Research and innovation are integral to Greater New Haven’s economic growth, and Yale University is the epicenter of this activity.  Now, newly announced federal rules will drastically reduce funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

These cuts will limit research and have a halting effect on our economy.  As a business community, we must rally against these cuts.

Recently the Trump Administration moved to immediately limit the percentage of NIH grant funding that can be applied to indirect costs or overhead.  This move is shortsighted.  While administrative costs may seem like an easy target for budget savings, these costs are what actually make grant work possible. 

Yale and other institutions use the funding to pay for fixed costs such as facilities, equipment, support staff and administration.  By capping these costs at 15 percent, Yale would lose more than $100 million in funding based on current grants.

You can only imagine the impact of taking more than $100 million out of our regional economy each year. These cuts will affect jobs, research, medical breakthroughs and the hundreds of businesses that service Yale and its employees.  It’s a devastating blow for economic growth in our region.

As a business community, we need to rally support for the university and advocate to reverse this rule change. No program is above review and finding more efficient ways to deliver results can be beneficial.  But here, this cutback would save far less than the economic impact it would wipe out, and it will slow down best-in-class research. 

NIH grants have led to astounding medical breakthroughs at Yale, which then form the basis of new bioscience companies in New Haven, leading to jobs for our region and the proliferation of life-changing therapies for all of humanity.  These cuts threaten this delicate sequence of events that benefits the university, Greater New Haven, the United States, and patients across the country.

Research equals winning.  As a business community, winning means more economic growth for our region.  We need to tell the story of the role Yale and NIH funding play.  There will be many efforts to reverse these cuts – at the moment, federal courts have temporarily halted them, but the threat is by no means over.