we can to protect UMass Chan’s vital and valuable public research mission. We remain actively engaged with our elected officials in Washington, D.C., and Boston, and with our professional organizations and patient groups who collectively, influentially and regularly advocate for the value of biomedical research.
We know you are following this matter closely and urge you to make your voices heard to your elected representatives. Indirect costs fund a portion of the specialized research infrastructure required by organizations such as ours, allowing us to comply with legal and regulatory mandates, maintain lab buildings, sustain complex research cores and retain highly skilled staff. These rates are negotiated and then memorialized in a written agreement with the federal government through a highly regulated process on a predictable cadence and have been essential to every scientific discovery, clinical trial and breakthrough treatment developed since the middle of the last century.
We will update the UMass Chan community as we can and will stay in close contact with the leaders of our research enterprise. We appreciate that biomedical research brings hope to the human condition and is essential to fulfilling our mission as Massachusetts’ first and only public medical school.
