Louisiana could lose out on tens of millions of dollars if cuts to public health research funding move forward under the Trump administration, according to one analysis.
In February, the National Institutes of Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, issued new guidance that it would sharply reduce how much money it gives to research institutions to help cover the cost of operating.
On average, about 30% to 40% of a NIH research grant has gone toward paying for facilities, equipment, maintenance and support staff, also known as indirect costs. Under the new NIH guidance, institutions would only be able to receive as much as 15% of the grant total for indirect costs, half what they had relied on in the past. A judge permanently blocked NIH from moving forward in April, but the agency has appealed the decision.
In response, a group of researchers from five universities — University of Pennsylvania, University of Utah, University of Maryland, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Oregon — published a national map that looks at how such a cap on indirect costs would have ripple effects on state and local economies. According to their projections, Louisiana could lose out on $79 million and 392 jobs annually.
Much of that loss would be concentrated around New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport. For example, St. Tammany, Jefferson and Orleans parishes could miss out on $45 million altogether.
Allie Sinclair is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania who helped create the map using grant data from the NIH itself. She said the team wanted to show that if the federal mandate moves forward, the impacts wouldn’t just stay in the lab.
“It’s not about ideological warfare. This is a blanket change that would lead to economic losses across the entire U.S. in every community, big and small, urban and rural, red and blue,” she said.
Sinclair said with less funding for indirect costs, institutions won’t be able to pay for the infrastructure needed to do critical public health research. Although cuts to indirect costs have been paused, the Trump administration has made other changes that show what’s at stake. Much of the country has already been hit by NIH’s decision to terminate about 700 federal grants, including here in Louisiana. Nationally, the move, combined with the threat of losing funds for operation, has had a chilling effect at universities, said Sinclair.
“There’s sort of two layers of things going on,” Sinclair said. “Some grants have already been cancelled outright. People have lost access to those funds, and people are losing their jobs because of it. But then in addition there’s this like broader existential threat of the indirect cost change which would have really sweeping impacts.”
Dr. James Robinson has worked at Tulane University as a professor of pediatrics for decades. He’s spent the last three years helping to lead a research project examining how COVID-19 affects the immune system and whether the vaccine was effective. The project, called the Tulane University COVID Antibody and Immunity Network, was funded by a $9 million NIH grant.
Then, near the end of March, NIH terminated the grant just six months before it was set to expire, stopping the research team from accessing their last $2 million.
“We had several things going that we would have liked to finish,” Robinson said. The team was trying to study the long-term health complications caused by COVID, known as “long COVID,” including problems with brain fog, fatigue and chronic illness.
“The reality, of course, is that COVID is over, but we still need to know about the longevity of the immune response and what happens to people with long COVID,” he said. “Unfortunately, that had to be shut down.”
Robinson said the early termination hit his younger colleagues the hardest. Those faculty members lost funding for staff and progress on their research.
“It was a big blow in terms of the continuity of the program and their career,” he said.
According to Tulane Chief Operating Officer Patrick Norton, Tulane alone expects to lose $32 million annually on money that gives the university the infrastructure to conduct research like Robinson’s if a court allows the cuts to funding indirect costs to move forward.
Norton said that amount would “severely impact current research and cripple our ability to expand research and innovation in the state.” He said Tulane’s research, operations and investments in physical infrastructure currently support 30,000 jobs and generate more than $88.2 million in state tax revenue.
Sinclair said her map shows that cuts to big universities like Tulane aren’t confined to the cities they’re located in. By examining census data on commuters, the research team modeled how the losses could diffuse into rural communities as well.
“If you hit a particular institution, the effects of that will be felt in a much broader radius,” Sinclair said.
Tulane’s COVID research project was one of three NIH grants in Louisiana to be terminated, according to an analysis by the Grant Watch project of the agency’s RePORT database. One was another Tulane study looking at how lupus progresses in Black women. A third project, at LSU, was studying how to reduce suicide among youth who identify as part of LGBTQ+ communities.
That institution doesn’t have to be a university either. NIH money spreads across research hospitals, children’s hospitals, small medical businesses and even nonprofit organizations.
Three hours north of New Orleans, My Brother’s Keeper, Inc., a Jackson, Mississippi-based nonprofit dedicated to improving public health disparities, also lost an NIH grant in March. The organization was working with several hospitals to study reproductive health care in Mississippi over 10 years and identify ways to bridge health gaps.
June Gipson, the nonprofit’s executive director, said the group was working toward creating a medical system that uses both prevention and treatment tools to help address sexually transmitted diseases like HIV. Historically, the country’s health care system has fallen short on preventing ailments in the first place.
“Not only is it a disservice to the data we collected on the people who need the service, it’s a deficit to how health care can work,” Gipson said. “This was an opportunity to merge it into the health care space.”
Gipson said, like Tulane, she’s had to lay off staff as a result. If organizations like hers aren’t able to receive the operational funding they need, she said, then it’s not just the economy that’s impacted, but the future quality of health care and health research as well.
“In this chaos that we’re in, we’re going to lose data that would help propel us into what we do next and shift the vision to how you treat people and provide care,” Gipson said. “We don’t know what the future looks like now.”
Back at Tulane, Robinson is set to retire at the end of the month. He said it couldn’t have come at a better time.
“I survived the whole game of getting research funding awarded for 45 years. And with the troubles that future scientists are going to have to acquire funding, I’m sort of glad that I’m getting out of the business,” Robinson said. But he added that he’s hopeful the political attitude toward research will shift again.
“We have a pendulum that’s swinging to an extreme right, and maybe all of that will even out, and the pendulum will go back to favoring the continuation of government support for really, really important research that affects the whole country.”
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