When Columbia University struck a deal with the Trump administration last month, the agreement came with the promise that the financial lifeblood of scientific research would start to flow again. But that was only part of the story.
While hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen federal research funding has been restored, a smaller subset of grants in areas that are out of favor with the White House, including transgender health, have not. Columbia’s School of Public Health and medical center remain in austerity mode, with fewer slots for Ph.D. students and hiring delays caused by the original suspension of funding.
And looming over the deal, researchers said, is a bleak national outlook for federal science funding, making some scientists feel as if they dodged a bullet only to face the possibility of a firing squad.
An Aug. 7 executive order signed by President Trump, for example, requires additional review of federal scientific grant awards to ensure that they are “consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.” The White House has also proposed a 40 percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health, the main source of medical research funding from the federal government, although a Senate committee has resisted the steep reduction.
“The effects, unfortunately, for research and the research community will be long-lasting and detrimental, despite any resolution at Columbia,” said Dr. Anthony Ferrante Jr., a medical researcher whose Columbia lab studies obesity. Interest from postdoctoral trainees from abroad, who typically send a steady stream of emails asking to work in his lab, has dwindled to a trickle, he said.
“One of the fundamental aspects of the American research enterprise since World War II has been the stable, apolitical, scientifically driven funding of research,” he said. “And people are now questioning that.”
As the first university to come to a deal with the Trump administration, Columbia is a bellwether for others, like Harvard, that are considering the same route. In interviews, nine Columbia scientists, including three Nobel Prize winners, said that the positive side of the agreement was that it saved Columbia’s own world-class research enterprise, at least for now. It did nothing, however, to diminish the broader national pressure on federally funded research.
The agreement, which was signed on July 24, requires that the university pay the government $200 million and change some of its policies in exchange for the restoration of research funding and the resolution of antisemitism allegations the administration had lodged against Columbia. According to the university, the vast majority of grants that the Trump administration terminated in March when it froze or canceled more than $400 million in funding are back in place. Columbia said it is working with the government to restore the rest.
In the past few months, research did continue at Columbia. The university provided bridge funding to minimize the impact on its laboratories, many of which could not get government reimbursement for expenses. Nearly 180 researchers and support staff received notices of termination or nonrenewal in May, but the federal spigot reopened before worse mass layoffs affected the university, which receives about $1.3 billion a year in federal research funding.
Still, the overall funding picture means that some damage cannot be contained. As Washington debates the cuts to science funding, Columbia and other research universities have instituted hiring freezes, cut expenses and reduced the number of students they will educate.
Despite the restoration of much of the federal funding, Columbia researchers are divided about the wisdom of making a deal with the Trump administration. Some scientists emphasize their relief, but others are upset that their life’s work was used as a rationale to sign a deal that they felt amounts to extortion. An organization of Columbia researchers and faculty members has urged the university’s trustees to fight back against the federal attacks. Hundreds have signed their petitions.
Joachim Frank, a German American biophysicist at Columbia and 2017 Nobel laureate in chemistry, said he was outraged by Columbia’s unwillingness to litigate instead of negotiate. The stance, he said, had emboldened Mr. Trump to ask for even more money from other universities. Dr. Frank called the administration’s decision to withhold funding over accusations that Columbia had tolerated antisemitism a “ruse for the government to take control of the universities, in a model essentially similar to what happened in Hungary and Turkey.”
He said he had tried to get other Nobel laureates to sign on to a joint protest action but had trouble convincing some of them of the urgency of the moment.
“From my background as a German, I have already seen what is happening from Day 1, and I was much more concerned than other people around me,” he said. “There has been too much complacency.”
Barry Honig, the director of Columbia’s Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, said he had been unhappy that scientists bore the brunt of the punishment for campus unrest, even though most of them work 50 blocks north of where the bulk of the demonstrations occurred. He supports the agreement with the Trump administration, and said he did not find the terms too onerous.
“There are limits, of course, and my own view is that we’ll see how it plays out, but at least the settlement seemed reasonable to me,” Dr. Honig added. “But I have a vested interest because I didn’t want science to end at the university.”
Richard Axel, a Nobel-winning neuroscientist at Columbia, said he was primarily grateful to the university for supporting scientists financially through the deep uncertainty of the past five months.
Some of his colleagues, he said, were “looking at what the consequences of diminishing their research were and what it would mean to terminate longstanding research and clinical efforts.”
He added: “Many were looking at positions elsewhere. The students felt this concern and questioned their own future in science.”
He noted that the agreement contained a clause that promises to respect academic freedom, and he said he felt that it was the faculty’s job to be vigilant and to ensure that pledge was honored.
“We are relieved to be able to return to our science, but there is an air of uncertainty and concern moving forward,” he said. Still, he thought Columbia had made the right call.
“I do not feel that we would survive as a university as we know it if this had persisted,” he added.
Some research did halt. A landmark diabetes study, which has monitored the health of about 1,700 people for more than 25 years, stopped work at 26 research centers around the United States because its $80 million federal grant flowed through Columbia.
Researchers and participants raised an outcry, calling lawmakers to remind them that the study had changed the way doctors prevent diabetes. But nothing worked until Columbia completed its deal. The research centers are now scrambling to rehire staff and tell participants that the study, which is examining links between diabetes and dementia, is back on.
“We were on life support,” Dr. David M. Nathan, a Harvard Medical School professor who chairs the study, said. “We’ve been resuscitated and now we are in rehab. We’re recovering and hoping to get back pretty quickly to full speed.”
Scientists said that the pipeline of novice researchers has already been disrupted, and that many departments had accepted half as many Ph.D. students this year as they normally would. Others had postdoctoral trainees turn down job offers to go elsewhere. In a statement, Columbia said it continued to take “a conservative approach to budgeting” because of the “uncertainty of funding availability on a go-forward basis.”
“As the university noted on May 6, we will be running lighter footprints of research infrastructure in some areas and, in others, maintaining a level of research continuity as we pursue alternate funding sources,” the statement added. “This guidance remains in place.”