The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

On the afternoon of Friday, February 7, as staff members were getting ready to leave the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health, just outside Washington, D.C., officials in the Office of Extramural Research received an unexpected memo. It came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and arrived with clear instructions: Post this announcement on your website immediately.

The memo announced a new policy that, for many universities and other institutions, would hamstring scientific research. It said that the NIH planned to cap so-called indirect costs funded by grants—overhead that covers the day-to-day administrative and logistical duties of research. Some NIH-grant recipients had negotiated rates as high as 75 percent; going forward, the memo said, they would now be limited to just 15 percent. And this new cap would apply even to grants that had already been awarded.

The announcement was written as if it had come from the NIH Office of the Director. It also directed all inquiries to the Office of Extramural Research’s policy branch. And yet, no one at the NIH had seen the text until that Friday afternoon, several current and former NIH officials with knowledge of the situation told me. “None of us had anything to do with that document,” one of them said. But the memo was dressed up in a way clearly intended to make it look like a homegrown NIH initiative. (Everyone I spoke with for this story requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from the Trump administration. HHS did not respond to requests for comment.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...hs/681736/