Northwestern braces for massive cuts that could nearly wipe out all its federal research funding

Northwestern University faculty say the Trump administration’s decision to freeze $790 million in federal funding to the school will disrupt research that benefits communities across the Chicago area and the country.Northwestern receives just over $1 billion in research funding each year, according to a 2024 audited financial report. The Trump funding freeze could wipe out nearly all of it.“There are grants to help teachers develop better middle-school math curricula. And those stop. There are grants to run medical tests in the medical school on a potential new drug — that test has to stop halfway through,” said Ian Hurd, a political science professor and president-elect of the Northwestern Faculty Senate. “The research [projects] of the university … are really investments in the future that everybody benefits from — medicines and cellphone batteries and cleaning up coal plant emissions.”Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates said university leaders were informed of the federal funding pause by members of the media — and as of Wednesday afternoon, they had still not received official notice from the Trump administration about what the pause entails. White House officials on Tuesday said the government is investigating Northwestern over alleged civil rights violations.“Federal funds that Northwestern receives drive innovative and lifesaving research, like the recent development by Northwestern researchers of the and research fueling the ,” Yates said in an email. “This type of research is now at jeopardy. The University has fully cooperated with investigations by both the Department of Education and Congress.”The world’s tiniest pacemaker is a temporary heartbeat regulator smaller than a grain of rice that can be injected, controlled by light, and eventually dissolves. Northwestern said the research that went into this pacemaker is the kind of work threatened by the Trump funding pause.JOHN A. ROGERS/GettyNorthwestern joins a growing list of universities — including Columbia, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell — that have been targeted by the Trump administration for what many allege are illegal federal funding cuts.“It is clear that the federal government seems to have taken an antagonistic stance toward universities across the country,” Hurd said. “It seems to me that the U.S. government is a little bit afraid, a little bit anxious about its own position, and so, it’s looking to undermine any institution that can stand up to it.“It strikes me as remarkably shortsighted on the part of the government [to make] it harder for kids to go to college and harder for universities to do the kind of research that improves everybody’s lives.”Julius Lucks, a chemical and biological engineering professor at Northwestern, has been working on providing low-cost, at-home water-quality testing for communities that need it most in the Chicago area.Lucks’ research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation, but in February, his work was included on a list of projects that the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee claimed promotes “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.”“It literally seems like a big win for society to support this stuff, and it was a little bit confusing why [my research] was on any list,” Lucks said.He said his team is thinking through next steps, given the news about the funding freeze.Lucks said there needs to be a broader collective movement to “convince the administration that they need to reverse course on this.”“I think we’re starting to be pretty galvanized. This is just important stuff, and it’s really important for the public to know that scientists are doing this work for them. We’re doing this for everybody, and we need to get the word out so the public starts to really value this type of work,” Lucks said.