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A chill went through Lauren Madden, a professor at The College of New Jersey, as she read an email several weeks ago from the National Science Foundation.

Madden, the recipient of a $3 million, six-year federal research grant, had never seen an email quite like this from the foundation — a key pillar of American scientific research.

It said that from now on, any research funded through the agency must adhere to President Donald Trump’s recent executive order barring federal spending that supports diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or DEI.

On top of that, the National institutes of Health — the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world —announced cuts last month that could amount to more than $4 billion a year.

In a social media post on X, formerly Twitter, the agency said that $9 billion of the $35 billion that the National Institutes of Health granted for research in 2024 “was used for administrative overhead, what is known as ‘indirect costs.’”

So the NIH lowered the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government to 15%, which it said was still more than what many major foundations allow.

On Friday, about 200 faculty and students from New Jersey universities protested against these moves at a “Stand Up for Science” rally in Trenton, part of a nationwide grass roots protest by scientists, graduate students and researchers who depend on federal funding.

The protesters — who included faculty from Rutgers University, The College of New Jersey and Princeton University, as well as members of the American Association of University Professors — hold federal grants to research everything from infertility in women to genetics, drug manufacture to cancer research.

“Facts not fear!” and “Out of the lab and into the streets,” they chanted.

The Trump administration’s executive orders were already having a real impact, said protester Tara Matise, a scientist and head of the genetics department at Rutgers-New Brunswick.

Some faculty in the Rutgers genetics department are not receiving any communications from their usually responsive National Institutes of Health program officers about the status of their projects, Matise said. “Usually, they keep in touch with you, and now boom, you just don’t hear from them.”

Grant opportunities and decades-long research with any connection to diversity have been scrubbed from the websites of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Grant approvals indefinitely delayed

Grant approvals have been indefinitely delayed since Jan 20. This leaves professors and doctoral students who depend on grant funding in limbo and unable to plan, Matise said.

“We can’t do research without grants. Universities don’t give us money for our research — grants do,” Matise said.

The funding freezes at the National Institutes of Health are affecting Matise directly. One of her grants that supports about half of her lab’s research and staff was supposed to be renewed. But the meeting for that renewal was cancelled. The grant money runs out in July.

“Once that happens I have to start reconsidering employees and scaling back my research,” Matise said.

On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked the National Institutes of Health policy to cut funding to universities for research grants. The Trump administration is expected to appeal.

And even with the judge’s ruling, “they seem to keep finding loopholes,” Matise said of the agency.

Trump moves hurting Rutgers research efforts

Rutgers received $560.1 million in federal funding for research in the 2024 fiscal year, the university said. It has created a webpage to provide the Rutgers community information and guidance, and is monitoring the situation, said Dory Devlin, spokesperson for the university.

The Trump administration’s initiatives are hurting research at Rutgers, outgoing university president Jonathan Holloway acknowledged in a university-wide email sent Friday. He noted that National Institutes of Health councils are still not meeting, which impedes the funding of new grants.

Also, “the federal government has modified or terminated several active research awards at Rutgers, and the university continues to closely monitor the activities at federal funding agencies,” Holloway wrote. “Our Government Relations and Office for Research teams are calling for attention to these issues with our elected officials.”

One of those grants up for review is a $1.5 million, five-year National Institutes of Health grant studying how women’s bodies produce egg cells, conducted by Karen Schindler, a professor of genetics and infertility research. The review meeting for her grant has not been scheduled, she said.

Money for doctoral students’ work is being terminated

Fellowships that pay for doctoral students are also being abruptly terminated. Annika Barber, a molecular bioscientist with two National Institutes of Health grants, learned that a fellowship funding her doctoral student was terminated without notice in the last month.

“He’s a fourth-year doctoral student,” Barber said. “He had some exciting new aims, and this grant would have funded the end of his graduate training and his transition to post-doctoral studies.”

“Our guidance for faculty with grants is to continue spending grant dollars to pursue research aims, to continue to apply for new grants, and to share communications and questions regarding federal funding through channels set up to gather information,” Devlin, the Rutgers spokesperson, said in a statement.

The January email the National Science Foundation sent to The College of New Jersey’s Madden and other researchers had them scrambling to remove words from their grant proposals that could be flagged for cancellation because they might be interpreted to promote diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

Madden’s grant, which is geared toward teaching science in elementary classes, also funds fellowships for 24 public school teachers in New Jersey. It initially focused on teaching environmental sustainability and social justice. It is welcoming its first cohort of teachers on March 21, she said.

Their fellowships are paid for, she said, but now she was worried about whether her grant funding will be released for the remaining years.

“We opted for funding to come one year at a time,” instead of in a lump sum, she said. “But that was during normal times, and these are not normal times,” she added.

Cuts at NOAA have climate scientists feeling targeted

The Trump administration move to lay off workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has left climate science researchers feeling targeted. Madden was worried about losing support for her fellows. A colleague advised her to change focus.

“The grant’s focus changed from environmental sustainability to STEM education,” Madden said. It was a “slight change,” she said, “but if it helps me support more teachers, I will.”

There is no official list of research grant terms that could raise red flags for the Trump administration, but a press release last week from the office of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, flagging 3400 NSF grants for further scrutiny — including those which use words such as “gender” which is a critical differentiator in scientific studies of men and women — has left Madden and other scientists even more alarmed.

“At least 54 of the grants that were flagged for scrutiny by Cruz’s office related to cancer research, and had terms relating to gender and race,” she said. Its common sense that breast cancer and prostrate cancer could not be studied if you did not include gender, she said.

“Among the terms that were searched for in the list Ted Cruz created were ‘special needs,’ ‘equity,’” Madden said. “My grant focuses on environmental and social justice, and I am concerned it will fall under additional scrutiny.”

“Never before has the future been so unclear,” said Matise, the Rutgers genetics professor.

“All medicine, drugs, discoveries — why some drugs work for some and not for other people — all this depends on our research,” she said.

“That is where the public will eventually feel the effects,” Matise said. “It’s completely unheard of what kind of words can or cannot be used in science. It’s never happened before in science.

“It makes people fearful about getting in trouble for using the wrong word,” she said. “And these are words that are standard, that we speak every day.”