Nola.com | Threat of sweeping federal cuts sends chill through Louisiana’s research community- by Anthony MCauley
The threat of sweeping cuts to federal spending on science and technology programs by President Donald Trump’s administration has sent a chill through Louisiana’s research community, where leaders have warned of potential broader harm to the state’s economic development efforts.
The billions of dollars in proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have been the main focus of concern for researchers in recent weeks. But broader proposed cuts across the federal government and the Trump administration’s freezing of billions of dollars in grants to universities including Harvard, Cornell and Princeton, over policy disputes is an added worry, they said.
Patrick Norton, Tulane University’s chief operating officer, said the threatened cuts to federal research funding could also have unintended consequences for broader economic objectives in New Orleans. Tulane is in the midst of a $600 million expansion of its downtown campus to add 1.7 million square feet, including the rehabilitation of the long-abandoned Charity Hospital and repurposing the Tulane Medical Center.
Most of the new space will be devoted to laboratories and other research facilities.
“If there was a reduction in funding for research to Tulane, that potentially could slow our development of downtown, which would have a very serious impact on New Orleans and our ability to diversify this economy,” Norton said in an interview last week.
Louisiana’s universities and research centers depend directly on federal programs for hundreds of millions in funding each year for research into a wide variety of areas, from cures for Alzheimer’s Disease, to the study the impacts of climate extremes along the U.S. Gulf region, and for improving ways to grow sugar cane.
While data on research funding for Louisiana from all federal agencies is not readily available, figures from the NIH alone provide insight into the scale of federal investment in the state’s research institutions. More than 460 Louisiana projects received $265 million in NIH funding last year, according to NIH RePORTER, which tracks funding by the agency. Tulane University was the largest single institution, with more than $113 million in funding from the agency.
Cutting budgets, closing labs
The Trump administration’s cuts are largely coming under the banner of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” the newly created agency run by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. While there are supporters of DOGE’s motto — “Getting rid of waste, fraud and cringe” — critics argue that the cuts often have lacked a full understanding of the target, especially when it comes to science and technology research.
In the case of NIH funding, the administration has proposed reducing “indirect costs” covered through NIH grants from as much as 53% to 15%. Those indirect costs include things like building maintenance, utilities and environmental safety which aren’t specific to any one research project.
A federal judge in Boston has blocked those proposed cuts for now, though the administration said it plans to appeal.
For Tulane, those cuts alone would mean a $32 million reduction in its research budget, Norton estimates. “We would have to close labs and scale back at a time when we’re trying to show that we’re the state that innovates and takes advantage of new discoveries and inventions,” he said.
The Tulane downtown campus is expected to be at the heart of plans to develop the New Orleans BioDistrict. The city recently approved a plan that would allocate a share of sales taxes to be spent on landscaping, lighting upgrades, transportation improvement and other aspects of the BioDistrict, which covers a 750-acre swath of the city, running from the Xavier University campus to Loyola Avenue.
The area also incorporates LSU’s Health Sciences Center, the Veterans Administration complex and University Medical Center.
LSU has estimated that the proposed NIH cuts would result in a $12 million hit to its latest research budget. Richard DiCarlo, Dean of the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, said they rely on grants not only from NIH and NSF but also from the departments of Defense and Commerce, which also are facing across-the-board cuts, including to their medical research grants.
“These grants advance both basic science and clinical application,” and cuts would have “a significant impact,” DiCarlo said via email.
Andy Kopplin, chair of the BioDistrict, said the threatened cuts come at a time when biomedical research has been a bright spot in the New Orleans economy, with Tulane, LSU Health and Xavier attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of additional research dollars over the last decade.
That’s just been an enormous economic development success story for the city,” he said in an interview Friday. “It is also one of our key focal areas for the BioDistrict: to support the tech transfer from university research and be the feedstock for the commercial growth that we hope to see in the district in the coming years.”
Broader implications
Researchers say they recognize the need for greater efficiency in the federal grant application process, as Musk has said he is seeking to accomplish. Hernan Bazan’s New Orleans-based company, South Rampart Pharma, has raised more than $9 million in NIH grants in its quest to develop a non-opioid pain drug. The NIH application process typically takes at least a year and he said any cuts to that timeline would be welcomed.
But he said that universities like LSU and Tulane cannot withstand arbitrary cuts to grant funding. “They don’t have the endowments of Harvard, Princeton or Stanford,” he said. “It’s not like they can just tap into their endowments to make up the gap.”
Kris Khalil, who runs the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, or NOBIC, which is another key plank in the BioDistrict, said the administration might not understand what is at stake with cuts to research institutions. NOBIC, which now hosts more than three dozen startups, nearly collapsed six years ago before the universities and state government stepped in to shore up its finances.
“The broader implications for the life sciences ecosystem are deeply concerning,” he said, noting that “academic research is the foundation of innovation in biotechnology and medical technology. Any disruption to this pipeline threatens to slow or even stall the commercialization of novel breakthroughs.”
In February, Democratic Congressman Troy Carter, whose district includes New Orleans, assured a meeting of local research center leaders that included Norton, Kopplin, Khalil that he would do what he could to stem the cuts. It’s not clear if there will be a concerted effort from the Republican-dominated Louisiana legislative group to fight cuts.
“We need others to step up during this time to keep momentum while the folks in D.C. figure out their next moves,” Khalil said.