Top universities face hiring freezes as federal research funding at risk
Princeton University and the University of California system have announced hiring freezes due to potential cuts in federal research funding, joining other top institutions like Harvard and Duke.
Scripps News
- The Medical College of Wisconsin has frozen some hiring, capped Ph.D. admissions and ended plans to launch a program for aspiring physician assistants
- The cuts come amid funding uncertainty driven by Trump administration policies that threaten or have cut research funding to universities
- MCW also lost $5 million in research funds after the Trump administration canceled eight of its grants, including one for studying HIV prevention
The Medical College of Wisconsin has lost about $5 million in research grants, frozen some hiring and halted development of a new physician assistant program, amid funding uncertainty driven by Trump administration policies, the college’s president said.
The details, outlined in an April 23 panel discussion, shed more light on how cuts at the National Institutes of Health, a federal agency that awards billions of dollars annually to universities, are affecting the Medical College, the second-largest research institution in Wisconsin.
John Raymond Sr., the Medical College’s president and chief executive, also condemned the cuts, warning that if continued, they would have a “profound” impact on lifesaving research at the Medical College and beyond.
“We will all need to shrink our research enterprises,” Raymond said at the event, hosted by Wisconsin Health News. “It’s not good for the country to choke off discovery science.”
The Medical College receives over $100 million a year in research funding from the NIH, which supports student researchers, faculty who lead research labs and the rest of the college’s research enterprise.
The Trump administration has canceled eight research grants to the Medical College, Raymond said, among hundreds of NIH grants canceled nationwide and related to transgender issues, COVID-19 or diversity, equity and inclusion — issues that the Trump administration sees unfavorably or as discriminatory.
But the bigger impact, Raymond said, has been from delays at the NIH that have slowed the issuing of new research grants or thrown existing ones into limbo.
“We’re tightening our belt across the board,” Raymond said at the panel discussion.
Medical College has a ‘soft’ hiring freeze for some positions, students
In response to funding uncertainties, the Medical College has implemented a “soft hiring freeze” on non-clinical faculty and staff and has capped the number of PhD students admitted, Raymond said.
“We had to do it on very short notice, because we’re trying to make a commitment to people who are here now,” he said of the cap.
The Medical College is still hiring clinical faculty, he said, but “we put a pretty hard pause on everyone else.”
Also, the Medical College has ended plans to launch a new master’s program to train physician assistants, also known as physician associates.
The Medical College had been developing the program, which Raymond said was slated to open in 2027.
The cuts to NIH funding have prompted a slew of lawsuits against the Trump administration.
In one of the lawsuits, a judge blocked a plan to cut all new and existing NIH grants to a 15% indirect cost rate, down from the 50% or more most institutions receive to fund the administrative overhead associated with research. The Trump administration has appealed the decision.
Another lawsuit, filed in April, is challenging the funding delays, cancellations and cuts at the NIH, where the process for issuing grants to universities has been disrupted by layoffs, meeting cancellations and delays in scheduling meetings to review grant applications.
‘A punch to the stomach:’ HIV researcher at MCW loses grant
One of the Medical College’s eight canceled grants was supporting a PhD student who has dedicated the last decade to studying HIV prevention.
Andrew O’Neil was awarded the NIH grant last year to study ways to increase use of an HIV prevention medication among vulnerable populations in rural states hard-hit by the HIV epidemic.
He spent the last year laying the groundwork for the project, including months building relationships with community organizers in those states who work with people infected with HIV or at risk of contracting the lifelong disease.
Then, on March 18, he was notified the grant — supporting his dissertation and his salary — was canceled.
In the notice canceling the grant, the NIH said the project was “antithetical to the scientific inquiry,” that it provided “low returns on investment” and ultimately did “not enhance health, lengthen life or reduce illness.”
“Worse, so called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination,” it went on.
The same or similar language has been used in cancellations of grants nationwide.
“It was a punch to the stomach,” O’Neil said in an interview in March.
Forced to abandon the research project he had already sunk months and years into, with no results to show for it, he had to adjust his dissertation and instead is using already available data collected by others.
The tumult has led O’Neil to rethink his future plans and question his research focus.
“I was wanting to stay (in Wisconsin) but now wherever I can get a job is where I’ll be,” he said last month. “That might mean moving out of state or looking somewhere different or potentially not being in academia.”
Raymond worries about losing the next generation of scientists, he said, if the research funding isn’t there to support them.
“We’re going to lose our momentum,” he said. “We’re going to lose our edge, and we’re going to lose the best and brightest.”
