By SUSAN JONES
Jeremy Berg says he’s never worked harder in his life.
And that’s a big statement for someone who has been editor in chief of Science magazine; director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences; and founding director of Pitt’s Institute for Precision Medicine
What’s keeping him so busy? He’s become a trusted and unofficial source of information about federal research funding upheavals during the current Trump administration.
Berg, who currently is associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning for Pitt Health Sciences and previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, said he recently told his brother, “It’s almost like my whole life has been preparing me for this event. And he said, ‘Yes, that’s true, but your life would have been worthwhile without you having to go through this.’”
He shares much of what he’s learned through the BlueSky social media app, where he has more than 14,000 followers, and has been quoted in several national media outlets.
While the threat to cut indirect costs reimbursement that universities get from the National Institutes of Health is “the biggest existential threat to universities,” Berg predicted two weeks ago that an injunction would be issued, and on March 5, a federal judge in Boston did just that.
Currently, the plan to reduce indirect cost reimbursement to 15% of a grant across the board is on hold, but the Trump administration is likely to appeal the ruling.
Pitt’s reimbursement rate was negotiated with the NIH at 59% and goes through a rigorous review process every few years. The University stands to lose around $168 million if the cuts go through.
He said the government has been putting out conflicting statements on whether the cuts in indirect costs would be used for other projects or would be straight savings. Regardless, any reduction would be difficult, he said.
“The problem is that indirect costs are real costs,” Berg said. “Those are just costs that can’t be allocated to individual projects. The government was wise enough decades and decades ago to say, ‘We’re just going to put all the costs in a big pool and charge everybody a rate.’ And it’s a very rigorous negotiation … picture the most intrusive tax audit you can imagine.”
If you start trying to break down how much electricity each lab uses or how much of one person’s salary was used on a particular project, “it’s completely inefficient,” he said.
Every grant, he said, costs each university money, even with the NIH grants and indirect costs funding. “If the indirect cost rate were to be capped, then the university would have to find other sources for those extra funds in addition to what they’re already providing, and that is basically cutting costs wherever you can — firing administrative staff, firing other people, not hiring new faculty.”
And fundraising for indirect costs “is almost ludicrous to contemplate,” Berg said. Asking a donor to fund the electric bill “is not as sexy as a new institute on vision research.”
If the courts eventually institute a permanent injunction on the funding cuts, then it would possibly go back to Congress to make any changes. Berg said now that schools have had an opportunity to explain indirect costs to their lawmakers, there seems to be less support for the cuts in Congress, even in red states.
Berg said the U.S. senators from Alabama have both issued public statements about how important indirect costs are because the University of Alabama, Birmingham is one of the largest employers in the state.
Another argument made by the Trump administration is that private foundations cover indirect costs at a much lower rate, but Berg said this is only possible because the infrastructure, which is funded by the federal grants, is already in place.
Funding delayed
What Berg finds really troubling right now are the study sections and advisory committees that have been canceled.
“That’s affecting NIH’s ability to advance proposals that have already been submitted, have already been through peer review, have gotten good scores, and the investigators … are waiting to be funded. Right now, they’re held up because the advisory councils have to formally approve them before the institutes can start making grants. That’s affecting lots of individual investigators and universities with grants that they have very good reason to believe will be funded and under normal circumstances would be funded, and are now in a months-long holding pattern that no one knows exactly when and how it’s going to end.
“Investigators are worried about bridge funding. And if they have ongoing projects that are held up that way, then they’ve got real people in their lab who are already working on it who need to be supported.”
Most labs have a little bit of a cushion, he said, that can keep them going for a month or two with money that’s still in their grants. After that they need to get funding from somewhere or “they have to start not doing things or firing staff and graduate students and postdocs.” And the demand for bridge funding will quickly exceed the supply.
This is already impacting people at Pitt, he said, “both individual investigators and some very, very large programs that just happened to be at the wrong place in the wrong time.”
Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at Pitt and an Alzheimer’s disease researcher who has about $3 million in delayed funding, told the Guardian she is working to “stop the bleeding” and retain her staff. She said she has reduced her lab’s budget to one-quarter of normal operating expenses, and is being tided over by “generous donors” and help from Pitt.
“Our clinicians and our staff are really highly trained, highly skilled people, and to lose them would be devastating,” said Cohen, who spoke in her personal capacity. She is based at Pitt’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “You don’t just pull those kinds of skill sets out of anyone in the general population.”
The firing of staff at NIH, through the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, is another very real concern, Berg said, although it’s still unclear who exactly has lost their jobs and how that will impact NIH operations. This is something he and others, including Congress, are trying to pin down.
Some of those fired were involved in the grant-making process, which could further slow down grant approvals. Others were scientist who had set up labs within the past two years.
Berg said he’d like someone to explain “how cutting off an investigator who’s been there for 22 months — when the government has invested hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in getting their lab up and running, and when they have four or five people working in their lab — … is increasing government efficiency.”
What to do?
“I think that informing the public about what’s really going on and trying to break through some of the media siloing that’s gone on is important,” Berg said. And individual researchers who are comfortable contacting their lawmakers, should do so.
“I think we just have to do what we can to figure out the best strategies to try to prevent too much damage from being done, because it’s so much easier to break something down than it is to build,” he said.
“We’re in an enviable position in this country with a biomedical research enterprise, both private sector and public sector, that’s incredibly strong and has been sort of the envy of the world. It can all go away pretty fast.”
He said the image Musk and the Trump administration are promoting is that there is a lot of overstaffing and idle workers at NIH and other federal agencies. “I spent seven and a half years working with the people (at NIH), and they’re more committed and harder working than anybody I’ve worked with at Johns Hopkins or Pitt or Science. At NIH, they’ve got a great mission. They’ve got a lot of work to do, and they work really well together to get stuff done.”
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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