The Trump administration has terminated over $2.5 billion nationwide in higher education federal research funding since the end of April, leaving some states with around half a billion in losses.
That’s according to a new crowd-sourced database aiming to track cuts to contracts and grants administered by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
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The project is spearheaded by Noam Ross, who heads science nonprofit rOpenSci, and Scott Delaney, a researcher at Harvard University. Their findings come from government websites, social media accounts, news reports and scientists who self-reported. All grants were then vetted by their serial numbers.
Findings
Contracts containing the words “HIV,” “gender,” “sexual,” “minority” and “women” were among the most targeted.
Projects containing research abstracts and public health relevance statements related to LGBTQIA+ issues also suffered major cuts, corresponding with President Donald Trump’s new U.S. policy recognizing only sex assigned at birth.
The top states to have lost funding are:
- New York: $641,444,496
- North Carolina: $608,673,113
- Washington: $409,639,605
- California: $135,761,522
- Georgia: $98,133,584
- Florida: $68,877,544
Columbia University in New York and its related campuses have lost the most grants at 175, a far cry from Johns Hopkins University (21) and Yale (17). Columbia and Johns Hopkins have both announced faculty layoffs directly related to the funding cuts.
In related news, the National Science Foundation is decreasing reimbursements to institutions for indirect costs related to federal research to 15%. At least 13 institutions are now suing the National Science Foundation to stop the spending cuts. Judges have blocked similar moves by the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy.
The federal government is also preparing to abolish all 37 divisions of the National Science Foundation as a result of Trump’s skinny budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, Science reports. The administration stated that the agency “has fueled research with dubious public value” in areas including climate, clean energy and economic sciences.
