1. United States
2. La.
3. Letter

I am writing to strongly ask you to oppose the Trump Administrations new NIH policy that slashes funding for indirect costs. Dr. Jo Handelsman of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery said, “Cutting the rate to 15% will destroy science in the United States. This change will break our universities, our medical centers and the entire engine for scientific discovery.” We have led the world in scientific research and I believe it will poorly impact our country, and your constituents if we don’t have researchers looking into illnesses. Megan Ranney, the Dean of the Yale School of Public Health said “Our research is conducted on behalf of the federal government. Projects are selected by them and contracted with them. And ‘indirects’ are reimbursements for costs incurred - lab safety, human subjects protection, IT, and more. They are negotiated every 3-5 years based on actual costs. They are literally part of the cost of doing research. So these cuts mean that the costs of research will not be covered, and many trials and as a result, some studies (whether with humans, animals, or data) simply will not be able to happen. This will have huge short- and long-term effects on human health. Cutting indirects also has an immediate economic impact on all of the people who are employed in these research support roles. And it has a longer term economic impact: 14 new companies were launched in the last year based on federally funded research conducted at my university alone, and each of these supports its own health and economic ecosystem. This economic effect is present in every state and at every university across the country. This will directly affect Louisiana researchers and will result in large economic impacts and job losses to the people of our great state.