Concerns over research funding persist despite restraining orders and lawsuits preventing funding freezes and restrictions. Photo courtesy of The Washington Post.
LILY O’CONNOR | NEWS CO-EDITOR | lkoconnor@butler.edu
Within the first month of his presidency, President Donald Trump has signed multiple executive orders (EO) and memoranda that have affected federal grant funding, specifically from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). While these orders have either been blocked or challenged by judges, they have caused uncertainty that is still impacting researchers and students at Butler and across the country.
EO 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing”, signed on Jan. 20, required that each agency, department or commission head terminate all grants or contracts related to DEI or “environmental justice” programs, services or activities. On Feb. 21, U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson in Maryland blocked the Trump administration from enforcing EO 14151 and other EOs regarding DEI as they relate to federal grants and contracts relating to DEI.
On Jan. 21, the Trump administration directed officials at agencies under the the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) including NIH to cease communications with the public until Feb. 1. This meant that NIH had to pause the essential step of publishing grant meeting notices in the Federal Register, which is required to have the meetings. However, there was only a partial lift of the communication freeze on Feb. 1. On Feb. 26, the NIH announced that it would resume sending notices of scientific review sessions to the Federal Register.
Although judges blocked the orders and memoranda regarding DEI within grants and contracts, many scientists and professionals throughout the country, including health sciences professor Heidi Rauch, are concerned that this is not the last of Trump’s attempts to reduce research funding.
“From a public health perspective, the main goal for the health of the U.S. is to eliminate the health inequities that we see, and a lot of those inequities are based on race and ethnicity,” Rauch said. “We need that research, and we need that funding, and we need to be able to tap into those communities and do that work.”
Biology professor Jennifer Kowalski has faced and continues to face many challenges in continuing her NIH-funded research. In January, she was afraid that she was going to face drastic cuts to her current funding, but it has remained intact after the blocks and lawsuits in February. She has now shifted her concern to renewing her funding, which expires at the end of July.
Her main concern for the future of her funding is the wording around her grant regarding DEI.
“My grant comes from a particular pool that’s focused on training undergraduate students,” Kowalski said. “Part of the mission of those grants has been to broaden access for all types of people … so I have a lot of inclusive language in there that I’m concerned may be problematic in terms of funding in the long run.”
Geoffrey Hoops, the chemistry and biochemistry department chair, is currently working on a grant application through the NSF with a group of chemistry and biochemistry faculty. Similarly to Kowalski, the particular program they are applying to requires part of the proposal to address how they are going to impact a diverse body of students equitably.
“There was DEI content that was required for the grant,” Hoops said. “We’re now just waiting to see what’s there and what they’re asking for because we can deliver that. But if delivering that should cause our grant to be rejected specifically for political reasons, we’re not going to put it in there.”
Hoops also submitted a proposal for an NIH program in May 2024 that was rejected. He was planning to consider their feedback and resubmit, but the program page was removed from the NIH website.
“We were going to redo our grant and resubmit again this May, but I don’t know if it exists anymore or not,” Hoops said. “We tried contacting the program officer, and they don’t know if it exists anymore or not and refused to give us any more feedback because they said they just don’t know enough to tell us anything.”
Alejandro Hernandez is Kowalski’s full-time lab assistant, a position funded by Kowalski’s NIH grant. Hernandez recently accepted an offer to pursue a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Hernandez is concerned about the future of research funding as a whole, within Kowalski’s lab and his graduate school experience.
“I want to be able to do research,” Hernandez said. “I want to be able to do what I like to do, and we cannot do that with [the Trump administration’s efforts] putting things back for a little while, so hopefully that gets resolved.”
Despite the blocks to many of Trump’s attempts to eliminate DEI in research and freeze NSF and NIH funding, many universities are still confused and uncertain about how to proceed with graduate programs.
Hernandez’s road to graduate school was not easy. He said that many largely research-funded institutions, such as the University of Illinois Chicago and the University of Kentucky, have slowed their admissions of graduate students while funding is still up in the air.
“There were a lot of programs that I applied to and that I had interviews at, that I was denied from,” Hernandez said. “[The universities said] ‘We can’t really accept you because we do not have the funding for it, but we’re placing you on the waitlist, and if a lot of people reject then we will accept you,’ but that’s probably not going to happen with the situation right now.”
Universities are not completely sure about whether or not their funding will be cut off or current programs that are NIH or NSF funded will have to be cut.
Senior biology major Will Jacob is a student working on Kowalski’s research that is currently applying to schools for the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). The program is funded by the NIH and pays for the students graduate school, medical school and stipend. MSTP grants have to be renewed every five years and some universities are afraid that the program will not be.
This program can also be defunded with students still participating in it if the particular school’s MSTP program is up for renewal during Trump’s administration.
“Right now there are programs that are waiting to send out acceptances until funding is renewed, which sucks because then you’re left in a debate as to whether or not you should wait for those to happen and then risk leaving an offer out there with programs that [you have received acceptance to],” Jacob said.
Besides the anti-DEI policies related to grants, the Trump administration and the director of the HHS, Robert Kennedy Jr., have attempted to block funding that supports universities and university faculty.
On Feb. 7, the director of the NIH and Trump’s administration announced that they were going to enforce a standard indirect cost rate of 15% on funded grants, which would be a drastic decrease for many universities, including Butler. Indirect costs include facility and administrative costs associated with research.
According to Shanna Stuckey, the director of the Office of Sponsored Programs, Butler has a federally negotiated indirect cost rate of 41%, so a cut would cause a significant decrease in funds.
“Half of indirect costs go to the university budget for university-wide programming and research-type activities,” Stuckey said. “The other half goes to the colleges. When it gets to the colleges, it’s dispersed a little bit, but typically, there’s some portion that goes to the college itself, to the department of the faculty member that has the grant and then also to the faculty member.”
In response, 22 states filed a lawsuit that eventually led to U.S. District Court Judge Angel Kelley issuing a nationwide temporary restraining order on Feb. 10 and an extension to the order on Feb. 17.
The announcements and blockages of the EOs, memoranda and policies in such a short time period have caused widespread uncertainty and confusion throughout the academic and research communities. Many faculty and students at Butler are hoping for more clarity in the coming weeks.
