Scientists self-censor as Trump axes research funds

I’m afraid that what will suffer the most will be the science that has to do with underprivileged populations or minorities. It’s not just that they’re saying we’re not funding [this] anymore. What they are really doing is a frontal attack on some of the issues that have made our societies progress in the last 10 to 20 years. LQBTQ rights is one example, so is gender identity. – Vincent Poitout, PhD, incoming (June) vice-rector, research, discovery, creation and innovation at the Université de Montréal.

Scientists around the world are reluctant to discuss publicly the cuts to their research programmes by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) out of fear they might lose even more research funding from the United States.

“The situation,” said a biologist at a leading Canadian research university, who spoke to University World News on condition of anonymity, “could be dire for many.”

The cuts are part of an ongoing mass termination of NIH-funded research grants that fund active scientific projects around the world.

Scientists’ fears of speaking out were evident in an 11 March radio interview with an American researcher into neonatal brain injuries broadcast by the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) who explained that “in the absence of funding” from the NIH her research falls apart.

Matt Galloway, the host of The Current, introduced the sound clip by saying: “We’re only using Elizabeth’s first name because she worries that speaking out could limit future work in her field.”

The next day, it was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) turn to shield the identity of a researcher, whose research is wholly dependent on US$15 million from the NIH.

ABC’s description of her research, “global health disparities” focusing on “specific populations” across four continents is admirably vague given what the research called the “scary” situation they are in.

The researcher “spoke to the ABC on the condition of anonymity for fears of reprisal”, ABC reported.

Vicki Thompson, chief executive director and CEO of Australia’s Group of Eight (leading research-intensive universities), said: “We’re not identifying projects or the professors,” whose American funding has been frozen.

“There is a sense of trepidation around identifying individual researchers in terms of what that would mean for, you know, other research projects they may be involved in,” she added.

The cuts via the NIH come in the wake of a questionnaire sent earlier this month to Australian researchers who receive US funding, asking them to confirm that their research was aligned with US government interests, including recognising only two genders, whether the organisation received funds from China, and whether the research contained elements of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Dr Nicholas Fisk (emeritus), himself an eminent perinatal researcher, who from 2016-2024 served as deputy vice chancellor (research and enterprise) at the University of New South Wales, told University World News that the combination of the 36-question questionnaire and the cutting off of grants has left “researchers a bit scared of poking the bear”.

Two funding streams

The total dollar amount that American funding agencies like the NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have cut from contracts with universities outside the United States is difficult to determine because there are two streams of funding support for those researchers.

The first provides direct support to universities or researchers. In 2023, for example, the NSF committed US$28 million to the Global Centers Program (which is also supported by Canadian, Australian and British funding agencies).

In 2024, the NIH made direct grants totalling US$52 million to 121 European-based researchers.

This year, NIH made direct grants totalling US$28.6 million to 48 universities in 22 countries, the smallest being US$48,963 to York University (Toronto, Canada) and the largest, US$2.5 million, to the WITS Health Consortium (PTY), Ltd in Parktown, South Africa, which is linked to the University of the Witwatersrand.

Universities in Britain received grants totalling US$2.3 million while those in Canada received US$3.7 million.

Direct NIH grants to Australian universities in 2024 totalled US$20.4 million, with 89% going to the Go8 universities.

The University of Melbourne received more than US$9.3 million, while the University of Sydney received more than US$4.5 million. According to Thompson, the total value of grants received by Australian universities between 2020 and 2024 was AU$515 million (US$325 million).

The second way that the NIH and other agencies fund international research is through subgrants. Typically the grant is anchored in an American university, which then works with universities and researchers outside the US.

For example, the USAID Partnership for Higher Education Reform is a five-year, US$14.2 million project, that began in 2021 and is anchored in Indian University (Bloomington, Indiana), which works with three university in Vietnam to develop programmes to “help these institutions become more sustainable, accountable, and autonomous; improve academic quality; and advance research and innovation”.

Another is a USAID-supported consortium involving the Syracuse University School of Education focused on developing inclusive and equitable early grade education in Uzbekistan.

Scope of disaster

While Australia, with tens of thousands of researchers, is still trying to tally up the cuts by American funders, other countries have already discussed the scope of the funding disaster Thompson explained.

On 15 March, Professor Mosa Moshabela, University of Cape Town’s (UCT) vice-chancellor, told his university’s council that “US federal agencies currently fund 155 projects at UCT through grants or subawards through the NIH, CDC, DOD, and CDRF (Centers for Disease Control, Department of Defense and Civilian Development and Research Foundation)”.

Among these, the NIH funds over 140 research programmes or projects at UCT through 10 of its institutes or centres, with most awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

The combined value of these awards over the total period is ZAR2.75 billion (US$150 million), with a current value of ZAR660 million for 2025. The corresponding indirect cost recoveries to UCT over the total period is ZAR204 million.

Billions of dollars of USAID grants have been cut. At UCT, for example, recent freezes and terminations of USAID grants have resulted in the loss of ZAR31 million of research funding over the total project period, with a current period loss of ZAR17 million, writes William Saunderson-Meyer in online publication Politicsweb.

In Pakistan, university-based research projects are among the US$845 million in grants that have been cancelled.

The USAID cuts have also forced the suspension of the Merit and Needs-Based Scholarship Programme, which since its establishment 21 years ago has paid for almost 5,000 Pakistanis to attend universities, reserving 50% of its funds for Pakistani women – 1,500 today.

Civil reconstruction under threat

In Colombia, cuts have already ended or threatened programmes that further the peace process begun in 2011, which put an end to the nation’s five-decade-old civil war.

At the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNC), the cancellation of the UNAL-Fulbright Seedbed programme has adversely affected students in several regions across the country.

Professor Mónica Reinartz Estrada, director of the university’s office of external relations, singled out Afro-Colombians, Raizal (Black Colombians from the archipelago off Colombia’s Caribbean coast) and Indigenous Colombians as among those who will be harmed by the loss of the programme which developed students’ English language skills and helped prepare them for postgraduate study.

UNC officials are assessing the full impact of other cuts on projects related to climate change, biodiversity, conservation and public health, food security, biotechnology, renewable energy solutions, strategies to save endangered species and artificial intelligence.

It is not yet clear whether the US$175 million cut to the University of Pennsylvania (UP), over transgendered women competing in women’s sports, announced on 19 March, will cause the cancellation of the Colombia-USA WEF Nexus Alliance, for which (UP) is the anchor institution.

The Water-Energy-Food alliance, established in 2022 and including UP, UNC, PUJ and two other Colombian universities and the Stockholm Environment Institute, is focused on sustainable development.

“These initiatives provide evidence-based solutions to pressing global issues and help develop capacities within both academic and local communities,” said Reinartz Estrada.

Biological projects, like those studying tropical diseases and regenerative medicine, Reinartz Estrada explained, are especially vulnerable to the “Stop Work Order” that Gordon Petty, a postdoctoral student at Columbia University (New York) told University World News some researchers have received.

These projects, Reinartz Estrada said: “rely on continuous funding to maintain cell cultures and experimental models. Budget reductions could lead to the discontinuation of these studies, affecting not only academic progress, but also potential medical advancement”.

“While we are still quantifying the impact, a significant number of researchers, including faculty members, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, rely on these [US] funds to conduct their studies,” said Reinartz Estrada.

According to Astrid Liliana Sánchez Mejía, vice rector of research at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ, Bogotá), the cuts to NGOs working to further the peace process in Colombia, threaten the university’s contribution to the reconstruction of Colombia’s civil society.

“The funds from USAID are super important for peace-building, rural development, judicial reform and the promotion of the rule of law,” she said, pointing by way of example to the Jesuit refugee service that works with internally displaced persons.

Until a few weeks ago, USAID provided more than half the funds PUJ needs to run a rural development centre that works with peasants and rural communities in various parts of the country. Rural development includes, Sánchez Mejía explained, attention to environmental issues.

USAID cuts to NGOs may affect a number of student internships at PUJ. We are trying to think how they can continue these internships through the university, she said, because the NGOs are not going to have enough employees to supervise the interns.

Like universities and research institutes around the world, PUJ is unsure of which projects the NIH has ended its support for.

Support for trainees

Researchers at the Centre de recherche du Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) receive approximately US$3.5 million from the NIH.

Among them is CHUM director of research and innovation, vice-rector, Research, Discovery, Creation and Innovation at the Université de Montréal, a researcher in endocrinology, who specialises in the regulation of beta-pancreatic cell function and its disruption in type 2 diabetes.

He said uncertainty surrounding the NIH cuts has resulted in “universities freaking out, and so they [universities] are actually blocking spending on awards that have already been approved,” for fear of the monies being clawed back.

His own research, which he characterised as “very basic” (foundational), is funded through a grant anchored in the University of California, Davis. It concerns “a receptor, a molecule that is at the surface of some of the cells that produce hormones that are important in the maintenance of blood glucose levels”.

Like the university officials in Colombia, who have had to consider how they will ensure that their graduate students fulfil the internship requirements needed to graduate, Poitout, whose office is less than 40 miles from the US border, worries about whether he could continue his research project if his NIH grant is cut – and how to ensure that his trainees finish their tenure in the lab.

“We have a postdoc working on this. I’m not going to tell her to go away, because she needs to finish her postdoc. We’ll find a way for her to do that.

“We will finish the current project but it won’t, it will not, continue,” he said.

Dr Julie Bruneau, also a researcher at CHUM who has been studying two models (in two different communities) of medical care for people who inject drugs but are disengaged from the health system, has received an email telling her to immediately stop her research study, which was entirely funded by the NIH.

The anchor institution for her research is Columbia University, and she does not know if her funding was caught in the US$400 million that President Donald Trump ordered withdrawn from the university as punishment for its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests last year or if her grant is part of other cuts by the NIH.

“We received a very, very short email saying that in the midst of the cuts at Columbia, our project was terminated,” Bruneau told University World News.

The stop work order came, ironically, when the data, which included blood samples to determine the rates of HIV and hepatitis C infection in each of the two randomised pragmatic trials, had been collected and was being “cleaned” by her collaborators at Columbia.

Her 12 graduate students were just at the point where they were choosing topics, which would become papers and parts of their PhD theses, dealing with primary outcomes, secondary outcomes and secondary analyses of the data, which she described as “promising”.

With the data not yet “cleaned” and the project stopped by an American fiat, what will happen to her graduate students?

“In reality and fairness, they will finish because I have some alternatives. In research, we always have a plan B, plan C and plan D. I don’t want to jeopardise the careers of my students.

“I have other studies underway that are looking at similar questions. So, there are ways to help students finish their thesis,” said Bruneau.

Self-censorship

Another CHUM professor, Madeleine Durand, who researches inflammatory responses and associated comorbidities that tend to occur in people living with HIV, attended the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (9-12 March) in San Francisco, where she found her colleagues “starting to self-censor themselves in fear of losing support from the NIH”.

The first self-censorship is seen in researchers staying silent in the face of or about cuts.

The second, even more insidious, self-censorship occurs because of bullying by the United States, chiefly in the form of the questionnaire that scientist in many countries have received that asks questions such as: “Does this project reinforce US sovereignty by limiting reliance on international organisations or global governance structures (for example, UN, WHO)?”;

“Can you confirm that this is [sic] no DEI project or DEI elements of the project?”; “Can you confirm that this is not a climate or ‘environmental justice’ project or includes such elements?”; and

“Does this project take appropriate measures to protect women and to defend against gender ideology as defined by the below Executive Order [which states that the US recognises only two genders, male and female, at birth]?”

It is impossible, Durand noted, for her research into HIV infections not to run afoul of the answers everyone knows the US administration wants.

“Basically, nothing in HIV research happens without consideration of underprivileged populations, gender identity EDI [the Canadian way of referring to DEI]; this is intrinsically linked to our field,” she stated.

Richard Gold, director of McGill University’s Centre for Intellectual Policy and a lawyer, told University World News in response to a question about the extraterritorial nature of the questionnaire: “Many of these grants will be one of several held by the lab and all are interconnected. Many of the local grants require attention to diversity [for example, in Canada the university protocols require this as does government].

“If I were a researcher filling in such a request, I would say that all my diversity efforts fall within the Canadian-Australian-EU grant and none of it within the US grant. That is, one can do diversity in the lab by relying on one’s other grants while complying with the current US administration’s rules [regarding] DEI.”

However, research labs are vulnerable to what Durand calls “bullying by the American administration” because “people are afraid” and because most labs are, essentially, “small businesses” within a university. This means it is not easy for scientists to band together and speak with one voice against NIH and other cuts.

“If everybody refused to comply, then Donald Trump and whatever his policies are would be weaker. But it’s very difficult for the research infrastructure to resist as one, given that we are not one body, but rather, a myriad of tiny businesses,” she said.

The situation in Canada is complicated by the trade war initiated by Trump and his ongoing rhetorical assault on Canada and stated desire that it become the 51st state because, Durand explained, Canada is now in an existentially perilous position.

“Canada is … overwhelmingly influenced by them [the US]. We have never had any reason to distrust the United States. The Canadian-US relationship has always been a very cordial one, and so collaborations have multiplied. We go and train in the US; they send their trainees here.

“We do feel awfully betrayed by the US, although this is not a sudden realisation. This has been creeping up on us for decades. Now, especially, as a researcher I’m faced with lots of questions about how to resist, how to make science survive, how to promote science, how to keep Canadian uniqueness vis-à-vis the United States.

“This obviously includes matters of being a free country.

“What I find the saddest now is the modification [of scientific language] that plays into their hands. That we are willingly doing [what they want] because we want to preserve what we have, ie, research funds.”

Durand said the “scariest part” was the self-censorship “because throughout history it's part of the rise of totalitarianism and violent governments”.

A moment later, when speaking of the dominance of the NIH, which budgeted $48 billion in research in 2024, Durand said the world had lost by relying on the dominant funder (the US). “This was a bad bet for humanity, unfortunately.”

In a subsequent email, Durand explained that by withdrawing funds for clinical trials of drugs, for example, in Africa, the NIH is acting unethically and putting principal investigators in the “nightmarish” position of “failing their ethical responsibilities” as investigators.

“It is unethical to embark on a clinical trial if you do not have the required financial resources to carry it through: this is the reason a budget is required by research ethics boards as part of the ethical evaluation of clinical trials.

“The reason for this is simple: if a trial is stopped before it has accumulated enough data to answer the scientific question it was designed to answer … then the risks incurred by participants to the trial will be in vain, as there will be no scientific knowledge gained.

“Early stopping will also be a breach of informed consent: before entering into a study, all study procedures, risks and potential benefits are explained to participants, and they must consent to take part.

“Changing study procedures by stopping early because of grant withdrawal is unethical because it does not respect the spirit of the consent that was given by participants: they consented to the complete study,” Durand wrote.

Is science a viable career?

Graduate students and postdocs are understandably reticent to discuss their personal situations. Petty, however, provided University World News with a window into the stress that he, and by extension, graduate students at CHUM and thousands of other universities, are experiencing.

A neuroscientist researching how schizophrenia affects social cognition or social perception, Petty is training to use MRIs of the brain to understand how people with schizophrenia process such social cues as facial expressions and tone of voice.

Petty’s training grant, which is supposed to run for two or three years, began last July and will run, at least, he’s been told, through to the end of June.

Although his department has said it will find the funds to pay him for next year, he says that “there’s a huge amount of uncertainty that I’ll even really have an appointment beyond the next four months. I trust my professor and department to do their best, but money is getting tighter and tighter all the time”.

Already, he said, the department has frozen travel grants, reduced money to run the MRI and pay the study’s participants for their time.

“I could lose my job here and that would derail my progression towards a professorship and having my own lab to do research,” he said.

“When I talk to my postdoc friends, everyone is saying, ‘Is there a viable career path as a scientist anymore? Things might be okay for the next couple of years, but what’s the fallout five or six years down the line, when we would be applying for professorship jobs?

“Are there going to be any? Is research going to be completely frozen for a decade or two? It really feels that dire in the long term,” he noted.

Dismantling its own influence

When asked to characterise the actions of the United States, Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, said: “There have been instances of states that went through traumatic upheaval in terms of a revolution or coup and their foreign relations suffer.

“But I cannot think of a time where a significant world power has so blatantly and voluntarily unwound the mechanisms of its soft power. I can't think of one where they simply chose to abruptly dismantle their own influence.”