April 10 (UPI) — The Trump administration’s threats to hold up federal funding for major universities has researchers seeking alternative resources.
The administration has singled out Columbia, Brown, Harvard, Princeton and others over allegations of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile universities across the country are losing grant funding due to President Donald Trump’s executive order to cut costs at the National Institutes of Health.
Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy with the Association of American Universities, told UPI almost all research universities are having grants terminated.
“We’ll lose essentially what has been one of the most successful systems for funding and advancing scientific research in the world,” Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy with the Association of American Universities, told UPI. “By taking away from researchers on certain campuses, you’re defunding the best researchers in areas like AIDS, vaccines, cancer research.”
Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, professor and chair of Columbia University’s environmental health sciences department, told UPI her team is rethinking how it will move forward with research that is already underway. She is concerned about the effect the federal government’s decision to withhold grant funding will have on future scientists.
“We have a strong motivation to continue advancing this work,” she said. “We are looking at all potential strategies, looking for additional funding through other philanthropic organizations and non-government organizations.”
The research Navas-Acien is involved in seeks to identify environmental factors — such as water contamination or poor air quality — that affect the health of people in certain communities and to solve those issues. Much of the research that benefits from federal grants impacts public health.
The government on Wednesday reportedly stopped $1 billion in funding for Cornell and $790 million for Northwestern University. The funding was tied to grants from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Health and Human Services.
Last month, the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education and U.S. General Services Administration canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University. The move caused some research projects to stop overnight, according to Navas-Acien.
“It’s shocking in the sense that I’ve never experienced anything like this,” Navas-Acien, who has been a professional scientist for more than 20 years, said. “We need to adapt quickly to this new situation.”
Research projects are often planned to last at least two years and as many as five to eight years. Navas-Acien explained the meticulous planning involved in carrying out her work and the agreements made between the university, government and communities at the center of these studies.
“You can imagine when you don’t know your research is going to be stopped from one day to another, many things are in the works,” she said. “Samples have been collected from people that need to be analyzed. We had a commitment to return those results back to those individuals. Now there is no longer funding available for us to complete that work. So those agreements we had with people and communities, we are not able to maintain them any longer.
“In some cases there could be a health risk for those individuals,” she continued.
The notification that projects were being stopped came abruptly. Navas-Acien said she received a notification when she returned home one evening that a project was being stopped at 10 p.m. that night.
“Now we need to adapt ourselves to start thinking of how can we finalize those research activities in an orderly manner so that we don’t impact the people, we don’t impact the animals, we don’t impact what is happening in the laboratory and we can see how we can do it in the best possible way,” she said. “We need to protect our data, we need to protect the samples. Ending research one day to another makes all of that very difficult.”
There are rare cases that projects are stopped without being completed but this is usually due to an ethical problem or an issue with the research that needs to be investigated.
Navas-Acien is concerned that the Trump administration’s approach to university research will have a detrimental effect on the future of the scientific community.
“I work very hard everyday to keep the motivation of my students high because they need to continue to see that there is hope in this work and this career,” she said. “I believe we need science. The country and the world needs scientists who think hard about important questions. We need to keep investing in the training of these super smart, bright people.”
Smith shares Navas-Acien’s concern.
“There’s such uncertainty in the system with all of these grants being frozen and terminated,” he said.” You have graduate students in the pipeline. They are working on their Ph.D. thesis on research on that grant. If the grant gets canceled, their life is upended. Meanwhile, you can’t predict how many graduate students you can bring in.”
Several universities have announced they will scale back the number of graduate students they admit into their programs next year due to a reduction in NIH funding. In February, the University of Pennsylvania announced it will cut admissions, including for students who have already been accepted into graduate programs. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also reducing the number of graduate students it will admit this year.
“Many departments are reducing the number of graduate students they’re admitting this year; for an institution grounded in research and education, having to turn away superb young talent is a striking loss,” Sally Kornbluth, MIT president, said in a statement. “And it’s clearly a loss for the nation too.”
Princeton University was notified last week that dozens of federal research grants are being stopped. Princeton president Chris Eisgruber confirmed this in a letter to students and faculty.
Agencies that suspended research grants to Princeton include NASA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.
“We have begun reaching out to affected faculty, academic researchers, and grants managers,” Eisgruber wrote. “My colleagues or I will continue to be in touch as information becomes available.”
The federal government has given financial support to research projects since World War II. The purpose for the partnership between the government and universities has been to support government interests and address issues that affect the people of the United States and the world.
In 1946, the National Institute of Health’s National Cancer Institute established a grant program to fund cancer research. Congress has continually approved increases in funding for cancer research on campuses.
Grant funding from the National Institutes of Health has resulted in a number of advancements in medicine. It contributed to helping Type 1 diabetics control their blood sugar with bioengineered human insulin.
Many vaccines were made possible with research that was federally funded, such as mRNa vaccines. It played a role in the development of flu vaccines, the Alzheimer’s treatment Donepezil and the breast cancer treatment Herceptin.
Components of the smartphone, such as the touchscreen, GPS, battery and multi-core processors were developed on U.S. university campuses.
Vannevar Bush, the engineer who advised President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the development of the atomic bomb, pushed for universities to be involved in government research. Universities were reluctant at the time, worried of losing independence and having their research become politically influenced.
When deciding how federal grants would be dispersed, Bush argued that they should be awarded based on merit, judged by the scientific community. This effectively minimized political influence.
It is not uncommon for research priorities to change with a change in the White House. Navas-Acien said researchers are used to the government changing its priorities when a new administration takes office.
“We have lines of research we pursue through our own initiatives but we also adapt to the research priorities the administration has,” she said. “We’re used to that. As scientists, we know different governments have different priorities. I am very respectful of any changing priorities while trying to advance the research we believe is needed.”
