NIH funding cuts are Trump’s latest attack on education, professors say | US news

Cuts imposed by the Trump administration on the world’s largest funder of scientific research are just one way university leaders see the administration seeking to “dismantle” higher education.

Last week, the administration announced it would cap all “indirect funding” from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at 15% – money that typically keeps the lights on and equipment maintained in labs all over the country, particularly in colleges and universities.

“It’s a devastating proposal,” said Neil Rudenstine, a former president at Harvard University and provost at Yale University. Rudenstine is the recent author of Our Contentious Universities: A Personal History. “It would be a totally disastrous thing if it actually happens.”

The cap could result in a $4bn grant funding cut to research institutions – framed as a savings by the Trump administration – that has already resulted in outcry, lawsuits and hiring freezes. Even some Republicans described the cuts as “drastic”.

Rudenstine said the only historical threat that compares came during the red scare of the 1950s, “when Senator [Joe] McCarthy was condemning all the universities for having all kinds of so-called communists in their ranks”.

“That was a very tough time, but of course he was not the president,” said Rudenstine.

The cuts reflect Republican attacks on educational institutions broadly, from the “hostile takeover” of Florida’s liberal arts institution New College by the governor, Trump’s ally Ron DeSantis, to JD Vance’s comments that professors are “the enemy”, to proposals to limit curricula on gender in Iowa.

Often, criticisms of colleges and universities focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, gender-based protections or education or campus protests.

“It’s a controlling, dominant narrative right now,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, who sums up attacks as arguing colleges and universities are “bastions of liberalism bent on brainwashing our children and teaching the next generation of snowflakes”.

“We’re facing an existential threat that comes from the attack on academic freedom and institutional autonomy,” Pasquerella said.

“Overturning decisions related to tenure and promotion, developing curricula, imposing curricula based on western ideologies – it goes on and on – the undermining of protections for trans students, protections for students who are survivors of sexual assault, all of this has a profound and lasting impact on American education.”

Federal courts paused the cuts, pending two federal lawsuits, including one from 22 predominantly Democratic state attorneys general and a coalition of higher education associations.

However, budgets have already been tightened. Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons paused all discretionary spending – including “hiring, travel, procurement, capital projects, and events”, according to an email to faculty from the school’s dean.

“It has a major economic impact on colleges and universities – not only for scientific research by limiting overhead but on the humanities and social sciences as well,” said Pasquerella.

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical and behavioral research with a $47bn annual budget. Basic and applied research funded by the agency has contributed to 386 of the 387 drugs the Food and Drug Administration approved between 2000 and 2019, and more than 100 Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists based on NIH-funded work.

The agency supports this research by distributing more than 60,000 grants a year to individual projects. Those grants go to more than 2,500 research institutions, overwhelmingly colleges and universities. They touch every state and nearly every congressional district.

As part of the grants, the agency also covers the “indirect costs” of research – such as keeping the lights, heating and cooling on and maintaining often sophisticated lab equipment – all costs that are not easily attributable to a single project.

“Campuses will struggle to pay for ongoing research that’s necessary in [the sciences], they will have to allocate scarce resources – and often that has meant eliminating programs in humanities and the social sciences,” Pasquerella said.

Although scientists have variously called for reform to the NIH grant system over the years, universities contend unilateral and sudden cuts are illegal and ill-conceived, and leaders of research institutions have called the potential cut an “apocalypse” for American science.

NIH grants span an almost unimaginable range of investigations, from major initiatives on maternal mortality to major killers such as cancer and heart disease to pediatric health to small studies on fluoride and developmental health.

Criticisms of higher education extend to Trump’s nominee to head NIH. Jay Bhattacharya is a Stanford University physician and health economist who considered tying university NIH grant funding to “academic freedom”, as measured by a libertarian thinktank, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

Bhattacharya’s profile rose precipitously during the pandemic. He was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that became a focal point of opposition to pandemic lockdown measures.

He was blacklisted by Twitter for anti-Covid-19 lockdown posts before the platform was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk. After Musk’s purchase, Bhattacharya was invited to the platform’s headquarters. Bhattacharya has received $3.7m in NIH grants, according to an agency database.

“[Critics] have made clear their intent is not to reform American higher education,” said Pasquerella. “It’s to dismantle it.”