Senators concerned about Trump administration caps on medical research funding

Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján are pressuring new Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to reverse course on the Trump administration’s decision to limit National Institutes of Health funding, which brings over $120 million annually into New Mexico for medical research.

The Trump administration wants to limit NIH funding for indirect costs to 15% of an overall grant award. Indirect costs include expenses like maintaining labs, paying for supplies and paying support staff. On average, indirect costs take up about 28% of a grant award, according to NIH grant policy guidance.

“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” reads guidance on the indirect cost cap from the NIH director’s office. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order last week on the NIH funding restriction, stopping the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from implementing the plan.

“The steps the Trump Administration has taken will create a serious funding shortfall for research institutions nationwide, threaten to undermine progress on lifesaving scientific advancements, could cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars, and threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of workers,” reads the letter, signed by Heinrich, Luján and 45 of their Senate colleagues.

In fiscal year 2023, there was $125.2 million in NIH funding in New Mexico, which supported more than 1,400 jobs and was the catalyst for $290 million in economic activity in the state, according to Heinrich’s office. For the 2024 fiscal year, there were $122.7 million in NIH awards in New Mexico.

From 2022 to 2024, the bulk of NIH funding in New Mexico went to the 1st Congressional District, which encompasses much of Albuquerque, but millions also went to medical research in Los Alamos and Las Cruces. The largest recipient was the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, which received over $70 million each year. As the Journal reported last week, a 15% cap could create a $20 million research funding shortfall for UNM.

In 2024, that $72.3 million for UNM Health Sciences Center went to 112 projects. The University of New Mexico had another 32 NIH awards that year, totaling $21.6 million.

The research topics are varied. Mindfulness-based relapse prevention; the impact of alcohol exposure in the third trimester of a pregnancy; and arsenic exposure and its association with cancers among residents with wells in New Mexico’s border counties are a few of the research projects with NIH awards in 2024.

One of the multi-million-dollar UNM Health Sciences Center research awards in 2024 was for the New Mexico Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, which had a $4.4 million award.

The New Mexico Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center is meant to improve dementia care in rural New Mexico communities and to collaborate with other Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers to find new risk factors driving dementia in Hispanic/Latino and Native American communities, according to the NIH project summary. The project is also supposed to develop novel neuroimaging to find biomarkers that help distinguish different types of dementia at an early stage.

Of the $4.4 million in funding, nearly $3.2 million was categorized as direct cost while $1.2 million was considered indirect cost — the type of funding the Trump administration would like to restrict. In this instance, the indirect costs made up approximately 27% of the total funding, in line with the national average.

If indirect costs had been limited to 15%, the researchers might only have been able to use approximately $660,000 for indirect costs, leaving UNM to try and make up over a half a million-dollar funding shortfall on just one of its 144 NIH awards that year.