"I summarize: Fuck." When I asked the chaos that broke out this week, a senior manager of a university told me. Facing the new restrictions of the Trump administration, academic circles are in panic. The US Department of Health and Public Services has demanded that employees from multiple health institutions including the National Health Institute have stopped communicating with the public. What is more destructive for universities is that the committee meeting of the NIH allocation proposal was also suddenly postponed until at least February 1.

Jane Liebschutz, a doctor and professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said on Bluesky that the appropriation review was closed and said: "This will lead to scientific stop and destroying the research budget of the university." Lindsay Wiley also expressed the same view. He added to Bluesky that suspending will affect the distribution of billions of dollars in public research funds. Influence". Education and hospital budget. This affects all of us, not just researchers. "

Even if the chaos ends early next month, it still pose a huge and lasting threat to universities in the next few years. The National Institute of Health has funded most of the research completed on campus, and the funds in their gifts also help the general operating costs of universities. In fact, this support is unclear because it is so casual. Although it causes a certain range of trouble, this fact shows that higher education will be very fragile in the second Trump era.

In any case, HHS (especially NIH) is not an exaggeration to fund universities. In 2023, the department provided US $ 33 billion in research funds to US higher education institutions, accounting for more than half of the federal academic research and development expenditure. In fact, the US Department of Health and Public Services alone accounted for nearly one -third of university research funds, most of which were allocated by the National Institute of Health.

In this case, NIH becomes the golden goose of the university, and it is also the golden bird in the coal mine. Researchers know how many research funds are from the institution. They are worried that if these funds are temporarily occupied, they may cause disaster. The funding of the National Institute of Health from basic scientific research (such as the role of specific genes) to the work that makes these knowledge useful (such as inventing a new gene editing therapy). Its resources far exceed the use of medical fields and provide funding for work in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, social sciences, and social work. Take all these at once, and many different types of researchers are not sure whether their laboratory, personnel, and experiments can be maintained and how long.

The National Institute of Health is not only the most generous provider of government research funding, but its funding method also brings secondary benefits to the subjects and their institutions. On the one hand, it usually pays more funds than other institutions. This is a good thing for individual beneficiaries: it takes a lot of work to write a funding proposal, so the less funding you need to apply, you can spend more time for practical scientific research. Some projects of NIH allow researchers to request standardization and "modular" allocation (eg, $ 250,000 per year), rather than listing each element of budget requests one by one. This saves time for science.

The funding of the National Institute of Health has its own attractiveness to university managers, and its form is to pay the so -called "indirect cost". Most federal allocation will pay for the management cost of any research funded by the funded by the federal funding. This money helps pay the cost of all campus infrastructure used for research. This includes the completion of the building and laboratory; the maintenance and management of these facilities; the special equipment; the badge scanner, the salary service, and the post -doctoral researchers of the laboratory staff or the other costs related to the scientist; and other operating costs.

How many federal subsidies have been added to the "indirect cost" subsidy, it remains to be negotiated. The cooperation between universities and federal institutions determines this percentage, and the percentage may change every year. Some sources of funds, such as the Ministry of Agriculture, often pay lower interest rates, and indirect costs may have a premium of 30%. But in general, the proportion of NIH is very high: its proportion sometimes exceeds 60%. Under such arrangements, each scientist provides $ 1 million to a scientist, and the university where the scientist is located will receive $ 600,000.

These indirect costs are mysterious and complicated, while the National Institute of Health is an important source of them. Many universities rely on them to balance their budgets. The problem is that the funds used by schools to support research are almost more than the funds they receive from the subsidy. In any case, they will do this work, because research is part of their mission, and because it helps them compete for better students, teachers and rankings. However, because the research of funding funding is already in a state of losses, any long -term interruption of the school's indirect cost income may cause a real financial crisis on the campus.

Editor of Holden Thorp science A former university president and dean told me that many schools can withstand these interference without problems: for example, a university with a large hospital may use clinical income to offset free research costs. However, even small -scale interference in the flow of institutions' funding flow may lead to unstable, and most research institutions will fall into at least some kind of confusion.

The long -term suspension of the gift funds will not happen, or at least it has not occurred. Sop said that panic is not a useful response to anything yes It happened in the National Institute of Health. He said that researchers, students, and managers are completely understandable, but there may be many explanations. "It is best to keep calm and continue." My own university, St. Louis Washington University, at the vice president responsible for research, the vice president responsible for research The same suggestion was made in a statement issued to the staff. Part of its content is: "Although these interference is frustrating, they occurred throughout the government, rather than focusing on university research activities or targeting specific science disciplines."

However, the panic of the National Institute of Health may be related to the current chaos (no matter how long it lasts), and it is related to its significance. If university research and the university's own survivability will be subverted by the chaos of a unit of the Health and Public Service Department, what will happen next? According to reports, Jay Bhattacharya, the president of the National Institute of Health, nominated by Donald Trump, put forward the idea of ​​linked to the freedom of speech on campus. Wall Street JournalEssence Trump's administrative order has clearly stated that any federal gift must be responsible for his own DEI measures. The Trump administration has many problems in higher education, and it seems to be willing to follow or even encourage any confusion that these quarrels may occur. The current situation may be fluke or a test.