JOINFederal funding crisis upends US research ecosystem
The Trump administration has continued its attack on the federal workforce and is proposing sweeping changes to federal science funding, creating significant disruptions across the US research ecosystem that will impact scholarly publishing.
Since our last newsletter, the administration has, amongst other things:
- Continued staff firings across the government
- Announced plans to cancel hundreds of billions in current, already awarded, research grants related to DEI or climate change, amongst other topics that are ‘not aligned’ with the administration’s priorities
- Frozen federal grant reviews and initiated audits of grant evaluations to scrub them of DEI, climate and similar topics.
- Blocked the NIH from posting notices in the Federal Register, stalling $1.5 billion in medical research grants
- Cancelled 2,600 peer-review meetings
- Identified hundreds of millions of grants to cut that are identified as ‘funds wasted on programs that do not support’ either the ‘core mission’ of an agency or ‘administration priorities’
- Cancelled $400 million in funding to Columbia University, with threats to cut off other universities that did not quash pro-Palestinian activism on their campuses
Whilst many of these actions have been challenged or even temporarily overturned by Federal courts (e.g., forcing the Administration to rehire some fired staff), collectively they are forcing research institutions to make hard decisions and their long-term effect will be significant.
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Our Policy & Advocacy team will keep monitoring the news and updating our members. Sign up for our newsletter (if you’re not already) to keep updated or reach out directly with questions.