Universities are facing big cuts to research funding. At Duke, it's a time for 'damage control'
By MAKIYA SEMINERA, Associated Press March 7, 2025
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — Facing the potential loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, Duke University is preparing for the worst.
Like research universities around the United States, the private school in North Carolina's Research Triangle would see a massive loss from Trump administration cuts to grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Duke would be among the hardest hit. In its previous fiscal year, Duke took in $580 million in NIH grants and contracts, 11th most among the country's research institutions. The cuts are delayed temporarily by a court challenge, but universities nationwide have implemented hiring freezes, scaled back research and drawn up contingency plans in case the loss in funding takes effect.
Historically, the federal government has negotiated with colleges and universities on its contribution toward their operating costs. If a scientist wins a federal grant to fund their research, the government pays the school an additional amount as a percentage of the grant money.
At Duke, the current rate for these “indirect costs” — expenses such as utilities and laboratory maintenance — is about 61%. Last month, President Donald Trump's administration set the rate cap at 15%, significantly less than most universities receive.
The cut in indirect costs is far from the only concern. Funding for new grants also slowed to a trickle after the NIH halted grant application review meetings in January. At Duke, NIH grant and contract award notices plummeted, dropping from 166 in January and February of 2024 to 64 so far in 2025, according to the university.
Already, the uncertainty is causing reverberations at Duke's School of Medicine, which receives over three-quarters of the university's NIH funding. Expansion projects are being shelved. Fewer Ph.D. students are being admitted. And researchers are assessing whether their projects can continue.
Payments maintain freezers and machines to grow cancer cells
The Trump administration has described indirect costs as “administrative bloat” and said the cuts would save more than $4 billion annually. The change would also free up more money for scientific research, officials said.
“The Trump administration is committed to slashing the cottage industry built off of the waste, fraud, and abuse within our mammoth government while prioritizing the needs of everyday Americans,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.
Through NIH funding, universities for decades have partnered with the federal government to support scientists’ academic pursuits.
Duke pharmacology and cancer biology professor Donald McDonnell estimates his laboratory has received up to $40 million in NIH funding over 30 years. His lab developed a drug approved in 2023 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat metastatic breast cancer.
Upkeep for lab equipment, including machines to grow cancer cells and massive freezers for enzymes and chemicals, would be difficult to afford if indirect cost rates dropped to 15%, McDonnell said. His laboratory also likely will be in the red due to the uncertainty around NIH grants, which would lead to staff layoffs.
“The bottom line is, I can’t live, I can’t think in this chaos,” McDonnell said.
Duke's total research budget last fiscal year was $1.33 billion, with $863 million coming from the federal government. Without NIH funding, many scientists would have to turn to private organizations and philanthropies, which typically offer substantially less money, researchers said.
“We have long-standing relationships with private funders and industry partners, and value the contributions they make, but federal funds by far provide the largest single source of research dollars," said Geeta Swamy, executive vice dean of the School of Medicine.
The cap on indirect costs also would hinder research for incoming neurosurgery and biomedical engineering professor Nanthia Suthana, who is relocating from the University of California, Los Angeles.
To study brain activity and treat conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and Parkinson’s disease, Suthana requires a lab large enough for patients to walk around while headsets and monitors capture heart rate, eye tracking, perspiration and brainwaves. Along the walls, 40 to 50 cameras — each costing about $5,000 — record their movements.
Her new lab is under construction, but Suthana said she is worried she will have to downsize within a year if funding uncertainties persist.
Ph.D. students are in limbo
Duke's medical school has scaled back the number of Ph.D. students it will admit for the upcoming fall semester. Last year, the school brought in about 130 students, said Beth Sullivan, who oversees the school’s 17 biomedical Ph.D. programs. Now, the target is 100 students or less.
That means smaller class sizes over time and, in turn, a shrinking pipeline into medical research careers, she said.
“Our next generation of researchers are now poised on the edge of this cliff, not knowing if there’s going to be a bridge that's going to get them to the other side, or if this is it,” Sullivan said.
Of the more than 630 Ph.D. students in the medical school, nearly all the students in their second year and beyond receive federal support from either NIH or the National Science Foundation.
Third-year doctoral student Caleb McIver was applying for an NIH diversity supplement — a funding opportunity to encourage professors to train minority students — when information about the initiative was removed from the agency’s website. McIver, who is Black, is now looking into other NIH grants without ties to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the Trump administration has been wiping out of the federal government.
“I’m pretty stressed,” McIver said. “I mean, I need funding, so we need to find it.”
Duke reconsiders plans for new research building
The university had been planning to build a new research building on the site of an old, recently vacated building. Now those plans are on hold, School of Medicine Vice Dean Colin Duckett said.
Even smaller projects like renovating a building floor can’t start because of the budget uncertainty. Hundreds of people working in shuttered labs will consolidate in other buildings. If the indirect costs rate drops to 15%, there also would be widespread layoffs, Duckett said.
Duckett’s job previously focused on recruiting the brightest scientists and providing them with resources at Duke, he said. Now, he has taken on a much different role.
“It’s damage control,” he said. “It’s how to survive as an institution.”
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/7/nih-
transgender-animal-testing-experiments-extensive-trump-
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By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Friday, March
7, 2025
The government’s spending on “transgender mice” runs
even deeper than President Trump let on in his speech
to Congress.
New numbers from the White Coat Waste Project, shared
with The Washington Times, show that the National
Institutes of Health is funding at least 26 projects,
totaling $64 million, to manipulate animals’ sex organs
and sex preferences with the hope of benefiting the
transgender community.
That includes nearly $10 million sent to the Oregon
Health and Science University to study whether gay rams
can be forced to prefer ewes as sexual partners through
prenatal infusions of testosterone.
Researchers told NIH that rams were the perfect test
subjects because about 8% of rams prefer sex with other
rams, and they have physiological differences
associated with this preference.
At Tulane University, researchers have collected $11.2
million from NIH to implant testosterone-releasing
capsules into female mice to study their vascular
health. They said it would help scientists understand
how testosterone treatments affect aging women and
transgender male patients who used androgen therapy.
Justin Goodman, the project’s senior vice president of
advocacy, called the spending “symptoms of an epidemic
of reckless spending at the NIH.”
“We’ve actually found tens of millions more in active
NIH grants wasted to create transgender lab animals,
including a $1.1 million DEI grant to overdose trans
rats on a sex party drug,” he told The Times. “The
sickness of reckless government spending on animal
testing has spread so badly that it can’t be cured with
a scalpel, only with a chain saw.”
Mr. Trump mocked the line of research during his
address to Congress on Tuesday. He complained about the
government spending “$8 million for making mice
transgender.”
“This is real,” the president said.
That claim drew howls of outrage from media fact-
checkers. CNN flatly declared Mr. Trump’s claim false
and said its reporters couldn’t find the research.
Hours later, CNN had to retract and acknowledge that
Mr. Trump was right about the $8 million, although the
network said his claim “needs context.”
The White House got its pound of flesh. It called CNN
“fake news losers” and declared that “President Trump
was right (as usual).”
They pointed to a half-dozen NIH projects revealed by
the White Coat Waste Project that used altered mice to
study questions relating to transgender people’s
health.
By Wednesday, after the speech, Mr. Trump’s budget-
cutting office, the Department of Government
Efficiency, announced that NIH had canceled seven
grants involving “transgender experiments on animals.”
Internet denizens complained that Mr. Trump and the
Department of Government Efficiency were mixing their
terminology and the animals weren’t transgender but
rather transgenic. That means they have had their
genomes altered.
In the Oregon ram experiments, the researchers said
they had “extensive expertise” in manipulating rams’
brain functions to alter sexual attraction.
“The proposed studies will illuminate essential
hormonal, neural and cellular mechanisms that activate
the fetal reproductive axis, and will contribute to our
understanding of underpinnings of brain sexual
differentiation, especially in relation to sexual
partner preferences,” the Oregon researchers said.
The ram research dates back to 2000 and totals $9.7
million. The current award of $431,662 was issued in
2023 and is active through this summer.
“This basic science research is designed to understand
core processes in order to expand overall knowledge of
biology,” said Erik Robinson, a communications
specialist for Oregon Health and Science University.
He said lead researcher Charles Roselli recently
retired and his work “is now available for other
researchers and the public to learn from and build
upon.”
He took issue with Mr. Trump’s words: “Not sure what’s
meant by transgender mice, but researchers are involved
in transgenic animal models, meaning genetically
modified to carry a human gene.”
Some grants were small dollars, such as Johns Hopkins
University’s $49,000 to use transgenic mice to study
how transgender males recover from wounds.
Schools argue that the criticism can be misleading
because the research is often intended to study more
general health issues, and the transgender aspects are
only part of it.
Tulane’s study, which will be worth $14 million by the
time it’s completed, implanted mice with testosterone-
releasing capsules to study female cognitive aging. The
researchers said the transgender aspect was another
benefit.
“These findings indicate that increases in testosterone
may impact vascular health, which may be important
clinically for transgender men, women using
testosterone for fitness or reduced libido, as well as
patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome,” the
researchers said in publishing their work.
The White Coat folks said not all the NIH grant
summaries they flagged mentioned altering animals’
sexual characteristics, but it was clear from the
researchers’ published findings that they were
conducting those experiments.
That includes nearly $7 million sent to the University
of Michigan, which used mice to study how
transmasculine “pubertal suppression” affects the
Achilles tendon.
The University of Virginia has received $2.2 million
for studies that include using mice transitioning from
female to male to determine whether they could still
carry a pregnancy if they paused their hormone therapy.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at
sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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