Johns Hopkins University has joined a dozen other research institutions in a federal lawsuit challenging the National Institute of Health’s indirect cost rate cuts.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, was filed in response to the NIH’s Rate Change Notice, which would restrict indirect cost rates to an additional 15% of total funding awarded — thus impacting the administrative and facility costs of conducting research. This move signaled a crackdown on federal research aid by President Donald Trump’s administration, as indirect cost rates have averaged about 40% for universities nationally.

According to a statement from university president Ron Daniels and Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Theodore DeWeese, indirect cost rate funds “quite literally keep the lights on.” They said the NIH’s proposed cuts would jeopardize about 600 of Hopkins’ ongoing clinical trials, including open clinical trials for cancer, pediatrics, heart and vascular studies, the aging brain and more.

“These abrupt and sweeping cuts in NIH funding pose an extraordinary challenge to the important and lifesaving work of our faculty staff and students at Johns Hopkins,” Daniels and DeWeese wrote.

Johns Hopkins is often among the largest recipients of federal funding for medical research. Federal data shows the university received about $857 million in direct grants last year, while the NIH awarded an additional 64% for indirect costs.

Separate lawsuit

In a separate NIH ruling Monday, a federal judge on the same district court sided with 22 Democratic attorneys general who challenged the Rate Change Notice’s potential “immediate and devastating” impacts on medical research. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown was among the plaintiffs.

The NIH is the world’s largest public source of biomedical research funding, as the agency awarded $26 billion directly to scientists and $9 billion to overhead costs last year.

Both of Maryland’s Democratic senators, Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks, have staunchly opposed cuts to the NIH as proposed by Trump and his allies.

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