Updated May 16, 2025 at 6:35 AM AKDT
This week's $450 million in cuts from federal grants to Harvard University added to the growing pot of federal money the Trump administration has frozen in university research funding.
In the past four months, the total, at universities across the U.S., is about $11 billion. The cuts affect things like cancer research, diabetes treatments, new wearable technology, farming solutions and studying domestic violence: research across nearly every discipline and subject. More than two dozen universities have been affected.
To offset the damage, a handful of universities have moved to self-fund some research. On Wednesday, Harvard announced it would supplement $250 million to continue research efforts. Harvard joined schools such as Johns Hopkins University and Northwestern University in seeking to make up at least a part of the lost federal dollars.
But university leaders tell NPR it's not a long-term solution, given the high price tag. Even in Wednesday's announcement, Harvard President Alan Garber signaled that cuts, layoffs and "difficult decisions and sacrifices" lie ahead for the world's wealthiest university.
That's because when the government stops funding research, there's really no other entity positioned to pick up the void.
How university research built the American economy
The relationship between universities and the federal government traces back to the 19th century. In the 1860s, the government provided funds and land grants to states to establish universities focused on agriculture and science. In the 1930s, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Public Works Administration, an agency created under the New Deal, got involved in funding building projects on college campuses.
For decades, most research was conducted and funded by private labs, including AT&T, Bell Labs, Westinghouse and DuPont — or university research was funded from philanthropic sources such as the Carnegie Corp. or the Rockefeller Foundation.
"Universities were highly decentralized, less dependent on government money," explains Christopher Loss, a historian at Vanderbilt University. "They feared that federal funding would lead to interference in the research process itself and perhaps corrupt the pursuit of truth in some profound way."
But World War II changed all that and marked the beginning of the federal government entrusting and deeply investing in universities to conduct research and development.
"The urgency of the war effort sent federal dollars into the system in order to produce the research and the wartime discoveries that we needed," says Loss. "That was the beginning of a publicly subsidized and funded research economy that we have today."
Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at New America, a left-leaning think tank, agrees.
"The government-university-industry partnership built the American economy in the 20th century," he said. "Everything from the iPhone to GPS technology to fortified vitamin D has had its roots in federally funded research."
By 2021, the federal government gave colleges and universities about $180 billion annually across dozens of federal agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office.
But President Trump has said that some universities no longer deserve such money because of widespread political bias that the administration sees at these institutions. In the letter from the federal antisemitism task force announcing the latest research cuts to Harvard, officials claimed that Harvard's campus "has become a breeding ground ... for discrimination" and that the university's leaders have "forfeited the school's claim to taxpayer support."
Letters from the federal agencies to Harvard said the grants "no longer effectuate agency priorities."
The crusade against universities didn't come out of nowhere. On the campaign trail, Trump talked about using federal funds as leverage to root out what he saw as communist indoctrination and woke liberalism at elite colleges.
What the future looks like may, to some degree, involve the courts.
Harvard is suing to block the federal funding freeze and has updated its lawsuit to include the most recent cuts. The university claims that the administration's moves are unlawful and that the cuts threaten academic freedom and First Amendment rights.
A trial is set to begin in July.
"The last four months or so have forced those of us that work in higher education to confront the fact that we're heavily dependent on taxpayer dollars," says Loss. "One definition of a university is that it's a charity, relying on other people's money. The federal government has been one of the biggest and most important patrons. In exchange, of course, our nation has received really important discoveries and groundbreaking research that improves the human condition."
Those groundbreaking discoveries, as well as the way government investment has benefited from the exchange, has drawn the attention of other nations.
"American research universities have been the envy of the world for a reason," says Jyotishi. "China and other competitors of the United States are borrowing from the American playbook for innovation. They're doubling down and increasing investments in R&D."
Jyotishi says the biggest worry is that if the government gets out of this business, there won't be anyone else to step in.
He says the private sector can and should play more of a role in helping universities commercialize university research, but he doesn't expect industry to replace the federal government.
Why industry support likely won't fully replace the government
Sabrina Howell, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, studies innovation and university research. She can rattle off many examples of how university research didn't result in just a product or a solution — it resulted in underlying ideas and technologies that went on to shape entire industries and the way we live our lives.
"We would not have iPhones if universities like MIT that are federally funded hadn't worked on lasers without having a particular commercial application in mind and with the interest of just creating new knowledge," she says.
Because that laser technology wasn't used on just the iPhone, she adds — it also helped create semiconductors that power so many things we use in our daily lives.
"No private company would take that on, on their own, because it's not obvious what the commercial application is for all the work that you're doing," Howell explains. "And the benefits of it are gonna be used by everybody who works on it, and so only the government can fund that kind of work."
While the Trump administration talks about handing off this type of funding to the private sector, she argues that such investments are too expensive without clear returns on investment. Howell has worked on research that looked at what happened when areas of university research experienced federal funding declines.
The research found that when the private sector tried to fill the void, it made investments at a lower level, which ultimately led to weaker outcomes. The research also found a dramatic drop in the likelihood of grant recipients founding a startup, and a reduction in entrepreneurship as a result.
Howell says that's because industry has a different motivation, much more focused on outputs, whereas the government is often investing in innovation to benefit society and the U.S. at large.
Is change always a bad thing?
But there are experts who think changes could be made to this partnership.
"It's time for someone to shake things up a bit," says Richard Vedder, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank and the author of the book Let Colleges Fail. He has called for scaling back government funding for research overhead and administration and says his decades working at Ohio University taught him that there is a lot of "waste" in higher education.
While Trump's broad cuts aren't what he had in mind, he says, the new administration has definitely sent an important message to colleges.
"It's not perhaps the ideal way to change things. It may be a disruptive way to change things," he says. "But on the whole, the attempt to reevaluate research grant money is a valid one."
He adds that maybe now that the public sees the high price tag of federally funded research, there will be a way to make changes without abruptly halting essential and lifesaving research.
Vanderbilt's Loss, who has studied the history of this high price tag, says the extent of the federal government's involvement in the research economy has not been well understood, even by people who work in the system and are part of it.
"It's quite a time here in our nation's history where there is a deep reconsideration and evaluation of that partnership. Whether it leads to the complete toppling of it is, as yet, unclear," he says. "But it suggests that we're at a very different place and that we should be prepared for a very different kind of higher education system in the future."
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