A few thoughts on the Trump move rattling universities today

Also: I have a new job as a White House reporter

I started getting a trickle of messages on Friday night that soon turned into a tidal wave. Federal officials, researchers, and policy wonks, all panicked by an abrupt National Institutes of Health announcement to change how America’s premier biomedical agency funds research projects.

You may have seen the news coverage of NIH’s announcement, including our own story. The move sounds technical and jargon-y, but the stakes are clear: NIH’s move would cut billions of dollars that were set to go toward universities and research organizations.

And the move is effective today.

Here’s some quick background on the core issues and the Trump administration’s new plan:

— The NIH spends tens of billions of dollars per year funding biomedical research around the country.

— As part of that process, the NIH awards grants to cover researchers’ “direct costs,” aka everything directly associated with their work. But the NIH also pays for “indirect costs” incurred by the organizations where the researchers do their work.

— Over time, the NIH’s payments for indirect costs have grown, with some universities getting payments equivalent to 50 percent or more of a researcher’s direct costs.

— Those indirect-cost payments have prompted some Republicans and scientists to question whether the NIH is just padding the budgets of America’s wealthiest universities.¹

— University leaders and many scientists have countered that the infrastructure around research — the labs themselves, the electricity to power experiments, the buildings and so on — isn’t cheap.

Now the Trump administration is saying that it will cap how much NIH spends on indirect costs at 15 percent, a dramatic reduction celebrated by Elon Musk and his allies in the U.S. DOGE Service who say it will free up more money to spend on actual science, not overhead.

Having done some reporting on the NIH policy-shift with my colleagues, a few takeaways immediately jumped out.

1. This would be a significant blow to U.S. universities and research organizations, if implemented, given how much they depend on NIH funding. The head of the University of Nebraska said it would be a $27 million hit to his system over the next year. Leaders at Stanford University said it would be a $160 million cut to theirs.

   The list goes on and stretches from coast to coast.

2. This would likely shake up which research projects get funded and how it happens.

   University leaders have stressed that it’s not so simple to dip into their endowments and simply replace the NIH funds that are lost, given restrictions on how endowments can be used, among other reasons. Many schools that are losing NIH funds also don’t have the deep pockets that the richest schools do.

   Some schools quickly tied the lost funding to potentially lost research. The University of Wisconsin-Madison warned about the effects on research into fighting cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.

3. This is going to face legal and political challenges. We talked to several people who insisted that lawsuits are forthcoming. (Perhaps they’re already out there by the time you read this.)

   Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate’s appropriations committee, pointed to language in existing law that barred the NIH from making this kind of change. I’ve seen commentary online that made a similar argument.²

4. This may catalyze a debate, but it’s already antagonized the research field. There are real questions about the scope of bureaucratic bloat in universities and how best to reduce it.

   But announcing a multi-billion-dollar funding cut on Friday and implementing it on Monday isn’t a careful conversation; it’s a sledgehammer.

You can read more in our story, written with my colleagues Carolyn Johnson and Lena Sun:

NIH cuts billions of dollars in biomedical funding, effective immediately

The White House called our story "fake news.”

We stand by it, and I’m grateful to the editors who put it on Sunday’s front page.

I also wanted to share a personal update: I’ve joined The Washington Post’s White House team.

It’s a tremendous honor. My colleagues are an amazing collection of reporters and editors. Some bring expertise covering prior White Houses and political campaigns; others have mastered beats like technology and foreign policy. I’ll do my best to measure up.

I’m also aware — more aware than most! — that it’s been a time of transition at The Post. I’ve spoken to friends and colleagues who recently left The Post about why they did it. I gave some thought to my own next steps.

I’ve tried to respond to readers who ask me what’s happening inside our newsroom, after a tumultuous 2024, and I’m reiterating a version of that message here.

To be blunt, no one at The Washington Post has ever told me what to write. No one has ever stopped me from pursuing stories on powerful people and their interests. If that changed, I’d speak up — and leave.

I know my colleagues feel the same way.

More important than idle speculation: the stories we’re actually producing. My colleagues broke the news that Trump had fired more than a dozen inspector generals. My colleagues like Jeff Stein and Emily Davies have scooped all manner of stories about the federal-funding freeze, Elon Musk’s White House influence and DOGE’s push to access sensitive systems.

My new White House colleague Jackie Alemany had the scoop on a revelation involving lawmakers’ private texts to a key Jan. 6 witness, and anchored a scoop on Caroline Kennedy’s searing letter about her cousin, RFK Jr.

Dozens, if not hundreds of Post staff pitched in to cover the horrible plane crash last month — telling the stories of the victims, unpacking how it happened and explaining what went wrong.

On the health-care side (which still consumes much of my brain space), my colleagues and I revealed that the Trump administration had paused the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports and other health information. I chipped in with a scoop about RFK Jr. missing a key pandemic-planning meeting because he was trying to lobby senators to vote for him.

Our team has changed. The work continues.

I’m excited to be part of it.

1. The first Trump administration sought to cut these payments but faced intense resistance.

2. Here’s

Sam Bagenstos

, who was the Biden HHS’s top lawyer, making the case that the NIH cut is illegal. Jonathan Adler, whose politics are rather different, concurs at Reason Magazine.