Universities are an easy target for right-wing populists. Polls show that a lot of Americans consider them too liberal, too expensive and too elitist, and not entirely without reason. But the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard is something more: It has become a test for the president’s ability to impose his political agenda on all 2,600 universities in the United States. Students, professors and scientists are all feeling the pressure, and that could undermine the dominant position that American science has enjoyed for decades.

What does that mean for the world?

European countries are wooing U.S.-based scientists, offering them “scientific refuge” or, as one French minister put it, “a light in the darkness.” Canada has attracted several prominent American academics, including three tenured Yale professors who study authoritarianism and fascism. The Australian Strategic Institute described this moment as “a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.”

In the mid-20th century, America was seen by many as a benign power, committed to scientific freedom and democracy. It attracted the best brains fleeing fascism and authoritarianism in Europe.

Today, the biggest beneficiary could be China and Chinese universities, which have been trying to recruit world-class scientific talent for years. Now Mr. Trump is doing their work for them. One indication of the success of China’s campaign to attract the best and brightest is Africa, the world’s youngest continent. Africans are learning Mandarin in growing numbers. Nearly twice as many study in China as in America.

Could America gamble away its scientific supremacy in the service of ideology? It has happened before. Under the Nazis, Germany lost its scientific edge to America in the space of a few years. As a German, my brain may wander too readily to the lessons of the 1930s, but in this case the analogy feels instructive. Several of my colleagues covering the fallout from the crackdown on international students and researchers pointed to Hitler’s silencing of scientists and intellectuals.

No one region can currently replicate the magic sauce of resources, freedom, a culture of risk-taking and welcoming immigrants that made America the engine of scientific innovation. But if it tumbles as a scientific superpower, and potential breakthroughs are disrupted, it would be a setback for the whole world. I spoke to my colleagues who are reporting on this, and here’s what I found out.

Higher education

Stephanie Saul is The Times’s higher education correspondent

There’s going to be fallout. We’ve talked to researchers at Harvard whose funding was cut, including those working on tuberculosis, and another who engineers fake organs that are useful in the study of human illnesses. There have been all sorts of different projects disrupted that could have led to some major breakthrough. When research is interrupted, there is no way of knowing if it would have led to a breakthrough that the world will now have to do without. But the impact might actually be more heavily felt on small regional public universities that had already lost some of their public funding and were relying heavily on international students to pay the bills. So if the United States is continually viewed as an unwelcome place for international students there will be ripple effects throughout the system.

Politics

Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington, covering President Trump’s domestic policy agenda.

It’s smart to think about this in terms of political calculus instead of ultimate goals. It matters little to the Trump administration if it’s dragged into court over and over again, or even how many of those lawsuits it wins. They view Harvard as an avatar for all universities that have become incubators of liberalism and are hostile to conservatives. And what better university in the world to send a message that, in their view, slows down the march of liberalism in universities. That would be a major victory for this administration. If Trump officials have any measure of success, it will be whether they can create a roadmap for imposing their political agenda on the other 2,000-plus colleges in the United States.

Global economics

Patricia Cohen is a business correspondent for the Times, covering global economics.

Even before Trump, American researchers were saying we have a problem with the supply of domestic science, math and engineering talent. And that’s something that takes a generation to fix. It’s not something that’s done overnight. Some, we’ve already seen, are looking to do research elsewhere because, one, their funding has been cut, and, two, they’re very worried about academic freedom. Can they study what they want? We haven’t seen people ask these questions since the McCarthy era, the anti-liberal ideological war of the 1950s. Take climate change: there’s basically a repudiation by conservatives in power of what most of the scientific community considers established trends and facts based on evidence. It’s very difficult for foreign countries to compete financially, but what I have noticed in all of their pitches courting American scientists — whether it’s in Australia or Europe or Latin America — is that they’re offering them freedom of inquiry and respect of facts.

Canada

Matina Stevis-Gridneff is The Times’s Canada bureau chief.

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We have seen a movement of American academic and scientific talent to Canada. And that reinforces the clear success of Canadian institutions before this all happened. I spoke to Timothy Snyder, a prominent American academic who recently moved to Toronto. He told me that this is a huge opportunity for Toronto. He said the city could become what London, Paris and New York were in different periods when the great and the good moved there to think about democracy and talk about the future. Canada, and especially the University of Toronto, he believes, have a special role to play in fostering an ideological counterpull to Trump’s America in this moment of great turmoil. It’s not so much that people are setting up an American resistance in Canada, but rather that the city is part of a global intellectual resistance to Trump.

India

Anupreeta Das is a South Asia correspondent for the Times, covering India and its neighbors, including Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

I don’t sense a big change in the mood in India yet. The United States still holds a lot of soft power and remains very attractive to Indians. In fact, many Indians are seeing something that is pretty familiar to them. They’re saying, “Welcome to the world as we have experienced it for the past few years.” The government under Narendra Modi has definitely cracked down on free speech. It has tried to quash dissenting voices, and it has also leaned on academics and has tried to squeeze certain research institutions that it considers too liberal. And there has been a demonization of the Muslim minority, which make up about 15 percent of the population. There are a lot of similarities to Trump’s America. Everyone in the world is just trying to understand what Trump’s actions mean for their own countries. So India’s experience can be instructive in making sense of this moment.

China

Vivian Wang is a correspondent for the Times in Beijing, covering Chinese politics and society.

China really wants to become a center for international education, because it sees that as a key ingredient for building its reputation as a global superpower. American universities have long been a source of American soft power. China wants Chinese universities to be a source of Chinese soft power. And now Trump is doing their work for them. You can see that in China’s rhetoric and messaging. It’s trying to portray itself as open and international, everything that the Trump administration is turning away from.

In reality, China isn’t a model of openness. There are a lot of restrictions on and suspicions toward foreigners in general, and that includes foreign students. But against the backdrop of what Trump is doing, China’s message may seem more convincing. Will it work? So far China has had the most luck with Chinese-born scientists who have studied and worked in America. They already had been riding out a wave of anti-Asian racism in the United States, as well as accusations of being spies. But now, if they also don’t have the resources to do their work because Trump has cut research funding, there is no reason for them to stay. Meanwhile, China has been pouring huge amounts of money into research and development. And so they are well positioned to take advantage of this brain drain.

Africa

Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for the Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Young Africans have this sense that the world is changing, that there’s a shift underway. And instead of going to the West, instead of lining up outside the American embassy and facing visa rejections, many are heading to new educational hubs — and especially to China. China enters the conversation because it provides the kind of opportunities young students are looking for. Many are attracted by the scholarships, by the easier access to visas, the affordable tuition and the comparatively cheap cost of living, which is prohibitive for so many people. And this shift is happening even as China trains thousands of African officials annually in fields such as science, technology and military strategy.

It’s not that young Africans wouldn’t choose Harvard if they were offered a chance. It’s all about opportunity for them. And where there is opportunity, soft power follows. America used to have that. Students were going there not just because they wanted a world-class education, but because they saw America as a symbol of modernity, democracy and progress – values they hoped to bring back home. Today, that image has been eroded, and China stands to gain the most from it.

Europe

Catherine Porter is an international correspondent for the Times, based in Paris.

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One university, Aix Marseille University, in southern France, immediately offered 15 positions to American researchers in reaction to the Trump administration’s policies. It began as a symbolic gesture. The university president said, “We’re offering a light in darkness.” What that one university is doing for individual American researchers is amazing. But it’s just a small drop in the bucket. There is an international system generating leaps and bounds in science, the motor and the anchor of which has been the United States. And if you get rid of the motor and you get rid of the anchor, it’s pretty hard to rebuild those things on the fly.

For example, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have these databases that they have maintained and that scientists around the world use. Some of the people I spoke to in Europe said, ‘Look, if we’re only going to spend 100 million euros, it would be much smarter to secure these databases.’ It’s not just that the United States has been a center in terms of people coming together and pushing science forward; it’s also been the data library for scientists everywhere. Think of all the health data that USAID has been financing around the world. It’s gone. Universities and researchers say that what’s at stake are not just individual jobs, but the greater research ecosystem.

Science

James Glanz is an international and investigative correspondent for the Times who writes about conflict and the science and technology behind disasters.

A lot of scientists said to me that they’re seeing the possibility of America tumbling from this position of scientific supremacy as Germany did under Hitler. What happened to Germany in the 1930s was not something anybody saw coming. All of a sudden, in a historical blink of an eye, the whole picture changed.The United States took over as the scientific superpower, using a lot of German scientists and a lot of German concepts and ideas. The question today is: is that happening again? And if so, who will take the lead? Could it be Europe? Could it be China? It’s hard to imagine somebody graduating with a physics degree from the University of Utah and then moving right to Beijing and continuing as before, raising kids in the suburbs, right? But one thing to keep in mind is that the smartest people in the world are also the least limited in their mobility. Scientists are wanted everywhere. They’re the ones who will fly free. Where they’ll land I’m not sure, but you just cannot keep them if they don’t want to be there. They’re too smart and too mobile.

With unusual speed, and despite an armada of controversial provisions, Congress has birthed a sprawling, nearly 900-page policy bill stuffed with hundreds of changes that will bestow trillions of dollars in tax cuts on the rich and special interests while slicing deeply into social programs relied on by millions of Americans.

Much like President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it will add substantially to the deficit and the debt without providing any meaningful impetus to economic growth. But this time, it will be much worse. This legislation will pile about $3 trillion onto the deficit over the next 10 years, double the amount its predecessor was expected to generate. And it lacks provisions that could significantly boost economic growth.

Its signature and most expensive components make a slew of individual tax cuts — cuts instituted in 2017 that primarily benefit wealthy Americans — permanent. To help pay for them, the bill makes student loans more expensive, slashes incentives for clean energy and reduces funding for and access to Medicaid. Missing yet again, despite Mr. Trump’s promises, is any effort to raise the tax rate on carried interest earnings, a major win for private equity. But the bill does deliver on one of his campaign promises: serving up tax deductions (albeit not permanently) for overtime pay, tips, car loan interest and for seniors.

The biggest and most damaging cuts are those to Medicaid — cuts that got only more draconian as the bill moved from the House to the Senate. About a third of the savings come from the imposition of a work requirement on recipients. While Republicans claim they are only attacking waste, fraud and abuse, the resulting paperwork to comply with the requirement is expected to daunt many and result in lost coverage. All told, these changes will cost over 10 million Americans their health care, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The legislation largely guts the Biden administration’s student debt repayment program that offered lower- and middle-income families generous terms. As a result, average monthly obligations for borrowers will surge, with a typical loan recipient with a college degree and an annual income of $80,300 paying an additional $2,929 per year.

The bill rolls back many of the clean energy tax incentives and investments created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, throwing a major roadblock in the way of combating climate change. Since the passage of the act, the United States has been experiencing a boom in clean energy investments, with $321 billion spent and $522 billion more on the way. Many of these projects will very likely be abandoned. Most Republican legislators are supporting this despite the fact that a vast majority of these investments have taken place in Republican congressional districts, where permitting is generally easier and weather can be more conducive to solar and wind power generation.

The package adds to our national debt in a way that dwarfs any of the other packages passed in the eight years since Mr. Trump first took office. His signature 2017 tax cut added a relatively modest $1.5 trillion to the 10-year deficit projection, but it did so by scheduling some of its provisions to expire after eight years, thereby setting the stage for the current legislation, which makes those changes permanent. (The bill uses the same gimmick with some of its tax breaks to keep costs down.)

The resulting deficit puts our economy in a perilous place. Over the past 50 years, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product averaged 21.1 percent. But since ballooning during the Covid-19 pandemic, spending has remained stubbornly above this average. With tax increases politically off the table, this means larger deficits.

The bill is just the latest, and worst, example of a policy followed by both Republicans and Democrats in recent years: Take the easy way out and let deficits climb. The costs of Medicare and Medicaid are rising relentlessly and are now just over 5 percent of G.D.P., compared with 1.2 percent in 1975. Social Security’s outlays have also grown. And now, because of increasing debt and higher interest rates, the cost of servicing the national debt has begun to soar. Allowing the 2017 tax cuts to expire, which effectively would have raised taxes on 62 percent of Americans, could have been highly unpopular. But it was also necessary.

Instead of growing to $2.7 trillion in 2035 from $1.9 trillion this year, this legislation will boost the deficit to $3.08 trillion a decade from now, according to one estimate. Exclude the gimmick of scheduling certain tax breaks to expire — an unlikely event, as demonstrated by Congress’s unwillingness to let the 2017 cuts fade — and the projected deficit climbs to $3.21 trillion. This puts total publicly held national debt at as much as 130 percent of G.D.P., materially higher than at any other time in our nation’s history. These higher deficits put upward pressure on interest rates, weakening the economy, and even more important, create an enormous debt burden for future generations to deal with.

The legislation will be far more beneficial for the wealthiest, at the expense of those farther down the economic ladder. The bill makes permanent a regime in which the richest fifth of American households — those with annual incomes of $120,390 and above — will get an average benefit of 2.3 percent of their income, or $6,055. In contrast, the fifth of Americans with the least wealth will suffer an estimated loss of $560, largely because of the effect of the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.

As for the impact of the legislation on economic growth, the White House is operating in its own universe. Private forecasters generally expect only a small bump to gross domestic product, with the Budget Lab at Yale University projecting even less growth. The White House Council of Economic Advisers, on the other hand, asserts that growth could reach 4.9 percent in 2028, multiples higher than other estimates.

In my 50 years of following tax and budget policy, I don’t believe I have seen another piece of legislation that would have such broad and deep impacts on virtually every American. No important social welfare program like Medicaid has ever been rolled back to this extent. The tax changes will also exacerbate income inequality. It is a result that should embarrass the Republicans — and may well come back to haunt them in 2026 and 2028.

The federal government annually spends billions funding research at Harvard, part of a decades-old system that is little understood by the public but essential to American science.

This spring, nearly every dollar of that payment was cut off by the Trump administration, endangering much of the university’s research.

The New York Times was able to identify more than 900 terminated grants, using court records, government databases and other internal university sources — a near-complete accounting of the cuts in the Trump administration’s escalating campaign to cripple the university.

The White House and Harvard have resumed negotiations to resolve the government’s claims that the nation’s oldest university has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” But while researchers await the outcome — or that of a parallel lawsuit brought by Harvard — the federal support for every one of these projects remains halted.

The Trump administration has canceled research grants at other universities, too, ending studies related to racial diversity and equity, scaling back the reach of federal science agencies, and sometimes attacking universities it views as ideological foes.

But Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

Foundational discoveries and future cures

Much of what the government funds at universities is “basic” research — the foundational knowledge that lays the groundwork for technological advances, disease cures and improvements in quality of life.

Daniel Nocera, a Harvard chemist, had four total grants terminated from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. His lab develops new chemical methods to address practical problems, such as developing an artificial leaf that can convert air and sunlight into biofuels, or extracting oxygen from seawater so that divers could one day swim without a heavy oxygen tank.

“I have to answer these questions that a company doesn’t have time to answer,” he said.

That’s because basic research takes years. And it produces insights that aren’t profitable on the time scale of corporate quarterly earnings.

Stephen Buratowski’s project to understand how genes are expressed and regulated is in its 25th year of federal funding. An early discovery in his lab used yeast cells to reveal how different steps are coordinated in the formation of messenger RNA, a mechanism later confirmed in human cells by researchers at other universities. Today, 20 years later, several companies are testing potential cancer treatments built on that knowledge.

Such long-term federal investments are inherently risky and expensive (a single tube containing a teardrop size of purified enzyme used in Professor Buratowski’s lab costs $400 to $500). And some ideas don’t prove as fruitful. But the government can bear this risk better than industry or individual universities can.

“It’s almost as if the government is acting as a venture capitalist,” Professor Buratowski said. “They’re putting out an ad saying, ‘We’ve got a pool of money, send us your best ideas.’”

Dragana Rogulja’s Harvard lab studies how chronic sleep deprivation harms the body. Her lab discovered that when fruit flies or mice are deprived of sleep, it damages their gut, which can be fatal. But when sleep-deprived flies were then treated with antioxidant drugs, they had normal life spans.

She received a grant from the Department of Defense’s health agency to detect biological signals in samples of blood, urine or saliva that warn of organ damage from sleep loss in mice. “If we are right,” her research proposal stated, “this would be a major breakthrough that would offer practical ways to mitigate health damage caused by poor sleep.”

Without researchers at Harvard or other universities doing this foundational work, it’s not clear who would. The government doesn’t have the expertise. Companies don’t have the luxury of time. And this same research would cost far more outside academia, where it runs on graduate students working long hours at relatively low cost.

Evidence for public policy

Other grants at Harvard produce something different from a lab discovery or a medical cure. This research provides evidence that shapes public policy, like nutritional guidelines, federal laws or local education initiatives.

A federal rule in 2018 banned artificial trans fats, following the findings of a decades-long longitudinal study of women’s health based at Harvard.

“A lot of things we take for granted — ‘Oh, everybody always knew that’ — no actually, we published those findings,” said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition who leads that study.

Of similar direct interest to the government, other Harvard researchers are trying to determine how well telemedicine appointments — sometimes paid for by Medicaid and Medicare — connect opioid use disorder patients with lifesaving treatments. (Some of the National Institutes of Health funding for that research goes right back to the government, in the form of fees to access Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services health data).

Other researchers are studying how well community college students have fared amid remote learning, after a pandemic boost in federal support for community colleges. Others are working on how to implement smoke-free policies in low-income housing after a move by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to curb secondhand smoke.

“We are directly informing the government’s capacity to work to serve its constituents,” said Vaughan Rees, the lead investigator on that HUD-funded research.

Just as much of basic research couldn’t be done in corporate labs, this kind of work — often relying on large-scale surveys, or partnerships that cross universities, hospitals and countries — couldn’t be funded by Harvard alone.

“No university could do that,” said Lisa Berkman, a professor of public policy and epidemiology who works on international studies. “This is science that rests on a public investment.”

Training the next generation of scientists

Federal funding also fosters not just science, but scientists. Grants pay the salaries of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Grant terms regularly require that lead researchers incorporate student training into their work.

Jessica Whited, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, was the first in her family to become a scientist. As an undergraduate, she earned a scholarship at the University of Missouri and worked part-time under the federal work-study program. As an early-career researcher, her research was funded by competitive N.I.H. grants.

“I wouldn’t be sitting here today without the government,” she said.

Her lab studies how the axolotl, a salamander species, can regenerate its limbs, producing insights that could lead to treatments for human amputees. In 2019, President Trump awarded her the Presidential Early Career Award, the nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers. Last month, the government canceled the grants that provided nearly all of her funding.

The canceled grants highlighted below are specifically designed for training and professional development. They include National Science Foundation fellowships for undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early-career researchers, and similar training opportunities from the N.I.H. Together, these awards cover about a tenth of the total funding cut by the government at Harvard.

Paul Bump, a postdoctoral fellow, was just awarded one of these grants — the first of his career — in January. He wants to uncover the fundamental mechanisms of where stem cells come from in certain animals that, unlike humans, continue to produce them throughout their lives. (He works, in particular, on the three-banded panther worm, which can regenerate into two worms when cut in half.)

“What are the grand biological processes that explain that?” he said, describing what amounts to nature’s solution for making stem cells. The public’s down payment on the answer was about $75,000 a year to fund Mr. Bump’s work for two years.

Harvard is trying for now to provide stopgap funding for many of these researchers and students, but it can’t permanently replace the government. That’s also because federal funds support much of the infrastructure that researchers rely on. Grants also cover the indirect costs Harvard pays to maintain facilities and research support staff. And some larger grants directly fund research hubs that assemble shared resources and facilities for many scientists from different specialties working on related topics.

For 18 years, Harvard has hosted a center studying worker safety, health and well-being funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an arm of the C.D.C., where researchers from multiple institutions have studied the health of construction workers, Sept. 11 first responders, health care workers and warehouse workers.

The center’s canceled grant jeopardizes its active research projects, but also the partnerships with hospitals, insurance companies and employers that have taken years to develop, said Glorian Sorensen, a Harvard professor who co-directs the center.

“This is larger than any individual grant,” she said. “What we are losing is a future.”

Explore the data

Click on the chart below to explore the canceled grants for yourself: