The Trump administration has launched a direct assault on medical research, by drastically slashing the research funds for academic research across all disciplines.

The massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been the focal point of reporting on these cuts to research funding, but if these cuts go through, they will disrupt the entire model for research in the United States.

Ever since the Second World War, the federal government and state governments have partnered with research laboratories, hospitals, and universities to share the costs of fundamental and applied research in all disciplines. The cost-sharing model is based on the federal government providing “indirect” costs to laboratories and universities that have to build laboratories, offices, and infrastructure to provide space for conducting research. Cost-sharing percentages are contractually negotiated between labs, universities, and federal agencies.

This research model has made the United States the leader of research in the entire world.

Curtailing federal research funding will halt most medical and scientific research, which rely on massive funding to construct laboratories and instrumentation. Research in psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences will also be heavily disrupted. Research on the humanities, arts, and education will be less directly affected, since their universities receive much smaller, if any, “indirect” costs.

However universities’ internal small research grants and awards for grant development, summer research, graduate training, graduate research in all disciplines are funded by cost-sharing models. So, these will also be cut.

These cuts do not represent cost-saving measures. Instead, they represent an attempt to torpedo the entire research model of the United States. This is one front in a Culture War on science and knowledge being waged by politicians and business owners.

WAMU’s A1 News Program offers a good discussion of how the cuts to research funding will affect medical research.

“The U.S. National Institutes of Health, or NIH, is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.

“Last year, the agency put more than $32 billion towards trying to better understand cancer, genetics, and infectious diseases. That’s according to a New York Times analysis of agency data. It also helped fund the mRNA technology that led to the COVID-19 vaccines.

“In short, these grants bolster our scientific knowledge and help protect us. But that funding is under threat. 

“Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced plans to seriously cut scientific spending. And thousands of employees across federal health agencies like the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control were laid off over the weekend.

“A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily pause its plans, but what could this loss mean for the future of science and medical research in the country?”

WAMU’s 1A reports on “Scientific Method: What NIH Funding Cuts Mean for Medical Research” (19 February 2025).