Research programs at Carleton and schools nationwide were plunged into uncertainty after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a plan to cut $4 billion in grant funding. The Feb. 7 directive was frozen by a federal judge days later, but the proposals signaled the Trump administration’s drastic shift away from decades-old practices on which collegiate research has long relied.
The federal government currently provides Carleton with $12.6 million in funding for research expenses such as grants for faculty. Carleton directly hosts 28 projects with federal funding, with 11 more being funded by other organizations that receive federal funding. That figure includes $1.5 million for TRIO/Student Support Services, but does not include funding for financial aid.
21 of the research projects are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), three by the NIH and one each by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), AmeriCorps and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The NEH award is $50,000, most NSF awards are for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the largest grant is $3 million.
“Normally, federal grant-seeking changes glacially,” said Grant Office Director Christopher Tassava. “It’s usually remarkable to have something change within a single year… Here, we’ve seen just this absolute flood of changes, and it’s been less than four weeks [since Trump entered office]… it’s very hard on our scientists because they’re not sure [what to expect].”
Given that the funding freezes are currently being litigated, it is impossible to predict what exactly will happen. “We are following the situation very closely and will share any updates we have with the faculty as soon as possible,” said Mattson. “If proposed federal orders take effect, they will absolutely know as soon as we do.”
Carleton President Alison Byerly explained that Carleton believes larger research institutions will be more able to prove damages in courts, and the college thus will not be playing a major role in litigation.
All faculty conducting research are supported at least in part by Carleton, Provost Michelle Mattson explained over email, but institutional funds are limited. Departments have funding for expenses such as equipment and conference attendance, and new science faculty are given funding to set up their own research labs. And many apply for funding to employ student workers or continue their research while on sabbatical.
Private non-profit organizations also provide some research funding, but the federal government is critical for many larger projects, especially those related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) research.
Carleton provides some research funding, but if “[federal] funding were no longer available, that would be a real blow to the research work of many faculty,” said Mattson.
If the situation arises, Carleton has promised “as an institution to provide stop-gap funding to the extent we are able, particularly to ensure that any staff members employed with grant funding will be continued for as long as we can do so,” said Mattson.
Carleton’s institutional funding could prevent students’ research experience from being impacted by restrictions in the short-term, explained Byerly, but would not address all of the potential effects of the funding cuts.
“What concerns me is not just the immediate impact on Carleton grants,” Byerly said. “Several major research universities have already taken actions like pausing graduate admissions… or freezing job offers. Those are things that have an impact on the overall kind of research ecosystem that our faculty, and potentially students, are part of.”
Many scientific grants, such as the NSF’s biology grants, are used to compensate faculty for research separate from their teaching, pay student assistants, purchase research materials and conduct other necessary analyses such as off-site gene sequencing, according to Biology Department Chair Raka Mitra. A portion of those grants pay for overhead costs such as utilities rather than specific research expenses.
“A grant pays for people, and supplies and equipment,” said Mitra. “But the people can’t just work out on the Bald Spot. You have to have a lab that works.”
“[Because certain] costs can’t be assigned to just ‘this faculty member and those two students,’ we’re allowed, as the college, to just charge them generally to the grant budget,” Tassava said.
Carleton’s indirect cost rate is 60%, according to the college’s Business Office, meaning for every $1 allocated to Carleton, $0.60 is allocated as overhead. Proposed funding cuts specifically target indirect costs and would place a 15% cap on them where no limit existed before.
“Those ranges are very common in those fields,” said Byerly. “Indirect costs are not money that is simply diverted elsewhere in the institution. It’s money that accounts for the cost of actually running whatever the lab, or facility, or support systems are for the research being done.”
“It’s really dismaying that the [federal government is] trying to change the rules on us midway through the game,” Tassava said. “It’s basically impossible to imagine a way for Carleton to support [such programs] at the same level. So they’d either have to be scaled back to some radical degree, or they would have to be ended entirely.”
While STEM research receives the vast majority of funding because of its expensive materials and equipment, funding is also critical to many arts and humanities projects, where grants are typically in the tens of thousands of dollars. Humanities research funding is primarily used to compensate faculty and student assistants, said Austin Mason, a history professor and the director of Carleton’s Digital Arts and Humanities program. He explained that humanities grants often enable faculty to devote time to reading, writing and travelling, as well as funding fees such as entrance fees at libraries and archives. Mason recently completed a research project with a $50,000 NEH grant.
“The humanities are cheap because it’s mostly our labor that [we’re] getting funding for,” said Mason. Grants are traditionally used for “ buying out time that you otherwise would owe to whatever [institution] you work for… [giving] you leave from those responsibilities so that you can focus more on a research project.”
Mason explained that although the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and NEH have not seen significant budget cuts, the field is already seeing restrictions in the types of content that can receive grants. Many new NEH policies limit what research topics they’ll fund, reducing the diversity of scholars.
Incorporating voices of different populations “has been a great boon to the discipline,” said Mason. “But if now you’re basically not allowed to mention any of those things… it’s not what [researches newer to the field have] built their careers on.”
Ultimately, he said, “it’s going to have a chilling effect on all sorts of interesting work that was pushing these fields into new directions.”
Humanities grants being smaller also means the effect of funding cuts could be greater, Tassava said: “It’s a dollar figure kind of issue — the NEH has a hundredth or something of the funding that NSF has… so just in that proportional way, it’s going to affect non-scientists far more.”
A Feb. 14 letter issued by the Department of Education further complicated the funding landscape by interpreting the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban of affirmative action to imply that other college programs based on race — such as identity-based housing — could be considered discriminatory.
This letter is not legally binding, but according to Byerly, its goal would be to “hold grant funding and other federal funding hostage to whether an institution is in compliance,” said Byerly. “There are lots of federal guidelines that all grants have to comply with… that’s very different from saying, ‘[You] have a grant that is about studying sea mollusks, and we won’t give it to you if your institution is running certain kinds of student support programs.’”
The letter, paired with recent proposals, worries college administrators. They “all tend towards undermining the independence and autonomy of colleges and universities,” Byerly said. “The whole premise of academic freedom and academic research is that it’s not directed by external forces or by the government.”
Many programs affected by current changes are have responded preemptively to potential funding cuts: STEM summer programs have been cancelled, some PhD programs are rescinding offers, private foundations like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are pulling their science diversity funding and some senior researchers at various larger research institutions are being laid off, said Mitra.
Austin and Tassava said faculty may be hesitant to submit research proposals that may run afoul of new content restrictions. They diverged, however, on their view of how private non-profits might respond. Tassava thought that non-profits filling in gaps in funding might alter their criteria to match the government’s, while Austin was more optimistic that non-profit humanities funding could expand if needed.
Departments are taking steps to prevent impacts from being felt immediately. The biology department, for example, allocated money from other parts of its budget to pay student workers in case it loses federal funding.
“We have to tighten in other ways so that we can make sure that students still have the opportunities that we’re hoping that they will have,” Mitra said. Still, many decisions will have to “be made in the moment… predicting [the] future is, as you know, super hard.”
“Regardless of what the future situation is, the Grant Office is going to be eager to work with [faculty] to try to find funding for their research, for their teaching, for their creative activities,” said Tassava. “And we’ll try to figure out the new landscape together.”
