Jobs lost in every state and lifesaving cures not discovered: Possible
impacts of research cuts
[March 07, 2025]
By LAURAN NEERGAARD and KASTURI PANANJADY
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rural cancer patients may miss out on cutting-edge
treatments in Utah. Therapies for intellectual disorders could stall in
Maryland. Red states and blue states alike are poised to lose jobs in
research labs and the local businesses serving them.
Ripple effects of the Trump administration’s crackdown on U.S.
biomedical research promise to reach every corner of America. It's not
just about scientists losing their jobs or damaging the local economy
their work indirectly supports — scientists around the country say it's
about patient health.
“Discoveries are going to be delayed, if they ever happen,” said Dr.
Kimryn Rathmell, former director of the National Cancer Institute.
It’s hard for patients to comprehend how they could lose an undiscovered
cure.
Yet “all the people out there who have, you know, sick parents, sick
children, this is going to impact,” said neuroscientist Richard Huganir
of Johns Hopkins University.
The administration’s unprecedented moves are upending the research
engine that has made the U.S. “the envy of the world in terms of
scientific innovation,” said Georgetown University health policy expert
Lawrence Gostin.
Among the biggest blows, if it survives a court challenge: Massive cuts
in funding from the National Institutes of Health that would cost jobs
in every state, according to an analysis by The Associated Press with
assistance from the nonprofit United for Medical Research.
That’s on top of mass firings of government workers, NIH delays in
issuing grants and uncertainty about how many already funded studies are
being canceled under the president's anti-diversity executive orders.
Earlier this week, lawmakers pressured Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the nominee
to become NIH director, about the turmoil. Bhattacharya said if
confirmed, he'd look into it to ensure scientists employed by and funded
by the agency “have resources to do the lifesaving work they do.”
Funding cuts may leave rural patients more vulnerable
Patients who live in rural counties are 10% more likely to die of their
cancer than those living in metropolitan areas, said Neli Ulrich of the
University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute.
A third of patients travel more than 150 miles for care at the Salt Lake
City cancer center. But for patients even further away — in Idaho,
Montana, Nevada and Wyoming — it’s also the regional hub for NIH-funded
studies of new treatments.
So Ulrich’s center helps train local doctors to do at least some of the
blood tests and other steps of clinical trials that let patients from
far away participate without traveling — a program threatened if her
university loses tens of millions in NIH cuts.
The issue: Most of the NIH’s budget — more than $35 billion a year —
goes to universities, hospitals and other research groups. The grants
are divided into “direct costs” — covering researchers’ salaries and a
project’s supplies — and “indirect costs,” to reimburse other expenses
supporting the work such as electricity, maintenance and janitorial
staff, and safety and ethics oversight.
NIH directly negotiates with research groups, a process that grants
managers say requires receipts and audits, to set rates for those
indirect expenses that can reach 50% or more. But the Trump
administration now plans to cap those rates at 15%. The administration
estimates it would save the government $4 billion a year but scientists
say it really means they'll have to stop some lifesaving work.
They are “real expenses, that’s the critical point – they are not
fluff,” said Ulrich. Using separate cancer center funds to cover those
costs would threaten other “activities that are really important to us
in serving our communities across the mountain West.”
[to top of second column]
|
Medical researchers from universities and the National Institutes of
Health rally near the Health and Human Services headquarters to
protest federal budget cuts Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025, in Washington.
(AP Photo/John McDonnell, File)
 A federal judge has blocked the move
for now but until the court fight is done researchers aren’t sure
what they can continue to afford.
‘Indirect’ costs directly support local jobs
NIH grants divided between researchers in every state in 2023
supported more than 412,000 jobs and $92 billion in new economic
activity, according to a yearly report from United for Medical
Research that often is cited as Congress sets the agency's budget.
The AP tallied how much money would have been lost in each state
under a 15% cap on those grants’ indirect costs. Those lost dollars
alone would have cost at least 58,000 jobs, concluded an analysis
assisted by Inforum, a nonpartisan economic consulting firm that
conducts UMR's economic impact reports.
Consider Hopkins, which runs about 600 NIH-funded clinical trials
plus other laboratory research and is Baltimore’s largest private
employer. “If we can’t do science and we can’t support the science,
we can’t support the surrounding community either,” Huganir said.
Research cuts could leave new treatments on the brink
Huganir studies how the brain stores memory as people learn when he
discovered a gene that, when mutated, causes certain intellectual
disabilities.
After years studying the SynGap1 gene, “we have what we think is a
really great therapeutic” almost ready to be tested in severely
affected children. Huganir has applied for two new NIH grants key
for moving toward those trials.
“The problem is for the kids, there’s a window of time to treat
them,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”
NIH reviews of new grant applications have been delayed despite
court rulings to end a government spending freeze, and it’s unclear
how quickly they can get back on track.
“Everyone I know is basically freaking out because we suddenly don’t
know how much longer we’ll be able to keep our labs open,” said
neuroscientist Rebecca Shansky at Boston’s Northeastern University,
who’s awaiting word on grants for her study of how the brain
processes pain and trauma.
Even scientists with existing funding are left wondering if their
projects — from transgender health to learning why white breast
cancer patients in Oklahoma fare worse than Black patients in
Massachusetts — will be caught in Trump’s anti-diversity crackdown.
Some already have, even though studying different populations is
fundamental to medicine.
“Those studies are very much threatened right now. People don’t know
what the rules are,” said well-known Hopkins specialist Dr. Otis
Brawley. “We’re actually going to kill people is what it amounts to,
because we’re not studying how to get appropriate care to all
people.”
___
AP journalists Shelby Lum and Adithi Ramakrishnan contributed to
this report.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved
 |
