Trump’s Funding Freezes Halt Medical Research, Deaf Education Training

On March 14, a week after the Trump administration said it was slashing roughly $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University, Jeanine D’Armiento received an email from Columbia telling her that two of her grants had been canceled.

D’Armiento, a professor of medicine in anesthesiology, was using the two National Institutes of Health awards to study people with rare diseases, she said. Her research appears to have nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion or “gender ideology”—broad concepts that the federal government had been targeting before.

“This work would have the potential to bring new therapies to patients with these fatal diseases,” said D’Armiento, who also serves as chair of Columbia’s University Senate Executive Committee. She questioned why the government would cancel the funding; it was paying her to conduct research it wanted and benefiting from the fact that Columbia provides her research infrastructure and pays about 80 percent of her salary.

The grant cancellations just mean “the world loses the research—my patients lose the research,” she said.

It wasn’t always that way. “Funding of academic medical centers is a brilliant strategic plan by the government that led to us being … the envy of the world,” D’Armiento said.

Now, the Trump administration is threatening America’s dominance in the field. D’Armiento’s is just one of multiple stories of researchers having their grants paused or canceled amid the federal government’s sweeping cuts to universities’ funding. Whereas federal officials justified some of the grant and contract cuts by saying they were related to DEI or other verboten subjects, more recent casualties seem to be part of the damage from the billions in cuts Washington has inflicted on universities for allegedly failing to address antisemitism.

The administration said it’s frozen more than $2.2 billion for Harvard University alone. That’s where Don Ingber directs the Wyss Institute. Ingber, who’s also a chaired professor at Harvard’s medical and engineering schools and at Boston Children’s Hospital, said his lab pioneered the development of “human organ chips.”

These devices—the size of USB computer memory sticks—contain channels lined by human cells, he said. Through them, his team can recreate the structures of human tissues and organs and their functions, including blood flowing through vessels or air moving through lungs, he said. The Food and Drug Administration says the technology could reduce science’s reliance on animal testing.

But, a week ago, just hours after Harvard refused a list of sweeping orders from the Trump administration—demands that The New York Times has reported were sent by mistake, though Trump has stood by them—the federal government ordered Ingber to stop work on two grants, he said.

One of them—funded by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA—was for a project using the chips to model effects of gamma radiation and to identify new drugs to mitigate those impacts, he said. The findings could help the U.S. respond to a nuclear reactor disaster or a nuclear bomb, Ingber said, plus help astronauts reach Mars by ameliorating the effects of the heavy exposure to space radiation they’d face on that lengthy flight. In a more down-to-Earth application, the research could’ve helped counter side effects of radiation therapy for cancer, he said.

The other grant—administered by BARDA but funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—was for studying how to use cells from astronauts to build bone marrows onto the chips, he said, creating “living avatars of astronauts” that would accompany them into space to test the impacts of radiation and microgravity. He said NASA’s significant investment in designing spacecraft payloads to carry these chips “would be totally lost if we just stopped this project for too long.”

Ingber said his lab hosts “terrified” young researchers from abroad who’ve been working on these projects and need employment to keep their visas. The Trump administration is “basically killing the future workforce,” he said. “No young people are gonna want to go into science. That’s what worries me the most.”

Furthermore, the federal government is slashing biotechnology research at the same time China is investing in it. “It doesn’t make any sense—there’s no strategy,” he said.

The administration’s cuts have also impacted Teachers College of Columbia University, which is a separate higher education institution. On March 7, the same day the federal government announced $400 million in cuts to Columbia University, the federal government terminated two Teachers College grants that were training educators of Deaf and hard-of-hearing children, Elaine Smolen said.

This means Teachers College won’t be able to train about 30 new teachers in the “huge shortage area” of Deaf education, said Smolen, a visiting assistant professor. The generic termination letter for the Education Department awards said each grant was “now inconsistent with and no longer effectuates the department’s priorities,” Smolen said.

“We’re not part of Columbia,” Smolen said. “But I don’t think that was clear to the administration.”

Spokespeople for the White House and multiple federal departments did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment for this story.

Smolen said 90 to 95 percent of Deaf and hard-of-hearing children are born to hearing families. As soon as these children are born, she said, their families “need immediate and specialized support—there are not enough people to provide that support.”

“Although our [termination] letter says that Deaf and hard-of-hearing children are not a priority, they are,” Smolen said. “They are to us; they are to the field.”

‘Shut Down Across the Country’

Some scholars are tracking the canceled grants in an effort to record the full scope of the lost or frozen research.

The Trump administration didn’t respond to requests for lists of the grants and contracts that have been cut or frozen at Harvard, Columbia and some other top research institutions that it has targeted since March. HHS does have a nearly 50-page list of canceled grants on its Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System website, showing terminations from the NIH, FDA and other HHS agencies. But this list doesn’t contain much detail on why grants were canceled, nor does it include terminations from non-HHS agencies.

Scott Delaney, a research scientist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross, executive director of the nonprofit rOpenSci, have been tracking eliminated NIH grants. Delaney said there are 176 canceled grants at Columbia University alone in their database, and “that, I guarantee, is not all of them.” He also doesn’t have any information on terminated contracts.

Furthermore, Delaney said, “We don’t have a clue about NIH grants that will be terminated or suspended at Harvard.” He said it took about three weeks to get a good idea of what had been lost at Columbia. And, he stressed, what’s happening isn’t limited to these Ivy League schools.

“Health science research is being shut down across the country—at public universities, at private universities, in almost every single state,” Delaney said, “lest anybody think that they’re safe because they live in Not New England.”

STAT reported Friday on an NIH email ordering staff not to grant any new awards to Columbia, Harvard, Brown University, Cornell University, Weill Cornell Medical College or Northwestern University. Inside Higher Ed asked NIH spokespeople about the directive and received an email simply saying, “NIH does not discuss internal deliberations on grant decisions.”

The research pauses and cuts, if not reversed, will harm patients. Sarah Bacon, one of D’Armiento’s patients who has lymphangioleiomyomatosis, a rare lung disease, said she directed people on her wedding registry to give to the Columbia researcher’s work after the Trump administration defunded it. Bacon said she had hoped to take part in D’Armiento’s clinical trial that would’ve attempted to kill the cells that cause cysts in her lungs, which are now down to 43 percent capacity and force her to sleep with oxygen.

“I think it’s insane,” Bacon said of the nationwide cuts. “It’s so shortsighted. Everyone gets sick—I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, New Right, Christian Nationalist, MAGA.”

“They are taking us back 50 years,” she said. “It’s regressive, it’s inhumane, it’s appalling, it disgusts me and it should disgust everyone—no matter what your political affiliation.”