Fielding frantic faculty emails and panicked texts was not how I had hoped my 2025 would begin. Little did I imagine that my role as a research dean at a medical school would be taken over by navigating chaotic grant terminations and delays of federal research funding, all justified in the name of scientific progress.
Under normal conditions, a major part of my job is reducing barriers for faculty, staff and students engaged in innovative research. For example, I make sure my faculty have enough human help to complete necessary administrative tasks so they can focus on their science while writing their grants. My overall goal is to remove roadblocks and foster an environment in which new discoveries are made that can improve people’s lives.
But none of us in research leadership positions around the country had ever faced anything like the Trump administration’s attacks on universities and science.
One of my first clues that we were no longer operating in business-as-usual mode was when the White House terminated U.S. Agency for International Development grants. Michigan State University was one of the institutions affected by this major blow to agricultural, food and other global research, but the medical school where I work wasn’t directly hit. Our turn came when DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump administration effort at eliminating bureaucratic waste – turned its attention to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
As the White House took aim at higher education and the scientific research enterprise with its budgetary scalpels, my world was thrown into chaos.
Nara Parameswaran’s job as a medical school research dean transformed into dealing with much more chaos and uncertainty.
Michigan State University College of Human Medicine
The human costs of grant uncertainty
While interruptions to grant funding slow scientific progress, there is an immediate real-world human cost to the upheaval.
Consider the case of one of my junior faculty members. 2025 was a critical year for them: If they didn’t receive funding, they would lose their employment – it’s common in academia for scientists to need to raise money to support their own research and part of their salary. Their NIH program officer – the person who recommends whether a grant would be funded – had previously told them their proposal would likely be successful. But by February 2025, that NIH officer was DOGE’d – that is, fired – and so the fate of the grant remained in limbo.
The review of a second grant proposal that this MSU researcher had submitted to NIH was delayed by several months after NIH suspended the panels that assess the scientific merit of grant submissions.
By the time the faculty member received initial feedback on that grant and resubmitted it for reevaluation, the government had shut down and delayed the review again. By this point, nearly a year had passed and no grant…
