02/09/2025
The Trump administration is placing a 15% cap on indirect costs from grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. Oakland University’s current rate is 50%. What are indirect costs used for? They support the infrastructure essential for biomedical research. Things like:
• Shared facilities and instruments—such as confocal microscopes, high performance computers, DNA sequencing machines, and electron microscopes—that no single research group could afford,
• Summer research programs for undergraduate science students.
• The grants office, staffed by experts who ensure each research proposal obeys all federal laws and university policies,
• Animal care facilities, where veterinarians humanely care for animals used in biomedical studies,
• Scientific review committees, such as the Institutional Review Board overseeing research on human subjects and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee supervising animal research,
• Funds to help new faculty obtain preliminary data to support their first NIH proposal,
• Graduate research assistantships,
• Research grade clean water used in biomedical experiments, autoclaves to decontaminate and sterilize equipment, biosafety cabinets where hazardous research can be safely conducted, and other facilities,
• Bridge Funding to keep research laboratories open between research grants,
• Support for obtaining patents and commercializing ongoing academic research,
• And much more.
These vital resources will be difficult to maintain with a two-thirds cut in the indirect cost rate, resulting in fewer research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, and less research into cancer, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and other debilitating disorders. We will all suffer the consequences.
