The effects of President Musk's cuts to medical research on Brown University Health

Brown urges U.S. court to ensure continued flow of federal funding to support high-impact research

Brown University — 

Brown University’s chief research officer submitted a declaration in support of a filing by the Rhode Island attorney general asking a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction that would ensure the continued flow of federal funding to all current grantees, including Brown. 

The declaration from Greg Hirth — Brown’s vice president for research and a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences — was filed on Friday, Feb. 7. 

“The federal funding Brown receives supports cutting-edge, multi-year research projects spanning a wide range of subjects in the national interest, including national security, human health, and emerging areas of science and technology,” Hirth’s declaration said . “As a research university with the only schools of public health and medicine in Rhode Island, Brown contributes to world-class medical care, strong patient outcomes, and innovative solutions for pressing health challenges facing all communities.”

Hirth noted that as a major research institution, Brown received more than $254 million in federal funding in Fiscal Year 2024 from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and other federal agencies. He outlined examples of federally funded Brown research that serves national interests. 

Those ranged from School of Engineering researchers developing technology to make manned undersea vehicles more effective; to School of Public Health scholars working on clinical trials focused on dementia, and on research to prevent heart disease; to NASA’s Rhode Island Space Grant Program, which promotes the study of STEM at all education levels to create a pipeline for and support NASA’s space exploration and research. 

This program is a consortium of partners including most of Rhode Island's public and private colleges and universities, and Brown has been the lead institution since 1991.

“If the pause in federal financial assistance were to be reinstated, or if such funding were to be withdrawn permanently, all of Brown’s research programs that rely on federal funding… would be in jeopardy,” Hirth wrote. 

He noted that Brown works in partnership with the federal government in its research endeavors and shoulders a substantial portion of the research costs. In FY24, Brown’s research and development expenditures totaled more than $374 million, with the University contributing $69.8 million. Over the last two years, Brown’s contribution to its institutional research enterprise has grown by $13 million.

Research programs that depend on federal funding would need to be severely downsized or even suspended, Hirth said, if the pause were to be reinstated. That would threaten a loss of institutional memory with respect to key research tasks, jeopardizing both the ability to pay salaries and the continuity of research for a broad range of research scientists, postdoctoral associates and graduate students. 

“These disruptions, interruptions and uncertainty in federal research funding and the resulting staffing gaps will in turn significantly compromise scientific advancement in numerous areas critical to the public interest, including national security, human health, and innovations in science and technology,” he wrote. 

Hirth outlined some of the near-immediate disruptions to ongoing research at Brown that followed the OMB directive. Those include cancellation of grant renewal reviews, a stop-work order on a sub-award that supports a U.S. State Department grant, missed and delayed payments to postdoctoral fellows who are paid directly by the National Science Foundation, and uncertainty on whether to purchase research equipment.

Hirth’s declaration supports the plaintiffs in State of New York et. al. vs. Trump et. al., a case filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island by attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia, including the Rhode Island attorney general. 

The case asks for a preliminary injunction to prevent the federal government from suspending financial support, including federal funding to support research. A temporary restraining order has blocked the federal government from implementing a freeze on federal funding, and the motion from the attorneys general for preliminary injunction that Hirth supported with his declaration seeks to keep that block in place until the case can be heard in full.