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Dive Brief:
University of California San Diego is bracing for budget cuts of up to 12.5%as it faces a potentially massive dropoff in federal funding, according to the university.
Officials predict government changes could lead to annual funding shortfalls of between $75 million and $500 million, Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said in a Wednesday community message. Researchers at the university have so far reported 50 notices of federal grant disruptions.
Citing “unprecedented conditions,” Khosla said UC San Diego is freezing all hiring and delaying capital projects.The latter includes an “indefinite” delay on construction of a new life sciences building and clinical research building.
Dive Insight:
UC San Diegois already feeling the brunt of the Trump administration’s efforts to pull the plug on wide swaths of federal funding to the higher education sector, including billions in grants commitments from multiple agencies.
In his message, Khosla noted “a concerning rise in payment delays on expected grant revenues from most federal agencies.”
As the chancellor explained, that impacts the university’s cash flows, withUC San Diego facing both short-term and long-term cash challenges from the government’s actions.
“Abrupt termination of research funding has far-reaching and damaging consequences not just for the research, but for individuals, teams, our university and society as a whole,” Khosla said.
More, and deeper, funding cuts could be on the way as President Donald Trump and Republicans seek to restructure the federal government’s role in the U.S. and potentially make dramatic reductions to existing education and research programs.
A new 15% cap on reimbursement for indirect research costs at theNational Institutes of Health— which for now have been blocked by a federal judge —would cost UC San Diego $150 million annually, the university has said.
Additionally, potential reductions to research funding and grants,as well as to reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid,could all hurt UC San Diego and its medical center, Khosla said.
The university was under some financial strain even before Trump took office. For fiscal 2024, the institution logged a $2.5 million total operating deficit as its expenses grew faster than revenues, according to its latest financials.
The good news is that the university is growing, unlike many of its peers. In fall 2024, its headcount reached 43,533, a record for the university and up about a third from a decade ago, according to institutional data.
The university’s hiring freeze is part of a broader initiative across the University of California system as it grapples with funding cuts at both the federal and state levels.
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Dive Brief:
Researchers, unions and others sued the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday over the agency’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion-related research activity that has resulted in lost grant funding and career opportunities.
Plaintiffs, including dozens of academic scientists, alleged that the agency’s leaders, starting in February, “upended NIH’s enviable track record of rigor and excellence, launching a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.”
They are asking a federal court to block NIH from enforcing its anti-DEI directives both in the short term and permanently and to restore grants to researchers that the agency has cut under the Trump administration.
Dive Insight:
The complaint counts at least 678 research projects that have been terminated by NIH, some of them potentially by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency rather than NIH staff.
The recently cut grants amount to over $2.4 billion, the lawsuit noted. Of that, $1.3 billion was already spent on projects “stopped midstream that is now wasted,” and $1.1 billion has been revoked.
Plaintiffs argue that grant terminations “cut across diverse topics that NIH is statutorily required to research,” many of which involve life-threatening diseases. Specifically, they argue that NIH’s actions violate the Administrative Procedures Act and constitutional limits on executive branch authority, and are unconstitutionally vague.
In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Massachusetts, plaintiffs detailed how their lives, careers and potentially life-saving research have been thrown into turmoil by the NIH’s attack on DEI under President Donald Trump.
Among them is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico’s medical school who studies alcohol’s impact on Alzheimer’s risk. The researcher, the first in her family to graduate college, sought a grant created to help promising researchers from underrepresented backgrounds transition to tenure-track faculty positions.
According to the lawsuit, the researcher “satisfies the eligibility criteria for the program and invested months into assembling her application,” but NIH refused to consider it “solely because the program is designed to help diversify the profession.”
Another plaintiff, a Ph.D. candidate at a private California university,had received a high score on a research funding application for a dissertation proposal that would have studied suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness.
But the candidate learned that new restrictions on LGBTQ-related research meant the NIH would not likely fund the project. The turn of events will harm the researcher’s “ability to progress through their PhD program,” the complaint said.
Others include a University of Michigan social work professor whose research focuses on sexual violence in minority communities. TheNIH has cut at least six grants supporting her research because the agency said it “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” according to the complaint.
Setting the various cuts in motion was internal NIH guidance, most of it revealed by the news media and cited in the complaint, that directed agency staff to terminate and deny DEI-related grant proposals. One memo instructed NIH officials to “completely excise all DEI activities.”
Staff guidance included research topics for grant terminations. One document forbade three research activity topics: China, DEI and transgender issues. A later document, the complaint alleges, effectively banned research grants around vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.
NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The scale of impact by both DEI cuts and other funding chaos at NIH is broad, cutting across much of the higher ed world.The United Auto Workers, one of the plaintiffs, counts tens of thousands of members who depend on NIH grants for their work and training, according to the lawsuit. It also noted 18,000 full-time graduate students who received their primary federal funding support through NIH in 2022.
Additionally, the Trump administration has variously moved to cancel or suspend research contracts and grants at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and most recently Princeton University as part of punitive actions tied to investigations of campus antisemitism or, in Penn’s case, the decision to allow a trans woman to compete on the women’s swim team three years ago. The administration also briefly froze (and then unfroze) United States Department of Agriculture funds for the University of Maine system after the state’s governor engaged in a tense exchange with President Trump at the White House.
Below, 16 researchers across nine different research areas who have had their federal grants terminated since the start of the Trump administration share just a few of the thousands of stories behind these cuts.
—Elizabeth Redden, opinion editor
Preventing Intimate Partner Violence
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By Rebecca Fielding-Miller, Nicholas Metheny, Abigail Hatcher and Sarah Peitzmeier
Each year, more than 3,000 American women are murdered by their partners. Pregnancy and the postpartum period are high-risk periods for intimate partner violence (IPV), which is linked to negative maternal outcomes such as miscarriage, hemorrhage and postpartum depression. Perinatal IPV is also linked to worse infant health outcomes, such as preterm birth and low birth weight, and to adverse childhood experiences. This makes prevention of perinatal IPV crucial not just for the survivor but for the entire family.
Perinatal IPV and its cascade of negative outcomes are preventable—but only if we study the epidemiology and prevention of IPV as rigorously as we study hypertension or any other perinatal complication. A grant rescinded last month by the NIH would have trained a cohort of 12 early-career clinicians and researchers to learn how to study IPV as part of their ongoing research on pregnancy, birth and the postpartum period. We proposed training investigators working in diverse communities across the spectrum of America, with a commitment to including communities disproportionately impacted by IPV and maternal mortality, including Black and LGBTQ+ communities. To solve a problem with constrained resources, it is efficient to focus efforts on where the problem is most severe. While the termination letter named this targeting of training resources an “amorphous equity objective,” we call it a data-driven approach to rigorous science.
Training grants like this one help shift an entire field by giving young investigators the skills and knowledge to add a focus on IPV to their research for the next several decades. In addition to training these 12 young researchers, the grant would have also supported turning the mentorship curriculum we developed into an open-access online training for clinicians and researchers to access in perpetuity, multiplying the impact of the work to train even more investigators in the field. As with the approximately 700 other terminated NIH grants, cutting this work before our aims are realized but after significant costs have been incurred to establish the mentorship team and design the curriculum is the definition of government inefficiency and waste.
With this grant rescinded, none of the promised training will occur. Pregnant people and their babies from every community across America will continue to suffer, without the benefit of advances in the science of how we prevent these violence exposures. Our termination notice claims that the proposed trainings are “antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.” We could not disagree more. Anyone who has cared for a child or for the person who gave birth to them knows that preventing maternal and infant death and abuse should be a nonpartisan issue. The current administration is intent on making even this issue into “us” versus “them.” When it comes to public health, there is no such thing. American families deserve better.
Rebecca Fielding Miller is an associate professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on health disparities in infectious disease and gender-based violence.
Nicholas Metheny is an Atlanta-area scientist and registered nurse with clinical and research experience in the post-violence care of women and sexual and gender minority communities.
Abigail Hatcher is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and University of the Witwatersrand, where she develops and tests health sector models for preventing violence in pregnancy.
Sarah Peitzmeier is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health who develops and tests interventions to prevent gender-based violence. She is also a practicing birth doula and victim advocate.
Is Work-Study Working?
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By Judith Scott-Clayton
On March 7, at 9:49 a.m., I received an email with “GRANT AWARD TERMINATION” in all caps in the subject line. Attached to the email was a letter, addressed to me as project director and referring to our Department of Education grant by its award number. The letter was generic, virtually identical to three other termination letters received that day at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where I am affiliated. It did not mention our project title nor provide any project-specific details to explain why our project, as the email states, “is now inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the Department’s priorities.” A few hours later, I received a formal notification that the grant end date was that day: March 7, 2025.
The project—a collaboration with Adela Soliz of Vanderbilt University and Tom Brock of CCRC—was titled “Does Federal Work-Study Work for Students? Evidence From a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The Federal Work-Study (FWS) program was created in 1964 as part of the Economic Opportunity Act and covers up to 75 percent of the wages of college students working part-time in mostly on-campus jobs, with colleges paying the rest. In a typical year, the program provides more than $1 billion in support to more than 450,000 college students with financial need at more than 3,000 institutions all across the country. Several states also have their own similar programs.
Our study would be the first to rigorously evaluate the causal impact of the program on students’ enrollment, employment, persistence and degree completion. We were also conducting interviews, focus groups and surveys to understand how students find FWS jobs, what kinds of work they do, what resources institutions devote to running the program and how much it all costs to operate, all with the goal of ensuring the program is delivering the maximum impact for every single student that participates and for every dollar spent.
At the time of its cancellation, we were about four and a half years into a six-year project. We were right in the middle of randomizing what would be the final cohort of our study sample and fielding the final round of a student survey. This final year is especially important, because the early cohorts were heavily impacted by the pandemic. For the past three weeks, we have been scrambling to pull together any other resources we could find to preserve our options and avoid losing this final cohort of participants. We have also been scrambling to figure out how to continue to pay critical staff and doctoral students involved in the project until we can figure out the next steps.
As for the broader impact of the termination: The Federal Work-Study program itself will keep on going, at least for now; we just won’t know whether it works or not. We hypothesize that it may provide valuable work-based learning opportunities that keep students engaged and give them advantages in the labor market after college, but it’s possible that it distracts students from their studies and hurts their academic performance. We may think that it helps students to afford college, but perhaps the complexity of finding a specific job and navigating all the necessary paperwork reduces its value for the students that need help the most. The next time the program is up for debate, policymakers will be flying blind: Without actual evidence all we can do is speculate.
Since 1964, the FWS program has disbursed more than $95 billion in awards. In comparison, our grant was less than three-thousandths of 1 percent of that amount, and the amount remaining to finish our work and share our findings with the public was just a fraction of that. Our project was motivated by a desire to help policymakers ensure that every dollar invested in financial aid has the maximum possible impact for low-income students. So it is discouraging to learn, so close to the finish line, that this first-of-its-kind evaluation of a major federal program is “now inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the Department’s priorities.”
Judith Scott-Clayton is a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis, where she directs the Economics and Education Program and teaches courses on the economics of education, labor economics and causal inference.
Democracy Research
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By Rob Blair, Jessica Gottlieb, Laura Paler and Julie Anne Weaver
We lost funding for the Democratic Erosion Consortium (DEC) as part of the federal government’s recent cancellation of foreign assistance grants. Directed by scholars at Brown University, the University of Houston and American University, DEC works to make academic research on democratic backsliding accessible to policymakers and practitioners seeking evidence-based strategies to defend democracy around the globe.
Originally launched in 2017 on a shoestring budget, DEC began as an effort to improve pedagogy on a troubling trend observable both abroad and at home: the strategic dismantling of democratic norms and institutions by elected leaders with autocratic ambitions. In 2022, in line with the U.S. government’s dual interests in democratic resilience and evidence-based policymaking, we received a grant from the State Department to expand DEC’s work.
The State Department’s investment enabled us to grow our reach beyond the classroom and into the policy arena. We drew on an expanding network of scholars to synthesize evidence on urgent questions—such as how to reduce the spread of misinformation and measure democratic decline. We also built out a novel event data set on democratic erosion and trained partners around the world to use it in their own work.
The immediate consequences are clear: several full- and part-time staff lost funding for their jobs. But the long-term damage is hard to quantify. It’s difficult to argue for the value of evidence-based policymaking in foreign aid when the entire category of foreign assistance has effectively been gutted. More than that, the partnerships we built between academics, practitioners and policymakers were yielding real-time insights and responses—a rare example of successful research-policy collaboration. That infrastructure is now gone.
And at a moment when democratic backsliding is accelerating in many parts of the world, the U.S. government is stepping away from efforts to understand and counter it. Ending this grant not only weakens the ability to monitor democratic erosion globally, it also reduces public awareness and understanding of a phenomenon that is increasingly visible in the U.S. itself.
With the federal policy audience for our work largely gone, we are refocusing our efforts on our other two core constituencies: students and academics. We continue to support instructors engaged in teaching our democratic erosion course and to improve the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset. And in response to growing concern about democratic backsliding in the U.S., we’re developing a more robust domestic data-collection effort, paired with public engagement.
Given intense partisan disagreement around what even constitutes democratic erosion, we are seeking to increase the credibility of new evidence by capturing partisan-diverse perspectives and applying our established comparative framework to U.S. events. We are hoping to continue this work, despite the loss of our federal grant, because the political reality in the U.S. and around the world tells us we need to be worried about democratic erosion now more than ever.
Rob Blair is the Arkadij Eisler Goldman Sachs Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Jessica Gottlieb is an associate professor at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs.
Laura Paler is an associate professor in the Department of Government in the School of Public Affairs at American University.
Julie Anne Weaver is the research director of the Democratic Erosion Consortium and a lecturer on government at Harvard University.
COVID-19 and Related Immunology Research
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By Matthew Woodruff
On March 24, 2020, I stood in a Biosafety Level 2+ facility at Emory University with six colleagues being taught best practices for working with the largely unknown pathogen, SARS-CoV-2. Other unknowns included where we would get masks (N95s were unavailable), risks of infection to our young kids at home and who would pay for the experiments needed to gain insight into the deadly new virus sweeping across the nation.
That last question was answered relatively quickly. Rapid investment by the first Trump administration’s NIH launched SeroNet, a five-year effort across 25 institutions to “expand the nation’s capacity for SARS-CoV-2 serologic testing on a population-level and advance research on the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination among diverse and vulnerable populations.” We did just that. Over the coming years, taxpayer dollars funded more than 600 peer-reviewed publications, reflecting significant advances in disease pathology, treatment strategies, disease impact in immunocompromised patients, vaccine testing and more.
Our team at Emory led projects dedicated to understanding the balance between productive and pathogenic immunity in hopes of alleviating disease. We discovered why your immune system sometimes turns on itself in the throes of severe infection, uncovered similarities between the immune responses of chronically autoimmune patients and those who were seriously ill with COVID-19, and documented continued disturbances in patients with long COVID. Importantly, we learned that these responses weren’t unique to COVID-19 and were broadly relevant to human health.
In 2022, I started my own lab founded on those concepts. We have been optimistic that the work we are doing will ultimately serve the American people in our shared desire to live longer, healthier lives.
But over the past months, that optimism has dissipated. Ham-handed targeting of “DEI” awards leaves us unable to understand how diverse human populations might respond differently to infection or develop different kinds of chronic diseases. Mistrust of the same vaccine programs that have halted the spread of measles globally has left us unable to test next-generation vaccines that might provide broad protection against emerging viral strains. And then, on March 24, it was announced that the five-year commitment that the first Trump administration made to our work would no longer be honored. Our COVID-related funding through SeroNet would be halted, effective immediately.
Our fledgling program, a few months ago extremely promising, is now on life support. My lab has invested heavily with our time and limited resources, which are now running thin, into promising new areas of clinically relevant immunology that suddenly look like financial dead ends. The decision to halt entire fields of study in what was previously highly fertile scientific space is as damaging as it is unprecedented, and our lab is left with a business model that is now fundamentally broken.
Matthew Woodruff is an assistant professor of immunology at the Emory University Lowance Center for Human Immunology. His lab studies antibody responses in the context of infection, vaccination and autoimmune disease.
Training Tomorrow’s Biomedical Workforce
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By Samantha Meenachand Ryan Poling-Skutvik
On March 21, the NIH terminated our training grant award, which supported the Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education Diversity (ESTEEMED) program at the University of Rhode Island. The mission of URI ESTEEMED was to increase the preparation of undergraduate students—freshmen and sophomores—to conduct biomedical research, enabling them to succeed in advanced research in preparation to pursue a Ph.D. in STEM. Our ultimate goals were to provide students who were from groups underrepresented in STEM or from disadvantaged economic backgrounds with academic enrichment, research and soft skills development, and a sense of community. NIH claims that our award “no longer effectuates agency priorities” and that it involves “amorphous equity objectives, [that] are antithetical to the scientific inquiry.”
While the language in the termination email itself was derisive and political, the fallout from the loss of this award will be felt for years to come. The state of Rhode Island immediately lost $1.2 million in direct economic activity, and an important workforce development initiative will end, significantly reducing state and regional competitiveness in a growing technological field. Like many other states, Rhode Island has a pressing need for professionals trained in biotechnology, and recruiting people to Rhode Island has often proven to be challenging. This challenge is exemplified by the recent establishment of the Rhode Island Life Sciences Hub with a specific mandate to grow the biotechnology sector in the state.
By contrast, there is a large untapped pool of talent within Rhode Island, who are limited by access to education and training in large part due to the financial pressures families face. Our URI ESTEEMED program recruited talented students who likely would not have had the resources necessary to enter these careers. While NIH would like to argue that ESTEEMED was used to “support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics,” ESTEEMED trainees were selected through a rigorous and competitive application process, making these awards merit-based. Without the financial support of this program, many of our trainees would not have been able to attend URI or would not have had the opportunity to focus on research.
URI ESTEEMED in its current form will cease to exist at the end of this semester. We are still figuring out to what capacity we can continue to recruit and train students, but without NIH funds, training programs such as ESTEEMED will not be able to alleviate the many pressures these students face. The political decision to terminate this grant inflicts direct financial pain on some of the most promising students, and these effects will reverberate for years to come.
Samantha Meenach is a professor in the Department of Chemical, Biomolecular, and Materials Engineering at the University of Rhode Island.
Ryan Poling-Skutvik is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical, Biomolecular, and Materials Engineering and the Department of Physics at the University of Rhode Island.
Alzheimer’s and Dementia Research for Diverse Populations
By Jason D. Flatt
Research funding for diverse populations impacted by Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) is currently being terminated by the U.S. federal government. These terminations are attributed to the premise that the research is incompatible with agency priorities. For instance, funding for studies including older transgender individuals, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, intersex and other LGBTQIA+ identities, has been terminated. In addition, funding decisions have been rescinded, and grants have been pulled from scientific review. The National Institutes of Health has stated, “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”
To date, around 700 NIH grants have been terminated, including many important studies on HIV/AIDS, cancer, COVID-19 and ADRD. Of these, about 25 have focused on ADRD. Personally, I have lost nearly $5 million in research funding from the NIH and the Department of Defense because my ADRD research includes transgender people. My research focuses on the needs of LGBTQIA+ and non-LGBTQIA+ older adults, particularly those affected by ADRD and Parkinson’s disease, as well as their caregivers and health-care providers. Some have suggested that we remove or rephrase “forbidden” language in future grants and/or exclude transgender people from our studies, but I will not do that. It is not pro-science and will not ensure that all people benefit from our research. The current and future termination of grants and contracts will have a significant impact on the health of older Americans, slow our innovation, limit our ability to provide care and impede progress in finding a cure.
I am working to raise awareness about these terminations and find ways to either reverse the decisions or secure alternative funding for this vital research. This includes speaking with the press, informing policymakers, generating visibility on social media alongside colleagues and peers, consulting with legal experts, and engaging with community members. I am also deeply concerned about the future of early-career scientists, who are essential in leading efforts to find cures for diseases affecting our communities, especially as the baby boomer generation ages. Many of the grants that have been terminated were early-career awards for newly minted doctoral researchers and faculty, diversity supplements for doctoral students, and competitive NIH predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships.
In light of today’s sociopolitical climate, it is more important than ever for our civic, academic and research communities to unite in advocating for inclusion, standing up for diverse groups, including LGBTQIA+ communities, and ensuring that early-career scholars and the broader aging population have opportunities for potential cures, treatments and health care.
Jason D. Flatt is an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, School of Public Health, in the Department of Social and Behavioral Health.
I have spent the past year and a half as a postdoc researching the effects of Virginia’s Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3) initiative, a tuition-free community college program implemented in 2021. Similar to most statewide free college programs, G3 is a last-dollar scholarship program for state residents attending one of Virginia’s 23 community colleges, though students who already receive the maximum Pell Grant and enroll full-time are eligible for an additional living stipend to support the costs of books, transit and other expenses frequently incurred while enrolled. Virginia implemented the program as a bipartisan pandemic-recovery strategy to reverse steep enrollment declines in community colleges and boost credential completion in five high-demand workforce areas: early childhood education, health care, information technology, manufacturing and skilled trades, and public safety.
Like so many other critical research projects in education, our Institute of Education Sciences funding was terminated by the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to gut the Department of Education and publicly funded research at large. The abrupt termination of the grant, which supports researchers at both the University of Pennsylvania and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, is a depressing way to finish out my postdoc. The project is part of a larger IES grant that established the Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges network, a group of research teams focused on strategies to improve community college enrollment and student success. The loss of funding means canceled conference presentations and convenings; it means planned collaborations with other research teams in the network will not happen. We simply cannot accomplish all the things we set out to do without the resources provided by the grant.
The grant termination is demoralizing on multiple levels. It funded my postdoc, which has been an invaluable experience in developing my skills as an education policy researcher. While my position was nearing its end regardless, the ongoing forced austerity on public-facing research portends a future where these types of opportunities are not available to later generations of scholars. And on a less personal note, canceling education research, especially toward the end of its life cycle, is extremely wasteful and inefficient. It hinders the completion of projects that public money has already been invested in and limits dissemination efforts that help to drive the overwhelmingly positive return on investment from these types of research projects.
This is a real shame in the case of our work on G3. Our findings and planned future research on the policy hold critical implications for policymakers and institutions in Virginia and across the US. States like Arkansas, Indiana and Kentucky have similarly implemented workforce-targeted free college initiatives. And given the heightened attention from policymakers on career and technical education in recent years, it is reasonable to think more states will follow suit. Our work on G3 is in service of improving community college student outcomes so that more students have the resources and opportunities to pursue meaningful careers and life trajectories. Without any federal funding, it will only be more difficult to uncover the best ways to go about achieving these ends.
Daniel Sparks is a postdoctoral researcher in economics and education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.
Training Pediatric Physician-Scientists
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By Sallie Permar
The NIH made the abrupt decision last month to terminate the Pediatric Scientist Development Program (PSDP), a long-standing initiative that has trained generations of physician-scientists dedicated to advancing child health. This decision was made without an opportunity for resubmission or revision, and it appears to be linked to diversity, equity and inclusion requirements in our renewal application, components we were previously required to include and encouraged to expand by our reviewers, and that were later weaponized as justification for defunding.
For more than 40 years, the PSDP has served as a critical pipeline for training pediatric physician-scientists. Through rigorous mentorship, research training and career development, the PSDP has trained more than 270 pediatric physician-scientists, helping launch the careers of child health researchers who have made groundbreaking discoveries in areas such as childhood cancer, genetic disorders, autoimmunity and infectious diseases. At a time when pediatric research faces increasing challenges, this decision further weakens an already fragile infrastructure. It is not merely an administrative setback; it has immediate and far-reaching consequences that will be felt across academic institutions and the future of the health of children and the adults they become. Pediatric research is the highest yield of all medical research, providing lifetimes of health.
Without federal funding, our health as Americans faces several dire immediate and long-term impacts:
Loss of training opportunities and career uncertainty for pediatric researchers: The PSDP was on track to expand through deepening of our public-private institutional partnership funding model, due to increasing interest across states and pediatric specialties. We received a record high number of talented applicants this year. Now we are now forced to determine how many, if any, new trainees can be supported. Additionally, the program serves as the critical bridge between physician-scientists’ clinical training and their ability to secure independent research grants. With NIH funding cut, current trainees will face financial instability, and prospective trainees might be forced to abandon their research, and their career aspirations, altogether.
Weakening of the pediatric research pipeline: The PSDP has been a key factor in addressing the national shortage of pediatric physician-scientists. Without it, fewer pediatricians will enter research careers, exacerbating an already urgent pediatric workforce crisis at a time when children are presenting with more complex health needs.
Children’s health in jeopardy: Cutting PSDP funding halts critical research on chronic childhood diseases like genetic conditions, asthma and obesity, leaving millions of children without hope for better treatments or cures, directly reducing their chance for health and quality of life.
The PSDP’s termination is not just a loss for academic medicine, it is a direct threat to the future of pediatric research and children’s health. Pediatricians pursuing research careers already face significant challenges, including limited funding opportunities and lower salaries compared to other medical specialties. By eliminating the PSDP, the NIH has removed one of the most effective mechanisms for supporting these researchers at a critical stage in their careers.
We call on academic leaders, policymakers and child health advocates to take immediate action. The future of children’s health research depends on our ability to reverse this decision and ensure that pediatric physician-scientists continue to receive the training and support they need to advance medical discoveries for the next generation.
Sallie Permar is the Nancy C. Paduano Professor and Chair at Weill Cornell Medicine and pediatrician in chief at New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Global Development and Women’s Empowerment
By Denise L. Baer
On Monday, Jan. 27, I received an email from local project staff in Guatemala canceling that day’s key informant interview due to the “review of cooperation projects by the United States government” and the request to “suspend activities” until further notice. This was the first notice that the evaluation of the Legal Reform Fund (LRF) project that I was conducting had been paused—and, in effect, permanently canceled. After checking in with the project implementer, the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative (ABA-ROLI), I received formal notification of the pause later that same day.
LRF provided contextualized expert legal technical assistance and training to partnering government agencies, parliamentarians, judges, court staff and women entrepreneurs to improve women’s access to land, property rights and credit in Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico and Timor-Leste. I had been working on the evaluation for about two months, with the intent to complete all initial staff interviews before the end of January and then move on to field data collection. The evaluation had been approved last December by the Department of State, with approval of the inception report coming from the department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues just a week earlier. While I’d been tracking the flurry of executive orders, I doubted that this project would violate the new “two-gender” policy—after all, it was funded through the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative created by President Trump himself during his first administration in 2019 and championed by his daughter Ivanka with great fanfare. The initiative aimed to help 50 million women in developing countries realize their economic potential by 2025; the LRF project was only one of many funded by W-GDP initially and later continued by the Biden administration.
The LRF project ended December 2024. Was it effective and efficient? Were the planned outcomes achieved? We will never know. Since I was paid by ABA-ROLI for the work conducted to date before the pause, the primary cost of this discontinuance is not to me personally, but to the American people, who funded this project. The call for this evaluation and the approval of my proposal was born of the government’s desire for efficiency and to ensure funded initiatives were going according to plan. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office had identified a less-than-robust implementation framework in many early W-GDP projects, and this evaluation was intended to provide critical evidence of whether processes had improved.
Now we will never know how strong the evidence base is for supporting women entrepreneurs through this initiative. It is profoundly stunning that not only would the Trump administration stop work midstream for so many projects, but they would also stop evaluations of project work already completed—even for programs they themselves created and supported. How does funding a project and then shutting down the work of determining how effective that project was fight waste, fraud and abuse?
Denise L. Baer is a scholar-practitioner fellow at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University.
The Department of Government Efficiency has struck higher ed institutions once again—this time through the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Leaders of the agency—which supports research, innovation and preservation in disciplines related to culture, society and values—told staff members Tuesday that the Trump administration intends to make substantial reductions in staff, slash the agency’s grant programs and rescind grants that have already been awarded.
Humanities advocates don’t know exactly how large the cuts to NEH’s approximately 180-person staff or $78.25 million grant budget will be, but they note that “patterns at other agencies” provide a solid hint. The impact on colleges and universities, they say, would be crushing.
“The NEH supports the full range of humanities work that takes place at higher ed institutions, including support for research and teaching, academic publishing and professional development programs for faculty,” said Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance. “Cuts would be particularly devastating, because unlike a lot of private funders, the NEH is more prestige-blind. With its mandate to support the humanities across the country, it’s more likely to give grants to people at smaller and public institutions.”
The president and his cabinet secretaries have already fired or offered buyouts to tens of thousands of government employees in an attempt to hollow out the federal workforce. Two of the most notable cuts impacted the Department of Education—which supports higher ed through federal student aid programs, data collection and accountability measures—and the Department of Health and Human Services, one of the world’s largest research funding sources for colleges and universities.
Now Trump is turning his focus from educational infrastructure and sciences to history, literature and philosophy. Paula Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, believes the move is “sending a message.”
The cut “adds up to a huge net loss for all of higher education” and suggests “it is not worth investing in the study of our culture and the culture of others,” Krebs said. “In the larger context of DOGE cuts, the nation is saying that it’s not worth investing in the study of anything at all.”
The announcement of looming cuts at NEH comes just three weeks after the agency’s Biden-appointed chair, Shelly Lowe, resigned. A citizen of the Navajo Nation, Lowe was the agency’s first Native American chair. Before that, she served as executive director of the Harvard University Native American Program.
The agency is now being led by interim director Michael McDonald, who previously served as its general counsel.
Since Lowe stepped down, DOGE staff members have made several appearances at the office. On Tuesday, they said 70 to 80 percent of the staff would be let go, three staff members told The New YorkTimes. Sources also told the Times that all grants approved by the Biden administration but not yet paid out in full will be canceled.
Neither NEH nor the White House responded to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.
Founded in 1965, the NEH has allocated more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, libraries, state humanities councils and higher education institutions to support a variety of programs.
Kidd, from the Humanities Alliance, said one of the most substantial losses universities could face is funding for curriculum development. In an era when public doubt regarding the value of a college degree is on the rise and skills-based hiring is gaining traction, humanities departments across the country are looking for new ways to mix the classical liberal arts with modern pre-professional training. NEH grants, he said, have been a key source of support for such experimentation.
“These kinds of curricular innovations can help to ensure that students in the humanities have strong pathways to future careers,” Kidd said. It’s “NEH’s support for curricular innovations that might bring the humanities in conversation with business or with biological and health sciences.”
He and other humanities association leaders have also expressed concern about cuts to grants intended to help libraries and museums preserve historical documents, art and other materials that are key to humanities research. The cuts to NEH, they say, will only compound the damage that has already been done by Trump’s executive order to disband the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“Without funding for preservation, materials will disappear, degrade or not be collected in the first place,” Kidd said. “And once those are lost—they’re lost. The record of human activity is gone.”
Though its mandate is much broader than the humanities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities also registered concern about the NEH cuts.
“NEH-funded research documents American history and culture [and] explores the legal and ethical use of emerging technologies such as AI,” said Craig Lindwarm, the association’s senior vice president of governmental affairs. “While undoubtedly reforms to NEH can be made and efficiencies found, cuts to NEH research would undermine progress in these critical areas and beyond.”
To Peter Berkey, executive director of the Association of University Presses, the looming endowment cuts are the epicenter of “a disastrous ripple through the entire scholarly ecosystem.”
“Perhaps most importantly,” he said, “these actions will diminish the very disciplines that drive the development of critical thinking, the understanding of value and the pursuit of justice and democracy among the next generation of scholars and citizens.”
March brought layoffs, buyouts and the elimination of multiple academic programs as universities sought to plug budget holes wrought by sector challenges and state budget issues.
While many universities have announced hiring freezes and other moves due to the uncertainty of federal funding under Trump, the cuts below are not directly tied to the administration’s efforts to slash budgets and shrink the government. Instead, they are linked largely to dwindling enrollment or the loss of state funding.
University of Dayton
Officials at the private, Catholic research institution in Ohio announced cuts last month that affect 65 employees; 45 faculty members will not have their contracts renewed and 20 staff positions have been eliminated, The Dayton Daily News reported.
Affected employees will reportedly be offered severance packages.
Total cuts are projected to save the university $25 million over three years, the newspaper reported. Officials at the university said the moves were “focused on financial sustainability,” noting that while Dayton does not currently have a budget deficit, the change better positions it for the future.
Wagner College
The private liberal arts college in New York is looking to phase out as many as 21 programs in an effort to reverse recent enrollment declines, The Staten Island Advance reported.
The changes reportedly could affect up to 40 full-time faculty members.
Less popular academic programs—including anthropology, chemistry, English, history, math, modern languages, sociology, philosophy and physics—are among those that may be wound down. Officials told the newspaper that the process will be completed over the next 12 to 18 months.
Kent State University
Up to 30 administrative positions and nine majors are being eliminated at the public university in Ohio as part of a phased academic realignment that was approved by the board last month, WKYC reported. Kent State will also shrink the number of academic colleges from 10 to nine.
The changes are part of a phased plan to be completed in 2028.
The plans cites two goals: “First to strengthen academic affairs by reorganizing and realigning our academic units so that we are more cost efficient and therefore sustainable, and second, to ensure that we are providing the most in-demand, up-to-date and relevant academic programs and services for our learners,” executive vice president and provost Melody Tankersley said in an announcement last month following approval of the restructuring plan by Kent State’s board.
Lakeland Community College
Facing a $2 million budget deficit, the public two-year college in Ohio is laying off 10 faculty members and not replacing 14 professors set to retire, Ideastream Public Media reported.
Another eight faculty members who will retire next year will also not be replaced.
Between the cuts and retirements, Lakeland expects to save $2.3 million this year and another $800,000 next year. It will reinvest $225,000 in three faculty positions in manufacturing, welding and electrical engineering as it prioritizes workforce development.
Lakeland also plans to close an unspecified number of low-enrollment programs.
St. Norbert College
The private, Catholic college in Wisconsin announced plans last month to lay off 27 professors and cut more than a dozen programs to address its budget deficit, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
Cuts will shave an estimated $5 million off the $12 million budget deficit. Of the 27 affected faculty members, 21 are set to lose their jobs in May, and the remaining six will be let go in 2026.
Averett University
Grappling with financial pressures, the small, private institution in Virginia announced plans last month to eliminate 15 jobs as part of cost-cutting measures, The Chatham Star-Tribune reported.
Additionally, Cardinal News reported this week that Averett listed its equestrian center for sale.
The university has navigated steep financial issues since last summer, when officials discovered a financial shortfall brought about by unauthorized withdrawals from the endowment by a former employee. While they said there was no evidence of embezzlement or misuse of the funds, the fiscal mismanagement prompted Averett to take a series of ongoing measures to fix its finances.
Oklahoma State University
Fallout continues at Oklahoma State, where the university laid off 12 Innovation Foundation employees after a recent audit uncovered financial missteps there, Oklahoma Voice reported.
Affected staffers will not receive severance but will remain employed through June 1.
In February, Oklahoma State president Kayse Shrum stepped down abruptly amid a review of improper transfers of legislatively appropriated funds. An audit later found that $41 million in state appropriations “were not properly restricted and in some instances were co-mingled with other funds” in violation of state laws and policies. In one instance, $11.5 million intended for other programs had been directed without board approval to OSU’s Innovation Foundation instead.
St. Joseph’s University
Officials offered buyouts to some faculty and staff last month as the private Jesuit university seeks to close a budget deficit following recent mergers, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
St. Joseph’s absorbed the University of the Sciences in 2022 and added Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences in 2023, which officials told the newspaper left them with a “small deficit.” President Cheryl McConnell did not specify a dollar figure in an interview with the Inquirer.
She added that there was no specific target number for buyouts, but when asked about potential layoffs, McConnell said it “depends on the nature of voluntary separation plan results.”
Utah State University
Voluntary buyouts are on the table and layoffs could be on the horizon at the public university following $17.3 million in budget cuts from the State Legislature, The Cache Valley Daily reported.
Those cuts were spread across two years, with the university taking a $12.5 million hit this year. However, USU could restore that money through the state’s strategic reinvestment initiative, which allows universities to regain funding if leaders can identify areas for cuts and shift resources toward strategic initiatives favored by the state.
Weber State University
Elsewhere in Utah, Weber State is also grappling with budget issues imposed by the state.
With anticipated budget cuts of $6.7 million due to the same strategic realignment initiative, Weber State is also offering voluntary separation incentives to employees, Deseret News reported. The university also plans to restructure some academic programs, including the College of Education.
Budget changes in Utah will also affect the other six state institutions, but not all have made their plans public yet.
Troy Wright from the Community and Public Sector Union said staff have been left wondering if they have a job. Picture: David Swift
Planned job cuts at the University of Wollongong (UOW) could hit 270 after the university announced it will extend its cost-cutting measures to non-academic staff.
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Democrat efforts to challenge President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education mounted Thursday, as 11 senators asked the agency’s acting inspector general, René Rocque, to investigate the push.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were among those requesting an evaluation of whether the administration is undermining the Education Department’s ability to provide students with equal access to education and to help state and local governments’ education systems
“Decimating the Department of Education’s abilities to administer financial aid, investigate civil rights violations, conduct research on educational outcomes, and oversee the use of federal education grants threatens to have disastrous consequences for American students, teachers and families,” they wrote in a March 27 letter to Rocque.
“The Trump Administration’s further attempts to close the Department entirely and transfer its responsibilities over to other agencies will likely interrupt and degrade education programs and services, causing additional pain for the 62 million students across the country that the Department serves.”
The administration’s gutting of the Education Department not only impacted nearly half of the department’s workforce, but also left civil rights investigation and enforcement offices at half their previous capacity, cut the Federal Student Aid office by over 450 employees, and slashed 90% of the Institute of Education Sciences staff.
These decisions would likely impede key functions of the department, including ensuring all students’ civil rights are protected, administering federal loans and overseeing lenders and FAFSA, and tracking students’ educational outcomes and the condition of education in the nation, the Democratic senators told Rocque.
Rocque, who joined the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General as deputy inspector general in December 2023, became acting director in January.
As with many other issues dividing lawmakers today, Democrats and Republicans have been starkly divided over the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate the department altogether. This makes attaining a Senate supermajority of 60 votes— which is required to officially shut the department — unlikely.
House Democrats introduced a resolution on March 21 calling for transparency and information from the administration, including unredacted copies of all federal documents referring to the department’s closure and information on workforce reduction decisions.
About a week after the massive reduction in force on March 11, Democrat lawmakers from both the House and Senate wrote the department demanding information on the layoffs, saying that halving its workforce could impact the agency’s ability to perform vital functions required by law.
Meanwhile, Republicans in some states have taken the opportunity to ask the administration for more leeway in their education spending.
On March 25, for example, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters sent a letter to the Education Department requesting a waiver to receive a block grant for all funds allocated to his state under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Such a consolidated block grant would “significantly enhance local flexibility” so “schools will be able to address their unique needs and priorities,” Walters wrote.
The block grant would be used to “expand educational choices,” including attendance at private schools, and would loosen federal oversight of education spending requirements.
The third month of the second Trump administration is coming to a close, and the White House has shown no signs of slowing down on the number of actions it’s taking that directly impact the higher education sector.
In the latest episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast, Editor in Chief Sara Custer checks in on the latest developments with news editor Katherine Knott and federal policy reporter Jessica Blake.
They discuss the huge staff cuts at the Department of Education, an executive order to shutter the agency, arrests and intimidation of international students and scholars, and a $400 million ultimatum to Columbia University. They share what IHE has learned from the people at the center of these stories.
They also consider what legal and policy experts have said about the potential for these actions to be challenged in courts or through Congress.
Listen to the latest episode here and find more episodes of The Key here.
US President Donald Trump speaks to press as he departs the White House from the South Lawn in Washington, DC. Picture: Annabelle Gordon
At least six Group of Eight (Go8) universities have had research grants terminated by the United States amid an anti-diversity and gender ideology studies crackdown from US President Donald Trump’s office.
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The University of California is implementing a hiring freeze across its 10 campuses as it navigates potential funding cuts at both the federal and state levels, system President Michael Drake said in a message Wednesday.
Drake also directed UC locations to roll out other cost-cutting measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing travel expenses.
“I recognize this is a time of great uncertainty for many in our UC community and in higher education across the country,” Drake said. “Throughout our history as an institution and as a nation, we have weathered struggles and found new ways to show up for the people we serve.”
Dive Insight:
UC joins an ever-growing cohort of higher education institutions taking preemptive steps to brace their budgets against a storm of funding cuts and financial attacks coming from the Trump administration.
Many institutions have cited the 15% cap on indirect research cost funding that the National Institutes of Health announced in February. Such a reduction would amount to billions of dollars collectively and could translate into funding shortfalls in the tens of millions of dollars for many universities.
NIH is the largest funder of UC research, having provided a total $2.6 billion to the system in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the system. Among the system’s campuses that could be hardest hit, UCLA stands to lose $65 million under the funding cap, UC San Francisco $121 million and UC San Diego $102 million, according to a New York Times analysis.
Faced with massive cuts to its research funding from the agency, UC filed a declaration in support of the lawsuit against NIH brought by the California attorney general and more than 20 other states.
A judge overseeing multiple lawsuits against NIH has paused the funding cap, but uncertainty abounds among higher education leaders over the issue and other potential funding stoppages in Washington.
“The University’s legal team prepared for this moment and has been working diligently to protect the University and our mission through the courts,” Drake said. “These efforts have allowed us to stave off some of the immediate and projected financial impacts — but not all.”
Even before President Donald Trump took office, UC faced potential future budget strains from state-level cuts. A fiscal 2025-26 budget proposal unveiled in January by Gov. Gavin Newsom would reduce UC’s funding by $271 million. At the time, Drake— who plans to step down as system leader at the end of the 2024-25 academic year — expressed concern about how the cuts would affect UC students and services.
Prior to that, the system had been improving its financial trajectory, with the system’s overall total budget loss shrinking significantly in fiscal 2024 to $178 million, less than a tenth of the prior year’s shortfall.
In his message Wednesday, Drake said he asked the presidents of all UC locations to “prepare financial strategies and workforce management plans that address any potential shortfalls,” adding that “every action that impacts our University and our workforce will only be taken after serious and deliberative consideration.”
