Space Travel and Tuberculosis Research Are Hit by Trump's Harvard Cuts

New York Times

16-04-2025

Dr. Sarah Fortune, an immunologist who spends a lot of time in her laboratory at Harvard, never expected to be caught in a battle with the White House.
But early Tuesday morning, she received an official notice to 'stop work' on her lab's federally funded research on tuberculosis, an infectious disease that kills more than a million people a year worldwide.
Just hours earlier, the Trump administration had vowed to freeze $2.2 billion in research funding at Harvard. If fully executed, it will be the deepest cut yet in a White House campaign against elite universities that began shortly after President Trump took office in January. Other universities, including Princeton, Cornell and Columbia, have also seen deep cuts to research funding.
Dr. Fortune's contract, a $60 million National Institutes of Health agreement involving Harvard and other universities across the country, appeared to be one of the first projects affected. Stop-work notices also began arriving this week at an obscure Harvard office called 'sponsored programs' that coordinates federal research funding.
One Harvard professor, David R. Walt, received a notice that his research toward a diagnostic tool for Lou Gehrig's disease, or A.L.S., must stop immediately. Two other orders will affect research on space travel and radiation sickness, just weeks after the scientist, Dr. Donald E. Ingber, who engineers fake organs that are useful in studies of human illnesses, was approached by the government to expand his work.
The Trump administration, which warned that another $7 billion may be at stake at Harvard, has framed its campaign to cut research dollars as an effort to combat antisemitism. Harvard had appeared to be seeking ways to work with the White House, until a letter to the school on Friday expanded the administration's demands, with new requirements that had nothing to do with antisemitism.
On Monday, Harvard's president, Alan M. Garber, put his foot down, saying that Mr. Trump's administration had gone too far.
He has been applauded for resisting, but his school, along with the nation's other elite research universities, is extremely dependent on federal research funds.
In a news briefing Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Harvard had not taken the president's demands seriously, resulting in the funding cuts.
Noting Harvard's large endowment, which is about $53 billion, she added, 'Why are the American taxpayers subsidizing a university that has billions of dollars in the bank already?'
Harvard is still processing the incoming notices and has not yet disclosed the exact amount that has been cut. Even short-term reductions could be devastating to work that has helped the United States stay competitive and even helped keep people alive, college leaders and researchers said.
Dr. Walt, the A.L.S. researcher, who received a presidential medal last year for his work, said the order put in jeopardy 'a transformative diagnostic test that may never see the light of day.' He added, 'If this project is terminated, which is the likely outcome, and then other projects are terminated as well, people are going to die.'
Even before the explicit attack on Harvard, the Trump administration had been cutting research expenses on campuses across the country, part of a broad effort to reduce federal government spending and end projects that contradict its policy aims, including work that touches on gender and race.
Harvard had already lost millions. An analysis last week by The Harvard Crimson found $110 million in cuts, many of them in projects that involved sexuality or gender.
Cancellations have been executed so quickly and with so little warning since Mr. Trump took office that academics have had difficulty tallying them.
University leaders have been scrambling to assemble in-house lists of stop-work orders that were sent to individual researchers. Complicating matters, the White House has sometimes announced cuts far larger than what the schools receive from the federal government in any given year.
The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities said on Wednesday that it had been unable to tally the fallout on its members, noting that the figure was 'constantly changing.'
Some administrators have wondered whether the government is inflating its estimates, speculating that it is including previously spent money in its totals. The White House has declined to comment on the concerns of campus administrators.
In some cases, there were no official announcements that cuts were coming at all. The president of the University of Pennsylvania, J. Larry Jameson, has said that initial word of a $175 million reduction for the university came through media reports. Eventually, Dr. Jameson said, faculty members in seven of Penn's schools received stop-work orders that added up to about $175 million.
The experience was much the same at Princeton, where researchers received notifications suspending dozens of grants without any formal word from Washington to the university about 'the full rationale,' said its president, Christopher L. Eisgruber.
Mr. Eisgruber said last week he would not make any concessions to the White House. Princeton and Cornell are among about a dozen universities, along with major university associations, that have jointly sued the administration over cuts to research.
With the deeper cuts now looming at Harvard, Dr. Garber, a physician, is keenly aware of the risks. In a statement this week explaining why Harvard was refusing to comply with the government's demands, he argued that federal research partnerships with universities are beneficial to both schools and society.
'For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation,' he said.
Dr. Ingber said he found the government's decision to end $20 million in contracts for his work on space travel and radiation baffling.
'They're canceling these two programs at a time when the government is announcing that they're going to build nuclear reactors all across the country to provide energy,' Dr. Ingber said. 'And they're also wanting to go to Mars.'
'They know how to destroy,' he added. 'They don't know how to create.'
Despite the consequences, the scientists whose projects were cut agreed that Harvard was doing the right thing.
Dr. Walt said he would begin searching for alternate funding.
'I'm pleased that Harvard had the courage to do this,' he said, 'and am willing to accept it.'