Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, along with 15 other states, sued the Trump administration Friday for delaying and canceling funding for medical and public health research.
The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Massachusetts, alleges the administration "has engaged in a concerted and multi-pronged effort to disrupt" grants distributed by the National Institutes of Health, the nation's premier forum for funding medical research.
The administration, Brown and the other attorneys general allege, is trying to block funding approved by Congress in two ways: by unreasonably delaying and stalling the grant application process and by terminating hundreds of grants that already have been issued.
Grant applications that received the highest marks from NIH's professional evaluators are in a state of "suspended animation — neither approved nor denied," the lawsuit says, making it impossible for research institutions to plan for the future.
"And now, NIH has started canceling grants already issued to plaintiffs' public institutions, clawing back millions of dollars (and counting) in already awarded money," the lawsuit says. "The result of these disruptions has been, in a word, devastating."
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH and is named in the lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brown was previously part of a multistate effort in suing the administration after it moved to cut NIH funding for "indirect costs" of research. That's funding that goes toward things like lab equipment and the upkeep of buildings where research takes place. A federal judge has blocked those cuts from taking effect while the lawsuit plays out.
In the latest lawsuit, the 16 plaintiff states lay out in detail the cuts' impacts — in hundreds of millions of dollars, in thousands of projects in limbo, in decades of research that could be squandered.
Washington is a major recipient of NIH funding. The University of Washington received the most federal research funding of any public university in the country, receiving more than $648 million from the NIH last year, according to the lawsuit. That funded more than 1,200 research projects.
But as of April 1, UW has had funding delayed on 73 grants totaling more than $61 million, Brown alleges.
"The Trump administration's illegal withholding of funding stops life-saving advances in medical, agricultural, and public health research," Brown said in a prepared statement. "The harm is not only to the advances in science, but also to the jobs of researchers doing this vital work. We are asking the court to allow funds that have already been allocated to flow to Washington's centers of research."
Among the projects that have been disrupted are trauma research for victims of sexual assault, work on prevention of chlamydia infections, and the impact of air pollution on Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, the lawsuit says.
A partnership among UW, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Seattle Children's has been waiting on an overdue $10.5 million annual grant for over a
month. The project works to translate laboratory discoveries — like a new cell therapy to treat ovarian cancer — into clinical practice that can be used in the hospital.
Without funding, the project has been forced to cut staff, put workers on furlough and eliminate positions, the lawsuit says.
The UW's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center is funded in part by the National Institute on Aging, a division of NIH. But the Institute on Aging Council didn't have its scheduled meeting in January, meaning no funding could be approved. Funding for the Alzheimer's Center lapses this month and next and "would leave large research teams without support," the lawsuit says.
"The work being done by these centers is longitudinal and lapse in funding will mean loss of critical cohorts that have been studied in some cases up to 40 years," Brown writes.
The UW has another $400 million in grant proposals that already have received fundable scores from the NIH but are awaiting final action.
"The terminations, delays, and unprecedented disruptions in funding have
had a profoundly negative effect on morale University wide," Brown writes. "Faculty and staff don't know if their funding will be cut, if their research will be terminated," the lawsuit says, "or even whether they will continue to have jobs."
This is one of 11 lawsuits Brown has filed or joined against the second Trump administration. He has had at least initial victories in six of those lawsuits.
© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
