By SUSAN JONES
Not surprisingly, the proposed 15% cap on National Institutes of Health indirect costs was the main topic of discussion at the Feb. 21 Senate Research committee meeting.
Rob Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research, said that he and his team are very engaged in lobbying against these cuts, which he said would be “devastating.”
Rutenbar is on the executive committee of the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities’ Council on Research, which he will head next year. He was in Washington, D.C., last week meeting with the APLU executive committee.
“There’s a very significant advocacy effort ongoing right now, talking to leadership in the Senate, in the House of Representatives. The Pennsylvania delegation is highly engaged. The governor’s team reached out,” he said. “All of the big universities have been sharing information — just counting stuff like how many awards from NIH, how many clinical trials. Giving very concrete examples of big, important clinical trials that would either have to stop or be drastically curtailed or diminished, because the infrastructure that supports these things is really expensive.”
Tom Hitter, from the Office of University Counsel, has been tracking many of the executive actions coming out of the Trump administration, and followed the hearing on Feb. 21 related to the NIH funding. For now, the temporary restraining order on the cap is still in place.
“It’s a lot of moving pieces,” he said. “In addition to the direction from the administration, courts are also stopping things or allowing things to restart. So it’s a lot of monitoring things in different directions.”
Rutenbar urged researchers and faculty to let his office know if they receive any notifications from a funding agency related to the executive orders. “Sometimes they send those things to every faculty who has funding from an agency; the National Science Foundation did that. Sometimes they send it to individual people. The thing we tell everybody is, let us know.”
The research office is maintaining a website on Executive Orders and Federal Funding, which tracks where the orders now stand and guidance from individual agencies.
Part of the issue with maintaining information like this, Rutenbar said, is that “a lot of standard administrative processes are disrupted.” They are frequently seeing websites that are up one day and down the next, or part of the website is there, then gone. “Part of the NSF website went away, then two days later it came back.”
Several on the committee expressed a desire to have talking points they could use when contacting their lawmakers. Hitter said that University Communications and the Government Relations office were working on that, but he wasn’t sure what the status of it was.
Committee member Melanie Scott, an associate professor of surgery and vice chair for research, said if people do reach out to lawmakers, they should focus on the “economic downsides of cutting the indirect rates that people wouldn’t necessarily understand. … Pennsylvania has a huge amount of NIH funding overall. And if you take away, I think it was something like $200 million or $300 million from local economies where places like Pitt and UPMC are the biggest employers around here, then there’s going to be a huge economic downturn because of it.”
Zongqi Xia, an associate professor of neurology, emphasized how important it was for researchers to advocate for their work. “If we don’t do it, who would it be? Yes, Rob will be advocating for us, but we are the people doing the actual research.”
Scott agreed saying they really need to show how concerned they are as a group. “I think people really don’t understand what goes into all of this stuff. And I think unless that we can help them understand — and we’re the ones to do it — then I think we’re not going to get that enthusiasm from people to defend us and to defend research funding.”
Scott also wondered what contingency plans are being put in place in case the spending cuts are upheld.
Rutenbar said he’s been meeting with Pitt’s leadership team and deans, as well as talking to people in his job at other universities. “There are a zillion strategic conversations happening, but I can’t speculate on any of the hypotheticals, because, as we sit here right now, the research engine continues to run. We send send invoices to NIH, and they get paid.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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