Amid Trump funding freeze, confusion permeates UNC research community

Following the flurry of executive orders released during President Donald Trump’s first week on the job — some having direct impacts on university research funding — the campus community is left grappling with the possibility of what comes next. 

One of the orders, issued Jan. 22, was an operational freeze of multiple government agencies, chief among them being the National Institutes of Health, which perform and fund a large majority of medical research in the U.S. 

Following the directive, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research stated that they are “carefully reviewing recent executive communications" and announced an OVCR Office Hours webinar to answer questions and address concerns. 

One of the webinar's attendees was UNC Professor of Medicine Amanda Nelson, who has studied osteoarthritis using an NIH research grant. 

“If even a single grant gets cut off, that grant is going to involve five, six, ten, a dozen people that may or may not have alternate funding for their position," Nelson said.

Now, confusion persists as two judges have moved to block the federal funding freeze. U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell and Judge Loren AliKhan both issued temporary orders to block the freeze this week, stating that the executive action was unconstitutional.

So far, nearly two dozen states have requested emergency orders that would allow them to access federal funding. New York Attorney General Letitia James and 22 other attorney generals, including N.C. Attorney General Jeff Jackson, sued the Trump administration in a move to protect essential federal funding.

It’s still uncertain how the freeze and subsequent blocking will play out or impact institutions like the NIH in the long term.

UNC Director of Federal Affairs Kelly Dockham urged all researchers to conduct business as usual, unless they receive direct communication from a federal office regarding their project or funding. In which case, those who received the order should get in contact with the OVCR.

Senior Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Andy Johns stated on the webinar that if a department received a stop work order, multiple of which have already been received, the University is willing to provide stopgap support to programs that cannot move employees to other funding sources. However, he said that stopgap funding is contingent on freezes being temporary. 

UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Professor Sam Lai, who runs a research program with study focuses ranging from infectious diseases and the microbiome to cancer, said that research projects like his own which have already received annual funding could be safe for up to a year, even with funding cuts.

However, if projects with multi-year funding and long-term planning face sudden cuts, they may have no choice but to lay off valuable team members, which Lai identified as a prevalent fear.

“If there comes a point in time when individuals have to be laid off, then the impact of that is going to be felt, probably for years,” Lai said. 

The Jan. 20 “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” executive order is also a cause for concern for some medical research programs whose work may be seen as radical or progressive. 

Lai, who is currently working on a research project that would create a new contraceptive method aimed at better meeting the reproductive needs of women, hopes the work isn’t interpreted as being contrary to the intentions of the President. He said there’s a possibility for skepticism, much like immunization research.

The University has received multiple requests for certification that research programs do not involve DEI activities. 

Undergraduate researchers are also facing the effects of the freeze. Sophomore Alejandro Mosera, who has been researching substance abuse disorders for over a year, said knowing that so much of the University's research funding is derived from the NIH makes his work feel more vulnerable. 

“It cuts down on a lab's ability to fund a student's opportunity for research,” Mosera said. 

While Mosera is unsure if any project he's working on will receive interruptions, he said he has heard from fellow students that other labs have had to limit the number of projects they pursue.

“I'm honestly worried that something like this is going to really kill the world of medicine and the love for learning for millions,” Mosera said.

The impact of NIH funding cuts will not only be felt at a university level. John Andrews, a chief neurosurgery resident at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, said that one common misconception he’s seen about the NIH is that it’s a policy institution, when in reality, he said its central purpose is to provide money to researchers to study and discover treatments for diseases. 

Andrews has garnered social media attention for his TikTok videos surrounding neurosurgery, and recently, the importance of medical research. 

“When someone you love gets really sick, and you think they might not make it, you go through this phase where you ask the doctors, 'Isn’t there anything you can do? Can’t you just try anything?,'" Andrews said in a recent video. "And that anything, that anything you can try, that’s what NIH research funds.”

One sentiment shared amongst all the mentioned researchers was the fear that changes like these will dissuade the next generation of medical researchers from pursuing the field at all. 

“NIH funding literally pays the salaries of researchers," Andrews said. "So we're going to lose out on young, smart people, and we're going to lose out on new ideas, research is going to ground to a halt, and we're not going to get better treatments."

Andrews said he hopes to use his platform to educate. 

“Diseases affect all of us indiscriminately," Andrews said. "It doesn't matter who you are, how rich you are, what party you are, [it] affects all of us.”

@mariaesullivan

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