Penn faculty and researchers discussed how federal funding cuts have impacted their research teams in interviews with The Daily Pennsylvanian.
On Feb. 7, the National Institutes of Health implemented a funding cut that could cost Penn $240 million. While a judge temporarily halted the changes after Penn and 12 other universities brought a lawsuit against the NIH, the cut — a 15% cap on indirect costs — resulted in hundreds of jobs being threatened and a sizable reduction in graduate admissions.
At the time of publication, six additional Penn research grants — including for projects surrounding messaging on vaccination, gender identity, and LGBTQ+ individuals — have been terminated because they were “not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,” according to a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson.
Nearly three months after the funding cuts were announced, the DP spoke to faculty members and researchers about the effects the federal actions have had on their colleagues and employees.
Annenberg School for Communication professor Victor Pickard received a $200,000 grant — which he shared with two professors in the United Kingdom and Canada — from the National Endowment of the Humanities to fund his research on corporate interests’ involvement in AI development and its implications for democracy.
In January, just weeks after his project formally began, Pickard wrote to the DP that he received “the generic letter that many NEH grantees received,” which informed him the grant had been terminated “in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Losing the grant, Pickard wrote, caused “untold wasted hours and tremendous stress.”
He was also forced to fire the postdoctoral researcher hired to work on the project, which he stated was “very unfair to them and an incredible loss.”
Pickard wrote to the DP that he believes this “wanton destruction” harms research, jobs, and public welfare in the short term, and is “dangerous for democracy” in the long term. He added that there was "nothing efficient about these actions" and that they were "punitive and cruel."
Last month, Computer and Information Science assistant professor Sharath Chandra Guntuku — who is also a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics — saw a Reddit post about a grant similar to his that was canceled. He had logged into the NIH portal on March 24 to find that his own research grant had been terminated four days prior, despite not having received “an email from the NIH or Penn.”
The funding was cut three years into Guntuku's grant, which was disbursed for a project researching “how online information ecosystems impact individuals' health behaviors and trust and health authorities.” The research was designed to “reveal how social media and online platforms” impact how people approach different health behaviors.
Assistant professor of Emergency Medicine Anish Agarwal — who worked on Guntuku's project — told the DP that their priority “was the people first” because those are the ones “whose job it is to help execute the project.”
“We had to rapidly figure out, could we pay our staff?” Agarwal said. “Do we have to find new jobs for them? Do we have to say that their role is terminated effective immediately?”
Guntuku said the School of Engineering and Applied Science stepped in to provide 30 days of bridge funding, which was only enough to support “one of the staff members … until the end of May."
The staff that had been working on this grant were forced to find new work, and one member left Penn. Guntuku said that a "couple of positions" were "solely dependent" on the federal funding.
“I know of at least one person who will leave Penn,” Agarwal said. “I know of at least two people on the broader team who had to move on to some other random team, and multiple team members who basically got big portions of their work just taken away from them.”
As their first major grant, Guntuku and Agarwal both spoke about how the termination disrupted their plans for future opportunities.
Guntuku said that he worked on another project that recently had its federal funding terminated, and noted that the two termination notices were "pretty challenging from an early career standpoint, where a lot of your work is being driven by this support.”
“This was the last three to five years of my life that got stopped on a dime,” Agarwal told the DP. “Pulling the rug out from somebody underneath them really is hard for most researchers to recover from."
Agarwal emphasized that a terminated grant “hurts everyone" — including study participants and the researchers themselves.
“These are people’s jobs that are being lost. I think even in all the politics of this we forget about people,” Agarwal said. "There are lots of people being impacted by these broad executive orders.”
Communication professor Andy Tan spoke to the DP about the termination of two of his projects in March. His staff was concerned about finding new positions should they be unable to continue with their current projects.
“We can't lose their talent, their efforts, their skills, their expertise [that] has been built up over the years working on these two projects,” Tan said. “It will be a huge colossal waste of energy and time if our staff can no longer work on these projects.”
A research team member on Tan’s projects — who was granted anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation — said she felt “devastated” by the termination. She added that there are increasing concerns among those in the industry about securing new employment should they lose their current positions.
Education and Sociology professor Richard Ingersoll spoke to the DP about his research relationship with the Department of Education and the impacts he has witnessed from funding cuts. While Ingersoll does not have any active grants, he has former doctoral students whose grants were cut off in the middle of projects.
Ingersoll described the impact of a grant being rescinded on one former graduate student who did “all kinds of good work” with people involved in local school districts.
“It was just cut midstream,” Ingersoll said. “They had a three-year contract, so she’s unemployed.”
Ingersoll described the decision-making process for what funding has being removed as “unclear” and expressed concern that the administration “may cut back on further data collection.” He added that it is “in Penn’s interest” for researchers to get funding from the government as opposed to private foundations, because the University receives more funding for overhead costs.
The Penn Museum was also among the entities affected by the funding cuts. A representative confirmed to the DP that the Museum lost a total of $879,944 in recently terminated NEH grant funds. The largest of these grants had been designated for renovations to the Museum’s Egyptian Galleries.
The DP previously reported that the Penn Museum was assessing impacts to its funding after a March 14 executive order called for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which awarded Penn over $1 million in fiscal year 2024.
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