University of Minnesota researchers, lawmakers decry Trump’s proposed cuts to medical research grants

University of Minnesota researchers and state lawmakers denounced Wednesday what they say are detrimental cuts to research facilities receiving National Institutes of Health funding announced last week by the Trump administration.

The cuts, announced last Friday, would limit “indirect” support by the National Institutes of Health to academic institutions as well as direct funding of research. State lawmakers estimated losses to the U could amount to $150 million.

“This is about life and death,” DFL Rep. Mohamud Noor, who represents the Cedar-Riverside area, said at the U campus in Minneapolis. “We are going to be left behind as a nation, as a state.”

President Donald Trump’s actions would cap indirect costs to no more than 15% on top of the grants NIH issues to research institutions like the U. Indirect costs are similar to overhead expenses that pay for everything from a lab’s research staff to computer equipment.

In 2024, NIH compensated the U at a rate of 54% beyond the face value of any grant for these expenses; getting just 15% would be significantly less, officials said.

“Trump is harming Minnesota,” said state Sen. Doron Clark, DFL-Minneapolis. “The biggest category of indirect expenses is compensation for staff, so this cuts jobs that support research activities.”

That could mean losing thousands of Minnesota jobs, lawmakers and university researchers said, halting studies already underway and limiting the university’s ability to create life-saving technology.

The U received 768 grants in fiscal year 2024 from the NIH totaling $380 million, Clark said.

State Sen. Alice Mann, DFL-Edina, is also an emergency room physician. She called the cuts “very misguided and short-sighted,” and said that stopping in-progress studies will mean researchers' work will be thrown away. Study participants in the process of taking experimental drugs or who have medical devices in their body will have no access to monitoring or continuing care.

“It’s not about saving money,” Mann said. “It’s about deliberate destruction of one of the most important fabrics of our society.”

David Kappelhoff, who has colorectal cancer, was just accepted into a study through the U’s Masonic Cancer Center after trying other traditional methods. If research funding is cut, people like him won’t have any other possibilities, he said.

“It’s about hope,” he said. “This offers another treatment path for me to go on.”

Rebecca Shlafer, a child psychologist and pediatrics professor, said she’s in her fourth year of leading a five-year NIH study related to pregnant women’s health care in state prisons; if she doesn’t get the next round of funding, the study will end and she’ll be unable to pay staff and graduate students.

It’s like training for a marathon but being told the race is over at Mile 20, she said.

The reductions are part of Trump’s rapid-fire efforts to reduce federal spending since taking office.

Uncertainty now surrounds Trump’s actions after U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley temporarily blocked the cuts Monday from taking effect. She also scheduled a hearing for Feb. 21 to determine whether they are legal. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has also joined 21 other states in suing the federal government to try to block the cuts.

Noor said he believes the state should help make up the funding lost by Trump’s cuts, something lawmakers are discussing, he said.

Shlafer said indirect costs are essential to research.

“I hope that people can understand that these are the critical pieces to which new discoveries, new innovations, lifesaving health sciences happens, so that your cancer treatment can be state of the art,” she said.

Trump’s abrupt pullback in NIH funding means, for now, full funding for Ashley Mooneyham’s Momease Solutions start-up business in Plymouth is on hold.

After winning a $288,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from NIH in 2023, her developing lactation-aid bra company was in the final round to receive a $250,000 NIH grant that would’ve funded a research study at the U’s lactation milk lab.

The plan was to have 100 new mothers test Momease prototype bras to prove its effectiveness and assist with design improvements.

“At the moment, we are still hopeful that it will go through for funding,” Mooneyham said.

Some folks don’t have that kind of time. Ellen W. Demerath, the researcher who runs the U’s lactation lab, has depended on $5 million in NIH grants over 10 years to run her lab.

This week, she was expecting an $80,000 draw down from the previously approved grant so she could pay her staff and research bills. She is also waiting to learn about another $2.5 million NIH grant that would allow her research to continue for five more years. Now, everything is frozen.

“And we don’t know what will happen,“ she said. “We have all these questions.”