The Johns Hopkins University has joined 12 other higher-education research institutions in a federal lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health this week to block potential “devastating cuts” to research funds.

The suit filed late Monday stemmed from NIH’s announcement last week that it would cap the availability of indirect funds, which are expenses added on to federally funded biomedical research grants to pay for equipment, safety measures and personnel who support researchers. The move announced Friday was presented as a cost-cutting measure by the Trump administration, with an estimated $4 billion in savings to come from the change.

But the funds, in some cases, “quite literally keep the lights on,” according to a statement from university president Ron Daniels and Johns Hopkins Medicine CEO Theodore DeWeese.

The NIH funding cut puts at risk approximately 600 current and ongoing clinical trials at Hopkins, according to Daniels and DeWeese. That includes open clinical trials in cancer, pediatrics and children’s health, heart and vascular studies and the aging brain, among many others.

The potential cuts, the Hopkins officials wrote, affect patients with “life threatening conditions or diseases that have failed to respond to treatment elsewhere.”

The NIH announced it would limit the additional indirect funding to 15%, which would be sharply below the previously negotiated figures at Hopkins and other research institutions that exceeded 50%. If the NIH does stop funding its share of the indirect research costs, according to Daniels and DeWeese, much of the research the university does will be jeopardized.

“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,” the officials wrote.

Hopkins is frequently the largest recipient of federal medical research funds. According to federal data for the fiscal year 2024, the university received about $857 million in direct grant funding. For Hopkins, the NIH allowed for an additional 64% for indirect costs.

Daniels and DeWeese stressed the impact that the Trump administration’s funding policy could have on the patients, many of whom are medical trial participants.

“The care, treatments and medical breakthroughs provided to them and their families are not ‘overhead’ — they offer meaningful hope and scientific expertise, often when it’s needed most," the Hopkins leaders wrote. “They are the lifeblood of the advanced care that draws patients from across the country and around the world to Johns Hopkins.”

The Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities are spearheading the lawsuit alongside a dozen of the country’s top universities such as Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The universities’ lawsuit comes on the heels of a separate suit filed by Maryland and 21 other states against the Trump administration to halt the funding cuts. On Monday evening, the court issued a temporary restraining order on NIH, freezing cuts on indirect costs in the 22 states that filed suit.

“Maryland’s research institutions have pioneered treatments that have saved countless lives, but they can’t do this vital work without proper funding,” said Attorney General Anthony Brown in a statement announcing the suit. “This decision not only jeopardizes Maryland jobs and our state’s position as a global leader in medical research, but it also delays or denies potentially lifesaving discoveries that could help our loved ones.”

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