The phone call came in April. No press release, no warning. Just a curt message from the National Institutes of Health: the $500,000 grant supporting vaccine research at the MaineHealth Institute for Research was gone.
Dr. Clifford Rosen, one of the lab’s senior scientists, still remembers the explanation—if you can call it that.
“The reason they gave had nothing to do with what we are doing now,”
“The system we have has worked for 60–70 years, and now it’s under siege.”
That wasn’t hyperbole. It was April 2025, and federal science funding was being hollowed out in silence. The Trump administration’s budget office had issued a wave of NIH grant terminations and quietly slipped a cap on “indirect costs”—the line items that keep lights on, staff paid, and research alive.
Across Maine, the ripple hit fast. Projects stalled. Labs froze hiring. Some simply shut down.
At the University of New England’s Portland campus, 25-year-old graduate student Griffin Tibbitts felt the chill before his own research was even targeted.
“If you cut off the source of new ideas, it chokes off basic research.”
“It could slow progress on diseases, cancers, Alzheimer’s.”
Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory hasn’t lost its funding—yet. But they’ve seen what happens when grants disappear mid-project. MDIBL President Hermann Haller warned Congress that slashing overhead reimbursements would “slow, and in some cases could end, front-line biomedical research projects.”
If the NIH cap goes through, MDIBL expects a 27% drop. That’s not a trim—it’s an amputation.
“There is no replacement for NIH investment.”
Even their undergraduate training programs could be slashed. A summer lab studying PFAS toxicity in zebrafish—models for early human development—might disappear.
At Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, the numbers are bigger, the stakes higher. Over $70 million in NIH grants support JAX’s work in genetic disease modeling. But those projects depend on the operational funding now under threat.
NIH calls it “efficiency.” JAX calls it sabotage.
Scarborough-based MHIR has already lost two projects in two months.
The first was a pilot grant studying chronic pain, diabetes, and long COVID. The second had investigated COVID vaccine hesitancy in rural Maine. NIH officials said research like that was no longer a funding priority.
“It is the policy… not to prioritize research that focuses on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated.”
Translated: Don’t ask questions we don’t want answered.