Research trapped ‘in limbo’ as courts block Trump orders

Although federal judges have temporarily blocked many of Donald Trump’s plans to overhaul the government through executive action, academic researchers who rely on federal grants say business is still far from usual.

Eager to keep working uninterrupted on time-sensitive projects — including medical research on cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease — university scientists are instead caught in a crossfire of conflicting guidance, with some still waiting on funding. And as Trump’s second term takes shape, many are uncertain if their life’s work will continue as planned or get derailed as part of the president’s crusade against alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” of taxpayer money and so-called woke ideology.

“I definitely wouldn’t say things are operating normally right now,” Ben Stone, a postdoctoral fellow in the biology department at the University of South Carolina, said in an email. That’s in part because he’s paid directly through a National Science Foundation grant that Republican senator Ted Cruz recently flagged as one of thousands of examples of NSF-funded “neo-Marxist” propaganda. Stone said his guess is that “we are a long way from clarity (if we ever get it), and that the worst days are yet to come”.

In the six weeks since taking office, the Trump administration has put out new orders nearly every day, including now-blocked funding freezes and a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Officials at the National Institutes of Health have largely stopped awarding new grants, grinding a $47 billion (£37 million) operation to a near halt.

And as the administration cuts staff and spending at the NIH, NSF and beyond, universities and researchers are bracing for more disruptions.

While judges have ordered the administration to restart funding of grants, Trump has made clear his intention to test the limits of executive authority, writing on social media last month that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Grants in ‘limbo’

It may take weeks, months or even years for the litigation to play out, but university scientists are already feeling the effects of Trump’s pushback against the courts.

Even though a judge has enjoined a 27 January from the Office of Management and Budget freezing most federal grants and loans, the Trump administration is still hamstringing the process for reviewing and approving grants from agencies like the NSF and NIH; the agencies collectively send billions in research funding to universities each year in a long-standing arrangement that also supports surrounding local economies.

“My grant’s future is in limbo,” said Eve Marder, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University who won the prestigious National Medal of Science in 2023. “I have no idea whether or not it will be funded.”

That’s because an NIH advisory council — which gives the final authorisation for disbursing grant funding — was supposed to meet in mid-February to review her grant application, which already had preliminary approval. But the meeting was abruptly cancelled, and Marder doesn’t know when it will be rescheduled or when — or if — she’ll get the money she needs to start the project. She’s far from the only scientist in that situation.

Advisory councils haven’t met since the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, issued a communications freeze for its agencies on 22 January. As a result, meeting notices for the councils, which typically convene three times a year in January, May and September, haven’t been posted to the Federal Register at least 15 days in advance as required by law. It’s not clear when the councils will resume.

The delayed advisory councils aren’t just holding up applications for new grants, which the NIH and the NSF — the third-largest federal funding source for university-led scientific research — are also reviewing for compliance with Trump’s nebulous anti-DEI orders.

Like many university researchers, Marder operates a lab funded by a multiyear grant from the NIH. Although she’s been working on the project for years, she’s not sure if she’ll get the final $250,000 instalment of the grant — which has already been authorised, but needs an administrative green light to get released — by 1 April as scheduled.

Any significant delays would put her in a precarious situation as both an employer and scientist.

“I have money to keep going for a little while, but if I don’t get another source of money in the next six months, I’ll have to shut my lab,” said Marder, whose grant pays the salaries of numerous postdoctorates and graduate students who work in her lab. “Scientists should always be thinking ahead to new and exciting things. What this is forcing us to do is say, ‘How can we finish as much as possible knowing that we may not be able to start new things?’”

Some 16,000 grant applications — or $1.5 billion in medical research funding — have been held up by the NIH since Trump’s return to the White House, according to NPR.

Is it DEI related? ‘No one knows’

At the NSF, where grant reviews were also temporarily paused last month to comply with Trump’s anti-DEI orders, money is also moving slower than normal. Federal data shows that the independent science agency awarded about $240 million in new grants in the month after Trump’s inauguration, compared to $365 million in the first month of Joe Biden’s presidency and $377 million during the first month of Trump’s first term.

For about a week last month, Adrian Fraser, an astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder who draws his salary directly from the NSF grant, couldn’t access his monthly stipend. He’s getting paid now, but he’s worried that the mentoring and community outreach requirements of his NSF fellowship will be flagged as noncompliant with Trump’s DEI ban and jeopardise his career.

“Things aren’t clearly defined from the top, so it becomes a messy game of telephone … No one knows what is considered DEI-related,” he said, wondering if there’s really anything stopping the NSF from cancelling his and other NSF fellowships altogether if they are deemed DEI-related. And since an NSF fellowship like Fraser’s carries heavy weight in faculty hiring decisions, Fraser said he and many of the other NSF fellows are “all worried our careers could be over.”

And that worry and confusion are continuing even after a federal judge blocked part of Trump’s anti-DEI orders last week, including a provision terminating “equity-related” grants.

“It’s just a temporary restraining order. I have no idea how long that’s going to last,” Fraser said. “None of us NSF fellows expect this to be the last word on the matter.”

It will also be some time before universities get the final word on whether the NIH’s plan to cut more than $4 billion in funding it gives them for indirect research costs — such as laboratory space and hazardous waste removal — can move forward.

NIH officials argue those costs are “difficult to oversee”, despite a complex negotiation and auditing process that’s been in place for years. But researchers and patient advocates warn that if the cuts move forward, they’ll compromise lifesaving medical research and undermine the United States’ massive research enterprise, long the envy of other nations.

That proposal is currently on hold as a federal judge considers arguments made at a hearing on 21 February.

But the judicial block hasn’t stopped colleges and universities from preparing for a future with far less federal research funding than they’ve been accustomed to for decades. Some have already implemented hiring and spending freezes, while others have paused acceptances for their PhD programmes — potentially drying up the nation’s strong pipeline of future scientists.

A subversive ‘budget cut’?

In the meantime, the NIH is resuming part of the process for awarding new grants, which has been on pause since late January.

Last week, the NIH announced it could resume posting some meeting notices in the Federal Register for NIH study sections — which review grants before sending them to advisory councils for final approval. The agency said it plans to submit notices for the next 50 meetings, according to NPR.

But Lizbet Boroughs, associate vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, said in an email that without the advisory councils also on the schedule, new research funding and studies are still legally prevented from going to scientists, jeopardizing “lifesaving studies and clinical trials that, absent this interruption, NIH would have approved”.

Jeremy Berg, associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning, health sciences, at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who also served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, suspects it may be part of a “stall tactic” designed as “effectively a way of cutting the NIH budget without cutting the NIH budget”.

If the NIH doesn’t spend all of its $47 billion budget by the end of the fiscal year on 30 September, the agency has to give the money back to the US Treasury.

“It’s probably illegal based on the 1974 impoundment provision, which says the executive branch has to spend the money Congress appropriated,” Berg said. “I think the view of the Trump administration and OMB is that that’s not true, that the executive branch can just withhold funds if they want to. That’s a huge issue.”

Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 after President Richard Nixon cancelled billions in congressionally appropriated funds. The law, which Trump has argued is unconstitutional, requires the president to get Congress’s approval to withhold portions of the federal budget.

But Trump doesn’t seem to be waiting around for the courts to litigate his interpretation of the law when it comes to research funding. The Atlantic reported last week that Trump officials pressured the NIH to ignore advice from the agency’s own lawyers to immediately resume grant funding to comply with court orders.

And with more news about the Trump administration’s challenges to both judicial and congressional authority coming out almost daily, it’s making it harder and harder for colleges and universities to “ride out the chaos,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at ACE.

“We also have the complication of a looming shutdown on 14 March,” Spreitzer said. “What has happened during previous government shutdowns is that people can continue to draw down funding for grants that are already awarded. It’s unclear if they’re going to be able to do that.”

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.