How scientists are fighting back against federal research funding cuts
Scientists are pushing back against the Trump administration’s massive cuts to federal research funding in a number of ways—by bringing lawsuits, tracking grant cuts, and working to spread the word about the harm resulting from the cuts.
A Sept. 10 Nature article featured some of the scientists who are leading the fight. Among them was Scott Delaney, former research scientist in Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health, who helped create Grant Witness, a project aimed at tracking grant terminations at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation. Delaney left his position in mid-September after learning that he was due to be laid off in October—because the grants that supported his own salary were among those that had been frozen.
Grant Witness and similar databases have been a crucial source of information for reporters, activists, and politicians trying to understand the extent of the terminations, according to the Nature article.
Delaney, who formerly worked as a lawyer, described his work as “an effort to organize, to advocate, and then for me personally, to support litigation.”
The Nature article noted that the Grant Witness database makes it easier to show that the Trump administration disproportionately pulled back grants for research concerning women, LGBTQ+, and minority groups. The database was cited by U.S. District Court Judge William Young in a mid-June ruling in response to two lawsuits challenging hundreds of NIH grant terminations relating to issues out of favor with the Trump administration.
Judge Young ruled that these terminations were illegal and ordered them reinstated, although the Supreme Court later ruled that the grant funding can remain paused while the Trump administration appeals the ruling.
Read the Nature article: Scientists take on Trump: these researchers are fighting back
Learn more
Creating a trusted database of federal research funding cuts (Harvard Chan School news)
