Clinical Trials and Tribulations
The New Policy Playbook, Part 1: The Trump Administration’s war on research is devastating science. Can colleges and universities fight back?
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Since President Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office in January 2025, the world of higher education has been in turmoil. From extreme cuts to the Department of Education, elimination of research funds, and bans on programs related to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, the second Trump administration’s policies are undermining academic freedom and the ability of colleges and universities to educate their students. Three writers explore the challenges and possible ways forward.
This is the first part of a three-part series. Find Parts II and III at:
Dismantled and Decentered: The New Policy Playbook, Part II
The Identity Reckoning: The New Policy Playbook, Part III
M G. Finn keeps his US congressional representatives on speed dial. Once a week, Finn, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, calls one of his state’s two senators or his representative in the House. His dialing ritual began following the inauguration of President Donald Trump in January 2025, and whether speaking to a staffer or voice mail, he spends sixty seconds or less emphasizing the importance of funding scientific research.
Like scientists across the country, Finn, the James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology at Georgia Tech, is coping with the Trump administration’s funding cuts. In the three months following the inauguration, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had awarded $1.6 billion less in grants compared with the same period in 2024, found the New York Times. As of July 28, the NIH had terminated 4,564 grants with an estimated outlay of more than $7.5 billion, according to Grant-Witness.us, a volunteer-run site that tracks the grant terminations (some grants could be reinstated due to lawsuits and agreements, such as Columbia University’s deal with the administration in July). During that same period, the National Science Foundation (NSF) eliminated 1,668 grants. If the NIH doesn’t distribute its allocated grant money by the end of the fiscal year on September 30, those dollars will return to the US Treasury, Inside Higher Ed reported in August. Plus, four agencies—the NIH, NSF, Department of Energy, and Department of Defense (DOD)—have proposed capping payments for indirect costs (which cover overhead expenses like building maintenance) of federally funded research at 15 percent.
Institutions are reeling. The University of Virginia has lost nearly $64 million in grants, the nonprofit news organization Charlottesville Tomorrow reported in July. More than one hundred grants have been terminated at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, which paused construction of a new research building in May, and Duke University reported a $20 million drop in federal funding in May 2025 compared to May 2024. Also in May, the administration canceled grants for more than 130 researchers at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. One professor called it “the academic equivalent of nuclear war.”
For researchers such as Finn, the cuts have created enormous uncertainty.
“I cannot promise that there will be space for new students in my lab, and my research program is therefore shrinking,” Finn says via email. “This is going on all over the country, and opportunities for amazing young scientists and engineers are gone.”
Student opportunities are indeed shrinking. In March, the University of Massachusetts withdrew several dozen offers to prospective biomedical-sciences graduate students. At least twenty-four University of California (UC) and California State University campuses have lost training grants that provided students with annual stipends of around $12,000 or more, reports CalMatters, a nonprofit news organization. In April, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program announced awards to 1,000 graduate students, down from 2,037 in 2024. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, fears “a lost generation” of scientists.
“I think the biggest challenge is what we say to people who are graduating from college and were thinking of going to graduate school,” Thorp says. “Do we continue to encourage them, or is it more honest to say, ‘You know what? It’s pretty uncertain, and I can understand why you don’t want to do this.’ Some people will go to graduate school overseas, but more than likely, most people will just decide science is not their thing.”
In a March poll of 1,200 scientists by the journal Nature, 75 percent said they were considering leaving the United States. Many are being courted by countries such as China and France—and the more researchers’ work is threatened, the more tempted they will be. In May, a Northwestern University scientist posted on Bluesky: “My research—including an active trial of cancer/cardiac disease prevention, part of a large national network—has been frozen, despite a notice of award for our renewal. Year 6 of a 6 year study. We are completely in the dark.”
Institutions are seeking alternatives. In mid-June, Harvard announced a $39 million deal with Private Equity, a Turkish firm, to fund a laboratory for ten years at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. But federal funding is largely irreplaceable.
“There will never be an equivalent source of research funding to what the federal government provides,” says Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “The private sector will not fill the gap. Foundations and philanthropy can’t fill the gap. ”
Most colleges and universities, Fansmith believes, are balancing resources to continue their work while evaluating which programs are sustainable if funding does not return. It is an exercise in preservation and perseverance, like bunkering down in a hurricane. But some institutions are embracing another option. Fighting back.
Months before she filed a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit, Claudia Polsky watched in dismay as the Trump administration targeted institutions on the East Coast. It canceled $400 million in grants and contracts with Columbia University over claims of antisemitism. After Harvard University refused to comply with the administration’s demands in April, federal officials vowed to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants.
“[The President] was making clear that he was willing to use grant money in his hostage-taking to get universities to acquiesce in reforms he wanted,” says Polsky, a clinical professor of law and director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley. She was stunned by the feeble resistance. “I saw Paul Weiss and other East Coast law firms start to cave, and I thought, Oh my God, these incredibly well-resourced private institutions are not putting up a fight. What’s going to happen when this marches westward and comes to public universities that have fewer assets to resist?”
More than half of the UC system’s total research awards come from federal funds. As Polsky heard stories of colleagues losing grants, she wanted to help them fight back.
On June 4, six UC faculty members filed a class-action lawsuit against Trump and various federal agencies. The grant terminations, Polsky argues, were a combination of executive orders and directions to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, a “nonagency with no legal authority to terminate grants by ostensibly saying they were wasteful and inefficient because they involved disbursement of government money,” she says. The cuts were determined by “keyword searches to see if these grants involved any subject areas that had suddenly become politically disfavored by the executive,” Polsky adds, such as climate change, gender, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“Categorically terminating agency grants on this basis violates the Constitution, it violates statutes, it violates agency regulations governing how grants get made and terminated,” Polsky says.
Numerous organizations have made similar arguments in court—and they’re winning. On July 24, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing the DOD from enforcing its cap on indirect cost reimbursements. One month earlier, a US District Court judge granted a summary judgment in favor of thirteen research universities and their co-plaintiffs ACE, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public Land-Grant Universities. The ruling halted the NSF’s attempt to cut indirect costs, calling it “invalid, arbitrary and capricious, and contrary to law.” A federal judge in June ruled that the termination of hundreds of NIH grants was “void and illegal.” That same month, sixteen states sued the Trump administration in federal court to block NSF cuts. The following month, a coalition of six organizations representing educators and researchers, including the American Association of Colleges and Universities, filed suit in a US District Court, claiming that the NSF’s mass termination of grants violates federal law.
“These cases are incredibly important because Congress isn’t doing oversight,” Fansmith says. “The administration, very clearly in multiple instances—including all of the cases where we filed suit—is not following the law. So you need the courts as the backstop to ensure due process, to ensure the rule of law, to ensure that the harms the administration is trying to visit on campuses don’t come to pass.”
The UC case, however, is unique because it includes plaintiffs who lost grants not only from NIH and NSF but from entities such as the Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). It’s also the only grant termination case being brought as a class-action lawsuit and the first to be filed by individual faculty members.
“It is narratively, rhetorically, politically, morally more powerful for researchers to make their case to the public, individually, not subsumed by a big, faceless institution, and an institution that can sound elite,” Polsky says. “I don’t think Joe Q. Public really cares if there’s harm to the American Association of University Professors. But when you say, ‘My name is Nita, I’m a doctor, I study lung function at UCSF, which is run almost entirely on federal grants for applied medical work, and I have a project to make sure that low-income people who live in crappy housing do not die from asthma attacks when we have wildfires and tons of smoke in California,’ that’s powerful.”
The strategy worked. On June 23, a US district court in California ruled in favor of the UC plaintiffs, and by mid-August most grants had been restored. However, the Trump administration froze grants to the University of California, Los Angeles at the end of July, but on August 13, the court ruled the suspensions violated its June decision and ordered part of the funding be restored.
Each victory is important, Fansmith says.
“The courts are what holds the line until the public comes around and catches up with what’s right,” he says. “And public opinion shifts how policy is implemented.”
It was a fiery declaration. In an April post about cuts to federal research funding on his “Can We Still Govern?” blog, Don Moynihan and a coauthor state that universities should not abandon a partnership that made America great. Their suggestion: “We need to collectively raise hell.”
This means standing strong, both in the courtroom and the court of public opinion. So has higher ed effectively raised collective hell in the initial months of Trump 2.0?
“I would probably give them a B-minus,” says Moynihan, the J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. “The public is mostly not aware of universities’ research function and its value. That has made it easy for people like Elon Musk to present universities as inherently wasteful, as opposed to, these are competitive grants that are in the federal government’s interests to make.”
Institutions need to communicate not just the dubious legality of grant terminations, Moynihan and others believe, but the importance of research. Among the talking points: In fiscal year 2024, NIH funding “directly and indirectly supported 407,782 jobs and produced $94.58 billion in new economic activity nationwide—or $2.56 of economic activity for every $1.00 of research funding,” a recent report from United for Medical Research states. Of the 356 drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019, 354 had NIH funding, a 2023 JAMA Health Forum study found. And research benefits blue and red state economies alike.
Sharing this message may mean trading editorials for anecdotes.
“We put way too much emphasis on what we say in statements and op-eds, and not nearly enough on the informal spread of information as to why higher education and scientific knowledge is a public good,” Thorp says. “And if you think about who really has the capacity to spread that, it’s your local doctor, your pharmacist, your nurse, your social worker. We’ve all kind of hung back and waited for the associations to say things or some collective group of presidents, [but] there aren’t any magic words. There’s no magic video. It’s got to happen in a movement, and that movement needs to involve people who can spread the word among folks who trust them.”
Fansmith believes that’s already happening. Researchers are talking to neighbors. They’re speaking to national and local media. “They’re saying, ‘Look, this is the work I’m doing and this is what this administration has done,’ ” he says. If you’re forced to suspend research on diabetes, people understand the significance, “no matter your political affiliations,” he says.
Researchers are also talking with legislators. In April, leaders and students from San Jose State University met with representatives in Washington, DC, to discuss the impact of federal actions. Finn at Georgia Tech says 80 percent of his weekly calls to representatives go to voicemail, but about 10 percent of the time he talks with a staff person (one was even a former student). His advice: Be succinct. Voicemail has a one- or two-minute time limit, and staffers have to summarize calls.
In many ways, public support for science is strong. In May, 62 percent of respondents in an Associated Press/NORC poll favored maintaining federal funding for scientific research, as did 57 percent of Republican respondents. Higher ed makes positive contributions to medicine and science, said 64 percent. Penny Gordon-Larsen, vice chancellor for research at UNC–Chapel Hill, says she’s had positive feedback from lawmakers: “We hear a lot from lawmakers who know that our research is an economic engine for the state and how it contributes to the greater good of the country.”
Fansmith cites a recent Politico article about a White House meeting at which insiders brainstormed new ways to attack Harvard since previous efforts had failed.
“People who came out of that meeting were saying, ‘Look, we’re losing. The public is now sympathetic to Harvard,’ ” Fansmith says. That hasn’t stopped the efforts to cut funding, but every administration, he says, even this one, cares about public opinion.
“You don’t last long in politics if you’re not sensitive and responsive to public opinion,” he says. “Letting people know the consequences of what’s being done is the surest way to shift what’s happening. So speak up. Talk about what we’re doing. Because what we do on college campuses is amazing—and it’s been mischaracterized and misrepresented.”
A New Model for Indirect Costs
In February, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a 15 percent cap on reimbursements for indirect research costs (facilities and administration expenses). The Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Defense (DOD) also declared 15 percent caps.
The NIH often covers 50 percent to 70 percent of indirect federal research costs. Otherwise, “research at universities would not be possible,” says Penny Gordon-Larsen, vice chancellor for research at UNC–Chapel Hill.
In April, a US district judge permanently blocked the NIH cap, but the Trump administration has appealed. The DOE and DOD caps have been temporarily blocked by judges; the NSF cap has been delayed following a lawsuit by universities and higher ed organizations.
In July, the Joint Association Group (JAG) on Indirect Costs, formed by ten research and higher ed organizations, proposed a new model for calculating indirect costs. The Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) model places research costs in three categories: Research Performance Costs, a.k.a. direct costs; Essential Research Performance Support (ERPS), indirect costs for a specific project; and General Research Operations (GRO), indirect costs for campus infrastructure and services needed for research. GRO costs would be charged at 15 percent of the total project budget.
FAIR also gives institutions two options for calculating all four categories of ERPS. One allows institutions to charge ERPS costs to the budgets of individual research projects. The other allows institutions to charge two of the four ERPS categories to the project’s budget. The other two would be charged at 10 percent of the total budget.
“FAIR provides greater accountability and transparency to the American taxpayer,” JAG said in a statement. Adds Gordon-Larsen, who participated in JAG: “This is complete reform in how we do the indirect cost reimbursement.”
The group hopes that Congress or the Office of Management and Budget will adopt the model this year.
Illustration by David Weissberg
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