Harvard researchers are devastated as Trump's team cuts almost 1,000 grants

Nature talks to scientists about the uncertain future when the U.S. government besieges their university.

As the U.S. government reduces funding for Harvard University, the damage to research at the school becomes more and more obvious. Nature learned that researchers at the university lost almost 1,000 grants worth more than 2.4 billion US dollars.

Last week, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced the termination of the contract in a press release, but did not specify how many of them would be targeted or the List of individual grants. Nature received figures from various sources, including employees of American financial agencies and online tracking of volunteers on grant-watch.us.

An email to Harvard from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) lists 193 grants worth almost $150 million that have been terminated, and one of them from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) registers 56 grants worth $105 million. Other reductions are smaller: for example, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped three grants. But to date, the largest tranche comes from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH), the world's largest sponsor of biomedical science: in a few years, it has reduced more than 600 grants worth about $2.2 billion. The reduction does not include hospitals affiliated with Harvard.

Through research grants, the U.S. government is funding about 11% of Harvard's annual budget of $6.4 billion, and these cancellations will be devastating, researchers say. "Harvard cannot, even with its huge resources, simply compensate for this loss of federal funding," says Joseph Loparo, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who lost two NIH grants to study DNA recovery processes totaling $4.3 million.

At the crossroads

Harvard, whose main campus is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the most prestigious universities in the world - and the richest - with its fund of $53 billion. The university was the main target for the Trump administration, as it seeks to eradicate what it calls the "awakened" ideology from U.S. campuses. According to The New York Times, Trump gave the opportunity to never pay Harvard his grant money during a private lunch on April 1. "Wouldn't that be cool?" He asked. On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an emergency statement that it had canceled Harvard's ability to enroll international students, a significant source of income. Today, the university sued, and an American judge quickly temporarily froze the Trump administration's policy until a hearing is held.

Although the Trump administration has suspended grants in other research institutions, such as Columbia University in New York, cancellations at Harvard are exceptional in scale. For example, the vast majority of NIH University awards have been discontinued. And cuts in several agencies include funding the Trump administration's stated priorities, such as artificial intelligence and quantum physics. A $20 million grant for the Quantum Materials Center was excluded, as well as several multimillion grants for quantum computing. Many of these grants have employees from several institutions whose funding status is unclear.

Trump's team claimed that Harvard and other universities contributed to the creation of anti-Semitism. In the emails she sent justifying the termination of grants, the administration said that Harvard is also engaged in "racial discrimination" in admission.

In early April, government officials contacted Harvard and provided him with a list of requirements that must be met in order for the university to continue to receive federal money, some of which will give the government oversight of its recruitment and hiring practices. Harvard publicly rejected the request, stating that it would be a violation of academic freedom. In response, the administration froze the institution's research grants. Harvard sued on April 21, claiming that the government holds federal funding "as a lever to gain control over academic decision-making at Harvard".