Harvard researchers devastated as Trump team cuts nearly 1,000 grants Nature talks with scientists about an uncertain future as the US government lays siege to their university.
By Dan Garisto
Students enter Harvard Yard, on the university’s main campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Credit: John Tlumacki / The Boston Globe via Getty
As the US government slashes Harvard University’s funding, the damage to research at the school is becoming clearer. Nature has learnt that researchers at the university have lost nearly 1,000 grants worth more than US$2.4 billion. Related: Will US science survive Trump 2.0?
Last week, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced the terminations in a press release, but did not specify how many would be targeted or list individual grants. Nature obtained the figures from a variety of sources, including US funding agency employees and an online volunteer tracking effort at grant-watch.us.
An e-mail to Harvard from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) lists 193 grants worth nearly $150 million as being terminated, and one from the US Department of Defense (DoD) logs 56 grants worth $105 million. Other cuts are smaller: for instance, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development each terminated three grants. But by far, the largest tranche comes from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest funder of biomedical science: it is cutting more than 600 grants worth about $2.2 billion over multiple years. The cuts do not include Harvard-affiliated hospitals.
Through research grants, the US government funds about 11% of Harvard’s annual $6.4 billion budget, and these cancellations will be devastating, researchers say. “Harvard cannot, even with its vast resources, just make up for this loss of federal funding,” says Joseph Loparo, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who lost two NIH grants for studying repair processes in DNA totalling $4.3 million.
