The federal commitment to supporting scientific and academic research emerged from the fulcrum of World War II under the leadership of Vannevar Bush, head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development. During the war, federal funds led to the development of critical technologies such as radar and the mass production of penicillin, a valuable proof of concept of what scientists could accomplish with federal support. In the decades after the war, a partnership between the federal funding agencies and research universities became a central feature of the American research enterprise. This partnership has now fueled American leadership in scientific discovery and scholarship for the better part of a century.

Federal dollars have always come with strings attached, and both Congress and previous presidential administrations routinely use those strings to further policy goals. However, the current administration’s withholding of funds for new and ongoing projects not aligned with its political goals are unprecedented in scope and ambition. The procedural changes the administration has implemented to the grant review process and the demands it has made on institutions seeking to restore their funding cut against deeply established norms and practices that protect academic freedom and the integrity of scientific research. 

Since January, the current Trump administration has withheld billions of dollars appropriated to support academic research. The legality of cancelling grants that have already been awarded, withholding some or all federal research funding from institutions, and other actions that are disrupting the financial basis of the research enterprise is being contested in the courts. The budget proposals moving through Congress suggest that the full scope of cuts the administration has proposed to NSF and the NIH, as well as the shuttering of agencies such as the NEH and IMLS, may not come to pass. There are reasons to hope that the threatened cuts to federal indirects could be resolved in ways that improve transparency of those costs without undermining campuses’ ability to maintain the human, technical, and physical infrastructure required to support scientific research. 

Yet, while we wait to see the outcomes of litigation and legislation, the impacts of the funding cuts and numerous executive orders are already being felt across the academy. Long-term federal investments that have supported the digital humanities as well as broadened the base of future researchers have been disrupted or cancelled. Entire fields of research, for example on the health of LGBTQ+ individuals, have lost all federal funding. At the same time, highly trained, expert staff at core federal funding agencies have been laid off en masse. The administration has further withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds from major research universities, including Harvard, Brown, and Columbia, in an attempt to secure often unrelated changes in university policies. Within the past several weeks, the Department of Education has circulated a letter threatening the withdrawal of federal funding and offering preferential research funding to institutions that agree to conditions. Sally Kornbluth, President of MIT, became the first university president to refuse to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” after determining that it would  “restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution,” and undermine the foundational belief that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.” Cumulatively, these and other actions taken by the administration leave all universities, whether they have been directly targeted or not, in precarious positions, uncertain if they can count on the federal research dollars they have been awarded.   

Thanks to the efforts of projects like Grant Witness, SCIMaP, and the Association for Computers and the Humanities’ catalog of cancelled NEH grants, it is possible to understand the magnitude of the cuts made by the NSF, NIH, and NEH. The Chronicle of Higher Education has created a useful one-stop-shop for up-to-date information about the administration’s executive orders and the status of legal challenges to them. 

Today, we are sharing a new resource tracking the costs of the administration’s actions on the people who make the research enterprise possible. As universities adjust their budgets to reflect these new realities, we are seeing what is likely the first wave of layoffs and program cuts. These cuts have immediate consequences for both university staff, faculty, and students and on local economies. The loss of the human expertise required to conduct and administer research, and reduced opportunities for new researchers to enter their chosen fields, will have downstream effects on scientific discovery and scholarship for years to come. 

The goal of the University Research Workforce Tracker is to gather public information about layoffs, hiring freezes, and related personnel actions that affect individuals involved in academic research. The tracker also includes information about the closure or reduction of graduate programs that train future generations of scholars, as well as institutional budget cuts that could impact people involved in research activities. Money is fungible, and university budgets face financial pressures from all sides, but the tracker includes entries only if the institution attributes their actions at least in part to cuts, cancellations, and uncertainty about federal research awards. 

At launch, the tracker is populated with data on Association of American Universities (AAU) member institutions, which include the nation’s largest research universities. We will continue to expand its scope in the months to include the full spectrum of US research universities. To ensure that the resource is as comprehensive and up-to-date as possible, we encourage submission of new entries by those using the tracker. Users can propose new entries by clicking this submit entry link here or in the upper left corner of the tracker, where they can create a spreadsheet entry that follows the format of the tracker. Submissions must include a link to where information in the proposed entry can be publicly found, and will only be published following review by Ithaka S+R staff to ensure the proposed entry meets the specific criteria for the tracker’s scope as described above and on the submission form.