Since President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration this year, his administration has been making baffling decisions, such as cutting and restructuring multiple federal agencies like the Department of Education (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services. Next to nothing is safe from the financial scissors that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) shears through whatever they deem as wasted funds to create an “efficient” government, especially higher education institutions like Stony Brook University.
One of the primary victims of DOGE’s budget cuts is the Department of Education. Its workforce got slashed by roughly 50% and Trump is expected to sign an executive order that wipes it entirely. Unfortunately for him, that would require 60 votes in the Senate which, for the meantime, doesn’t seem feasible with its current composition.
The DOE is responsible for a range of education management from collecting school-related research like the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, which evaluates education programs supported by federal funds and the What Works Clearinghouse, which focuses on promoting efficient and proper teaching methods to prevent discrimination in education. This entire process is based on the ridiculous notion that schools should be put back into the hands of the states. There’s only a little problem: the DOE is responsible for about 10% of public school funding in the United States and most of these costs are funded by state and local governments collecting taxes.
Despite the DOE stating that they will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, call centers for the Free Application for Student Financial Aid (FAFSA) and other student aid programs could be downsized. These reductions in employees could lead to delays in processing financial aid requests, as 1,300 positions were recently cut that dealt with processes related to FAFSA application.
DOGE is cutting grants for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) and other institutions with higher minority populations. 54% of HBCUs’ revenues come from federal and state funds compared to non-HBCUs’ 33%. Around 73% of students attending HBCUs receive Pell Grants compared to non-HBCU students at 36%. Nothing screams efficiency like doubling the workload for every employee and increasing the wait time for students’ financial aid packages.
The DOE is not the only federal department that’s getting slashed to ribbons, as the National Science Foundation (NSF) is bleeding out as well. Compared to a year ago, the amount of grants the NSF has awarded have decreased by half, dropping the benefits researchers were able to gain by a whopping $400 million. If you compare February to April after Trump’s inauguration to the year before, the difference is even more apparent. These cuts have the academic world reeling; institutions like Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt University have paused hiring efforts, spending and graduate admissions.
Universities aren’t the only ones that are feeling the heat — the entire world is. From Jan. 21, 2024 to March 27, 2024, the education directorate handed out 120 new grants. This number has dropped drastically across the board since Trump’s inauguration. This year, they handed out only 12 grants, which is roughly a $54 million decrease ($60 million to $6 million). The NSF Directorate for Engineering dropped from handing out 351 grants to 63 ($133 million to $20 million, a $113 million decrease) and, in total, the new awards created last year totaled 1,707. This year, however, only 919 were created ($761 million to $312 million).
The NSF has funded multiple Stony Brook research projects before, like studies on understanding how coastal flooding causes foundational damage to infrastructure as well as how metabolic interventions can prevent the brain from aging. Funding for research initiatives like these will become much harder to come by, which serves as a sinister warning for any students looking to pursue postgraduate research opportunities, especially considering Stony Brook is a research-heavy school. The areas affected by these include important research from Stony Brook’s Rachel Kidman, who works in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine as an associate professor, who found that teenage boys who experience violence are more likely to be violent with their partners. This endeavor was funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, whose budget was slashed nearly in half.
The NIH is the largest public research donor on the planet and future meetings for disbursing funding are banned “indefinitely.” This measure would impact Stony Brook substantially as the NIH has previously funded the University’s research projects. For example, researchers at Stony Brook discovered this past March that by using certain Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs for cancer treatment, doctors can treat hemorrhagic strokes. Hemorrhagic strokes, despite having extensive research done on hemoglobin, heme and free iron, remain an enigma. Proper funding could potentially change our understanding of the injury and give us a treatment all in one thanks to a $2.6 million grant from the NIH.
Cuts to these federal sectors make no sense, especially when new scientific and healthcare discoveries are being made at a consistent pace. Economists agree that the NSF and the NIH should be getting more funding to work with, not less. Using tax dollars to fund risky medical research is like giving a dollar and getting five back, and that’s ignoring the positive impacts on Americans you can’t find looking at the gross domestic product. After all, Google started off as a project funded by the NSF.
The cuts Trump’s administration has ordered would not only harm the progress Stony Brook is making towards new discoveries in science and medicine, but universities across the country as well.
