Hundreds of people gathered at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday afternoon to protest President Trump’s recent cuts to government spending on research institutions.

The Trump administration has taken steps to disrupt operations at the country’s top federal research institutions since late January, freezing grants issued by the National Institutes of Health and issuing executive orders on sex and gender and diversity, equity and inclusion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrubbed its health data from its site in order to comply with those orders.

Most recently, the administration issued a policy to cut government funding to the National Institutes of Health by reducing the amount of grant funding that can go toward overhead costs.

NIH is the largest biomedical funder in the world and spent $35 billion on grants for research last year alone. About $9 billion of those funds went toward “indirect costs” like fees associated........

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