“I’d summarize it as: fuck.” That’s what one senior university administrator told me when I asked about the chaos that erupted at the National Institutes of Health this week. Academics are in panic mode in the face of sudden new restrictions from the Trump administration. The Department of Health and Human Services has told employees of several health agencies, including the NIH, to stop communicating with the public. Even more disruptive for universities, the committee meetings for reviewing NIH grant proposals have also been abruptly put on hold until at least February 1.
“This will halt science and devastate research budgets in universities,” Jane Liebschutz, a medical doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, posted on Bluesky, in reference to the grant-review shutdown. The UCLA professor Lindsay Wiley echoed the sentiment, adding on Bluesky that the pause, which affects the distribution of a multibillion-dollar pool of public-research money, “will have long-term effects on medicine & short-term effects on state, higher education & hospital budgets. This affects all of us, not just researchers.”
Even if the mayhem ends early next month, it would still represent a large and lasting threat to universities in years to come. The NIH funds a major portion of the research that gets done on campus, and money from its grants also helps pay for universities’ general operations. The fact that this support has been switched off so haphazardly, for reasons that remain unclear, and despite the scope of troubles it creates, suggests that higher ed will be profoundly vulnerable during the second Trump era.
It’s hard to overstate the role of HHS, and the NIH in particular, in funding universities. In 2023, the department contributed $33 billion in research grants to American institutions of higher education, representing more than half of all federal spending on academic R&D. Indeed, HHS alone accounts for nearly one-third of all funding for university research—most of which is distributed by the NIH.
This situation makes the NIH a golden goose for universities, and also a canary in a coal mine. Researchers know just how much research capital comes from the agency—and they worry about the calamity that might ensue if those funds were to be tied up more than momentarily. NIH money funds everything from basic science research (figuring out what a particular gene does, for example) to the work that makes that knowledge useful (inventing a new gene-editing treatment, say). And its resources are put to use well beyond the field of medicine, with grants for work in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, social sciences, and social work, among other fields. Take that all away, all at once, and a mess of different kinds of researchers are left uncertain as to whether and how long their labs, personnel, and experiments can be sustained.
Not only is the NIH the most generous provider of government funding for research, but it also gives out money in a way that has secondary benefits for grantees and their institutions. For one thing, it generally doles out funds in larger chunks than other agencies. That’s good for individual recipients: Writing grant proposals is a lot of work, so the fewer grants you have to chase, the more time you can spend doing actual science. Some NIH programs allow researchers to ask for standardized, “modular” allocations—say, $250,000 a year—instead of itemizing every element of a budget request. That saves time for science.
NIH grants have their own appeal for university administrators too, in the form of payments for what are called “indirect costs.” Most federal grants pay fees to cover overhead for whatever research has been funded. That money helps pay for all of the campus infrastructure that goes into doing the research. This includes the buildings and labs in which the work gets done; the maintenance and management of those facilities; specialized equipment; the badge scanners, payroll services, and other costs associated with the postdoctoral researchers or research scientists who staff the labs; and other operational expenses.
Exactly how much federal grant money gets added to a grant for “indirect costs” is subject to negotiation. Universities work with federal agencies to determine the percentage, which may change from year to year. Some funding sources, such as the Department of Agriculture, tend to pay lower rates, with perhaps a 30 percent premium going to indirect costs. But the NIH goes very high, in general: Its rates will at times exceed 60 percent. Under such an arrangement, for every $1 million the agency gives to a scientist, that scientist’s university gets $600,000.
These overhead funds, of which the NIH is such an important source, are mysterious and complicated. Many universities rely on them to balance their budget. The problem is, schools almost always have to spend more money to support research than they take in from grants. They do the work anyway both because research is part of their mission and because it helps them compete for better students, faculty, and rankings. But with grant-funded research already operating at a loss, any long-term interruption of schools’ indirect-cost revenue could create a real financial crisis on campus.
Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of Science and a former university chancellor and provost, told me that many schools could weather these disruptions without issue: A university with a big hospital, for example, might use clinical revenue to offset uncompensated research costs. But some schools could be destabilized by even a small-scale interference with the flow of agency grants, and most research institutions would be thrown into at least some disarray.
An extended pause on grant funding isn’t happening, or at least not yet. And Thorp said that panic isn’t a useful response to whatever is happening at the NIH. It’s totally understandable for researchers, students, and administrators to be unnerved, he said, but there are many possible explanations, and “it’s best to keep calm and carry on.” My own university, Washington University in St. Louis, made the same suggestion in a statement sent to faculty from the vice chancellor for research. It read, in part, “While these disruptions are frustrating, they are occurring government-wide and are not focusing on university research activities or targeting specific scientific disciplines.”
But the NIH freak-out may have less to do with the present disruption (however long it lasts) than with what it signifies. If the viability of university research, and of universities themselves, can be so upended by a disarrangement of a single unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, then what might be coming next? Donald Trump’s nominee to run the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, has floated the idea of linking grants to measures of free speech on campus, according to The Wall Street Journal. And Trump’s executive orders have already made clear that any federal grantee will have to answer for its own DEI initiatives. The Trump administration has many bones to pick with higher education, and it seems willing to abide—and even encourage—whatever chaos those squabbles may produce. The present situation might be a fluke, or it might be a test.
