When Columbia University struck a deal with the Trump administration last month, the agreement came with the promise that the financial lifeblood of scientific research would start to flow again. But that was only part of the story.
While hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen federal research funding has been restored, a smaller subset of grants in areas that are out of favor with the White House, including transgender health, have not. Columbia’s School of Public Health and medical center remain in austerity mode, with fewer slots for Ph.D. students and hiring delays caused by the original suspension of funding.
And looming over the deal, researchers said, is a bleak national outlook for federal science funding, making some scientists feel as if they dodged a bullet only to face the possibility of a firing squad.
An Aug. 7 executive order signed by President Trump, for example, requires additional review of federal scientific grant awards to ensure that they are “consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.” The White House has also proposed a 40 percent cut to the budget of the National Institutes of Health, the main source of medical research funding from the federal government, although a Senate committee has resisted the steep reduction.
“The effects, unfortunately, for research and the research community will be long-lasting and detrimental, despite any resolution at Columbia,” said Dr. Anthony Ferrante Jr., a medical researcher whose Columbia lab studies obesity. Interest from postdoctoral trainees from abroad, who typically send a steady stream of emails asking to work in his lab, has dwindled to a trickle, he said.
“One of the fundamental aspects of the American research enterprise since World War II has been the stable, apolitical, scientifically driven funding of research,” he said. “And people are now questioning that.”
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The post Columbia Got Most of Its Research Funding Back. The Damage Goes Deeper. appeared first on New York Times.
