In the spring, the Trump administration cut funding to federal research organizations such as the National Institute of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities, affecting projects at Dartmouth. The Dartmouth sat down with vice provost for research Dean Madden, who advises and oversees research projects sponsored by the College, to discuss recent updates to federal research funding at Dartmouth and how projects will unfold.
This spring, organizations including the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation withdrew significant funding for research at Dartmouth. Have there been developments on the situation since then?
DM: The cuts that occurred in the spring had a pretty dramatic impact across campus. There have been a number of [District and Appeals] court decisions in the meantime that have generally sided with Dartmouth. Unfortunately, that has not led to the restoration of funding.
Were any of the repealed grants reinstated? Are there still some that are in the appeals process?
DM: It’s a bit of a confusing landscape, because there are mechanisms for appeal within the agencies and there's also legal action. Some grants were reinstated by court decisions, and that was great news. However, the formal appeals that we submitted to agencies that award the funds have been denied.
How has Dartmouth supported projects and programs that had already begun before this funding was withdrawn?
DM: It was really a campus-wide effort to try to buffer the impact as much as we could. We worked very closely with the deans to identify bridge funding or alternative sources to support projects that were interrupted midstream, so the researchers could wrap up their work and make sure that they didn't lose data or have a major disruption to an ongoing study. We worked closely with the deans, because we wanted to make sure that the departments were aware of the processes going on and the resources that were being invested, and often the [departments] were contributing a substantial fraction of those resources themselves.
How has the funding of new or future projects been impacted by the reduction of federal funding?
DM: There’s been less of a negative impact in that space. There was a long series of delays at NIH and other funding agencies in the final approval of new grants or grants that were being renewed for funding after a competitive review. In the early summer, it looked like there might be a substantial loss of funding, but by July, the funding agencies had managed to work out new processes that were more efficient, and over the [summer], a lot of the grants that we had been hoping to receive did get funded. Those include the core funding for the Dartmouth Cancer Center from the National Cancer Institute. We have a brand new Center for Implementation Science grant that was funded in August, we had renewed funding for our Dartmouth Cystic Fibrosis Research Center.
Overall, there were delays that were unsettling and definitely delayed the science. But I think many universities found that at the end of the federal fiscal year, which is Sept. 30, they were able to move a lot of grants out and fund them.
How have faculty and staff been impacted by these changes? How have they responded?
DM: This has been really challenging for faculty and staff. The process of managing the final grant approvals became far more complicated than it usually has been because of interference from these various mandates and uncertainty at the agencies about how to implement those changes. This required a huge amount of additional work by our departmental staff, by the research staff, by the office of sponsored projects and by the faculty members to overcome all of these hurdles and make sure that we did get funding. The second impact was that the research delayed the start of their projects substantially.
In the long term, how is Dartmouth planning to adapt to this change in the process and the gap in federal funding?
DM: We have doubled our efforts to pursue funding from private foundations, philanthropy and corporate sponsors. But we have to be realistic right now, because those sources account for approximately 15% of funding for research activities. It’s going to be hard from that to make up for large cuts in the federal funding, if they occur.
There’s actually some good news on the budget front in general. The appropriations bills that had been drafted prior to the federal government shutdown had bipartisan support for level funding for most of the science agencies, which was better news than the proposed federal budget in February, so we were feeling a lot more positive about the prospects for funding in the coming fiscal year. That said, one of the things that we’ve also recognized is that we are in a landscape of permanent change. Part of Dartmouth’s adaptation to this is that our faculty need to be really nimble. We need to be constantly advocating in Washington, D.C., in Congress, with the public, with the administration, to try to minimize the negative impact of the changes on the research partnership.
The government just shut down. Do you believe this could substantially affect the research funding Dartmouth is currently receiving?
DM: This is not the first time that the government has shut down, so we do have standard procedures that we can use to sustain funding. There may be some specific cases where individual payments could be disrupted, and we're asking people to check in with the administration if they run into a problem, but by and large, our expectation is that most of the resources will continue to be available.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
