Dozens of top universities have frozen hiring, slashed spending and retracted graduate admissions offers amid uncertainty over Trump administration cuts to federal research grants.
The precautionary moves come as U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, a Biden appointee, has temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing a 15% cap on taxpayer coverage of “indirect costs” that colleges have long tacked onto National Institutes of Health grants for scientific research.
The latest universities to pause hiring and limit nonessential spending in March were Brown, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Notre Dame, North Carolina State, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Vermont, the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego.
Harvard University President Alan Garber said his temporary hiring freeze was necessary to address “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”
More than a dozen schools such as Stanford, Cornell and the University of Missouri implemented similar measures in February.
Several higher education insiders told The Washington Times that the cap would drive struggling campuses to merge or close and reduce doctoral programs at elite schools permanently if the White House prevails in court. They said annual federal investments in university-based research and development total about $60 billion.
“Even institutions with substantial endowments can be fundamentally affected by the abrupt and substantial reductions in federal funds,” said Tim Cain, a professor of higher education at the public University of Georgia, which has asked administrators to review environmental and diversity-related grant spending. “Colleges and universities cannot just replace discontinued federal dollars with endowment dollars due to legal requirements and donor agreements.”
According to a Feb. 5 news release, the University of Georgia received $255.1 million in federal research grants in fiscal 2024, nearly half of expenditures passing $600 million. The university’s Office of Research credited the grants for fueling the Athens flagship campus’s top-tier ranking and a multibillion-dollar impact on Georgia’s economy.
As part of a quest to reduce the size of government, the Trump administration is working to restrict a broad range of education grants and eliminate the Department of Education, offloading federal student aid and other essential functions to other agencies.
Johns Hopkins University, a private Maryland school with a popular foreign service program, announced on March 13 that it would eliminate more than 2,000 domestic and foreign employees due to cuts to international aid programs.
The administration has also suspended grants to Columbia University over campus anti-Semitism complaints and has threatened to do the same at other campuses suspected of evading policies restricting illegal immigration and transgender research.
On Thursday, the Department of Education ended a Biden administration program for disadvantaged students that it said California and Oregon universities used to provide services to illegal aliens.
“American taxpayer dollars will no longer be used to subsidize illegal immigrants through Department of Education programs,” said Acting Under Secretary James Bergeron.
Officials at private American University in the District of Columbia recently canceled student internships and warned international students not to leave the country.
“The internships are graduation requirements, so there has been a scramble to figure out how to manage that for students,” said Omekongo Dibinga, a professor of intercultural communications affiliated with AU’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center. “Trump is crippling the American university system.”
Pressures on universities to heed President Trump’s political priorities have mounted as falling birth rates, rising costs and declining revenues push a growing number of campuses to close or merge.
“The most direct cuts in funding to higher education by the Trump administration involve anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Michael Warder, a California-based nonprofit consultant and former vice chancellor of private Pepperdine University.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, one of four nonprofit compacts established by President Dwight Eisenhower, projects that the headcount of high school graduates will fall by 13% from a record 3.9 million in the class of 2025 to less than 3.4 million by 2041, reversing decades of growth.
Gary Stocker, a former university administrator who founded College Viability to evaluate campuses’ financial sustainability, said the Trump cuts add “another market factor” to those pressures on college enrollment.
He predicted that more private colleges with “an unsustainable financial history” will rapidly close and small public campuses will merge this fall as recent policy changes reverberate throughout higher education.
“There will be a trickle-down effect that will ultimately hit those financially stressed colleges,” Mr. Stocker said. “The historical trends, in combination with the changes in federal policy, will bring dozens to the realization that there is no sustainable path to continue.”
In New York City, the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner has launched a Trump Second Term Legal Tracker to facilitate legal changes to recent policy changes.
Education lawyer Sarah Hartley, who heads Bryan Cave Leighton’s higher education team, said each round of new cuts has amplified uncertainties and bolstered the legal standing of graduate students to sue as universities suspend their admissions offers.
“If legal challenges brought by educational institutions are successful, it may allow for some of those programs, jobs, and admissions spots to be reinstated,” Ms. Hartley said. “But the impact for current students and programs that cannot weather even a short gap in funding will be significant.”
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, said limiting NIH discretionary spending to 15% of grants is the president’s biggest weapon.
“Those wholesale cuts are probably best seen as a tactic to get the university to end their DEI commitments,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at private Boston University.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.