Two days ago, I wrote about a pattern operating largely under the radar in the President’s war against higher education. We know about the general grant freezes on about half a dozen elite universities. Then there are countless other grant terminations across a much larger group of universities. One of the complexities of this story is that there are so many different versions of cancellations and terminations going on, it’s hard to figure out which is which. It’s just as hard deciphering to what extent the differences even matter. There are ones tied to prohibited words and concepts (DEI, transgender); there are ones tied to targeted universities; others are terminated on generic efficiency grounds; others are canceled for no clear reason. Are these categories even meaningful or is that all just more smoke and mirrors and distraction?
What I focused on Tuesday was a particular pattern with frozen NIH grants. Most government grants were being terminated through a formal process involving a “stop-work order” and various other procedures that the U.S. government uses to cancel a grant. But the NIH grants were different. Stop-work orders never came. The reimbursements for the research simply stopped coming. Indeed, as I noted in Wednesday’s post, there was actually an email in which NIH civil servants were ordered explicitly not to explain or even discuss the lack of payments. It was like a bureaucratic ghosting: funds-ghosting, we might say.
I first got onto this from information I learned about Northwestern University and I was able to find hints of the same thing happening at Brown and Cornell. In response to that post, I heard from a large number of new sources at various universities. And the upshot of talking to all those people is that this is a clear pattern across all the targeted elite universities. In almost every case, individual researchers or departments have known about this for weeks but have struggled to find out more from their universities and had little or no idea it was happening everywhere else too.
Well, it wasn’t just you, folks!
Something else similar but distinct cropped up. Most research grants operate over a number of years. Over that period there are required “non-competing renewals.” This is essentially the grantor (the U.S. government) checking in on your progress, making sure everything is being done to the proper standards and then, if so, re-upping the support for the originally agreed-upon term. The way the process works is that you have a process of formal reviews. If all those reviews look good, the formal notice of renewal should be forthcoming. In a parallel to the payments-ghosting described above, the reviews are proceeding as normal. But the renewals never arrive.
There is clearly a very deliberate policy of ghosting or forcing the shutdown of these studies without any formal termination or paper trail. In almost every case, the universities have continued to cover the expenses. The way the process works is that the university pays and is then reimbursed. So to date you’re mostly talking about periods of non-payment varying from six weeks to significantly less. The difference seems to turn at least partly on different universities’ frequency of submitting reimbursement requests. But that can’t continue indefinitely. Most of these universities have issued internal guidance that amounts to locking down expenses as much as possible — no new hiring, as little spending as possible consistent with keeping a study viable. Many universities have asked lab heads to quickly arrange a triage plan of staged cuts as available funds dwindle.
One additional fact — and one I’m quite interested in hearing more on — is that this does not appear to be limited to the target elite universities. It appears to be happening at other research universities as well. Some are extremely well-known and as “elite” as the target list but ones we have not heard mentioned to date. I’m still trying to find out more on those cases and to get a clearer sense of how general the funds-ghosting is at those universities, whether the patterns are the same or not. In one non-target university I’ve heard about similar NIH non-payments. But rather than ghosting, this case sounds more like the NIH continually kicking back new questions about a request for reimbursement. That sounds like DOGE’s “defend the spend” gambit, a more deliberate and bespoke slow-rolling. As I said above, it can be hard to know in many cases just which DOGE/Trump racket you’re dealing with. In any case, if you’re at a university that isn’t on that target list and you’ve seen any non-payment of non-terminated NIH grants, please contact me. As usual, you can reach me via encrypted channels listed above and below this post.