When the federal funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health were first announced in February, Swati Nagar, a professor in the School of Pharmacy at Temple University, felt it as “a gut punch to the research enterprise of universities in America.” For now, these cuts are on hold after Federal Judge Angel Kelly extended the initial injunction issued on February 10.
The devastation of morale in the sciences, typically receiving the bulk of NIH funds, has been acute over the past three months. Nagar, whose research on drug disposition in humans has received NIH support, emphasized to me that these cuts would likely impact researchers across the university.
Josh Gladden, Temple’s Vice President for Research, confirmed this in a recent email. The Lewis Katz School of Medicine will suffer the largest cuts, he wrote, but the Colleges of Public Health and Liberal Arts, and the Schools of Pharmacy and Dentistry could also suffer from significant reductions in federal research support.
Federal grants serve a few different needs for research teams, and are broken into two distinct categories, direct and indirect costs. The former includes lab supplies, equipment, patient care, assistantships (stipends and/or tuition remission), and salaries.
The proposed cuts target the latter, also known as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) expenses, associated with overhead costs. Until now, these reimbursements have been regularly negotiated and based on demonstrated real costs to Temple.
Nagar, who also serves as Associate Vice Provost for Graduate Education, told me, this federal money supports the infrastructure of all research, not just the projects that receive the grants. This negative trickle-down effect could damage research projects not directly connected to NIH funding.
Indirect funds could be used for preventative maintenance of equipment or the offsetting of salary expenses. Lab managers, who are staff scientists, could be paid with up to 50% of indirect costs, according to Nagar. This helps when a research team is between funding. If the cuts move forward, many highly trained scientists could lose their jobs.
Labs are also shared by researchers receiving funds from a range of sources. If a lab needs a centrifuge that isn’t covered by direct costs, then indirect funds could cover that expense. The entire lab would benefit from the new centrifuge.
President Fry’s February 9 email details the severity of these cuts. Temple had been receiving reimbursements at a rate of 58%. The new rate, also the maximum for any research university, would drop to 15% under the revised guidelines. This revision uses a standardized market-based model for funding rather than each institution negotiating rates based on their actual costs.
The guidelines use the maximum reimbursement rate for private funding sources such as the Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to justify their rationale. Rates for those organizations range from 10%-15%. It’s possible those percentages are calibrated according to the historically larger amount of federal support rather than an idea that these numbers are the only rational ones to use.
Ken Kaiser, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, told me in a recent email that Temple would lose up to $18 million in cost recovery, if F&A is capped at 15%. These losses “would largely need to be made up by realizing efficiencies.” In other words, Temple researchers would need to find ways to do their work with less waste and fewer resources.
Notably, there are differences between the interests of a private funding source and that of the federal government. The former can make decisions that are based on discretionary prerogatives of individuals. Profit interests in those cases might not be too far in the background. The latter has maintained the goal, at least since the post-WWII era, of improving the health of American citizens, without regard to financial profit, as a matter of national interest.
James Byrnes, professor in the College of Education and Human Development, insists that without federal institutes like the NIH, no one would be doing long-term research on diseases like Alzheimer’s or on how to improve the recovery of stroke victims.
He described for me Dr. Denise Faustman’s difficulty in getting funding for her research on the use of bacillus Calmette-Guérin for treating type 1 diabetes. This drug, initially used for treating tuberculosis, is inexpensive. If Faustman proved the drug’s efficacy, the pharmaceutical industry stood to gain very little.
After many years, the Iacocca Foundation helped raise money for Faustman’s work. The funding hinged on the fact that Lee Iacocca, the Chrysler CEO during the 1980s, wanted to see a cure for the disease because his wife, Mary, had died from diabetes-related complications.
The NIH also played a supporting role when researchers successfully reproduced the findings of Faustman’s work. But without the initial investment based on the discretionary concerns of the Iacocca Foundation, this research could have been further delayed.
Nagar also commented on the long-term nature of scientific research, accepting that her work might not have an impact in her lifetime. Studies build upon studies. Perhaps the people making the current funding decisions as well as the general public might not fully understand this, she said.
The development of Covid-19 vaccines within a year of the first cases of the illness illustrates Nagar’s points. It might seem, to many people, as if the vaccines appeared quickly. In reality, those treatments relied on NIH funded research first published by Katalin Karikó and Drew Weismann in 2005. There was little interest in their work on mRNA, initially. But the pandemic highlighted the significance of their findings.
By the end of 2020, Pfizer and Moderna had developed two vaccines based on Karikó and Weismann’s research. These scientists, who at the time were both affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. That’s nearly twenty years after the publication of their first studies on mRNA.
The recent decision by the Trump administration to cancel funding for new vaccine studies for Covid-19 and other pathogens that could possibly lead to another pandemic is, along with the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Secretary of Health and Human Services, could be seen as purely anti-science.
But arguments made by the Heritage Foundation reveal a larger goal to delegitimize the role of expertise in American lives and to eliminate the ability of higher education to serve as an informal check on power. Defunding universities, via cuts to scientific research, is a means to their desired outcome.
Without question, higher education institutions play a substantial part in the development of scientific knowledge. Perhaps even more than that, these institutions help students develop the critical thinking skills necessary to ask questions of their leaders, whether they are liberal, conservative, or otherwise.
Historically, the liberal arts and social sciences have been the targets of those looking to weaken higher education. Faculty who teach and publish in those disciplines have often been accused of being too liberal or too woke. Critical race theory and gender studies have been two of the more recent focal points of attack.
The prerogative of the current administration maintains this drive, but has expanded to include the devaluation of the sciences as a means to bring higher education institutions to heel. Perhaps a loss of scientific progress is a reasonable overhead cost, for conservative critics, if this larger disciplinary goal can be achieved.
“Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense,” by Heritage Foundation researchers Jay P. Greene and John Schoof, avoids discussing any examples of NIH funded research saving the lives of American citizens in their argument for market-based NIH funding.
Instead, they insist that indirect cost reimbursements are used to subsidize DEI programs at universities around the country, urging that federal research funding be reduced as a way to curtail DEI initiatives. Arguments like Greene and Schoof’s became the foundation for Project 2025, which appears to be a guiding doctrine for this administration.
Under Temple’s RCM budgeting model, F&A funds are distributed to the deans of colleges to buy and maintain equipment, fund research opportunities for students, and support conference travel costs, according to Gladden.
Kaiser, in our email exchange, confirmed, “There is no truth to the claim that F&A reimbursement funds DEI programs. [They] are allocated to the schools. IDEAL [Temple’s university-wide diversity and inclusion office] is funded by the general operating budget, which mostly comes from tuition and state appropriations.” He went on to tell me that the appropriations are derived purely from state-generated funds.
Byrnes, who has also served as the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs, rejects the claim that F&A funds are for “woke purposes.” These proposed cuts reflect a misunderstanding of the relationship between NIH funding and university research. The cuts appear to be indiscriminate, he told me. It’s possible, he went on, that the Trump administration’s goal is to reduce costs. We didn’t discuss the Heritage Foundation documents. If salaries make up a big part of a budget, he suggested, those can often lead to the first cuts.
This fits with Elon Musk’s strategy of “zero-based budgeting.” According to this model, all financial expenditures in a department or a company are cut to $0.00. Any cost added to a budget from that point must be justified as necessary. It involves continually making the case for departmental needs and can become an administrative burden. The use of zero-budgeting in this environment has become one way to realize the Heritage Foundation’s goals.
This model is widely used by start-ups in Silicon Valley. Musk used it to rebuild Tesla when it was on the verge of bankruptcy and during his takeover of Twitter. There is also an element of built-in impulsivity that is unproductive and possibly dangerous. Just think of the nuclear scientists fired on a Thursday only for the government to seek rehiring them by the end of that weekend.
Byrnes emphasized to me how competitive the NIH funding process can be, with the rigorous demands of peer-review panels ensuring integrity in the process. Each applicant must state why their work is cutting-edge and how it will help solve particular health concerns. The projects need to have national significance. Applicants have around a 6% chance of receiving funding for their project. By comparison, scholars have around a 20% chance of publication in an academic journal. These numbers, for Byrnes, show how the assumption of wasteful spending is fallacious.
After our initial conversation, he wrote in a follow-up email, “the grant cuts affect academic freedom since we get funded to conduct research on significant topics, including alleviating mental health problems and improving educational outcomes. If the administration does not like us focusing on certain topics and cuts our funding, that is infringing on academic freedom and is a form of censorship.”
The long-term effects of these cuts in medical terms are not hard to imagine. There will be more illness and death. Many highly-skilled people could lose their jobs. Families will likely watch their loved ones suffer due to lack of treatments. Borrowing the framing of Angus Deaton and Anne Case, Byrnes described the deaths to come as those of despair. Lurking behind these policy changes, he went on, is racism, adding that “it’s just plain cruel to stop this money.”
Nagar’s perspective on how these cuts will impact her lab research provides insight into the long-term effects at the institutional level. If equipment breaks down due to lack of maintenance, this can delay research by at least 2-4 months. These labs are shared spaces that require scheduling. This is troubling for a faculty researcher but poses more acute problems for graduate students. If a lab schedule falls behind, the timeline for dissertation defenses also gets longer.
These cuts also intersect with the Executive Order ending federal DEI programs. A Japanese American high school student in the Philadelphia area had been consulting with Nagar for a year as the two of them planned for the student to gain research experience alongside Nagar this summer. Nagar’s grant status at the time would have made it possible to pay the student for her work.
The day the order was announced, Nagar told me, she checked the link for the student to apply and it had been removed. This meant the student could no longer be paid but could volunteer their time. It’s easy to see how the elimination of this student’s opportunity to develop crucial scientific research skills could cast a long shadow over her intellectual interests. I would also imagine that there must be other young people in similar predicaments around the country.
Nagar, who emigrated from India as a student, believes that many scientists will try to leave the country for research opportunities abroad. She told me, “I came [to the United States] because it was the cutting edge of science being carried out in academic institutions.” If this ceases to be true, she worries, how will the U.S. attract the best minds and how will American universities stay the best in the world.
The cascade of executive orders and revised regulations have created an overall feeling of chaos. And not only for academics. As Michel Foucault points out in his work, chaos can be a way to maintain and reinforce power. For those wielding the power, chaotic environments do not feel disordered. Those who bear the brunt of disciplinary action are the ones who feel destabilized.
Over the past two months universities have found themselves more and more on the defensive. Perhaps the Trump administration considers the issue of NIH cuts more like a chain-jerking negotiation in which universities are given an absurd low-ball offer. This is one facet of bringing us all to heel. When the cuts eventually make their way through the courts, it’s possible that funding could be cut to 25%, not 15%. This would give the administration the ability to say that the cuts aren’t so bad and that universities should be thankful. But the goal to control will have been achieved.
President Fry’s April 4 email to the Temple community acknowledges the difficulties facing higher education. The president insists that “Temple University will be well equipped to rise to these challenges. This is one of the most consequential public urban research universities in the nation and our mission of access—a mission rooted in meeting every student where they are—will ensure that we stay relevant amidst any challenges that will inevitably arise.”
It is reassuring to hear President Fry defend what many of us consider to be unique about our institution. We will need leaders at Temple and throughout the region who believe in what we do. The recent $27.5 million gift from Sidney and Caroline Kimmel for a new building housing the Klein College of Media and the Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts represents the type of financial support that universities might need to compete for if federal funding remains low for a sustained period.
Chasing down donations is a tough game to play, given that we don’t seem to live in an era of generous philanthropy, not to mention that this would make universities even more subject to the whims of private donors.
But as President Fry declared in his investiture speech, “we must redouble our efforts to remind the federal government of the direct connection between university-led scientific research and America’s future greatness and economic prosperity.” The uncertainty and confusion many of us feel right now means this will not be short work. It will require patience, stamina, and a refusal to cave under the pressure of federal leadership that neither cares about our work nor the well-being of our fellow citizens.
Perhaps the only way to prevent the elimination of our academic freedom and preserve our commitment to educating our students is to do the opposite of what this federal administration expects of us.
