Visualizing the Impacts of Federal Cuts to Medical Research & Why It Matters
Why it matters how we communicate and visualize the impacts of proposed and ongoing cuts to science and medical research nationwide.
Since early March, I have been working on a project with a collaborative team to tackle a simple idea: there is an awareness gap between the immensity of proposed cuts to federal support of science and research and the perceived targets and impacts. This post describes some of the motivation behind building the first of a series of data-visualization tools available via our ‘Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project (aka SCIMaP)’.
The website we developed communicates how just one part of White House cuts to NIH-supported medical research would cause $16B in economic loss and more than 68,000 lost jobs in communities all across the U.S. That’s not what the White House has been saying – and that is the challenge we are trying to confront.
What is being cut?
On Feb 7 as part of ongoing White House-directed cuts to science described extensively on this substack, the NIH announced it was slashing “indirect costs” associated with medical research by more than half. To understand why this matters we have to first understand how medical research is typically funded.
In fiscal year 2024, the NIH funded approximately $35B of its $47B budget via grants and awards to universities, hospitals, and research institutes. These grants support the salaries of scientists and the “direct” costs of medical research including the lab supplies required for experiments. Scientists don’t work in isolation, there is power and advantage in pooling resources, in sharing common facilities, as well as leveraging economies of scale in supporting the day-to-day operations that make science possible. These operations include facilities, safety checks, ethical compliance, and operational support for researchers across an institution. Because these operational costs are not specific to a grant, each university has a negotiated “indirect cost” rate that is then calculated as a fraction of the direct costs.
Although details vary, the effective indirect cost rate is approximately 42% with most effective rates spanning 30%-50%. On February 7, the NIH released guidance that the new indirect cost would be reduced to 15% effective immediately – slashing essential operational costs by more than half. A coalition of institutions sued. A judge issued an injunction. But the threat looms.
If the IDC rate were to be reduced to 15%, then life-saving research on cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and more would be slowed if not halted altogether. Thus far the White House and DOGE have framed these cuts as cost-saving measures. In contrast, studies show that investment in NIH research is a smart one: returning more than $2.56M for each $1M invested and supporting more than 400K jobs in 2024. If so, then cutting support is a real cost, not a savings. Which leads to the next question: can we communicate these costs in direct, accessible terms?
What we built
Working with a collaborative team (in a project that I co-lead with Dr. Allie Sinclair at the U of Pennsylvania) on an accelerated time scale (i.e., <1 month) we set out to build an analysis framework and interactive website that took the cuts at face value. What was the impact? Who was impacted? And where?
The NIH has invested significant resources in building transparency into its grant awards reporting system. Each grant award comes with a breakdown of the direct vs. indirect costs. So, we could estimate the reduction in funding to institutions in tens of thousands of individual grants at institutions located all across the US.
Because of the knock-on effects of medical research, we then calculated both the economic loss and equivalent loss in jobs using research from the United for Medical Research coalition. Related analysis had been done in mid-February, both by The Upshot at the NYT and by higher-education analyst James Murphy. Our view was that there was a missing perception gap which required focusing on localization: how cuts would impact communities all across the US.
For many, the “state” level impact seems far removed from their sense of what matters – so instead we focused on counties.
In practice, by projecting home-work commuting patterns using US census data, we are able to estimate the ripple effects of IDC cuts in terms of economic impact and job loss at the county level. The result visualized on https://scienceimpacts.org reinforces themes from disconnected stories bubbling up in local news.
Yes, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford , and more would be impacted – and we are in fact far worse off if world-class discoveries on life threatening diseases at these institutions are cut short. But the cuts are not targeted. They hit everywhere, from Birmingham, Tucson, Pittsburgh, near the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, to Houston and beyond. The cuts are large. Tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars would be lost by counties throughout the US, in big cities, regional medical hubs, and small towns that drive innovation.
We released the site on March 27th and have already seen extensive interest, including tens of thousands of visitors – but we are also cognizant: this remains just a start to what it will take to bridge the awareness gap. But if we don’t try, then another narrative wins, one that presents a misleading picture of who really is impacted when science and medical research are cut.
Why it matters
Our team includes researchers from multiple backgrounds spanning data analytics, biosciences, cognitive neurosciences, geographic information sciences, and more. We are at different institutions and career stages, united by a common vision that data-driven visualizations have an outsized role to play in helping people understand both what science produces (from new drugs, therapeutics, diagnostics, and more) to what sciences does (driving innovation and fueling local economies).
We have a challenging road ahead, but we believe there is room to tell a data-driven story in support of science and medical research - it matters.
Update April 4: Ruling in the legal challenge to stop drastic reductions in IDC support for research infrastructure. A coalition won a permanent injunction & the original rates stand. This is important news... for now. The Trump administration will likely appeal.
Update April 8: As expected, the Trump administration has appealed the ruling.
Update May 29: The scienceimpacts.org website has been updated to include county, district, and state-level impacts as well as the impact of terminated NIH grants.
Thank you for doing this. And I think visuals make a bigger impact on people than words at this point. And, I can imagine how brutal it is to put this together. I respect you and I thank you.
Thank Heaven there is a Perm Injunction! In Birmingham (my home) almost the other entirety of the southside has been purchased and built into massive buildings where research on a myriad of subjects takes place.
This is our beloved Univ of Alabama Medical Center, the largest employer of the state!
We were concerned, still are, as to how much havoc Trump will bestow on our throngs of researchers.