Are universities too dependent on federal support?

Destroying a decades-long scientific partnership will hurt more than higher ed

An emerging conventional wisdom is that universities became vulnerable to Trump’s authoritarian moves because they’re too dependent on federal research funding. It is undeniable that such funding certainly offers Trump leverage over higher education institutions such as Harvard and Columbia.

But viewing universities as “dependent” fundamentally misunderstands what federal research funding does, which is to fuel a knowledge-based economy. It’s not a coincidence that an administration with a fantastical model for bringing back manufacturing through a tariff war is at the same time destroying the engine of a modern economy, which includes innovations that have extended US life expectancy by almost a decade.

The idea of universities as federal cash addicts has wide appeal. Project 2025 emphasized that federal research spending at universities was “an open ended subsidy” and should instead focus on workforce training for those without college degrees. In the Wall Street Journal, Larry Arnn, the President of the right wing Hillsdale College, echoed the same sentiments. By never taking federal money, Arnn argues, Hillsdale was impervious to federal threats. On the left, M. Gessen, a New Yorker contributor, New York Times columnist and journalism professor at the City University of New York, wrote that universities:

must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.

In a separate interview, they said:

The approach that some people have been advocating is for universities to protect their endowments; to try to protect their science funding, to get through Trump’s four-year term, and then hopefully things will get better. I don’t think that’s realistic.

None of these critiques, however, acknowledge the reality that abandoning the federal government-university research partnership would have profound consequences. Federal research funds are not an entitlement, they are not a subsidy: they are subject to exceptionally competitive award processes and intense federal government oversight.

Moreover, these funds serve the public interest. Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good. And the rewards have been enormous. Everything from the internet to pharmaceutical and health care innovations evolved from such investments. We are richer and healthier for the investment.

It is important to be realistic both about the real threat that Trump is imposing using federal research funds, and the broader costs of abandoning a multi-decade partnership between higher education and the federal government.

The research funding cuts are already happening

While Trump threatens individual universities, like Harvard and Columbia, with cutting off their federal research funds, the bigger picture shows that his administration is already gutting scientific funding at a much broader level.

Over the past four months DOGE, with the full backing of the Trump Administration, has taken a chainsaw to the public research infrastructure. The federal government funds two-thirds of basic science research, with most of it flowing through universities. And that flow has become a trickle.

• The National Institutes for Health has currently only distributed about 40% of the funding that would be expected at this point in the year. In addition to almost a thousand grant cancellations, DOGE has engaged in a series of actions that have made it difficult to issue new grants, reauthorize already funded grants, and even pay out funds already promised. NIH is now requiring that grantees verify that they have not engaged in DEI programs or “prohibited boycotts” even outside the activities of the grant.

• The National Science Foundation NSF has awarded 50 percent fewer grants at this point in time compared to last year, with an additional 200 grants currently in the DOGE crossfire. Some of the grants have been killed because a word or phrase does not fit with the new regime’s agenda, e.g. research on misinformation, or because they appeared on Ted Cruz’s list of “questionable projects”. The flow of research funds is being effectively frozen contrary to court orders through deliberate red tape, requiring that decimated agency staff review and justify every dollar of already approved awards.

• Billions of additional research dollars from the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, Department of Education, and other agencies have either been cancelled altogether are in limbo.

Comedian Seth Rogen’s claim that Donald Trump has “single-handedly destroyed all of American science” at the “Oscars of Science” is only a slight exaggeration. (The claim was edited out of the public broadcast, another measure of the climate of fear that pervades America now). But it is true that no public figure has done as much damage to American scientific research, as quickly, as President Trump.

Rogen knows what he is talking about. He and his wife produced a documentary about her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s Disease. The federal government funds nearly $4 billion annually in research focused on the disease, which dwarfs private sector funding. But many of the NIH federally funded centers that do pathbreaking work on its causes, and potential cures, are caught up in the current funding freeze.

In just one example, the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center collection of nearly 4000 brain donations —from its research participants— is threatened by the funding freeze. Every year 200 people provide a donation. For obvious reasons, this is an irreplaceable resource. It was an extraordinary gift that these donors gave. They did it because they wanted to help find treatments, and even a cure, for this devastating disease. There’s nothing crueler than carelessly throwing away the contributions these Americans made—and are making on an ongoing basis. But this is just one example, among thousands of others, of the devastating impacts of these cuts, of what is at stake in gutting scientific research.

Why the private sector can’t replace higher ed research

Maybe the Trump Administration's end goal is to just divert federal research dollars to the private sector. This might enrich some Trump supporters, but it won’t replicate the basic science infrastructure. Here are three reasons why.

First, training and research are intertwined. What if US universities continued to train students while the private sector conducts most of the research? This doesn’t work. At the highest level, you cannot separate training from knowledge creation. PhD students participate in the research process from start to finish—how to design and conduct experiments, how to analyze data, and how to communicate what they learn. You can’t learn these skills solely in a book or in a classroom—you have to be in a lab, collecting data, and working closely with faculty experts. Indeed, a good fraction of NSF and NIH spending includes funds for graduate and postdoctoral research training. Notably, significant amounts of this funding is now either canceled or held up, and many universities have retrenched their graduate admissions for next year.

To give a sense of scale regarding higher education’s training mission, U.S. universities awarded 57,596 research doctoral degrees in 2022. The U.S. significantly outpaces the rest of the world, producing twice as many PhDs as its nearest competitor. Indeed, US higher education is one of the country’s most envied exports, producing a vast trade surplus. And US federal research funding is ultimately producing a large fraction of science worldwide, undergirding most published scientific research.

Private organizations simply will not—and cannot— step into the breach to cover the costs of training. While the collective benefits of training a highly educated scientific workforce are great, it remains too costly for individual companies to take on. This training is the pipeline for scientific innovation. Shutting it down might save money today but with disastrous long-run effects.

Second, the private sector doesn’t have the incentive to invest in basic research. While companies invest heavily in R&D to get products to market, they can’t take the kinds of financial risks required when doing the core basic science that ultimately feeds to that end stage development. For example, NIH funding supports 99.4% of new drugs. Information technology has been heavily impacted by federally funded university research.

Source: National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine

Third, the private sector will not treat knowledge as a public good. Rapid scientific development requires that we share and disseminate the knowledge that we create. The private sector acts in proprietary ways to ensure they enhance profits. Federal research funding does the opposite. It requires scientists to widely share the innovations, tools, and data that they generate. For example, NSF spends a good portion of its budget funding shared resources, like telescopes or detailed data collection efforts. NIH behaves in a similar fashion. These resources are shared widely (with careful and rigorous protections for human subjects) across the scientific community and the private sector.

Are we really spending too much on scientific research?

While nominal federal funding of science research in higher ed has been increasing, federal R&D spending has been declining since the 1970s.

As our colleague Beth Popp Berman points out on BlueSky, the US government spends about the same on higher education research as America spends on video games, or on pet food and treats. The percent of higher ed R&D funded by the federal government has been in steady decline for decades.

Making the case for competence in an era of incompetence

While Trump’s threats to withhold funding from specific institutions is getting the headlines, it is important to understand that the Trump Administration has effectively frozen a large fraction of university research already, with the goal to permanently decimate it.

Trump has gutted the capacity of the agencies, like NIH and NSF, that manage such funding. They’ve cut nearly 20 percent of the expert staff in these agencies, and hope to cut more. The personnel savings are minimal. The point is to stop them from doing their job. Scientific agencies can’t distribute funds if they don’t have employees to do it.

That’s step one. Step two will be to make permanent the de facto impoundments—with funding currently down 50 percent at NSF and 40 percent at NIH. For example, Trump’s budget proposes a nearly 40 percent reduction in NIH funding. It’s striking that this is effectively what DOGE has already done to existing Congressionally appropriated funds to the NIH. Watch for the administration to say that they are merely reflecting current cost savings in future budget proposals, by arguing that previously appropriated funds were left unused. Don’t believe them. The consistent strategy has been to undermine research funding.

To answer the questions we posed: no, universities are not too dependent on federal research support. That research funding, competitively awarded based on merit-based processes, more than pays for itself. The problem is not the money. It is a government willing to use the money — or any other lever they have — to strongarm our institutions.

Ultimately, universities may not have a choice about where the decades-long partnership with the federal government is heading. And they cannot trade their independence for money. Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that the end of that partnership will come with enormous costs. It’s hard to wrap your head around lost potential, but the simplest way to do it is to imagine what life would be like today without the innovations that have shaped our lives over the last eighty years.

Universities have been mostly on the receiving end of a culture war narrative presenting them as hotbeds of radicals. The reality is quite different. Universities, while not perfect, have effectively served the public, generating the knowledge that has shaped our modern economy and our lives. Right now America is getting a real-life lesson in what happens when fantasy drives policy. Universities shouldn’t walk away from a partnership that actually made America great, instead we need to collectively raise hell, reminding the public about what is at stake.