Education

Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

Published

6 months ago

June 23, 2025

Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

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.

Grants terminated at Harvard

This picture represents nearly every grant the government has canceled at Harvard.

This one has tracked the health of 116,00 American women continuously since 1989.

This one supported domestic Ph.D. students training to be America’s next neuroscientists.

This one studied the role of telemedicine in treating opioid addiction.

These two probed how salamanders regenerate their legs, to eventually aid human amputees.

These sought advances that could one day enable Navy divers to breathe underwater without oxygen tanks.

This one funded work with rural school districts to test ideas to lift student outcomes and attendance.

Now all of these projects are in jeopardy.

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.

Terminated grants for training and career development

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:

About the data

To account for Harvard’s terminated grants, we used data from multiple sources: letters from government agencies included in court filings by the university; lists of terminated grants provided by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation; a crowd-sourced list of grant terminations at Grant Watch; and some additional data from internal university sources. We interviewed 23 researchers whose grant funding was terminated, who confirmed those specific cancellations.

Our charts show the total obligated amount for each grant using data from USAspending.gov, which reflects the funds that the government has set aside for each project. In cases where a grant was extended or renewed, this figure typically accounts for the entire lifetime of the grant to date, and not just the most recent renewal. Obligated funds for multiyear grant awards are typically paid out gradually over a number of years. Our charts do not account for this outlayed spending — the portion of these obligated funds that have been paid by the government so far — because there are substantial lags in this spending data for some agencies. This analysis did not include the $100 million or so in federal contracts, separate from grants, much of which also fund scientific research.

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Education

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

Published

24 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Press Room

Opinion | America’s Military Needs a Culture Shift

The U.S. military
is broken. Young
Americans want
to fix it.

Bailey Baumbick traded a
career as a national security
consultant to build tech
solutions
for the challenges
she saw at the Pentagon.

Elias Rosenfeld left a job
in social
impact consulting
to start a career aimed

at revitalizing America’s
industrial base.

Lee Kantowski spent
eight years in the
Army before
switching to defense tech,
where
he hopes to fix the
military’s outdated tools.

Opinion

The Editorial Board

a New

Definition of

Service

By The Editorial BoardThe editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Bailey Baumbick knew she wanted to serve her country when she graduated from Notre Dame in 2021. Ms. Baumbick, a 26-year-old from Novi, Mich., didn’t enlist in the military, however. She enrolled in business school at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Baumbick is part of a growing community in the Bay Area that aims to bring high-tech dynamism to the lumbering world of the military. After social media companies and countless lifestyle start-ups lost their luster in recent years, entrepreneurs are being drawn to defense tech by a mix of motivations: an influx of venture capital, a coolness factor and the start-up ethos, which Ms. Baumbick describes as “the relentless pursuit of building things.”

There’s also something deeper: old-fashioned patriotism, matched with a career that serves a greater purpose.

In college Ms. Baumbick watched her father, a Ford Motor Company executive, lead the company’s sprint to produce Covid-19 ventilators and personal protective equipment for front-line health care workers. “I’ve never been more inspired by how private sector industry can have so much impact for public sector good,” she said.

Ford’s interventions during the Covid-19 pandemic hark back to a time when public-private partnerships were commonplace. During World War II, leaders of America’s biggest companies, including Ford, halted business as usual to manufacture weapons for the war effort.

The Covid-19 pandemic drove public-private partnerships, such as Ford’s decision to produce ventilators needed by patients and hospitals.

For much of the 20th century, the private and public sectors were tightly woven together. In 1980, nearly one in five Americans were veterans. By 2022, that figure had shrunk to one in 16. Through the 1980s, about 70 percent of the companies doing business with the Pentagon were also leaders in the broader U.S. economy. That’s down to less than 10 percent today. The shift away from widespread American participation in national security has left the Department of Defense isolated from two of the country’s great assets: its entrepreneurial spirit and technological expertise.

Recent changes in Silicon Valley are bringing down those walls. Venture capital is pouring money into defense tech; annual investment is up from $7 billion in 2015 to some $80 billion in 2025. The Pentagon needs to seize this opportunity, and find ways to accelerate its work with start-ups and skilled workers from the private sector. It should expand the definition of what it means to serve and provide more flexible options to those willing to step in.

The military will always need physically fit service members. But we are headed toward a future where software will play a bigger role in armed conflict than hardware, from unmanned drones and A.I.-driven targeting to highly engineered cyber weapons and space-based systems. These missions will be carried out by service members in temperature-controlled rooms rather than well armed troops braving the physical challenges of the front line.

For all the latent opportunity in Silicon Valley and beyond, the Trump administration has been uneven in embracing the moment. Stephen Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense, is a Wall Street billionaire who is expanding the Pentagon’s ties with businesses. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, his “warrior ethos” and exclusionary recruitment have set back the effort to build a military for the future of war.

America has the chance to reshape our armed forces for the conflicts ahead, and we have the rare good fortune of being able to do that in peacetime.

Elias Rosenfeld had been at Stanford for only a month and a half, but he already looked right at home at a recent job fair for students interested in pursuing defense tech, standing in a relaxed posture, wearing beaded bracelets and a sweater adorned with a single sunflower. Rather than use his time in Stanford’s prestigious business school to build a fintech app or wellness brand, Mr. Rosenfeld has set his sights on helping to rebuild the industrial base on which America’s military relies.

It’s a crucial mission for a country that is getting outbuilt by China, and Mr. Rosenfeld brings a unique commitment to it. Born in Venezuela, he came to the United States at age 6 and draws his patriotism from that country’s experience with tyranny and his Jewish heritage. “Without a strong, resilient America, I might not be here today,” Mr. Rosenfeld says. Working on industrial renewal, he says, is a way to “start delivering as a country so folks feel more inclined and passionate to be more patriotic.”

Not on Mr. Rosenfeld’s agenda: enlisting in the military. In an earlier era, he might have been tempted by a wider suite of options for service. In 1955 the U.S. government nearly doubled the maximum size of the military’s ready reserve forces, from 1.5 million to 2.9 million, in part by giving young men the chance to spend six months in active duty training. Today the U.S. ready reserve numbers just over a million.

The Pentagon should broaden its sense of service as fewer younger Americans meet the military’s eligibility requirements.

Other countries provide a model for strengthening the reserves. In Sweden, the military selects the top 5 percent or so of 18-year-olds eligible to serve in the active military for up to 15 months, followed by membership in the reserve for 10 years. The model is so effective that recruits compete for spots, and according to The Wall Street Journal, “former conscripts are headhunted by the civil service and prized by tech companies.”

America’s leaders have argued for a generation that the military’s volunteer model is superior to conscription in delivering a well-prepared force. The challenge is maintaining recruiting and getting the right service members for every mission. There are some examples of the Pentagon successfully luring new, tech-savvy recruits. Since last year, top college students have been training to meet the government’s growing need for skilled cybersecurity professionals. The Cyber Service Academy, a scholarship-for-service program, covers the full cost of tuition and educational expenses in exchange for a period of civilian employment within the Defense Department upon graduation. Scholars work in full-time, cyber-related positions.

The best incentive for enlisting may have nothing to do with service, but the career opportunities that are promised after.

It was a foregone conclusion that Lee Kantowski would become an Army officer. One of his favorite high school teachers had served, and his hometown, Lawton, Okla., was a military town, a place where enlisting was commonplace. Mr. Kantowski attended West Point and, in the eight years after graduating, went on tours across the world. Now he’s getting an M.B.A. at U.C. Berkeley, co-founded a defense tech club with Ms. Baumbick there and works part-time at a start-up building guidance devices that turn dumb bombs into smart ones.

The military needs recruits like Mr. Kantowski who want to support defense in and out of uniform. Already, nearly one million people who work for the Department of Defense are civilians, supplemented by a similar number of contractors who straddle public and private sectors. Both paths could be expanded.

A rotating-door approach carries some risk to military cohesion and readiness. The armed services are not just another job: Soldiers are asked to put themselves in danger’s way, even outside combat zones. America still needs men and women who are willing to sign up for traditional tours of duty.

The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps serves as the largest source of commissioned officers for the U.S. military. For more than five decades, R.O.T.C. has paid for students to pursue degree programs — accompanied by military drills and exercises — and then complete three to 10 years of required service after graduation. In 1960 alone, Stanford and M.I.T. each graduated about 100 R.O.T.C. members. Today, that figure is less than 20 combined. The Army has recently closed or reorganized programs at 84 campuses and may cut funding over the next decade.

This is exactly the wrong call. R.O.T.C. programs should be strengthened and expanded, not closed or merged.

The U.S. Army is closing or reorganizing Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs across the country.

It remains true that the volunteer force has become a jobs program for many Americans looking for a ladder to prosperity. It’s an aspect of service often more compelling to enlistees than the desire to fight for their country. In the era of artificial intelligence and expected job displacement, enlistment could easily grow.

Most military benefits have never been more appealing, with signing and retention bonuses, tax-free housing and food allowances, subsidized mortgages, low-cost health care, universal pre-K, tuition assistance and pensions. The Department of Defense and Congress need to find ways to bolster these benefits and their delivery, where service members often find gaps.

Standardizing post-service counseling and mentorship could help. Expanding job training programs like Skillbridge, which pairs transitioning service members with private sector internships, could also improve job prospects. JPMorgan has hired some 20,000 veterans across the country since creating an Office of Military & Veterans Affairs in 2011; it has also helped create a coalition of 300 companies dedicated to hiring vets.

When veterans land in promising companies — or start their own — it’s not just good for them. It’s also good for America. Rylan Hamilton and Austin Gray, two Navy veterans, started Blue Water Autonomy last year with the goal of building long-range drone ships that could help the military expand its maritime presence without the costs, risks and labor demands of deploying American sailors.

Blue Water Autonomy, founded and staffed by Navy veterans, is building fully autonomous naval vessels capable of operating at sea for months at a time.

Mr. Gray, a former naval intelligence officer who worked in a drone factory in Ukraine, said Blue Water’s vessels will one day do everything from ferrying cargo to carrying out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. This summer, the company raised $50 million to construct a fully autonomous ship stretching 150 feet long.

Before dawn on a Wednesday morning in October, military packs filled with supplies and American flags sat piled on a dewy field near the edge of Stanford University’s campus. Some of the over 900 attendees at a conference on defense tech gathered around an active-duty soldier studying at the school. The glare of his head lamp broke through the darkness as he rallied the group of students, founders, veterans and investors for a “sweat equity” workout.

“Somewhere, a platoon worked out at 0630 to start their day,” he said. “This conference is all about supporting folks like them, so we are going to start our day the same way.” The group set off for Memorial Church at the center of campus, sharing the load of heavy packs, flags and equipment along the way.

A group of students, founders, veterans and investors participate in a run during a defense tech conference at Stanford University.

That attitude is a big change for the Bay Area, not just from the days of 1960s hippie sit-ins but also from the early days of the tech revolution, when Silicon Valley was seen as a bastion of government-wary coders and peaceniks. Now it’s open for business with the Defense Department. “The excitement is there, the concern is there, the passion is there and the knowledge is there,” says Ms. Baumbick.

There are some risks to tying America’s military more closely to the tech-heavy private sector. Companies don’t always act in the country’s national interest. Elon Musk infamously limited the Ukrainian military’s access to its Starlink satellites, preventing them being used to help in a battle with Russian forces in 2022. Private companies are also easier for adversaries to penetrate and influence than the government.

Yet in order to prevent wars, or win them, we must learn to manage the risks of overlap between civilian and military spheres. The private sector’s newly rekindled interest in the world of defense is a generational chance to build the military that Americans need.

Portraits by Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times; Carlos Osorio/Associated Press; Mike Segar/Reuters; Maddy Pryor/Princeton University; Kevin Wicherski/Blue Water Autonomy; Aleksey Kondratyev for The New York Times (2).

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Published Dec. 12, 2025

Education

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

Published

4 days ago

December 8, 2025

Press Room

Video: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

new video loaded: One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

transcript

One Hundred Schoolchildren Released After Abduction in Nigeria

One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

: “Medical checkup will be very, very critical for them. And then if anything is discovered, any laboratory investigation is conducted and something is discovered, definitely they will need health care.” My excitement is that we have these children, 100 of them, and by the grace of God, we are expecting the remaining half to be released very soon.”
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One hundred children who had been kidnapped from a Catholic school in northwestern Nigeria last month were released on Sunday. This is part of a larger trend of kidnappings in Nigeria, where victims are released in exchange for ransom.

By Jamie Leventhal

December 8, 2025