What’s at stake: Federal grant funding under Trump

The Trump Administration’s efforts to freeze federal funding within a week of the president’s inauguration left academic research grants in limbo. Over a month later, researchers at Syracuse University are bracing for potential cuts. 

“It would break my heart to have to let anyone go,” said Tripti Bhattacharya, a Syracuse University professor and researcher. “So my priority is, how do I maintain salary for my staff, my lab managers, my postdocs and my grad students?”

Guidance for universities and researchers is mixed and changing in the wake of the administration’s Jan. 27  order to freeze “all federal financial assistance,” including federal research grants issued by the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The White House rescinded the Office of Management and Budget memo two days later, and by the end of the week, two federal judges had ruled to temporarily block the funding freezes. 

Still, the future of federal support for universities – which includes grant money, financial aid, loan programs, contracts and more – remains uncertain for the around 1,500 colleges and universities that rely on more than $53 billion in grants and other types of federal support.

A study from the Chronicle of Higher Education estimates that SU received $68.5 million in federal funds in 2023. That’s about 4% of its total reported revenues of $1.7 billion. But the Chronicle estimates that money funds 115 different grant and loan programs on campus.

The NewsHouse has made multiple requests for an interview with Syracuse University officials for this story, starting on Feb. 10, hoping to better understand the university’s reliance on federal money and its plans in case that funding is interrupted. The SU administration has thus far declined to comment.

Some researchers at SU are struggling to chart a path forward amid the uncertainty. For Bhattacharya, who runs the Paleoclimate Dynamics Lab and leads research projects operating under five NSF grants, a chief concern is the capacity to hire new students on top of retaining existing staff and maintaining expensive equipment and supplies. 

“The thing I love most about my job is mentoring students, and I would hate to have to give that up,” Bhattacharya said. “I very strongly believe that you should always pay undergrad students for working in the lab at a fair rate so there isn’t any barrier to participation, so … cuts to federal funding actually make those opportunities more scarce.”

These costs — including salaries, equipment and supplies — fall under a grant’s direct funding. On Feb. 7, the NIH announced a new policy capping indirect overhead costs at 15%, down from the previously negotiated 30-60% rates. These overhead costs, known as facilities and administrative (F&A) expenses, cover lab maintenance, utilities and other operational needs.

The Trump administration argues that lowering these costs prioritizes research over university bureaucracy. But to Sebastian Karcher, a political science professor at SU and director of the Center for Qualitative and Multi-Method Inquiry, the NIH’s cap poses a serious threat.

“They pay my salary, they pay my graduate students, that’s great, but they don’t pay for my computers,” Karcher said. “They don’t pay for my phone. They don’t pay for Dorothy at the front desk. They don’t pay for the building, which is expensive. They don’t pay for the people who help me with complying with the federal regulations for the grants. There’s a lot the university does for me, even for the half of the salary that they don’t pay.” 

SU’s evolution into a major research institution coincided with the post-World War II expansion of federally funded research and the establishment of F&A costs, which Karcher identified as a critical component of the modern American research enterprise. 

As the U.S. government recognized the value of scientific inquiry beyond immediate practical applications, institutions like SU saw rapid growth in research infrastructure, where new labs and specialized institutes were part of a growing research ecosystem based on federal-university partnership.

The climate that spawned that investment has turned into a deep skepticism in the value of research and higher education in general.  That worries Karcher, who said a rollback now would be a threat to the country’s basic research apparatus. 

“It sounds terrible, right? Like the universities are grabbing half of people’s demand, and instead of doing the research, they get this money from the government,” Karcher said. “It’s very hard to sell this, and because of that, it may have the most sticking power and would be one of the most devastating things if it actually happened. The contemporary research university would be crushed.” 

As an R1 research institution, SU relies heavily on funding, with an F&A costs rate of 49.5% for on-campus research—higher than the national average of 25-33% but similar to peer universities. Boston University, also R1-designated, has a higher rate at 63.5%, while major research institutions like Caltech, Rockefeller, and Harvard negotiate rates around 70%. If the 15% cap remains, SU could lose millions each year, creating significant funding gaps.

Funding for specific areas of research also remains up in the air. Alongside its rescinding of the initial Jan. 27 funding freezes, the Trump administration clarified that the freeze would only target “programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders,” namely DEI initiatives and environmental programs associated with the Green New Deal. 

Bhattacharya, whose research focuses on global climate change through the lens of regional rainfall, said a lack of guidance from the top has meant chaos and speculation among the scientific community on whether funding that doesn’t align with the administration’s priorities will be pulled. She said that despite that scenario’s illegality, she sees the current situation as uncharted territory and worries about implications for her field.

She also identified a lack of guidance on DEI restrictions that contradict standards for funding proposals. Since 1997, the NSF has required that proposals outline the work’s “broader impact” components, which often include inclusion and outreach efforts.       

“That’s the guidance everyone in science has been operating on since (the 1990s), right?” Bhattacharya said. “Once we’re told what they expect us to do, then we’re going down that road. But really the guidance we’re relying on is what Congress has been telling scientists for decades at this point.”

Karcher also expressed concern with how far-reaching and confusing a DEI label is and pointed to the experiences of colleagues in the hard sciences who have had their work subjected to scrutiny over DEI-associated language, even before recent federal changes.

In October 2024, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz released a report — which included 10 grants awarded to research at SU — detailing NSF grant-funded research it identified as promoting DEI tenets based on a collection of keywords and phrases like “inclusive,” “culturally relevant,” “racial inequity” and “climate change.” 

Among the SU projects cited in the report are research projects on coatings for gravitational wave detectors and problems in convex geometric analysis, which include “broader impacts” in line with NSF criteria. 

“That seems important to me, and, regardless of your politics, that should seem important to you, I think,” Karcher said. “But that’s the type of thing that’s going to go first.”

The NSF is in the process of examining thousands of active research grants against a similar list of keywords, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post and screenshots leaked to social media. 

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science. pic.twitter.com/L8HwpyUUKT

— Darby Saxbe (@darbysaxbe) February 4, 2025

Researchers themselves are also adapting the language they use to write about their projects, regardless of their work’s actual connection with targeted topics. Karcher pointed to the ultimate consideration researchers face, between risking the research itself and choosing to tailor some of its language. 

“There are maybe some very brave people who don’t. But as I talk about my research publicly, certainly I think about omitting terms,” Karcher said. “The concern is, do you really want to sacrifice your research that you think is important? The whole concern about censorship and people not wanting to say what they want — that’s happening everywhere now. But by using the wrong language, you’re just painting a target on yourself, and it’s problematic, right? You feel dirty doing it.”

Grant Reeher — an SU professor and research associate with expertise in political theory and democratic representation — says many organizations and businesses are pre-emptively moving away from certain kinds of DEI policies and rhetoric. He said the effects of this sort of self-censorship will start to show up in the coming months.

SU has not released any public comment on the direction of at-risk policies, programs or activities since its initial Feb. 4 university-wide email on the executive orders, which stated that “what remains constant is Syracuse University’s commitment to being a university welcoming to all.” The email also stated that the university’s government relations team and Office of Research were working to maintain communication with the federal delegation and with researchers, respectively.

When it comes to academic freedom, Reeher observed that the academy’s overall response to potential censorship is muted compared to reactions in 2017, when the first Trump administration attempted to cap indirect cost reimbursements for NIH grants at 10%. 

He added that he doesn’t necessarily see academic freedom being constrained, but said the question of constitutionality will come into play if the Supreme Court finds one or more of the orders to be in conflict with the Constitution and the administration openly refuses to comply with its finding.

“I cannot remember a presidential administration issuing this much of a blizzard of orders, calling for this amount of change in the way government works, this fast out of the gate,” Reeher said. “Several members of the Supreme Court have indicated in past rulings and their writings that they are inclined to interpret the powers of the president quite broadly, but these orders will push on the outer boundaries of that comfort level, I think.”

For Bhattacharya, advocating for science means thinking about it beyond its role in politics and reaffirming the spirit of open inquiry and innovation that established the U.S.’s research enterprise in the first place. 

“Science has knock-on benefits for other fields, for the economy, for society generally, and that’s why, as a country, we’ve tried to keep science non-partisan, right?” she said. “We often don’t see the benefits we’ll get 10 years down the line, and I do worry that we’re missing out on that edge of competitiveness if we decide to make the entire process subject to ‘who’s in power?’