Princeton, 12 Universities Sue To Block Trump Cuts To NSF Research Funding

PRINCETON, NJ – Princeton University has joined many major U.S. universities in a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from cutting federal research funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in Boston by 13 universities, including MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, and Brown University.

The lawsuit challenges the decision by the NSF to slash “indirect cost rates” for government-funded research.

It said the NSF’s actions mirrored funding cuts attempted by the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy, which has so far been blocked by judges.

“NSF’s action is unlawful for most of the same reasons, and it is especially arbitrary because NSF has not even attempted to address many of the flaws the district courts found with NIH’s and DOE’s unlawful policies,” the lawsuit said. “As with those policies, if NSF’s policy is allowed to stand, it will badly undermine scientific research at America’s universities and erode our Nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation.”

On Friday, NSF announced it will limit reimbursement for facilities and administrative (F&A) costs on all new awards to U.S. colleges and universities to 15 percent of modified total direct costs.

The NSF said the rate cut was to “streamline funding practices” and “ensure that more resources are directed toward direct scientific and engineering research activities.”

“For decades, universities have built their research institutions on the government’s settled approach to funding the actual costs of the research it sponsors. Some of those costs are “direct;” that is, they are readily attributable to specific projects. Others are “indirect;” that is, they are necessary for the research to occur but harder to attribute to individual projects,” the plaintiffs said in their filing.

According to the lawsuit, computer systems to analyze enormous volumes of data; information-technology and utility systems providing the backbone for those efforts; building, maintaining, operating, and keeping up to date the buildings in which funded research occurs, including specialized electrical, plumbing, and waste-management systems — are critical to cutting-edge research, but their costs typically cannot be allocated to any single project.

In the 2023 fiscal year, universities bore $6.8 billion in unrecovered indirect costs, the lawsuit said.

In the legal action, complainants noted that Congress blocked the initial Trump administration's attempt to reduce the indirect cost rate to 10 percent across all National Institutes of Health grants. They argued that implementing such a proposal would "throw research programs across the country into disarray."

Academic institutions claimed that National Science Foundation reimbursement reductions would produce similar negative consequences.

“The effects will be immediate and irreparable. If indirect cost rates are cut to 15%, the amount and scope of future research by universities will decline precipitously. Vital scientific work will come to a halt, training will be stifled, and the pace of scientific discoveries will slow. Progress on national security objectives, such as maintaining strategic advantages in areas like AI and quantum computing, will falter. And because of all this, America’s standing as a world leader in scientific discovery will decline,” the plaintiffs said.

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