Legal experts say the proposed cuts violate federal law and are unlikely to survive a legal challenge by states.

The new National Institutes of Health policy would strip research groups of hundreds of millions of dollars to cover so-called indirect expenses of studying Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and a host of other illnesses — anything from clinical trials of new treatments to basic lab research that is the foundation for discoveries.

A court battle is set to resume Friday over the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in medical research funding that many scientists say will endanger patients and delay new