Northwestern University Still Not Getting NIH Funds but Also Not Notified of Cutoff

Northwestern University, for which about 100 federal contracts and 50 grants worth $790 million were cut off in April, also has not gotten National Institutes of Health grant payments since late March even though the federal government has sent no official notice of freezing them.

The way its federal grants work, researchers provide evidence of spending on approved projects to the university, which pays the bills and then submit claims for reimbursement to the government. The government has simply stopped reimbursing, reneging on its grant awards without saying anything, which leaves the university stuck with the bills. The university is spending about $10 million per week from its own resources to keep its research going. It hopes to eventually collect what it is owed. If it cannot, this could destroy research at Northwestern.

Carole LaBonne, a professor of molecular biosciences at Northwestern ,said:

Just about everything they’re doing was clearly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and that happened before Oct. 7 — before the encampments on campus [for protests against the war in Gaza which the federal government has used as a pretext for funding cutoffs]. None of this has to do with any of that. It’s about hurting universities, and why you would want to do that when they’re so centrally important to our scientific research enterprise and the economics of the U.S. is mind-blowing.

and

The government doesn’t fund university labs to help universities’ bottom line—it funds the best ideas and people to meet national priorities. The resulting discoveries spill over to benefit all of society: new medicines, new companies, new military capabilities. This has been called one of the most productive partnerships in American history.

Click here for more details.