What will happen when the United States eliminates biomedical research?
In 1887, a research facility known as the Hygienic Laboratory was established at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island by the United States federal government. This lab started one of the largest biomedical research organizations in the world and was the beginning of United States government-supported scientific research. In the following decades, the single-room bacterial research laboratory on Staten Island relocated to Bethesda, Maryland, researching everything from cancer to tuberculosis and operating under a name that we all recognize today: the National Institute of Health (NIH).
The NIH has historically suffered from significant financial strain with its budget, accounting for only 0.6% of government spending in 2024 despite funding more than 300,000 researchers at over 2,500 universities. However, this has been nothing compared to the recent federal pressure on the agency in recent months. The National Institutes of Health houses 27 different institutes, each covering a different field of biomedical research. These range from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The NIH not only researches these different fields itself in its own laboratories, but also provides financial support to both researchers and labs in universities and institutes across the country to help further biomedical research in the United States. Despite this, since coming into office, U.S. President Trump has repeatedly called for significant cuts to the NIH budget. In 2025, he called for a nearly 50% decrease in the NIH discretionary budget and made funding cuts to grants through capping indirect grant costs that maintain government infrastructure at 15%, putting an already financially starved agency into even more trouble. Institutes separately negotiate a rate with the NIH for the percentage of indirect costs that they will get with their grants. What this means, though, is that the indirect costs for a university or research center in a major city will always be higher than those of an institute somewhere else, as indirect costs are correlated with real estate prices.
President Trump has not taken a nuanced approach to public health funding. This stance has also spread to his appointees, including the NIH’s new director, Jay Bhattacharya. Bhattacharya, under the direction of Trump, has pushed for this change for indirect costs in NIH grants. He argues that the varying numbers aren’t fair, giving elite, richer universities more money as opposed to smaller, less wealthy ones. Even though the larger and better-funded elite institutions do get more federal funding, they are also responsible for a disproportionate amount of research papers in major journals. By cutting indirect costs, the amount of money researchers will receive in grants will be reduced significantly. For example, under Harvard’s negotiated rate, for every dollar received through a grant for on-campus research, Harvard would receive approximately 69 cents. Now, due to the capping of indirect costs at 15%, that grant would only give Harvard fifteen cents per dollar. Those remaining 54 cents will now instead be coming directly from the grant’s funding, meaning the grant recipient will lose 46% of their grant to covering indirect costs that would’ve otherwise been funded. While the President may argue that research doesn’t immediately benefit people, such is the nature of science. Trump’s funding cuts, with their current timing, appear to be politically motivated, as institutions key to American research, including Harvard, NYU, and Columbia, have been fighting the President over admissions and campus policies. Now, Trump has taken his fight to these institutions’ scientific communities.
The risks are astronomical. America leads the world in biomedical research; however, if billions of dollars of medical research funding disappear, thousands of young scientists, students, and junior lab researchers may go abroad and turn away from academia and science research as a whole. Biotech and pharma companies offer enticingly high salaries, and while they are extremely important for providing drugs, tests, and other medical products to patients, academia offers a purity they can’t rival. Scientists in academic laboratories are almost entirely focused on researching for the common good, doing science for the sake of science and the patients who benefit from it. Losing academia to funding cuts risks commercializing a sector that remains essential for scientific breakthroughs and societal progress. Finding a cure for cancer or a drug to regrow limbs requires time and mistakes—things that profit-oriented companies can’t afford. The shift away from scientific academia will be detrimental, and that’s assuming the best-case scenario, where all of these talented, brilliant young people choose to go towards commercial scientific research. However, the bigger risk is realignment of students away from science altogether, and the risks of that don’t need to be explained. We need science, and we need scientists, but the President’s current message proclaims the opposite. What is the point of scientific research altogether if it is constantly under the threat of losing funding and being micromanaged by the federal government?
