The New Federal Funding Problem

For more than a year, research universities across the country were on red alert over the Trump administration’s drastic proposed cuts to federal research funding. So it’s no surprise that University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill administrators were excited to see funding levels stay steady as the 2026 fiscal year closed.

“Things aren’t nearly as dire as we might have figured,” Chancellor Lee Roberts said at an event The Assembly and The Atlantic hosted in April.

UNC-CH’s federal research funding declined by a mere 2.5% in the 2025-26 academic year, Roberts explained. 

“That’s not great—it’s better to go up,” he said. But research funding fluctuates from year to year by an average of 4%, Roberts added, so the drop was within the normal range.

Underneath those topline numbers, however, the research funding environment is far from normal. 

The number of new federal grants has declined noticeably. In 2025, the National Institutes of Health gave out 25% fewer new grants than it did in 2024, and it’s behind that pace for 2026. The National Science Foundation’s number of new grants shrank 46% from the average during the Biden administration, to a level not seen since the 1980s, according to Nature.

Senior faculty who for decades earned competitive grants say they have been left in limbo as applications went unanswered and expected funding opportunities were never opened. Early-career researchers risk being shut out of funding pipelines, and graduate students could get much less financial support.

“We’re all in a situation where we’re still trying to navigate this and figure out what the long-term impacts are going to be,” said Andy Johns, UNC-CH’s senior associate vice chancellor for research. 

The changes are forcing UNC-CH, and other universities in a similar position, to adjust. Research jobs have been canceled, graduate cohorts have shrunk, and UNC-CH may have to alter faculty funding structures, Johns said. He fears some researchers may even leave academia altogether.

Grace Davis Jamison, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement that the Trump administration “is committed to funding rigorous, high-quality research that advances the health of the American people and ensures taxpayer dollars are used responsibly. Funding decisions are made consistent with agency priorities, applicable law, and the scientific merit of individual proposals.”

Rocks and Pebbles

Johns said that while overall funding at UNC-CH has been fairly stable, “It’s definitely been through a redistribution. We’ve been very fortunate to receive some very large grants … but that’s been offset by a decreasing number of moderate-sized grants.”

Typically, federal research grants are awarded for five years, so much of UNC-CH’s current funding was earned in past years. Looking specifically at new grants shows a troubling pattern about future revenue. 

In the 2024 fiscal year—the last of the Biden administration—UNC-CH brought in $257 million in annual funding from new grants. In 2026, it had declined to $212 million, according to data Johns provided. 

The Trump administration has also changed the structure of its grants. “The White House budget office wants the agency to award many multiyear grants as a single lump sum,” Science reported about the NIH. As a result, the number of grants has decreased even more than the dollar amount: At UNC-CH, it fell 22%, from 746 new grants in 2024 to 582 in 2026.

“I think it’s going to shift the expectation within certain fields, at least temporarily, on what faculty are expected to bring in,” Johns said. “Because if the funding opportunities aren’t there, it’s going to be difficult to hold them to that standard.”

All of those trends are distributed unevenly across different fields and disciplines. The Trump administration has made no secret of its desire to change federal funding priorities, especially moving away from subjects at all connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion. (And even some that are not.)

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—whose department includes UNC-CH’s largest funder, the National Institutes of Health—has also drastically changed his agencies’ emphases, moving away from topics like vaccines and COVID-19.

“We’ve devoted all of these dollars to infectious disease and to drug development and very little to chronic disease,” Kennedy told the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in 2025, saying he was flipping those priorities.

UNC-CH’s Department of Epidemiology, for instance, saw its new funding fall from 38 grants worth $18.9 million in the 2024 fiscal year to 17 grants worth $3.3 million in 2026. But the Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics, which studies drug delivery at the molecular level, saw substantial increases in new funding: from eight grants worth $1.8 million in 2024 to 11 worth $11.2 million this year.

Research universities without UNC-CH’s medical footprint may be less impacted. North Carolina State University saw a decline in new funding, but not nearly as steep as its fellow flagship.

“Until February 2025, NC State’s federal research award trajectory grew an average of 10.5% annually for the three years post-COVID,” said Matt Shipman, an NC State spokesperson. “In 2026, NC State was awarded 8% less in new funding than the previous year. In 2025, we ended the fiscal year with approximately 2% less new funding awards than in 2024.”

North Carolina A&T State University saw the number of new awards fall from about 300 to about 280 between 2024 and 2026, but the dollar value increased, according to data provided by Vice Chancellor for Research Lisa Clough. “We feel the future is bright for research at N.C. A&T,” she said.

Beyond subject-specific trends, the pace of funding has slowed across the entire research enterprise. One factor is the lack of staff at federal research agencies, thanks to Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency slashing through federal budgets in 2025: The Department of Health and Human Services lost 20,000 of its 82,000 staff, though it has since hired 10,000 back. The layoffs mean remaining workers can’t keep up with existing grants or award new ones, The New York Times reported in April.

In the Lab

Mark Holmes is one of the researchers the funding shifts have impeded.

The distinguished professor and senior associate dean at UNC-CH’s Gillings School of Global Public Health researches rural health care and has a long history of earning funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a part of Health and Human Services. 

In July 2025, though, the agency largely stopped funding any new grants. Data that former Science editor-in-chief Jeremy Berg compiled shows that as of mid-August 2026, it had awarded just 37 grants compared with 443 at the same point last year and 974 in 2024. The total award amount fell from $336.8 million in 2024 to $16.5 million in 2026.

Holmes said he struggled to get responses from the agency about his applications.

“We had a grant we submitted that was never reviewed,” he said. “They just didn’t do it. We had delays in deadlines. Originally we expected the notice of funding opportunity in January, and it finally came out in June.” Another grant Holmes oversaw for research training, which UNC-CH had received for 35 years running, was canceled. In 2025, it supported the salaries of nine postdocs and graduate students.

“It’s been highly successful,” Holmes said. “We’ve taken researchers, and our program is deliberately designed to make them policy relevant, practitioner facing, and making it more useful to the public.”

One trainee focused on improving care for veterans in rural areas. Another looked at the costs of cancer care that are not covered by insurance, from wigs to long trips to specialty hospitals.

Holmes received the first year of funding for the five-year grant, but the second never came. He didn’t receive any information about it until a year later, when the grant was officially terminated.

Holmes was left scrambling to cobble together other funding sources for the early-career scientists who were depending on it. One found another federal award, one received a departmental grant, and Holmes was able to hire one for six months to analyze data. 

But even those who received funding lost the autonomy the grant offered. “The training program allowed them to focus on their own research,” Holmes said. “They had 40 hours of full-time dedication to their own dissertation or their work.” 

If the trend continues, Holmes said, the university won’t be able to support as many scientists doing important, public-minded work that the state needs. 

“We won’t see it,” he said. “There’s not a reverse ribbon cutting. We don’t see the research that’s never done. We don’t see the researcher who doesn’t have the breakthrough that leads to the big change. They just disappear.”