Why the Trump Administration is Reshaping Federal Research Funding

Thank you for joining us this Saturday morning. 

The headlines about President Donald Trump’s cuts to university research funding track the polarization of our era. According to the headlines, America is simultaneously spiraling into the dark ages and courageously fixing an outdated, ideological federal research bureaucracy.

“Trump’s attack on universities is putting research in peril,” reads a headline from the journal Nature. “Deep cuts to HIV research could halt decades of progress,” the Washington Post reported.

The Washington Examiner, by contrast, reported that “Trump’s NIH is right about bloated research grants.” National Review wrote that “the National Institutes of Health needs an overhaul.”

So which is it? We offer the following analysis to try to help you make sense of it all. Understanding that even writing about this topic is controversial – hopefully learning a bit more on the topic will be helpful.

Thanks for reading.

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To get at an understanding of the state of play, we ask and try to answer four questions:

1) What is the Trump administration’s goal? 
2) Is that goal reasonable? 
3) What is the Trump administration doing to try to achieve that goal? 
4) How does all of this impact North Carolina?

First, what goal does the Trump administration say it’s pursuing in cutting federal research grants? 

The administration has not declared war on science itself, as some corners claim. Rather, the administration is targeting research that it says no longer comports with federal priorities, especially research that centers on race, gender, and related topics broadly consistent with critical theory or “intersectionality.” A less precise but simpler description is research that can be called “woke” or related to DEI.

Doing so, the administration says, will restore trust in science, promote “impactful” research, and mitigate the influence of ideological aims on research endeavors.

A May 23, 2025, executive order outlines something of a mission statement for science and research under the Trump administration:

“Over the last five years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly… Actions taken by the prior Administration further politicized science, for example, by encouraging agencies to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication… My Administration is committed to restoring a gold standard for science to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful.”

Distilling the administration’s various statements, orders, interviews, litigation responses, and more into concise criteria is hard (it’s chaotic out there!), but this seems generally over the target: Trump wants his administration to fund research that can contribute to American competitiveness, and to not fund research that aligns with left-leaning political ideas.

Second, is that goal reasonable? Here’s what the administration wrote following a court order reinstating some federal research grants: “The district court’s order directs the NIH to continue paying $783 million in federal grants that are undisputedly counter to the administration’s priorities.”

They have a point. Congress has long delegated sweeping authority to the executive branch, including to make decisions on how to distribute scientific funding. It seems reasonable that a duly elected president can exercise that authority in a way that aligns with his priorities. 

And, like him or not, Trump ran for office while railing very loudly against identity-based policies. It is no secret he does not support that line of thinking, and it stands to reason he does not support research into that line of thinking.

We don’t have polling on the question, but it’s probably true that most voters wouldn’t support some of the research projects that have been targeted for cuts, either. Here are a few of them at North Carolina universities:

• Investigating whether microgrants can reduce COVID-related psychological distress among transgender people 
• Investigating the influence of gender identity on cardiovascular disease risk among Hispanics 
• The contribution of structural racism to the effects of natural disasters on behavioral health outcomes 
• Understanding the heterogeneity of intersectional discrimination experiences among “young black men who have sex with men.”

This research is funded by taxpayer dollars. Therefore, public sentiment and election outcomes impact whether this research continues to receive funding. That is the nature of budget decisions made in a republic.

By the same token, it does not seem reasonable to place all the blame on universities. Faculty will produce grant proposals for research they know the federal government wants to fund. The research follows the money – that too is the nature of budget decisions made in a republic. And if some are upset that Duke or UNC is conducting this research, they should place a fair amount of blame on the federal bureaucrats who incentivized and approved it.

Third, what is the Trump administration doing to achieve its goal? This is where things have gone sideways. There are many ways to calculate the totals, but suffice to say, the Trump administration has paused or canceled thousands of research projects totaling billions of dollars.

Something of that magnitude can be done quickly or thoroughly, but not both. The Trump administration chose quickly. The result has been managed chaos.

Some projects were terminated but then restored. Some states sued, alleging violations of the Administrative Procedures Act, among other claims. Staff have been laid off and then rehired. None of this is settled or orderly, and it’s unclear if or when the process might reach some equilibrium. 

Fourth, how does all of this impact North Carolina? Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State University are research funding powerhouses. Combined, they receive about $2 billion in federal research dollars each year.

It stands to reason, then, that these three universities will face particular disruption from the Trump administration’s research cuts, and that’s partially true. But just how much disruption may be surprising to some.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, produced a helpful mapping tool to estimate the value of research cuts all over the country. The group reckons North Carolina’s three major research universities have lost about $60 million worth of research projects so far (this data is sourced from the Department of the Treasury; however, data from the Departments of Government Efficiency and Health & Human Services calculated a combined total of roughly $110 million in lost grants for UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State). That’s not a small number, but it’s also not a very large percentage of their total. 

Potentially more concerning for the universities, though, is the NIH’s decision to cap the amount of grant funding universities can dedicate to “overhead.” In recent years, universities have diverted 55% or more of NIH grant dollars to indirect costs – buildings, staff, administration, supplies, and the like. Moving forward, though, universities will only be able to use a maximum of 15% of NIH grants for overhead. This represents a very large decrease over time in an important revenue stream that universities relied upon. Some of the state lawsuits against the NIH target this very cut.

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The Trump administration’s changes to university research funding represent a sharp policy shift driven by a coherent – if controversial – worldview: that taxpayer-funded research should serve clearly defined public priorities, as interpreted by the sitting administration. That’s a legitimate goal in a democracy. But when the shift happens quickly, the result is uncertainty for universities and potential legal exposure for the administration, not to mention general chaos.

What’s clear is that the federal role in science is being rewritten in real time. And as with all big rewrites, much depends on who’s holding the pen.