Member Newsletter
The following is very important news about the Trump White House’s unfolding war against biomedical/disease-cure research in the United States. But the set up is a bit complicated. So I want to note both the complexity and the importance in advance, because I want to really encourage you to read the set up and the details. It’s important stuff and most of it remains unknown to the public, though a few threads of the story have been published.
Back in late March and early April, the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against antisemitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern. Harvard eventually sued the administration. Princeton has decided to fight the cuts but hasn’t sued. But most of the universities have generally kept quiet about what they’re doing. And in most cases what that means is that they’re negotiating with the administration and trying to keep their faculties quiet to avoid antagonizing anyone during those notional negotiations.
The dollar figures at stake at different universities were all into the hundreds of millions of dollars and in some cases well over a billion dollars. I thought these cuts were cuts. I thought they’d all gone into effect. But that’s not quite right. I’ve gotten some visibility into the situation at Northwestern, where the administration has been very much in the “let’s be nice and keep quiet and negotiate and hope for the best” camp. I have confirmed the following with my own sources. But the outlines are also contained in a story by Jerry Wu, the managing editor of the Daily Northwestern, the student paper, published yesterday.
Here’s the deal: Soon after the White House announced the grant freezes, Northwestern received “stop-work” orders for a range of mostly Pentagon contracts. That’s by the book. The government agency is the customer or funder. So they send a message saying discontinue work and then they stop sending payments. That’s how the federal government shuts down a research project. But that didn’t happen with the National Institutes of Health grants. The stop-work orders never came. The university didn’t know and wasn’t able to find out what that meant, so they continued negotiating and did something between assuming and hoping that the money would continue to flow. After all, the NIH grants never received stop-work orders — and in the world of law and contracts that means the money has to keep flowing.
But it didn’t continue to flow.
Here’s the mechanics of how these payments work: Payment comes at the end of each month and covers expenses for the research done over that month. So you do January’s work on your own dime and then at the end of January you get paid for the work you did. Because Northwestern never got the stop-work orders for the NIH grants, the research continued. But at the end of the month (late April) the payments never came. So they not only had no warning the payments were getting stopped, it’s not entirely clear to me that they had permission to stop the research at all.
There was one news report saying this would happen. Last month, Max Kozlov, a reporter for Nature, published an internal NIH email dated April 17th in which instructions were given to stop sending all money to the targeted universities. Critically it also included instructions not to “provide any communications to these schools about whether or why the funds are frozen.” So the strategy was intentional: create confusion about the status of grants and just have the money stop coming.
I know based on my own reporting that this is what happened at Northwestern, as Wu also reported in the school paper yesterday. It seems almost certain that this happened at all the targeted universities, but that everyone is being quiet about it. (See below for more evidence of this.) Why would the other schools be quiet about it? Well, that’s what’s happening at Northwestern. The university, both formally and informally, is itself remaining silent and doing everything it can to keep its researchers and faculty silent. Why? Because they’re still hoping something can be worked out with the administration to keep the money flowing. Meanwhile, I’m told that the White House (technically one of the several entities managing these cut-offs for the White House) has been following the same playbook as it did with Harvard. They’re refusing to say what it is they actually want and are thus making “negotiations” difficult or impossible. The White House already has its freeze. So they’re not in any rush to solve anything. It is easy and correct to say that these universities are timid or cowardly. But what you see when you look up close is that the universities simply lack the institutional muscle memory to handle a fight like this. There’s no institutional experience and they lack institutional cohesion between administrations, boards of trustees, faculties and major donors.
This is likely happening at all these universities. If you’re at one of those institutions and know details, please get in touch. (See the secure channels above and below this post.)
The cut offs here include various kinds of research. But as you’d expect, much of it is investigating and looking for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s and the range of diseases that, until January, the U.S. government was investing billions trying to cure. What’s striking is how much the White House has managed to enlist the universities into their conspiracy of silence. At Northwestern, they’re not only not going public or suing. They’re enforcing the silence across the university. Because they don’t want to upset the administration. It’s probably the same at the other universities I mentioned. Some of the news is already dribbling out, though it is still being kept very close to the vest. You’ve got to look very closely to find it.
Here’s one example: In a May 1st email (“Advocating for Brown”) to alums from Brown University Brown, President Christina H. Paxson wrote …
[s]ince early April, Brown has not been reimbursed for any expenses associated with active (i.e., not terminated) grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose grants make up roughly 70% of Brown’s overall research portfolio. Again, we have not been given any official explanation for why expenses for active grants are not being reimbursed. These unreimbursed expenses, which amount to millions of dollars per week, represent a significant threat to Brown’s financial sustainability and its ability to conduct federally funded research.
Paxson doesn’t get into the full backstory I did above. But this is the exact same set of facts we just discussed at Northwestern.
There was a similar internal notification at Cornell. Last week, Cornell Provost Kavita Bala sent an email to university researchers which noted that …
… in addition to grant stop work orders and terminations, there have been significant delays and now rejections for reimbursement of research grant expenses from the NIH and the USDA. We are exploring the potential causes and remedies for this and will share more information when available.
The same email was sent today to the entire Cornell faculty.
Again, it’s almost certainly happening at each of these institutions.
What remains unclear is why the NIH did not just do what the Pentagon did: send a stop-work order and end the funding. Some of it may simply be deliberate mischief. Create as much pain and uncertainty as possible. What seems more likely, though, is that it is a way to strangle as much disease cure research as possible while keeping it out of the news. The universities can’t say the grants have been canceled because they in fact have not been canceled. And they’re scared to say they’re not being paid because they’re hoping the White House or the NIH will relent. At Northwestern, at least, it appears they’re being strung along with Harvard-style “negotiations” in which the White House won’t even say what it wants.
This is how the Trump White House is currently strangling billions in cancer, Alzheimer’s and other disease and cure research in real time while mostly managing to do it with near-perfect radio silence.