Since President Trump returned to office in January, his administration has leveraged billions in federal research funding in an attempt to reshape higher education. Freezes and cuts have hit highly selective institutions that the administration sees as violating civil rights laws — and Brown is no exception.

On April 3, the White House confirmed to The Herald that the federal government plans to freeze $510 million in Brown’s federal funding. Since that day, researchers have not been reimbursed for expenses from National Institutes of Health grants, according to an April 23 email sent from the Division of Research to researchers and obtained by The Herald.

Staff at the NIH were instructed to freeze all grants awarded to Brown and other universities, according to an internal email reviewed and verified by The Herald. The email told employees not to “provide any communication to these schools about whether or why the funds are frozen.”

Currently, at least $8 million in federal grants at Brown have been cut by the Trump administration, The Herald previously reported. Gender- and diversity-related terminology were cited as the reason for these cuts.

With cuts rolling in over the past month, more grants are likely to be at risk.

The Herald’s data desk dove into federal and institutional data to understand how research is funded at Brown, and the possible implications recent federal developments will have on College Hill.

In 2023, Brown spent over $353 million in research and development expenditures — a stark increase from 2017, the start of Trump’s first term — where they spent $212 million. Data from 2023 is the most recent data available from the Higher Education Research and Development Survey by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

The appropriations for federal research grants are typically set through a budget from the president, which is voted on by Congress, according to Vice President for Research Greg Hirth ScM’87 PhD’91.

“Right now, that budget hasn’t been set for the coming years,” Hirth said, explaining the budget is on “a continuing resolution, where they basically take the money agreed on from a previous time and just forward that same amount of money to the future.”

“But there’s wiggle room with that, and with all the things going on in Washington, D.C., there’s more uncertainty,” he added.

Finding a grant is mostly the responsibility of the principal investigator of a research project, according to Hirth. Most researchers are exposed to the grant application processes as graduate students when they work with their advisors.

“The Division of Research has a whole office where (the staffs’) job is to make sure that your grant is compliant with all the regulations that you’re sending it to,” he said. “The person writing the grant will work with their department, typically, and then the department will interface with the administration in the research office.”

From there, the Office of Sponsored Projects sends the application to the funding agency.

In 2024, Brown submitted 1,710 grants and 821 of them were funded — meaning around half of submitted grants were approved, according to Hirth, who added the national average of grants approved is around 30%. But he noted these numbers can fluctuate depending on the field of research.

Half of Brown’s R&D expenditures in 2023 came from life sciences, according to the NCSES survey. Social sciences came second at 12%, followed by engineering at 8%. According to Web of Sciences, an online database of publications, “Clinical Neurology” was the field with the highest number of publications from University researchers in 2023, with “Public Environmental Occupational Health” coming in second.

At Brown, the National Science Foundation and the NIH are two of the federal agencies where researchers most commonly submit their proposals, according to Hirth. The U.S. Department of Energy and NASA were also popular funding agencies, he added.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Defense backed $19 million of the University’s R&D expenditures, while the DOE financed $7 million — the next two highest sources of funding for Brown, according to the NCSES survey.

Brown, along with eight other universities, filed a lawsuit against the DOE last Monday claiming the department’s plans to cut funding of indirect administrative costs were “flagrantly unlawful.” In February, Brown joined another suit attempting to stop NIH cuts.

Compared to other Ivy League schools, Brown receives considerably less funding from federal agencies, with the third-lowest R&D expenditures from federal institutions. In 2023, the University spent around $239 million in federal funding on these expenditures, while Columbia spent over $988 million.

Nationally, the University ranks 89th in total R&D expenditures, under George Washington University and above Auburn University ranked at 88th and 90th, respectively.

Brown also receives funding from other institutions, such as businesses and nonprofit organizations. While federal funding constitutes nearly 68% of R&D expenditures, over $113 million come from these external sources. Only $32,000 came from local and state governments in 2023.

But even without the effects of federal funding cuts, researchers still face the possibility of funding sources rejecting their grant applications.

Hirth explained that, in some cases, a submitted grant may have good reviews, but are ultimately rejected due to lack of a “proof of concept.” The funding agencies may also request pilot data during their review, a process that Brown’s Division of Research can help facilitate by providing additional funding to researchers through a seed program, he added.

“We can provide funding for the PIs to get to the next step, and then they can resubmit,” Hirth said. “In some cases there’s actually a good chance of getting funded on the second go-around.”

Hirth emphasized that the University is still receiving funding from grants that were previously submitted, and researchers are “still submitting grants at a pretty high level,” noting the University is currently at a similar number of submissions compared to this time in previous years.

Amid current uncertainty, Hirth advised researchers to “still submit your grant proposal, because your chances are zero if you don’t submit them.”