Federal Cuts Force Hiring and Raise Pauses At Johns Hopkins University

Forbes

2 days ago

Johns Hopkins University announces four immediate cost containment measures in an attempt to ... More stabilize ts finances.
The leadership of Johns Hopkins University announced on Monday that it was implementing several belt-tightening measures as it tries to address the financial pressures brought on by the Trump administration's cutbacks in research support and other changes in higher education policies.
In a letter to the campus community, Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels, Provost Ray Jayawardhana, and Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Laurent Heller identified the financial strains the university had already suffered, and they outlined additional challenges they anticipated were yet to come.
Referencing 'a steady stream of research grant terminations, suspensions, and delays,' the leaders wrote that the university had sustained losses of more than $800 from USAID grant terminations.
In addtion, since the start of the year, 90 grants have been terminated by other federal agencies, resulting in the reduction of more than $50 million in research funding, 'with more terminations arriving nearly every week.'
New federal research grants awarded to Hopkins investigators are down by almost two-thirds since January, compared to the same period last year, and Hopkins leadership said they "fear that this downward trend may be laying the groundwork for deep cuts to the extramural research programs at the NIH, NSF, DOD and DOE…significantly curtailing Hopkins' capacity to undertake our core academic and research mission and to sustain the people who allow us to realize it.'
Hopkins had previously taken steps to provide limited bridge funding to researchers whose grants had been suspended or cancelled, but officials acknowledged at the time that they would not be able to 'make up the full measure of recent or potential federal research cuts.'
The leaders also pointed to recent attempts by the Trump administration to revoke or withhold visas from international students and scholars as another threat, claiming that 'our international community has always been critical to our research mission, and we are deeply concerned about the toll of this uncertainty on our students and on our university as a whole.'
According to the most recent figures from the Institute of International Education's Open Doors report, 10,054 international students were enrolled at Johns Hopkins in the 2024-2025 academic year, representing more than a third of its total enrollment.
According to the letter, several other actions 'are gaining steam in Congress" that will impair its ability to carry out its mission. Included among those policies are plans to:
As a result of these reductions, JHU leadership identified four steps it would take immediately to stabilize its finances:
Hopkins officials did not indicate how much money these four steps might save, but they did write that they expected to make further 'moderate but meaningful" expense reductions in next academic year's budget and were also exploring 'more aggressive actions down the road if needed to safeguard our core mission.'
The reductions by Johns Hopkins are just the latest illustration of the mounting financial difficulties that major research universities are facing and the extraordinary steps they are taking to address current or anticipated shortfalls.
In just the past month alone, Duke University, Columbia University, Rice University, Michigan State University, the University of New Hampshire, the Catholic University of America and Princeton University have all announced some combination of layoffs, buyouts, hiring freezes and other cost reduction measures.
But there is a particular, almost poignant, significance to the cutbacks at Hopkins. It was, after all our nation's first research university, cast in the mold of its European predecessors by its inaugural president, Daniel Coit Gilman. And year in and year out, it ranks first among all institutions in the U.S. for the amount of money it spends for research and development.
We can debate the reasons why the Trump administration is targeting leading research universities across several fronts, but there is little question that these institutions— and their mission of discovering and disseminating new knowledge — are being diminished. The immediate consequences of that strategy are now being felt. The long-term damage is likely to be much greater.