The Spencer Foundation normally receives around 500 letters of intent from scholars applying for grants to support education research. This year, the Chicago-based organization received nearly 2,000. And the William T. Grant Foundation, in New York, received three times as many applications for a major research competition.
They’re among the many philanthropies facing a surge in demand as scholars scrounge for private funds to compensate for historic cuts to federal research subsidies.
For decades, universities have relied on federal funding to run labs, pay graduate workers, and cover indirect research costs, all in service of advancing the nation’s renowned research enterprise. The government funneled around $60 billion to universities in the 2023 fiscal year alone. Now, that long-standing relationship is teetering: The Trump administration has terminated hundreds of federal grants and proposed massive cuts to the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
In response, several influential philanthropies are increasing investments in scholarly work that aligns with their missions.
Some are offering emergency bridge funding for researchers who have had federal grants terminated, while others have said they’ll dip further into their endowments. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest philanthropic organization in the country, recently announced plans to entirely spend down its endowment — at a moment when the Trump administration has reduced support for key parts of the foundation’s mission, including global health and international aid.
But at least one organization is scaling back amid the uncertainty: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced last week that it’s pausing all grant competitions, including for a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship.
While philanthropy can bridge some gaps, the private sector doesn’t have anywhere near the wherewithal needed to become a full-blown replacement for federal funding, foundation leaders and higher-ed experts told The Chronicle.
Even if you were to add up all the money that even the largest private foundations put towards research, then double that sum, “you wouldn’t get anywhere close to what the government spends,” said Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals and former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
‘It’s Time to Really Stretch’
In March, Ariel Beccia’s NIH grant was one of hundreds terminated by the agency. Since then, Beccia, an instructor of epidemiology in Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has spent much of her time writing applications to fund her LGBTQ-health research.
Beccia has applied for around five grants in the past two months, she said, most of them through private foundations. (She received temporary bridge funding from the university, which she said will cover her for around a year. That’s about how long it’ll take, she said, to obtain new funding.)
Any one of those grants likely won’t replace the NIH grant she previously relied on. Beccia’s federal award was supposed to provide funding for five years, while most foundation grants she’s applied for will last for one or two years and only cover a fraction of her salary, she said. Plus, she is far from the only one turning to foundations.
“Everyone who has had their funding terminated is going to be applying, so the application pool is going to be massive,” Beccia said.
Several science advocates told The Chronicle that private foundations should be investing more in research. “If you have a rainy-day fund, it’s raining right now,” said France A. Córdova, president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance. “It’s time to really stretch.” Córdova also served as the NSF director until 2020.
Some philanthropies have answered that call. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, for example, said it will increase the baseline payout rate on its endowment from the mandated 5 percent to 6 percent for the next two years, and urged other foundations to follow suit.
“The need for a surge in funding is plain,” John Palfrey, MacArthur’s president, wrote in a February statement. “Artificial scarcity will create a crisis, but only if we let it.”
The Spencer Foundation — which typically invests around $20 million per year in academic research — recently announced a collaboration with several other philanthropies to provide “rapid response bridge funding” in the form of $25,000 grants to researchers who lost NSF funding. Na’ilah Suad Nasir, the president of the Spencer Foundation, said she was moved to start the program after watching the rollback of federal research funding “with horror.”
“People are seeing us as a place of hope,” Nasir said. “We’re trying to just get as much money out the door as we can.”
The foundations can put around $1.5 to $1.7 million towards the bridge-funding program, so they will award somewhere between 60 and 70 grants, Nasir said. While “a little bit of funding can go a really long way,” she said, that amount hardly makes a dent in the more than 10,000 new grants the NSF awards each year. “Our role isn’t to be the sole funder of education research,” she said.
Most private foundations have much smaller staff sizes than federal agencies like the NSF, which taps hundreds of scientists to peer-review the tens of thousands of grant proposals it receives each year.
“The process is completely different and requires a different skill set and different institutional supports,” said Krista Koeller, a grant opportunity specialist in the office of research development at the University of Vermont, whose role involves connecting researchers with funding opportunities. “It also takes time.”
Foundations don’t have the budget, either.
Last year, the NSF and the NIH had budgets of $9 billion and $48 billion, respectively. The only foundation that comes close to that is Gates, which will spend almost $9 billion this year. For most other philanthropies, it’s “millions compared to billions,” said Alonzo L. Plough, the vice president of research and chief science officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest private funder of health-equity research.
Moreover, not all philanthropies are increasing funding opportunities.
When the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research — announced it had paused all competitions, it delivered a blow for applicants who had felt hopeful about private funding avenues.
It added an extra burden during an already-stressful period for Chiara Masnovo, a researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who had applied for HHMI’s Hanna H. Gray postdoctoral fellowship. Now, at 38 weeks pregnant, Masnovo was forced to return to the drawing board.
Masnovo can only apply for foundation grants, not federal ones, because she’s from Italy and on an international visa. Foundation grant cycles were already tough to break into, but now they’ve become “insanely competitive,” she said.
“It feels like the pool of possibilities is getting more restrictive,” Masnovo said.
HHMI said the “difficult decision” to pause all competitions was made so the institute can focus its attention and resources on current labs and programs. “This step is critical to maintaining HHMI’s support for our current scientists during an uncertain time for science,” a spokesperson said in an email to The Chronicle. HHMI earlier this year also canceled an “inclusive excellence” STEM education program and scrubbed references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from its website after Trump’s anti-DEI orders.
Carl T. Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, said he was “baffled” by HHMI’s pause on awards. Closing off funding opportunities is “actively setting science backward” and “reeks of administrative panic,” said Bergstrom, who has studied how current norms and institutions shape scientific knowledge.
An Irreplaceable Partnership
Long ago, science in the United States was mostly funded by private sources and universities themselves.
But in 1945, as research was playing a decisive role in ending the war, the federal government declared science an “Endless Frontier” — drastically scaling up its funding for scholarship, largely to bolster national security. The American research enterprise became an international envy for its depth of resources and relative lack of governmental interference.
The decline in public research funding started before President Trump’s second term, but his administration has significantly expedited the trend, even as federal officials vow to restore a “gold standard” of scientific and technological advancement. Some of the Trump administration’s proposals — such as 15-percent caps on indirect research funding through the NIH and NSF — could be catastrophic for universities’ budgets. Trump has also proposed a 56-percent cut to the NSF’s budget and an almost 40-percent reduction for the NIH.
“More money has not meant more scientific discovery, and total dollars spent has not been a proxy for scientific impact,” Michael Kratsios, Trump’s science and technology adviser, said in recent remarks at the National Academy of Sciences. “Evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting, and using science.” Since the 1945 “Endless Frontier” report, he added, “the scientific enterprise has changed.”
A return to a prewar model of private funding would be a “very, very significant loss for the nation,” said Adam Gamoran, the president of the William T. Grant Foundation.
The world’s leading research infrastructure was built on the shoulders of the partnership between the government and universities. That infrastructure “is the fuel for American prosperity,” Gamoran added. “Only the federal government can play that role.”
A private funding model would also raise questions over which research gets funded and which doesn’t. While federal agencies act based on congressional appropriations and public interests, philanthropies distribute funds based on private interests, science advocates said.
Foundations generally view themselves as innovators, accelerators, and catalysts who play “supportive and ancillary” roles within the research enterprise, often targeting specific missions aligned with their founders’ intentions, said Plough, at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He is also a professor of health services at the University of Washington.
Now, as higher-ed institutions rethink their funding sources, philanthropies are tasked with offering “life support,” Plough said. His organization recently opened a request for proposals from researchers who have had health-equity grants canceled by federal agencies, he said.
“It can keep the field alive,” Plough said. “But life support isn’t thriving. It’s waiting and hoping … that the travesty and the harm that’s being caused by this reduction and elimination of funding will be reversed.”
Ultimately, there’s a simple economics problem: The demand for private funding is growing, but the supply is mostly the same. Emergency grants can help bridge gaps, allowing researchers to solidify the last data set on a project, smoothly transition out of community work, or get a paper over the publishing finish line.
“There are small things we can do,” said Lorelle L. Espinosa, a program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, whose budget is around $85 million per year. But “none of us alone — not even all of us combined — in private philanthropy can fill the void that the federal government appears to be leaving.”
