Shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, he signed a series of executive orders that have disrupted the world of academic research. Orders that denounced DEI initiatives and established the Department of Government Efficiency spurred a widespread reassessment of grant funding and sweeping personnel and budget cuts.
At the Institute, these cuts manifested as several “stop work” orders from federal agencies and a projected loss of over $13 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding. Although federal courts have paused actions that pose an immediate threat to Tech’s researchers, the security of future funding is still at risk.
“Tech currently manages more than 3,000 active grants and contracts,” says Abbigail Tumpey, Vice President of Institute Communications.
“To date, eight projects were put on hold, and four have now resumed. The projects originally put on hold were from the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID], Department of Energy [DOE], U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA], Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA], and a Department of Defense [DoD] subcontract. Of those, the four that were restarted were from the DoD, DOE, and USDA. Additionally, four DoD projects, one NIH award, and one USAID subcontract have been terminated.”
In an interview with the Technique, Liuwen said that recently, the Department of Defense cancelled two of the Institute’s projects under its Minerva Research Initiative (MRI). These are two of many terminated grants from the initiative that funds social science research related to national security.
Tech receives over $100 million per month in federal funding for research activities, and in FY25, 14% of the Institute’s revenue comes from overhead, or indirect cost recoveries of grants and contracts, the majority of which involve federal agencies. Lower caps on indirect costs or grant cancellations could threaten this usually reliable stream of revenue for the Institute.
A possible disruption sparked uncertainty within the research community, leading Tech’s Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen to host a research town hall on Feb. 27.
“There are 10,000 members of this research community, and I feel the weight that there are 10,000 people whose paychecks are reliant on federal funding,” said Lieuwen. “I am going to commit to this organization to minimize that disruption for that community of 10,000 people. … I make no apologies for that commitment.”
On Jan. 20, President Trump enacted the executive order titled “Protecting Civil Rights and Expanding Individual Opportunity” which sought to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) related work in the federal workforce. It specifically blocked DEI-related grants or contracts, which directly applied to applicable research at the Institute.
The next day, Trump passed another order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which required all contract and grant rewards to certify that they complied with “Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
According to Lieuwen, these orders led the Institute to receive 12 “cease non-compliant activity orders,” which permitted research projects to continue, just without work on a facet of the grant proposal that included DEI-related language. The U.S. Court for the District of Maryland placed a partial injunction on the executive orders on Feb. 21 after multiple organizations brought up a lawsuit against them.
Tech researchers were permitted to continue their work until March 14 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit stayed the injunction, meaning that the Trump administration can now implement the orders while the lawsuit is pending.
On Feb.10, the NIH announced that a 15% cap on all indirect costs would be implemented for all current and future grants. Days later, attorneys general from 22 states sued the agency, and a preliminary injunction has prevented the cut for the foreseeable future. Currently, Tech is receiving funding without interruption from the NIH and is not at risk of any other direct funding cut to research from federal agencies.
Indirect costs, which fund items not explicitly necessary for specific projects like laboratory equipment, building maintenance and other miscellaneous costs, have been a target of the Trump administration. Though the courts have stymied this initiative, it could threaten a vital source of funding for the Institute if other agencies follow suit.
“We’re advising local units that know their own profile better, because some units are largely National Science Foundation, some have much larger industry funding and some have larger [Georgia Tech] Foundation funding. And so [we] try to make central decisions about [dealing with grant freezes or cuts] because the risk is very granular.”
As administrations change, federal research interests also change. Lieuwen says that now, Tech faculty will have to figure out how to adjust their grant proposals and their research to align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
“I’ve been in [Washington,] D.C. I was there this week. I was there last week. We talked to … a lot of legislators. I think the general idea was, ‘Hey, we really appreciate the great work you’re doing. Research is important, but we’ve got to do something to deal with our deficit. We’ve got to deal, do something to deal with the government bloat,’ and so I don’t know where it’s going to land.”
While shifts like this are common, the scale of changes brought by the Trump administration is not. EAS professor Alexander Robel is the director of Rising Tide, a program that develops Tech’s promising scientists for the academic job market. He tells the Technique that administrative changes could damage the vital pipeline that brings academic scientists to industry.
“Programs that are very important for the development of early career climate scientists have disappeared entirely. This includes several of the NSF [National Science Foundation] postdoctoral fellowship programs, which have been “archived” on the NSF website, meaning they no longer plan to solicit proposals for those programs, … and there aren’t so many of these types of programs out there,” Robel said.
The primary concern of Tech faculty is uncertainty. Based on the drastic changes the Trump administration has already enacted or attempted to enact within federal agencies, the outcome of future grant applications remains unclear.
“Writing grants takes planning far in advance,” said Robel. “If we don’t know whether a program will exist in a few months or in a few years, it is hard to do long-term project planning if we don’t know whether there will be support for this sort of research in the future. Science is a long-term endeavor, and right now the future of climate science and science funding in general are in doubt, so this makes planning hard to do.”