Going into February, Andrew P. Capaldi was confident that the National Institutes of Health would fund his lab at the University of Arizona for the 15th year in a row. Instead, the agency unexpectedly shut down its review process and threw thousands of grant applications, including his, into limbo.
The cancer biologist said he’s had to stop doing his most expensive, crucial experiments, cut his lab manager’s hours, and stop paying his undergraduate students. When a $20,000 sub-zero freezer for sensitive supplies broke down, he couldn’t afford to replace it. At this rate, his half dozen Ph.D. students will run out of funding before they graduate. It is an “escalating crisis,” said Capaldi, a professor of molecular and cellular biology. “Each week that goes by, it’s getting worse.”
But the University of Arizona has extended a lifeline: an internal fund to help keep researchers and research afloat through the delays. It is one of a handful of universities doing so during the Trump administration, which in just a few weeks has thrust America’s staid research enterprise into unprecedented disarray. The University of Michigan, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Yale’s medical school recently started providing gap funds for employees and students. And the University of Hawaii’s foundation is raising donations to help affected graduate students.
Scientists have been screaming for a life raft in the face of billions in lost federal funding. Starting in February, the NIH canceled a slew of the routine peer-review meetings that evaluate grant requests — and then, in apparent defiance of a court order, froze the bureaucratic mechanism for scheduling such meetings. Soon after, it began terminating hundreds of grants about subjects it said no longer fit its mission: transgender health, diversity and equity, vaccine hesitancy. Other agencies, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Defense, have slashed external research funding, too.
Separately, the administration has threatened to revoke $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University and $175 million from the University of Pennsylvania, citing, respectively, an antisemitic atmosphere and a transgender swimmer who used to compete for the institution. On yet another front, President Trump wants to significantly cap the indirect funds that NIH grant recipients can receive, a proposal that is on pause while lawsuits proceed through the courts.
Each week that goes by, it’s getting worse.
Capaldi has been urging university administrators and lawmakers to help stanch the bleeding. His lab studies cellular processes that control cancer-cell growth. A proposal to build on that work received high scores in the first round of peer review last fall, he said. If all had gone to plan, the final stamp of approval would have come from a second group of reviewers on February 6, and the five-year, $3.4-million grant would kick in on April 1. But the February meeting got canceled and Capaldi’s existing grant concluded at the end of the month. The interruption doesn’t hurt his lab alone: Without a grant of his own, he isn’t allowed to tap into a separate federal training grant that funds him to run his department’s graduate program.
In an interview late last week, Capaldi said he’d just learned that his peer-review meeting was among those rescheduled for May, meaning that, at best, his grant would start in July. He called the bridge fund “absolutely critical.” He’s already put in a request for $50,000, the bare minimum he believes he needs for his top priority: paying his graduate students through the summer, most crucially an international student who needs proof of funding in order to renew his visa.
“I was very happy that they paid attention, responded, and are trying to act,” Capaldi said of his university. “It makes no sense to let labs collapse for the sake of six months or three months of money, and them then have to build up over long periods of time again once they get the grants.”
Capaldi’s employer has said it will cover up to six months of graduate stipends and research supplies and expenses, according to details shared with faculty. Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, senior vice president for research and innovation, said in an announcement that the Tucson institution is “committed to sustaining world-class research and ensuring that faculty have the support they need to advance discovery and innovation.”
Like other universities, Arizona hasn’t disclosed how much it’s allocating to the bridge fund. But spokesperson Mitch Zak said by email that “it is the largest internal grant set aside” and “for the next six months, eligible requests that meet the program’s guidelines will be supported as fully as possible.”
The University of Michigan is freeing up central funding to subsidize salaries, benefits, and supplies for faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers at its three campuses and medical center. Funding will cover up to 50 percent of eligible costs for half a year, but departments and units must cover the remaining expenses. Central funding can also be used to wind down studies involving human subjects, the university has said. (A spokesperson declined a request for comment.)
In similar fashion, UMass will require that its bridge funding, available through the end of August, be matched by individual faculty, departments, schools, or colleges. It will draw from university funds for strategic investments and deferred maintenance, according to spokesperson Emily Gest.
From institution to institution, scholars’ eligibility will depend on the reasons their usual funding hasn’t materialized. UMass and Michigan are opening their coffers to those with grants that have been not just delayed, but prematurely terminated, and Yale is offering up to a year of funding to medical-school faculty whose “funding has been discontinued prior to the anticipated project end date, through no action of the [lead investigator] or routine course of grant activity.” (A Yale spokesperson did not return a request for comment.)
The sad reality is that universities individually and collectively do not have enough unrestricted money to compensate for long for the magnitude of cuts the Trump-Musk team is trying to inflict.
The University of Arizona, on the other hand, is limiting assistance to scholars “experiencing or anticipating a temporary disruption in external funding due to delays in funding decisions,” specifying that it intends to “bridge the gap created by delays in funding from federal agencies when there’s a reasonable expectation from existing reviews that the proposal would otherwise be funded.” Grantees whose projects have been terminated are not eligible, according to Zak, the spokesperson.
“I think it’s very important that universities do whatever they can to provide bridging funds for their faculty and research staff who have lost federal funds in the mindless cuts being imposed by the Trump administration,” said John P. Holdren, research professor of environmental policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Obama, in an email.
But, he added, bridge funding is a Band-Aid for an existential threat that higher education needs to be attacking much more aggressively.
“The sad reality is that universities individually and collectively do not have enough unrestricted money to compensate for long for the magnitude of cuts the Trump-Musk team is trying to inflict,” he wrote. “What I hope the universities will also do, as a group and in addition to providing what bridging funds they can, is challenge the legality of many of those cuts in hope of getting them reversed or at least paused in the courts. Any objective re-examination of what is in the national interest would have to conclude that a large fraction of what the administration is attempting is unjustified.”
Andrew L. Paek, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of Arizona, is anxious about the short term: He’s requesting about $35,000 in bridge funding to cover three graduate students for five months. But he worries more about a future in which the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, can no longer be relied upon. Funding from foundations and donors is usually targeted to a specific disease, he said, whereas the NIH funds basic, curiosity-driven research that often doesn’t directly produce new cures, but builds the groundwork essential to get there. That “historically is actually what drives the whole scientific enterprise,” Paek said.
And the next generation of would-be scientists may not have the stomach for the chaos. “My worry is, even if and when this all blows over, they’re going to have that lack of interest in going into this area because of the uncertainty,” Paek said. “I really feel mostly for the trainees, the graduate students, the postdocs who are left hanging high and dry and concerned about the future.”
