Looks like scientists and scientific funding in the U.S. are now facing a different type of cancel culture—one in which their funding from federal agencies is being abruptly canceled. More and more researchers have been posting on social media news about their research grants being abruptly terminated since President Donald Trump took office. There have also been reports of the National Institutes of Health wholesale yanking grants in particular areas, such as Sara Reardon reporting for Science about at least 33 research grants for studying vaccine hesitancy being pulled. And since a large proportion of scientific research funding typically goes to research personnel, the result has and will be job losses. For example, Johns Hopkins University is having to lay off over 2,000 people after $800 million in grants to the institution’s investigators were basically yanked, as Kanishka Singh reported for Reuters.
Federal Grants Being Abruptly Terminated
The processes by which these decisions have been made have been about as clear as mud mixed with orange spray tan. The termination letters have provide very little explanation beyond stock language like saying that the research award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This has been stunning to many researchers since a grant from the NIH usually represents an extensive long-term commitment. Imagine being in a serious long-term relationship with someone only to find one day a note that says, “You longer effectuate my priorities.”
The letters typically haven’t given the researchers and institutions any opportunity for further clarifications or modifications to the project either. They’ve included language like “no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.” Again, this is a bit like your significant other saying, ”No matter what you do, I won’t like you.”
If you are thinking that researchers who have lost their grants can simply get new ones to save the jobs of those working for them and even their own jobs, think again. It ain’t that easy. The whole process of applying for grants is a lengthy, onerous one, usually taking at least a year from the time the grant proposal is submitted till it being awarded, assuming that the proposal is part of the lucky 10% or less that successfully gets funded. So, unless you’ve got a time machine in the form of a DeLorean or know a charitable billionaire, you won’t be able to get new funding quickly enough to prevent job loss.
The kit and caboodle of grants being terminated have included various training and early career grants. Such grants are designed to help researchers establish themselves at crucial periods in their careers when they have few other options to continue their scientific work. Who knows how many may have to abandon their scientific careers as a result?
The loss of grants will also significantly affect universities and other such institutions. These institutions depend on funding for indirect costs from the research grants that researchers pull in for all sorts of things ranging from salaries for administrators to the maintenance of facilities as I’ve described before for Forbes.
Opportunities For Grants From NIH Being Pulled
Plus, it looks like a number of funding opportunities have been pulled as well. So, there are fewer things to apply to now. In a LinkedIn post, Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Stanford University, mentioned 76 notices of funding opportunities from the NIH being unpublished:
There’s been no indication whether these dropped funding opportunities will be replaced with new ones. Meanwhile, researchers may be quite reluctant to apply for any new grants until there’s more clarity on what may or may not be funded. And who knows if and when that clarity will come. It seems like the Trump Administration has been searching grants and contracts for particular terms to identify those to terminate, as I recently detailed for Forbes. But this practice has been uncovered by talking with and obtaining issued memos from various sources at NIH and NSF and not through official announcements or statements from the leadership of the NIH, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the White House.
Mass Cuts In Grants May Damage America For Years
As you can see, Salles described these cuts as “devastating” for “the American scientific enterprise. People will stop coming here for training (did you know 40% of American Nobel prize winners since 2000 have been immigrants?) and Americans will increasingly seek training and careers elsewhere.” She continued with, “This is a massive self-inflicted wound from which we won’t recover for generations.”
In addition, it is important to remember that the American scientific enterprise is not like Las Vegas. What happens in it doesn’t simply stay there. The American scientific enterprise ends up affecting all of society. When countries are trying to grow, they typically will invest heavily in science. It’s not surprising, for example, that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. included scientists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
So much of the stuff that you use each day is the result of science. You can also thank science for being alive so that you can use all that stuff. Before the advent of routine childhood vaccinations, many more kids used to regularly die from diseases like the measles and smallpox. Life expectancy in the U.S. has gone from around 47 years in 1900 to around 78 years in 2022, largely because of various health and public health measures that were identified by scientific research. That’s right, only about a hundred years ago, you would have already been middle-aged had you reached your 20s.
If American want to remain as competitive as it’s been in the world, it has to continue producing new scientific ideas and things. Michael Jordan and Larry Bird didn’t say, “Oh, now that I’ve won a championship, I’m going to stop doing this work-hard-and-improve-my-game thing and instead rest on my laurels and eat bon-bons.” No, they kept practicing hard and adding new skills, which not only made them great but kept them great.
Cutting scientific funding might do the opposite. It may discourage people from staying in or even going into science and encourage those who want to continue to do science to go to other countries. Those who would have become successful scientists may do other things to make a living like make YouTube videos because there just aren’t enough people doing that already.
This may only be the beginning of this new cancel culture that has emerged at the NIH and other federal agencies during the Trump Administration. Who knows how many other grants and grant opportunities will be canceled. I will continue to follow this situation, make inquires to the agencies and provide updates accordingly.
