As President Trump unleashes dizzying firepower at the nation’s top universities, he and his supporters have made the argument that the institutions have brought such action onto themselves.
They turned into bastions of leftism hostile to conservative thought and lost the trust of the American people, according to the administration. The universities accrued massive endowments, becoming less like noble nonprofits spreading good to the world and more like corporations taking advantage of government largess, the argument goes.
Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, which receives the most federal funding of any American university, has been listening.
For years, he has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the U.S., has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools.
The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money.
The university’s troubles show how a Republican campaign against higher education could decimate the nation’s research enterprise.
“We had these shining institutions that contributed so much to human knowledge, and there are explicit steps being taken to undermine them,” said N. Peter Armitage, a Johns Hopkins physicist, speaking in his office on the university’s main campus in Baltimore. “I find that remarkable.”
Johns Hopkins, which also includes a medical school and an applied physics laboratory, has been battered by a series of cuts, grant cancellations and confusion about Republican plans to cut more.
The funding cuts include:
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International research and aid: In March, the federal government gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development. The university’s public health school, which worked closely with the agency, had ongoing efforts in more than 100 countries. The cuts forced the loss of more than 2,200 jobs, about 250 of them in the United States.
Judd Walson, chair in international health at Johns Hopkins, said that some of the slashed programs focused on preventing cervical cancer in Madagascar, on diagnosing tuberculosis in Uganda, and on building health systems in Bangladesh. He fears that millions of people could die as a result of the cuts.
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Domestic research: Federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, have slashed funds to Johns Hopkins. It is the top recipient of N.I.H. funds, getting more than $1 billion this year. About 90 grants have been terminated, totaling $50 million.
The Trump administration has said that the N.I.H. had “grown too big and unfocused” and had “promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth.”
The canceled Johns Hopkins grants supported research aiming to make engineering easier to navigate for high school students with autism, to reduce H.I.V. in transgender women, and to improve Covid vaccination rates among low-income Latinos. The Republican budget bill, which has passed the House by one vote and is being debated in the Senate, could slash the agency’s budget by about 40 percent, likely leading to more grant cuts.
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Research support: Republicans also want to reduce the amount of money that government agencies provide to universities for research overhead expenses, such as support for laboratories and administrative staff, on top of the grants. The losses would cost Johns Hopkins more than $300 million. The Heritage Foundation, the author of Project 2025, has decried the money as a way universities bilk taxpayers to fund “ideological and illiberal activity on campus.”
Johns Hopkins researchers dispute the accusation, and the university has joined other universities in lawsuits to oppose the change.
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Endowment tax: Johns Hopkins also might face a new increase in the tax on a $13 billion endowment, which helps the university fund daily operations. Conservatives have argued that universities that have amassed great wealth should be taxed on the income they earn from their endowments.
Under the House proposal, Johns Hopkins could be hit with a 7 percent tax on its endowment income. The Senate version lowered the increase, to 4 percent.
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Student aid and loans: The university uses endowment income for financial aid, including a $1.8 billion gift in 2018 from Michael Bloomberg, an alumnus, and another major gift by him for medical and graduate students last year. Mr. Daniels has said that an endowment tax “would undermine student financial aid.”
To the university’s supporters, these cuts represent a retreat from the post-World War II agreement between Americans and their research universities. The United States government poured hundreds of billions into innovation and research at these institutions over the last century. Such a partnership powered American technological and economic dominance, and became the envy of the world. And many universities, including Johns Hopkins, built their institutions around this steady stream of reliable funding.
Professors across the university — those who work on international health, cancer, physics and space exploration — spoke of dread, confusion and sadness as that relationship has frayed, without a robust national debate or less disruptive ways to unwind programs.
Dr. Otis Brawley, a Johns Hopkins oncologist who studies cancer, said he had never felt so bleak about the future of American research. He pointed to the plummeting death rate of cancer in recent decades, a trend he attributed to a Republican president who first declared war on the disease in the early 1970s.
“What if Richard Nixon, instead of saying, ‘We’re going to invest in the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health,’ had said, ‘We’re going to pull away?’” Dr. Brawley said.
The lifesaving discoveries at Johns Hopkins — named after its benefactor, a local philanthropist with Quaker roots — began almost from its start, in 1876. Before the turn of the century, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins created the rubber glove, reducing surgical infection.
The university became a magnet for federal dollars after World War II, partly because of the proximity to Washington. Milton Eisenhower — the brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower — became president of Johns Hopkins in 1956, and funding for the university under his watch quadrupled, said Andrew Jewett, a university teaching professor who is writing a book about Johns Hopkins history.
The university invented the first rechargeable cardiac pacemaker, and developed the first effective treatment for sickle cell anemia. Johns Hopkins helped build a spacecraft that smashed into an asteroid, an accomplishment one scientist called “humanity’s first planetary defense test.”
The smartest and most ambitious students and researchers around the world have clamored to study and work at an American research university, Dr. Armitage said. “That has been turned off basically overnight,” he said.
“How does this make sense?” he added.
Over the years, the increasing reliance on federal money became worrying to some of the university’s presidents, who wondered whether the school was becoming too dependent on the government. The Baltimore Sun in 1981 described Johns Hopkins as “the favorite nephew of a very rich uncle — Uncle Sam.”
Among them was Mr. Eisenhower, who worried that the federal government could withdraw funding from projects that were either controversial or deemed trivial. He anticipated that the humanities and social sciences would be vulnerable, and sought to insulate them by attracting private funds.
By contrast, “research in the biological, physical, and health sciences is noncontroversial,” he argued, and appeared safe from interference.
Under the Trump administration, the opposite scenario has come to pass, as the sciences have become some of the areas hardest hit by the cuts.
In a May 2 letter accompanying Mr. Trump’s budget proposal, Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote that the government’s current spending was “contrary to the needs of ordinary working Americans.”
The nation’s budget, he added, “tilted toward funding niche nongovernmental organizations and institutions of higher education committed to radical gender and climate ideologies antithetical to the American way of life.”
Although Johns Hopkins has argued that its large endowment cannot be easily drawn down to help the university cover the losses, it does plan to tap some of those earnings — more than it would in a typical year — to plug holes in research money.
Beyond money, science depends on stability, which is in short supply. Researchers are struggling to plan for multiyear projects and commitments. Even if the Trump administration were to back off on its higher education agenda, researchers worry that the fallout from the stoppages will unspool for years or decades.
“We’ve already been turning people down for postdoctoral fellowships because we just don’t know the situation right now,” Dr. Armitage said. “Students know they better look elsewhere.”
The university’s precarious situation could also hurt Baltimore. The university’s relationship with the city has been historically fraught, marred by medical exploitation, segregation and gentrification. But the university has spent more than $1 billion on local businesses since 2016, according to Alicia Wilson, Johns Hopkins’s vice president for civic engagement and opportunity.
“The city, as a whole, is bracing,” Ms. Wilson said, adding: “ As goes Hopkins, so goes Baltimore.”
In his 2021 book, “What Universities Owe Democracy” Mr. Daniels in some ways predicted this moment. He looked at countries where authoritarian leaders had turned on universities, and argued that American schools must be more open to a wide array of viewpoints to help thwart the same fate.
Mr. Daniels, who declined to comment for this story through a spokesman, has tried not to poke the federal bear. He did not join a letter signed by more than 600 college leaders urging resistance to the Trump administration.
In early June, Mr. Daniels announced in a message to the campus that the university was bracing for more upheaval. New federal research awards were down by almost two-thirds from the same time last year, he said.
For now, he said, the university would pause pay increases for anyone making more than $80,000 a year, would scale back on construction projects and would freeze hiring.
This spring, at a dreary and drizzly commencement ceremony, he delivered standard-issue graduation remarks, sending his students off on a note of hope and renewal. Universities are the engine of “individual flourishing and societal advancement,” he said.
But he also argued that the modern research university “must change” and “do repair.”
Vimal Patel writes about higher education with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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