Science News & Analysis

Trump freezes university research funding as ideological leverage; Columbia, Harvard lead $11 billion in cuts (March 7, 2025)

March 7, 2025 — The Trump administration froze $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University — the first major university targeted — citing the administration's accusations of inadequate response to campus antisemitism. The action set a template rapidly deployed against other research institutions. Within three weeks, $8.7 billion in federal grants and $256 million in contracts at Harvard University were placed under review; by June, the administration had canceled nearly 1,000 grants and contracts worth $2.6 billion specifically from Harvard, spanning cancer research, AIDS, neuroscience, climate, and basic sciences.

Between January and May 2025, the administration reduced university research funding nationwide by approximately $11 billion. Targeted institutions included University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, UCLA, and others. The demands attached to funding restoration — covering admissions policies, hiring practices, curriculum, and governance — went far beyond anything tied to research merit or even the stated antisemitism rationale. Columbia and several other institutions negotiated settlements to restore funding; Harvard refused, sued in April 2025, and courts ordered the funding restored. The administration appealed in December 2025.

Harvard committed $250 million of its own endowment to bridge the gap for the most critical ongoing research while litigation proceeded, with President Alan Garber calling the cuts an "unlawful freeze and termination" that was "stopping lifesaving research and, in some cases, losing years of important work." Researchers reported graduate students and postdoctoral fellows — the next generation of American scientists — beginning to seek positions at universities in Europe and Canada, a brain drain that experts warned would take a generation to reverse.