Maryland is one of 22 states that filed a lawsuit Monday challenging a new rule by the National Institutes of Health that caps funding for the “indirect costs” of research at 15% of grants.

The change, which took effect Monday, affects costs such as rent and other building costs, utilities and administrators’ salaries.

“This agency action will result in layoffs, suspension of clinical trials, disruption of ongoing research programs, and laboratory closures,” the states wrote in the legal complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

At a press conference Monday, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said the change will “cripple” research at universities, including the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University.

“The funding loss will devastate lab operations, delay breakthroughs and harm the U.S.’s — the United States’ global leadership in biomedical research,” Brown said. “It's an indiscriminate cut that undermines critical medical advances, including the important work done here in Maryland on cancer research.”

The lawsuit says the move by NIH violates the Administrative Procedure Act, as well as appropriations bills passed by Congress.

The lawsuit is one of several by Brown and other Democratic state attorneys general challenging President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders. One of the other cases challenges Trump’s offer to federal employees to stop working and still get paid through the end of September. That case was in court Monday.

Brown said he is also considering a legal challenge to an executive order cutting off federal funding for medical institutions that provide gender-affirming care.

Trump’s actions since taking office are testing democracy, Brown said.

The idea that “the president should act without any guardrails or restrictions, that's simply equivalent to taking the U.S. Constitution and burning it up and throwing it out, because that is not what was contemplated by our founders,” he said.