“I personally think that the post–World War II system of big research universities funded heavily by the government will not continue.” That’s how one professor at a big state research university responded when I asked how he was feeling about our shared profession. That system is the cornerstone of U.S. higher education—at Harvard or Princeton, yes, but also the University of Michigan and Texas A&M. The research university has helped establish the meaning of “college” as Americans know it. But that meaning may now be up for grabs.
In the past two weeks, higher ed has been hit by a series of startling and, in some cases, potentially illegal budget cuts. First came a total freeze of federal grants and loans (since blocked, perhaps ineffectually, by two federal judges), then news that the National Science Foundation, which pays for research in basic, applied, social, and behavioral science as well as engineering, could have its funding cut by two-thirds. On Friday night, the National Institutes of Health, which provides tens of billions of dollars in research funding every year, announced an even more momentous change: According to an official notice and a post from the agency’s X account, it would be slashing the amount that it pays out in grants for administrative costs, effective as of this morning.
This latest move may sound prosaic: The Trump administration has merely put a single cap on what are called “indirect costs,” or overhead. But it’s a very big deal. Think of these as monies added to each research grant to defray the cost of whatever people, equipment, buildings, and other resources might be necessary to carry out the scientific work. If the main part of a grant is meant to pay for the salaries of graduate students and postdocs, for example, along with the materials those people will be using in experiments, then the overhead might account for the equipment that they use, and the lab space where they work, and the staff members who keep their building running. The amount allotted by the NIH for all these latter costs has varied in the past, but for some universities it was set at more than 60 percent of each grant. Now, for as long as the Trump administration’s new rule is in place, that rate will never go higher than 15 percent. Andrew Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me the administration takes the view that it could force universities to pay back any overhead above this rate that was received in the past. “We have currently chosen not to do so to ease the implementation of the new rate,” he said.
In practical terms, this means that every $1 million grant given to a school could have been transformed, at the stroke of midnight, into one that’s worth about $700,000. Imagine if your income, or the revenue for your business, was cut by nearly 30 percent, all at once. At the very least, you’d have a cash-flow problem. Something would have to give, and fast. You’d need to find more money, or cut costs, or fire people, or cease certain operations—or do all of those things at once.
It’s safe to assume that those consequences now affect every American research university. Some campuses stand to lose $100 million a year or more. Schools with billions of dollars in endowments, tens of thousands of students, or high tuition rates will all be affected. Just as your family has to pay bills or your business has to pay salaries, so do universities. “I think we could lose $1 million to $2 million a week,” one top university administrator, who declined to be named to avoid political scrutiny, told me. But the loss could also be much larger. Administrators can only guess right now. They don’t yet know how to figure out the impact of this cut, because they’ve never been through anything like it.
The cap on indirect costs could soon be undone by the courts, just as the freeze on federal funds was quickly put on hold. (Stuart Buck, who has a law degree and is the executive director of the Good Science Project, a think tank focused on improving science policy, told me that the cut, which is already being challenged, probably won’t pass legal scrutiny.) But whatever happens next, a jolt has already been administered to research universities, with immediate effects. And the sudden, savage cuts are setting up these institutions for more punishment to come. A 75-year tradition of academic research in America, one that made the nation’s schools the envy of the world, has been upset.
The “post–World War II system” of research that the state-school professor mentioned can be traced back almost entirely to one man: Vannevar Bush. His diverse accomplishments included his vision, published in The Atlantic, for a networked information system that would inspire hypertext and the World Wide Web. In 1941, Bush became the first director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, funded by Congress to carry out research for military, industrial, medical, and other purposes, including that which led to the atom bomb.
Universities in America received little public-research funding at the time. Bush thought that should change. In 1945, he put out an influential report, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” arguing that the federal government should pay for basic research in peacetime, with decisions about what to fund being made not by bureaucrats, but by the scientific community itself. Bush advocated for a new kind of organization to fund science in universities with federal money, which was realized in 1950 as the National Science Foundation. Then his model spread to the NIH and beyond.
Money from these agencies fueled the growth of universities in the second half of the 20th century. To execute their now-expanded research mission, universities built out graduate programs and research labs. The work helped them attract scientists—many of them the best in their field—who might otherwise have worked in industry, and who could also teach the growing number of undergraduates. The research university was and is not the only model for college life in America, but during this period, it became the benchmark.
Now many university professors and researchers believe that this special fusion of research and teaching is at risk. “I feel lost,” a research scientist at a top-five university who works on climate and data science told me. (She asked not to be named, because she is concerned about being targeted online.) Like others I spoke with this week, she expressed not only fear but anger and despair. She feels lost in her own career, but also as an American scientist whose identity is bound up in the legacy of Bush’s endless frontier. It’s “like I don’t know my own country anymore,” she said. Even though her work isn’t funded by the NIH, she worries that similar cuts to indirect costs will come to the NSF and other agencies. She said that her salary and benefits are paid for entirely by federal grants. If money for overhead gets held up, even temporarily, the work could get stopped and the lab shut down—even at a wealthy and prestigious school like hers.
Others I spoke with had similar reactions. Bérénice Benayoun, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California who studies how male and female immune systems respond differently to aging, has already heard that the NIH overhead cut might lead to salary freezes and layoffs at her institution. The people working in administrative, purchasing, and shared-services roles are all funded by this pool of money, she said, so they might be the first to lose their job. Mark Peifer, a cell biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, worries that his doctoral students and research techs might not get their paycheck if the lab’s accounting staff, which is also paid from overhead, are let go.
Both Benayoun and Peifer suggested that, in addition to harming their friends and co-workers, these changes would affect the pace of science overall. Some administrative duties might be handed off to faculty. “We’ll be able to do less science and train fewer talented people,” Benayoun said. Support for doctoral tuition—often paid from grants—could also be at risk, which would mean fewer graduate students doing lab work. That would slow down research, too. Some of these consequences might arrive “within weeks,” she told me.
Peifer told me he feels “both devastated and defiant.” His research relies on advanced confocal microscopes that are priced as high as $1 million each. Indirect costs on grants help a school like UNC invest in that equipment, along with laboratory cold rooms, electricity bills, and other, more mundane needs. Universities also use overhead to cover start-up costs, sometimes millions of dollars’ worth, for setting up new faculty with labs. Those kinds of investments would also be endangered if the NIH overhead cut is maintained. “It will mean the end of biomedical science in the United States,” Peifer said.
Biomedical science is probably not about to end. But Peifer and his peers do have reason to worry. Many scientists have devoted most of their lives to doing research, and they’ve done so in a system that is designed, through its structure and incentives, to wind them up. Even as their fields have grown more crowded over time, and grant funding more competitive, they may be pressured by their universities to spend more money on their work. The schools compete for rankings, status, talent, and students based in part on the number of dollars that they dole out in doing research, a metric known as “research expenditures.” Given all the pressure on professors to win more grants, and pay more bills, even just the prospect of a major funding cut can feel like a cataclysm.
The one that kicked in today may be over soon. When the first Trump administration tried to limit overhead on NIH grants in its 2018 budget proposal, its plan didn’t work. Congress rejected the idea, and the NIH appropriations language that lawmakers adopted in response is very clear: Indirect-cost rates can not be touched. The fact that the administration has changed them anyway suggests “no theory of reform,” Stuart Buck said.
At the very least, the cut to indirect costs will precipitate a short-lived funding crisis, of a type that should now be familiar to American scientists. George Porter, a computer-science professor at UC San Diego whose work focuses on how to reduce the energy required to run big data centers, has been through similar scares. In 2017, the Department of Energy briefly halted payment on a $12 million grant he was awarded after the administration sought (unsuccessfully) to eliminate the agency that funded it, Porter told me. Government shutdowns in 2018 and 2019 created further obstacles to his getting access to federal grants. “I’ve been trying to tell people that science funding is very fragile for some time,” he said.
But after most of a century of success and support from the federal government, research universities and their faculties may have become inured to risk. One computer-science professor who declined to be named because he was coming up for a performance review told me that few of his colleagues believed that anything would really change that much because of Donald Trump. “Everyone was wondering whether their grant funding would be delayed. The idea that it might be canceled, or that two-thirds of the NSF budget may be cut, just wasn’t something anyone believed could happen,” he said.
Now the sense of dread has reached even those in computer science, where grant money tends to come from other sources—the NSF, the Department of Defense, NASA, the Department of Energy. Any budget cuts brought on by the NIH could be felt by everyone across the university. “Suddenly there are some very serious rumors going around,” the computer-science professor said, including the possibility that faculty in his department would have to pay some of their grant funds back to the university to make up for the total shortfall. Even university leaders seem surprised. “This literally breaks everything,” one senior administrator at a major public university told me after learning about the NIH overhead cut. “What are they doing?”
If this cut sticks, or if new ones follow, universities will need to figure out how to respond. Some might press researchers to make up the deficit with future research funds, a practice that would make an already hard job even harder. Some might choose to invest more of their endowment or tuition proceeds in research, a choice that could cut financial aid, making college even less affordable. Big state schools could try to appeal to legislatures for increased funding.
Even if they head off a crisis, other institutions of higher ed might suffer in their stead. Nicholas Creel is a business-law professor at Georgia College & State University, a small, public liberal-arts college. Schools like his focus on teaching, which might suggest that it’s immune to the sort of government cuts that would be catastrophic for a large research university. But Creel worries that his college could be in trouble too, if the state government responds by shifting money to the bigger institutions. “That’ll mean less funding for schools like mine, schools that operate on a budget that those major research universities would consider a rounding error.”
In the meantime, the Trump administration’s cuts aren’t even set up to make research more efficient. The real problem, Robert Butera, an engineering professor and the chief research operations officer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told me, is compliance bloat. Buck agrees. More changes to the regulations and policies affecting federal grants have accrued since 2016 than they did in the 25 years prior, and universities must hire staff to satisfy new demands. In other words, the federal government’s own rules have helped create the rising overhead costs that the same government is now weaponizing against higher ed.
Inside universities, faculty members squabble about the details. Many scientists would agree that overhead is too high—but only because they perceive that money as being taken from their own grant funds. Administrators say that overhead never covers costs, even at the rates that were in place until last week. Despite all of this, few of those I’ve spoken with in the past few days seem to have considered making any lasting change to how universities are run.
Maybe this was never about efficiency. American confidence in higher education has plummeted: Last year, a Gallup poll reported that 36 percent of Americans had “a great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed, a figure that had reached nearly 60 percent as recently as 2015; 32 percent of respondents said they had “very little or no” confidence in the sector, up from just 10 percent 10 years ago. These changes don’t have much to do with scientific research. According to Gallup, those who have turned against universities cite the alleged “brainwashing” of students, the irrelevance of what is being taught, and the high cost of education. Destroying American university research does not directly target any of these issues. (It could very well result in even steeper tuition.) But it does send a message: The public is alienated from the university’s mission and feels shut out from the benefits it supposedly provides.
Scientists, locked away in labs doing research and scrabbling for grants, may not have been prepared to hear this. The climate and data scientist, for one, simply couldn’t believe that Americans wouldn’t want the research that she and others perform. “I just can’t understand how so many people don’t understand that this is valuable, needed work,” she said.
But now may not be the perfect time to make appeals to the value and benefit of scientific research. The time to do that was during the years in which public trust was lost. In a way, this error traces back to the start of modern federally funded research on college campuses. In “Science: The Endless Frontier,” Vannevar Bush appealed to the many benefits of scientific progress, citing penicillin, radar, insulin, air-conditioning, rayon, and plastics, among other examples. He also put scientists on a pedestal. Universities make the same appeals and value judgments to this day. Cutting back their research funding is not in the nation’s interests. Neither is insisting on the status quo.