President Donald Trump’s attempted freeze on federal financial assistance is continuing to sow uncertainty across the local and US region, and its universities.
Multiple federal agencies, including the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, have enacted funding freezes or cuts as they seek to comply with executive orders. While a federal judge has halted the executive order, research programs at Drexel University and many others remain in limbo until a final federal court ruling.
Amidst the uncertainty on campus, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Professor Franco Montalto described various national and Drexel initiatives affected by funding disruptions.
One instance is a request for proposal issued by the National Science Foundation in the summer to develop a University-Community Climate Action Network to bring “together multiple universities, or regional groups of universities, with their local communities to develop climate action solutions.”
However, on Jan. 23, that proposal was rescinded by the Trump administration’s NSF ahead of an executive order that froze federal aid assistance for any project that “promote[s] Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”
Even though that order has been halted, the initiative has not been restarted.
Montalto’s threatened research projects include a study being conducted at the White Clay Watershed, located south and west of Philadelphia.
“They had essentially agreed to hire my research team to help them to understand which communities in this watershed will be flood-prone in the future under climate change, and then also to develop some tools that would allow them to test out, in a computer simulation, different ways of reducing that flooding,” Montalto said.
The project was set to start March 1, but Montalto and his team received a phone call stating that “because a significant percentage of the funding was allocated through the Department of the Interior, [we] had received a stop work order, and that meant that [while there were] other sources, that component of our funding was no longer available.”
While they were trying to navigate how to proceed after the stop work order, the Trump administration rescinded the nationwide funding freeze. As of Friday, Feb. 7, the team received a contract to begin work on March 1 as they originally planned. However, the contract now includes a termination clause. This clause allows for the project’s funding to be pulled if the Trump administration decides once again to end funding for research.
This confusion regarding research funding is affecting not only the research projects themselves but also the students who are working on them. Many graduate students who hold student visas work with professors on projects as part of their dissertation, and these projects are funded by money from the federal government.
In Montalto’s case, he funds the graduate students working for him through the NSF and the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Foundation.
“For these students to continue to have their student visas valid, they need to be funded PhD students,” Montalto said. “For these particular students it’s very worrisome because…if tomorrow or Monday I get a stop work order on some of these grants, then all of a sudden I don’t have the funding to continue giving them their research assistantship,” stated Montalto.
As a consequence of losing this research assistantship, students would have to either pay the Drexel tuition on their own or drop out since their student visas require them to be full-time students.
“If you’re not a full-time student, then you have to leave the country,” Montalto emphasized. “If you leave the country in the way things are going right now, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to get back in.”
These students have invested considerable time into their PhD programs, and while their funding is not being taken away right now, Montalto has begun rushing their projects to make sure they can complete their dissertations because he does not know if funding will be pulled again in the future.
Montalto also receives funding from a program within the NSF called the Program for Environmental Sustainability. The program manager who has held his position since Montalto’s start at Drexel in 2007 is retiring, but Montalto does not know if he will be replaced.
“We don’t exactly know if that program will continue to exist or not. I don’t know if he’s leaving because of what’s going on, but there’s just a whole bunch of moving parts that make it very chaotic if you do environmental work or work that involves social justice or climate change right now,” Montalto said.
He added that some of his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania were told by their administration to stop working on certain projects because “they weren’t sure that they’d be able to get paid.”
In research, once a university has a signed contract, they start working before they receive the money.
Montalto’s program manager at the NSF advised him to “make sure that [for] any work that you’ve done, that you sent them an invoice, because there’s no guarantee that the National Science Foundation will pay these invoices if they’re not received now.” Even with the looming risk of the invoices going unpaid for university research, Drexel has not decided to stop work on certain projects.
Another critical source of funding for researchers is the National Institutes for Health. The NIH disburses financial assistance in the form of grant money dedicated for research. The Philadelphia Inquirer estimates that Drexel’s active NIH grants total $86.6 million.
The NIH also issues separate grants to cover researchers’ overhead expenses, or indirect costs. Indirect cost coverage grants help pay for the background infrastructure essential for conducting research: administration, IT support, legal compliance, building maintenance and even utility bills.
Drexel’s negotiated cost coverage rate, the Facilities & Administrative rate, has hovered around 52 percent. Federal spending data available on USASpending.gov indicates its active grants come with a further $9 million in indirect cost coverage.
Effective Feb. 10, NIH seeks to cut this coverage rate to 15 percent across the board. University leadership issued an updated statement on Feb. 11 revealing that while they would continue to request the negotiated rate, they will likely be forced to settle for 37 percent less.
With the University of Pennsylvania claiming the cuts could amount to $250 million and require 4,500 layoffs across its research enterprises, along with rippling effects for its student researchers, the outlook for other universities may be similarly dire.