At the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Michael B. Reid frets that a senior scientist might retire from research to work in patient care. At the University of California at Riverside, Frances M. Sladek fears she may have to lay off her longtime cell-biology lab assistant just three years shy of retirement, costing the woman a sizable chunk of her pension. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Barbara Entwisle worries that a researcher might have to end her longitudinal study of a birth cohort of children, 10 years into the project.
Similar scenes are playing out at research universities across the United States as administrators and professors wonder which projects will be trimmed or eliminated by the mandatory federal budget cuts known as sequestration, which took effect on March 1. The National Institutes of Health is doing its best to minimize the pain of the $1.6-billion in cuts it must inflict on grant applicants this fiscal year, says Mr. Reid, chairman of physiology at Kentucky’s medical college. As a participant on committees that help the NIH vet grant proposals, he is fluent in both sides of the process.
In past years, proposals scoring within the top 12 percent would have been sure winners. Now the guaranteed grant level might be as low as 5 percent, says Mr. Reid, who complains that there is little to no distinction among proposals that score in the single digits.
“This is no longer a peer-review process,” he says. “It’s becoming a lottery.”
The winners of the scientific sweepstakes can continue doing research, often with less than their requested budgets. The unlucky must choose whether to try again or even consider looking for careers that are less of a gamble.
The cuts, Mr. Reid and others make clear, are only the latest in a string of budgetary blows to scientists and administrators who rely on federal research dollars to stock their labs and pay the graduate students and postdocs who operate them.
“The insecurity is a fundamental, pervasive, underlying stress on biomedical researchers,” says Mr. Reid. “We are having constant, daily conversations about how to adjust our research, our faculty support, our graduate programs to respond to what we think is coming.”
The NIH’s budget peaked in 2003, and other than a brief boost from federal stimulus funds in 2009, it has been on a fairly steady downward slope ever since.
“We really have been flat-funded in terms of the NIH budget over the past four or five years,” says Jay W. Fox, an associate dean of research at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
Federal grant agencies further slowed the spigot last year in anticipation of the sequester, and academic-science organizations rallied to thwart the cuts. The Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and the Science Coalition collaborated on a campaign called ScienceWorksForU.S. to highlight how federally backed, university-based science formed the backbone of the economic growth and health innovations that powered America’s global dominance in the second half of the 20th century.
Scientists like Mr. Reid, of Kentucky, and Joseph M. DeSimone, of Chapel Hill, appeared in video editorials urging Congress to halt the looming sequester, which was designed to lop $85-billion from the federal budget in “meat cleaver” fashion, a process so ham-handed that its prospect would cause politicians of both parties to unite to oppose it.
But no deal was struck, March 1 came and went, and to no one’s surprise, university research continued. “Everybody knew that nothing was going to happen instantaneously, because there’s too much momentum in the system,” says Thomas Baldwin, executive associate dean of the University of California at Riverside’s College of Natural and Agricultural Science.
Early Warnings
Five weeks later, everyone has a few anecdotes that hint at what is to come. A tickle in the throat that develops into a persistent cough.
Mr. Baldwin, a protein chemist who will retire next year, describes a young neuroscientist, “an absolute star” who was supposed to have heard back on his grant application by April 1. He is an assistant professor, and if he doesn’t receive a grant by next year, his chances for tenure will plummet.
Another colleague just got bad news about his grant application to the Department of Energy for a project that was supposed to start this month. He cannot support the graduate students and postdocs in his lab. “We’re scrambling around right now trying to find the nickels and dimes just to keep everything together,” he says.
Mr. DeSimone, at Chapel Hill, tells of a military grant his lab applied for in the area of chemical-biological defense that typically would have had a quick turnaround. But in the current climate, nothing is guaranteed. “I’ve been cautioning at faculty meetings that maybe we shouldn’t accept so many graduate students as a department because of the pressure on getting grants,” he says. “If we have a 10-percent cut in our grant, we need to be careful we don’t get caught here.”
Ms. Entwisle, North Carolina’s vice chancellor for research, says principal investigators are bearing most of the pain: “The ones we’re hearing from the most are people with new projects or competing continuations that are very, very well reviewed, in the top 10 percent, that have not been awarded their grants.”
She hopes that passage of the continuing resolution in late March to finance the federal government’s spending will lead grant agencies to make awards for projects like the $18.5-million longitudinal study that hangs in limbo. As of last week, however, no news.
Administrators at some institutions, like Mr. Fox at the University of Virginia, and William H. Farland, senior vice president for research at Colorado State University, say they are pursuing grants from private industry and foundations to replace diminished government support.
Mr. DeSimone anticipates a rise in talent raids from abroad. “There’s a trend toward going after great researchers, no matter where they are in the world, to have satellite laboratories in places like Singapore and China,” he says. “You’re going to see some of the rainmaker faculty around the nation have opportunities to devote some of their time and energy to activities overseas. They’ll relocate a portion of their lives over there.”
Credit-Raters Bullish
Amid the uncertainty of the coming cuts, the credit-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service issued a report last month asserting that the vast majority of American universities and nonprofit organizations would “face only minimal effects” from the 2013 budget cuts.
John Nelson, managing director of the health-care and higher-education rating teams at Moody’s, acknowledges that the report might not sit well with worried administrators and scientists at research universities.
“There are a lot of careers on the line, a lot of disappointed young researchers and older researchers who were used to certain success rates on their grants,” he says. Federal budget pressures are hitting all sectors now, Mr. Nelson says, and higher education is not immune to them. Nonetheless, he says, universities remain a solid investment.
“We don’t make any statement about whether the government policy on funding is a good idea,” he says. “We’re just saying that universities have a lot of adaptive abilities, and from the perspective of ‘Are bondholders going to get their money back?,’ this is not a serious threat to them.”
Stand-alone research institutes face the greatest risk from an across-the board cut because they lack the revenue diversity of universities, which can draw on such sources as tuition and room-and-board fees, says Faiza Mawjee, the analyst who wrote the Moody’s report.
Mr. DeSimone isn’t buying that, not for research-dependent universities like his. “You’ve got to keep in mind that 35 percent of the federal R&D budget goes to 25 universities,” he says. “Carolina’s ninth on that list.”
But M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and Barry Toiv, spokesman for the Association of American Universities, agree, more or less, with the ratings agency’s assessment.
“Moody’s is looking at whether universities will pay back their bonds,” Mr. McPherson says. “For purposes of the soundness of the individual institutions, Moody’s is probably right.”
He and Mr. Toiv worry about far more serious consequences if the long slide in federal research spending is not reversed. The AAU reported in 2011 that universities perform 31 percent of America’s total research—basic and applied—and 56 percent of its basic research. Federal grants pay for about 60 percent of university research.
At the same time that the United States is reducing its research budget, Mr. McPherson says, countries like South Korea, China, and Singapore are sharply increasing theirs. “For us to cut back instead of continuing to grow will place us at a competitive disadvantage,” he says. “The sequester is hurting universities some, ... and as time goes on it could hurt them a lot more. But perhaps most pertinent of all, it is a risk for the country not to drive this basic research machine we have that has benefited us so much.”
Mr. Toiv expresses confidence in the suggestion of the Moody’s report that universities will weather the cuts and continue to produce research, albeit less of it. What is noteworthy, he says, is what the report does not say, “To what degree will universities not be producing quite as many ideas and quite as many graduates to be the next generation of scientists?”
Correction (4/8/2013, 3:49 p.m.): This article originally misspelled the surname of a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is Joseph M. DeSimone, not DiSimone. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
