The document is an amicus curiae brief filed in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and seventeen other higher education associations, supporting the plaintiffs-appellees—various states, academic institutions, and medical associations—against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The brief addresses NIH’s recent decision to unilaterally impose a 15% cap on the recovery of indirect costs for all new and existing federally funded biomedical research grants, diverging from the long-established model of individually negotiated indirect cost rates between agencies and research institutions.
The amici present a historical and policy-based analysis, emphasizing that for over six decades, the U.S. government has reimbursed universities’ indirect costs on research grants through a negotiated, individualized rate, a framework continually reaffirmed by both Congress and the Executive Branch after extensive public debate and regulatory processes. The brief argues that NIH’s abrupt rate cap disregards statutory and regulatory history, ignores the substantive operational and compliance differences between federal and private research funding, and undermines the reliance interests of universities that have budgeted and planned according to the established system. Furthermore, the amici detail how the cap would cause immediate and irreparable harm to research institutions, threatening ongoing scientific projects, specialized infrastructure, employment, and the broader national research enterprise in ways that cannot be remedied by retrospective financial damages. They urge the Court to affirm the District Court’s injunction against the NIH’s rate cap, contending that the rule is both unlawful and detrimental to the nation’s standing in scientific innovation and public health.
