In a presidential administration with an unlimited capacity for chaos, colleges and universities have become targets of this early phase of right-wing assault. This is not so surprising: Many of the key political threads that comprise today’s Trumpism share an opposition to the academy and all it represents. Chris Rufo has presided over the dismantling of New College of Florida and succeeded in smuggling his bespoke interpretations of concepts like “DEI” and “critical race theory” into state law and now federal policy. JD Vance has appeared at gatherings of national conservatives to say that “professors are the enemy.”
Trump’s newest allies in Silicon Valley may worship a narrow idea of intelligence, but they view the long apprenticeship, not to mention the still-broad education required of the traditional college student, as a waste of time. And then there is Trump’s traditional base, which splits decisively along educational lines: educational attainment now reliably predicts support for the Democratic Party. Trump, for his part, has said that he loves “the poorly educated”—and they love him back! From another quarter, the battle is joined by MAHA types, COVID skeptics, and Big Pharma truthers who see the country’s medical research apparatus as a machine for laundering money into dubiously valuable experiments that make Americans sicker and the pharmaceutical companies that sell medical remedies richer. What Americans really need, in their view, is raw milk, beef tallow, and a few weeks on the happy farm.
These forces converge in the assault on higher education. Trump’s anti-establishment base gets to see the professors they despise feel the pain, while Thiel and friends get to delegitimize the universities that, they feel, miseducate students by trapping them in classrooms. Rufo gets to remake public institutions in his own hateful image. Elon Musk unleashes a phalanx of broccoli-haired teenagers in the name of cost savings, and the wellness nuts cheer on the end of traditional medical research.
It was shocking, but not surprising, to see the Feb. 7 announcement that the Trump administration intended to change the existing rules for National Institutes of Health grants by drastically limiting the amount of money that universities and other institutions could spend on indirect costs, or overhead. In a tweet celebrating this change, Musk commended the new NIH administration for singling out wealthy schools like Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins as particularly bad offenders, alleging that these schools were allowed to “siphon off 60%” of the total federal grant money and divert it to their general budgets (this is false).
The new cap on indirect costs, if allowed to become permanent—it is currently paused in contemplation of a preliminary injunction—would be devastating, not only to higher education and medical research, but to communities across the country that depend economically on the universities, hospitals, and other medical centers. To get a sense of just how serious this change could be, it’s essential to understand what the NIH is and how it operates. At a basic level, the NIH is the major funder of research in biomedicine and public health. Every year, the NIH spends about $47.4 billion on science; of that amount, about 11 percent goes to research carried out at the NIH itself, while the other 89 percent is distributed to researchers at institutions across the country. Those billions in federal dollars fund studies on everything from cancer to infectious diseases to psychology and neuroscience.
Typically, the NIH grants allow for universities to take a percentage of the total grant award for overhead. This can include administrative costs, salaries for employees of the university not directly employed by the research project, facilities maintenance and upkeep, equipment depreciation, and rental costs. Different institutions have different rates for indirect costs; for instance, Brown University’s is 59.5 percent. Crucially this does not mean that 60 percent of the grant award goes directly to the university for overhead, but that, for every one dollar of research money spent on direct costs like “salaries, travel, equipment, and supplies directly supporting or benefiting the grant-supported project or activity," 59.5 cents is spent on indirect costs. On average, across all of the NIH’s billions of dollars in grants, about 26 percent of the money goes towards overhead costs. The new Trump administration rule would limit that number to 15 percent, resulting in a loss of approximately $4 billion in funding for scientific research.
While the funding cuts would hit some states harder than others, the economic damage would be spread across the entire country. In fact, according to the education policy analyst James Murphy, every single state stands to lose substantial sums of money.
The Trump administration, in singling out some of the best-endowed institutions of higher education, has opened the door to the erroneous suggestion that wealthy schools are raiding government money rather than paying for their own scientific research. It’s certainly true that the wealthiest schools, starved of federal funding, would find a way to continue paying for science. But most schools do not possess the kind of resources that Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins do, nor can the relative handful of extremely wealthy institutions be expected to fund scientific research for the entire country. The vast majority of NIH money goes to institutions that, without federal support, would likely be forced to shut down most or all of their medical research. The economic effects of such a development would be profound: Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote in the New York Times that “[e]very dollar in N.I.H. grants spurs $2.09 in economic activity, and every $100 million in investment leads to 78 patents and $598 million in further research, according to N.I.H. calculations.”
To focus only on the economic benefits of NIH-funded research, of course, risks ignoring the reason that research exists in the first place: Scientists funded by the NIH are principally concerned with understanding, treating, and curing diseases, and when their research is successful, all of society benefits. Government research exists to invest in basic science that has no immediate commercial applications; such work often leads to the development of new, unexpected, or novel treatments (as in the case of Ozempic, a drug which Musk supports but Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has opposed). It’s certainly possible that in the absence of reliable federal government funding, some private funding could come in to fill the gap, but the industry could apply its own, short-term standards to deciding what research gets funded, possibly preferring only projects with clear, immediate applications, to the detriment of future scientific discoveries.
The architects of Project 2025, who proposed targeting NIH indirects before Trump took office, seek to defund their political enemies: Supporters of the cuts have incorrectly suggested that federal scientific research dollars are being routed into university slush funds, where they go to support diversity initiatives and so-called “woke” ideology. The real reason for indirect costs is that science is expensive. Building, maintaining, and equipping laboratories filled with specialized equipment is expensive. Controlling for climate, maintaining sterile environments, cleaning and maintenance, facilities upkeep, and general institutional administration are all expensive. And in most cases, even indirect payments do not recoup the full cost of university investments in scientific research: In chasing federal scientific research dollars, universities often commit large sums of their own money to upgrade facilities, kickstart projects, or incubate scientific experiments in the hopes of later competing for external funding. Even generous levels of indirect cost reimbursement from the NIH do not make universities whole for this initial outlay.
The forces arrayed against scientific inquiry, once dispersed, are united and organized.
This latest round of anti-science attacks only confirms the underlying reality that there is nowhere for scientific research to hide from hyperpoliticization. The science of climate change, infectious disease, vaccines, and public health all have, over the last several years, increasingly come into question. The forces arrayed against scientific inquiry, once dispersed, are united and organized. Climate denialism was always present in the Republican coalition; anti-COVID politics brought anti-public health sentiment into the fold; and the embrace of antivax raw-milk wellness in the guise of the MAHA movement completes the circle. Scientists, simply by virtue of being part of the academic apparatus, cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.
Luckily, recent days have seen mass mobilization among scientists and researchers. A Feb. 19 day of action for federal workers and other groups targeted by Elon Musk’s DOGE offensive brought thousands of demonstrators out at dozens of sites across the country. Higher-ed workers and researchers constituted a major component of this larger wave: Labor for Higher Ed, a coalition of unions and advocacy groups, sponsored events that mobilized 10,000 demonstrators across 18 different U.S. cities. The message, American Association of University Professors president Todd Wolfson told me, was clear: “Impacts [of cuts] for everyday Americans will be deadly. We will lose funding for crucial medical research that can save people’s lives. Treatments for diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and so much more are being gutted so that billionaires can get more tax breaks. They are intent on making America sicker so they can pad their pockets.”
These moments of mobilization are crucial for maintaining morale and retaking the initiative against a shock offensive that has proceeded at lightning speed. Employees at federal institutions like the NIH main campus describe a climate of fear and persecution. “All public communications, meetings, and presentations must be reviewed by a presidential committee and sent to the communications office for clearance,” one NIH researcher, speaking anonymously, told me. The future of NIH funding across the board looks uncertain, as the NIH has been systematically canceling meetings to review new funding applications, citing the government funding pause. This slowdown in funding comes on top of the layoffs of 1200 staff at NIH headquarters.
As Musk’s shock offensive continues, so too will the efforts to fight back. Labor for Higher Education executed a rally and press conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 25, convening researchers, students, teachers, and national labor leaders to reinforce their pro-science message; elsewhere, federal workers continue to organize to retain their jobs and keep their administrations intact. There are signs that the public may soon grow tired of DOGE; prices remain high, as does inflation. Unemployment will rise in areas with high concentrations of federal jobs, and Republicans are set to claw back Medicare and slash Medicaid benefits while Elon Musk waves around a chainsaw on the CPAC stage. Even the Republican Representatives Rich McCormick, of Georgia, and Mark Alford, of Missouri, got earfuls from constituents concerned about Musk’s extreme and haphazard approach to slashing government.
Yet these bright spots feel small compared to the magnitude of the assault on science, research, and ultimately, civil society. Declining public confidence in higher education only testifies to the extent to which colleges and universities have allowed themselves to be defined by their worst enemies rather than their greatest strengths. In defending ourselves and our institutions, scholars, teachers, researchers, students—and the public that benefits from scientific research conducted in universities—ought not to make the same mistake as the Democrats during the Biden administration. Our task is not to preserve a failing status quo, but to advance a better model of higher education, one that puts science in service of the public good, educates students to be thoughtful and accomplished citizens, and offers the benefits of education, training, and professional development at affordable prices to all. We ought to fight for a model of higher education that better integrates universities and colleges into the communities where they are located, and among the people they serve, rather than supporting policies that wall them off from the streets and keep them insulated from accountability.
Such a vision might look a lot like the College for All act, introduced by Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal back in the early days of the Biden administration. While in power, Democrats largely abandoned the opportunity to make big changes to college access and affordability, which has left the nation’s entire higher education infrastructure now open to right-wing plunder. Meanwhile, university administrators file legal challenges to Trump’s rule changes, but largely avoid taking the openly confrontational stances seen during the first Trump administration. Organized higher ed workers have been at the forefront of articulating an alternative vision for higher education over the past several years, and it is no coincidence that labor is now at the forefront of the opposition to Trump and Musk’s anti-science cuts. It is time for the rest of the sector to get on board with labor’s plan. For now, the task of higher education leaders and scientific researchers will be to make the case to lawmakers and the public alike that there is no ivory tower separate from the economy as a whole: Slashing federal support for colleges and universities will make us poorer, sicker, stupider, and more vulnerable. Whatever version of higher ed emerges from the Trump administration will still have to work urgently to expand its base, to open itself up politically, to welcome more students and citizens at more affordable prices. In the war between colleges and Trump, too many Americans are choosing Trump. That’s a troubling fact, and one we ignore at our peril.
