Sneak Preview: Lawsuit Challenges NIH’s Funding Terminations
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) Calling the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) recent mid-stream terminations of countless federal research grants to institutions of higher education (IHEs) “arbitrary and capricious,” on April 17, a coalition of higher education associations submitted an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief on behalf of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the current administration’s “unlawful” actions as “a concerted, and multi-pronged effort to disrupt NIH’s grants.”
On April 4, a collection of states filed suit against NIH claiming that the agency’s “critical work is now in jeopardy” as the agency moves to cut off research funding awarded to IHEs. The plaintiffs are challenging both NIH’s delay in “review and approval of otherwise-fundable grant applications and widespread terminations of already-issued grants.”
In its brief, the coalition claimed that the NIH lacks authority to terminate the grants and maintains that federally funded “biomedical research grants are not gifts. Rather, they represent a decision by the government to find partners who can best combine resources with federal agencies to advance science and improve human health. … NIH’s en masse grant terminations are also arbitrary and capricious. The agency purportedly reversed its publicly announced research priorities in internal agency directives void of any reasoned explanation. NIH does not endeavor to explain — let alone rationally explain — how particular awards violated the priorities it previously announced. Moreover, NIH failed to weigh the enormous reliance interests of institutions, researchers, study participants and the public in the stability, predictability and reliability of NIH-launched research endeavors.”
ScienceInsider is reporting that the NIH recently said it “will not only block new funding” for Columbia University, but will “also stop paying investigators [at the university] working on all existing NIH projects. Although these researchers will not be ordered to stop work, they will need prior approval from NIH to draw from existing disbursements.”
In an April 9 statement, Columbia said that it “has not received notice from the NIH about additional cancellations. … [T]he University remains in active dialogue with the federal government to restore its critical research funding.”
After a review by the federal government’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University were cancelled “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” according to a joint statement from members of the task force (see "Government Cancels $400 Million In Awards to Columbia").
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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