The National Science Foundation has already cut more than $2 billion from active grants established under former President Biden deemed to have “promoted DEI tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle” by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation headed by Sen. Ted Cruz. 

Academia has been on high alert regarding recent moves by the Trump administration to cut funding to scientific research provided by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation, the two largest funders of U.S. academic research. 

NIH will be unable to distribute $4 billion to universities, cancer centers, and hospitals if pending lawsuits from several states are decided in Trump’s favor. Trump attempted to make similar cuts at NIH during his first term in 2017 but was blocked by Congress. 

On Feb. 19, several academic unions, consisting of faculty, students, and postdocs from institutions including CUNY, NYU, and Cornell, demonstrated. They marched at Washington Square Park to protest research funding cuts and “Defend Public Research.” 

Baruch College professor Pablo Peixoto said his mood was “bittersweet” at the 25th Annual Biophysical Society’s annual meeting in Los Angeles, despite his scheduled talk about his work in CUNY’s natural sciences department on Feb. 17. 

“I should not be here pretending that science is as usual, that it’s business as usual,” he said. “I’m aching for the time when we’re actually going to go somewhere—to the National Institutes of Health, to the White House, or to the National Science Foundation—and show our support for science.” 

Trump’s 2024 campaign website still hosts a link to the American Academy section of his plan for his second term, named Agenda47, which calls for the establishment of a new institution whose endowment will be “collected by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments” described as “plagued by antisemitism.” 

American Academy will have “no wokeness or jihadism allowed” and be done “without adding a single dime to the federal debt,” according to a video of Trump recorded on Nov. 1, 2023. However, there is also no mention of research facilities at the future bachelor-degree-granting institution. As such, it will have no need for grants from either NIH or NSF. 

Peixoto is in a much different boat at his CUNY biomedical lab, where he studies the mitochondria’s role in cell health, participates in peer-review panels, reviews grants for approval, and, as of this month, makes a lot of calls to program directors seeking guidance on the pending political crisis in government funding. 

One such grant Peixoto was calling about was an NSF grant for Hispanic-serving institutions aimed at increasing recruitment and retention of transfer students in biology majors. 

“Even though transfer students make up over 73% of the student body, when it comes to the natural sciences, [they’re] only 20-ish percent,” Peixoto said. 

It’s possible the grant would be canceled if NSF, following the example set by the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, screens Peixoto’s grant for keywords like “Hispanic” that would flag the grant as promoting DEI. 

The Senate committee shared keywords it scanned grants for to identify and categorize them (as either “Environmental Justice,” “Gender,” “Race,” “Social Justice,” or “Status”) for cancellation in Appendix B of the Oct. 2024 report it released. 

While “HISPANIC COMMUNITY” and “HISPANIC INDIVIDUAL” were both noted in Appendix B under the Social Justice category along with seven other phrases including the word “Hispanic,” “HISPANIC-SERVING INSTITUTION” was not included. But Peixoto wasn’t told that. 

“As far as guidance [from NSF] to Principal Investigators—that’s what they call us, PIs—there is no clear guidance. I took that to mean ‘continue doing what you’re doing,’” Peixoto said. 

For him, that meant trying to outsmart search algorithms with phrases like “a student body representative of the country’s demographics” instead of “diverse” when writing grants that promote his preferred term: “inclusive excellence.” 

Peixoto is also checking to make sure NIH grants, his and others’, still include a Plan to Enhance Diverse Perspectives, which is required for such proposals according to NIH. 

PEDP originated at the NIH Brain Initiative in 2021 and was adopted by other institutions of NIH. PEDP includes more than just the diversity described by Ted Cruz in his U.S. Senate Committee report; it encompasses geographic diversity as well as transdisciplinary expertise. 

According to NIH, “the recruitment of diverse research participants and the inclusion of community perspectives ensures that research questions are informed by patient and family perspectives and that the benefits of research have wide applicability.” 

Peixoto agrees, saying, “Inclusive excellence is good business.” 

Research faculty, in CUNY and beyond, aren’t without criticism of the current academic research funding system. 

The Trump NIH research funding executive order resulted in lawsuits being brought by Massachusetts and other higher education associations regarding NIH indirect rates being capped at 15%, according to the Council on Government Relations. 

Peixoto said there are lots of indirect rates that the general public may not realize. 

“As a researcher, I feel that a lot of the research infrastructure and the administrative component comes at my own onus,” he said. “I wear the hats of HR person, cleaning person… sometimes I wonder: what really is the cost?” 

The NIH indirect rates, which determine what percentage of the total costs of the project will be used to pay for indirect costs—also called facilities and administration—have existed since the 1960s but are inscrutable almost by definition. 

They can appear suspiciously all-encompassing to outsiders, according to Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH from 2003 to 2011. 

“The term ‘indirect costs’ or the alternative term ‘overhead’ sounds dangerously close to ‘slush fund’ to some people,” Berg said in an interview with the New York Times. “There are real costs somebody has to pay for, and heating and cooling university laboratory buildings is a real cost.” 

Indirect funding is designed to take advantage of a university’s shared resources—like building maintenance and high-speed internet—which are used by almost every laboratory, as well as economies of scale. Grouping these costs is more efficient than separating line items for each of an institution’s thousands of possible grant applications, according to the Council on Governmental Relations, which represents an association of research universities, affiliated medical centers, and independent research institutes. 

Chapter 11 of Project 2025 (page 355), however, calls for a cap on universities’ indirect rates “to help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” It was written by the Director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, Lindsey Burke. 

“I think we need to start a conversation about what the cost will be to us locally,” Peixoto said of indirect costs. 

Meanwhile, he is having conversations with his Baruch natural sciences students, not about politics, but about the environment in which they do research. 

“It’s understandable that they might be questioning their sense of belonging given what’s happening,” he said. “I want to communicate to them that they do belong. And that they will continue to belong here.” 

“Sense Of Belonging + Sense Of Belongingness” appeared in Ted Cruz’s Senate DEI report in a table showing the phrases were scanned 296 times in the more than 3,000 grants the committee searched for DEI and leftist values. 

“Sense of Belonging” falls under the category of “Status” in Cruz’s report.