A “nightmare,” “in shock,” “devastating.” Those are some reactions Columbia University researchers had in mid-March 2025 after learning that their funding is included in the $250 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that President Donald Trump’s administration is terminating because of the University’s alleged “antisemitic harassment.” The cancellation, which covers about one-third of the university’s NIH grants, mostly to Columbia’s Irving Medical Center, has put research projects on hold while the University scrambles to negotiate with Trump officials and find ways to at least temporarily support students, postdocs, and other staff.
Columbia’s situation has rocked major research universities nationwide as the Trump administration has warned it is investigating 59 additional schools for antisemitism. As Science went to press, many were waiting to see whether Columbia sues to block the funding elimination, as legal experts say it could do successfully. “They would have a very, very strong likelihood” of winning a court order to “un-pause” funding,” says Samuel Bagenstos, a Law Professor at the University of Michigan and former General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent Agency.
The nightmare began on 3 March 2025, when HHS, the Department of Education (DOE), and the General Services Administration (GSA) notified Columbia that officials were reviewing the school’s federal funding as part of “ongoing investigations” into potential civil rights violations involving antisemitism. White House officials have suggested University officials did not do enough to protect Jewish students at Columbia who felt threatened last year when other students held major demonstrations opposing Israel’s bombing of Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas.
On 7 March 2025, the administration announced it was terminating $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia. That total included 400 NIH grants totaling $250 million, the Agency later claimed on X, the social media company owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who now leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
As of 18 March 2025, the University could not confirm how many grants had been killed, a spokesperson said. Among the awards NIH grantees say administrators have told them are terminated are training and research project grants, as well as larger awards to Columbia’s Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer centers. Grantees have been told to cease work. One (1) researcher who received a formal cancellation notice this week from NIH was told their funding was terminated “…due to unsafe antisemitic actions that suggest the institution lacks concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students…” Columbia can request funds only “…to support patient safety and orderly closeout…”
Immunologist Megan Sykes, in contrast, only learned from Columbia that her $3.2 million grant to study xenotransplantation — transplanting animal organs into humans — in mice, monkeys, and pigs was killed. “I’ve been working with the NIH for 35 years and it’s beyond anything I ever imagined. I feel absolutely shattered,” Sykes says. Like many others given the bad news by Columbia, she wonders whether a “diversity” component of her grant — to hire a graduate student from a group underrepresented in science — caught the administration’s attention.
The school’s partners are also potential collateral damage. Columbia physician and aging researcher José Luchsinger is a Principal Investigator for an $18 million grant that Columbia manages for about two (2) dozen institutions and a couple hundred staff for a study that has been following 1700 people with diabetes for nearly 30 years. The latest phase is exploring mechanisms by which diabetes might cause Alzheimer’s — an alternative to the popular amyloid hypothesis. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has expressed support for such Alzheimer’s research, Luchsinger notes. Luchsinger has not yet been formally notified by NIH; howver, “there’s great concern about job cuts” and participants have been told by Columbia the funding has been eliminated and the study could be ending, he says. “It’s a pity because Columbia is just a fraction of the study.”
Several affected researchers told Science the University has said it will provide funding to keep trainees paid and help maintain experiments. However, that will be “…like trying to stick your finger in the dike…” says Physician-Scientist Anthony Ferrante, who expects to lose two (2) grants, one (1) a $1.2 million award that helps support a 44-year-old obesity research center with about 100 researchers at Columbia and a partner school. “To be targeted in this way is demoralizing,” Ferrante says.
Columbia so far has told staff to “stand together” and “we will never stray from open dialogue and free debate of ideas.” However, after the NIH announcement, the University said it has expelled or suspended some students involved in last year’s protests. On 13 March 2025, Trump officials sent a list of demands to Columbia that includes banning most mask wearing, adopting a formal definition of antisemitism, and placing one department in “receivership.”
NIH has recently terminated grants on specific topics, such as transgender health and vaccine hesitancy, disfavored by the Trump administration; however, the Columbia episode represents an escalation in which a political fight takes out unrelated science funding. There is worry the damage could spread. Another school on the administration’s investigations list, Johns Hopkins University, has already announced it is laying off about 2,200 people, most of them abroad, because it lost $800 million in multi-year public health funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The agency has largely been dismantled by DOGE.
Bagenstos notes the civil rights statute covering discrimination, Title VI, lays out a specific process — including a hearing — for withdrawing funds, which the Trump administration did not follow. “The cutoff of funds is totally illegal,” he says. “If Columbia does not stand up [in court],” he says, “that makes it harder for the next university.”
REFERENCE: Science; 18 MAR 2025; Jocelyn Kaiser