University professors face uncertain future after research grants terminated by Trump

For Jeremy Springman, a research professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump administration’s rollback of federal research grants has taken a personal toll.

On March 2, he learned that the Department of Defense had terminated a three-year, $1.6 million grant he was awarded in 2024 to study how climate change was fueling political stability and conflict in developing countries.

The research, Springman told Yahoo News, would look into ways to reduce “the extent to which climate change is driving instability and threatening our national security.”

Though the DOD did not specify why Springman’s grant had been terminated other than to say it did not align with its priorities, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth offered clues over the weekend, writing Sunday in a message posted to X that his department “does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”

But the climate adaptation grant isn’t the only funding Springman has had pulled by the Trump administration.

“Between the beginning of February and the beginning of March, we lost five grants that were funding my salary and my team’s salaries,” Springman said, including four research projects awarded through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The cancellation of the Defense Department grant, however, proved to be the final straw, leading Springman to decide to leave his “dream job” in academia for work in the private sector.

The Trump administration’s sweeping cancellation of federally funded grants to universities is part of its larger effort to shrink federal expenditures and to restrict what areas of study are worthy of receiving government money. That effort, several university professors told Yahoo News, could lead the United States to relinquish its global competitive advantage when it comes to higher education and scientific research.

'A really challenging moment'

Tara McKay, an associate professor of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University, learned in a Feb. 28 email that the National Institutes of Health had terminated her multiyear grant to study the effects of aging in the LGBTQ community because her project included transgender people.

"Your project does not satisfy these criteria,” the email, which McKay shared with Yahoo News, stated. “Transgender issues: Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”

The NIH had funded the $1.9 million study, one of the largest health studies of its kind, in which 40 researchers tracked 1,256 people for five years. But under Trump, the changing criteria for what will be funded made it a target.

“There wasn’t a ton left on the budget. I think it was $200,000,” McKay said. “The big impact is that you can’t renew these awards for another five years.”

“They go through a scientific review by well-established peers, and ours scored really well last October and met the funding criteria,” she said. “This was about to go through its next steps to be funded when the administration change happened.”

A tenured professor in a field now deemed essentially worthless by the Trump administration, McKay says she and many of her colleagues are trying to navigate uncharted waters.

“I think it’s a really challenging moment,” she said. “There is a lot of legal activism happening that’s trying to reverse or cut off these terminations. We have a lot of other projects that haven’t been terminated among the folks I work with and other LGBTQ health researchers. There’s a lot of concern that those projects are basically next.”

'U.S. will become irrelevant'

Over the last week, the Trump administration has also targeted individual colleges, withholding $400 million in grants to Columbia University over its alleged “inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students” and terminating $800 million in grant funding for Johns Hopkins University because of its foreign aid work with USAID.

“I received one of the 232 NIH grant ‘terminations’ sent to scientists at Columbia last night. My research focuses on improving maternal and child health in the US,” Jamie Daw, assistant professor of health and policy at Columbia University, wrote in a message posted Wednesday to Bluesky, a site where hundreds of researchers have been sharing their stories of losing funding.

The damage caused by the administration’s actions extends far beyond the professors whose studies have been halted, said Shana Gadarian, a political science professor at Syracuse University.

“This is potentially a direct harm to people who are, for example, waiting for a cure for cancer or a genetic disease. But also, you can’t do a half-study and expect that we will understand long-term implications of a drug,” she said.

Last week, in a lawsuit brought by 22 state attorneys general, medical associations and universities, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the NIH from cutting roughly $4 billion in annual funds that goes to universities to support research. In an internal memo, the NIH justified the plan as a cost-saving measure.

"The United States should have the best medical research in the world. It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead," the memo stated.

Johns Hopkins, a university that relies heavily on federal funding, announced Wednesday that it’s planning staff layoffs in response to the Trump administration’s termination of research grants. On Thursday, the school said it would lay off 2,000 workers in the U.S. and abroad due to the funding cuts.

Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at the university who is overseeing an NIH grant to study how to treat pneumonia patients, told the Wall Street Journal that the impacts of terminated federal funding would be profound.

“If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland,” he said.

Another consequence is that universities will simply stop accepting graduate students. On Wednesday, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School sent an email to students who had been accepted to its Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

“Due to ongoing uncertainties related to federal funding of biomedical research, UMass Chan, along with many of our peer universities, is facing significant challenges in ensuring stable dissertation research opportunities for incoming students,” the email stated. “Unfortunately, as a result, we must rescind all offers of admission for the Fall 2025 term.”

Ultimately, even with fewer students, graduate programs that want to continue performing research in the absence of federal funding may need to pass on costs to students.

“Where does that money come from to continue the educational mission of the university? Much of that is going to come from students and tuition,” Gadarian said. “You could imagine philanthropy and private donors coming in to make up some of that, but it’s unclear whether we have enough to make up for all of those huge cuts.”

In the short term, however, all of the professors who spoke to Yahoo News said that much of the robust research conducted at American universities would simply cease to exist.

“Over the next couple of years, at least, it just doesn’t seem like there will be much appetite for policymakers in this administration to be engaging with researchers,” Springman said.

That, in turn, could open up huge opportunities for places like Europe and China to take the lead.

“There’s a very strong concern that this work will leave and that the U.S. will become irrelevant in the research space more broadly.” McKay said.

'Attack the universities'

While this upheaval has not come as a total surprise for many professors who have had their research criticized by Republican politicians, the scale of the grant terminations is still difficult to comprehend.

“The American university system is a jewel,” Gadarian said, adding, “People come here from all over the world to study, and the federal government does not pick winners and losers in terms of what people should study. They leave it up to scientists and people with expertise, which leads to a great deal of innovation.“

But this is exactly the system that Republicans have spent years railing against. Delivering the keynote address at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vice President J.D. Vance laid out the blueprint for the coming ideological war.

American universities, he said, “control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country,” adding, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”