Dr. Sarah Fortune, an immunologist who spends a long time at her Harvard University lab, has never expected to be involved in a battle with the White House. But on the morning of Tuesday (15), she received an official notice to “stop work” in her federal government-funded survey of tuberculosis, an infectious disease that kills more than 1 million people a year worldwide.
Just a few hours earlier, the Trump administration had promised to freeze $ 2.2 billion in Harvard research funding. If fully executed, it will be the biggest cut so far in a White House campaign against elite universities, which began shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January.
Other universities, including Princeton, Cornell and Columbia, also faced deep cuts in research financing. The immunologist’s contract, a $ 60 million agreement from national health institutes involving Harvard and other universities across the country, seemed to be one of the first affected projects.
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Work suspension notices also started arriving this week to an obscure Harvard office called “Sponsored Programs”, which coordinates federal poll funding.
A Harvard teacher, David R. Walt, received a warning that his research for a Diagnostic tool for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, should stop immediately.
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Two other requests will affect research on space travel and radiation diseases, just a few weeks after the scientist, Dr. Donald E. Ingber, who develops useful artificial bodies in human disease studies, was approached by the government to expand their work.
The Trump administration, which warned that another $ 7 billion may be at risk in Harvard, framed their campaign to cut research dollars as an effort to combat anti -Semitism.
Harvard seemed to be looking for ways to work with the White House, until a letter to school on Friday expanded the management’s requirements, with new conditions that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
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On Monday, Harvard President Alan M. Garber signed his position, stating that Trump’s administration had gone too far. He was applauded for resisting, but his school, along with the other elite research universities in the country, is extremely dependent on federal research funds.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Harvard had not taken the president’s demands seriously, resulting in funding cuts.
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Inflation numbers?
Observing the Great endowment [fundo patrimonial de longo prazo] From Harvard, which is about $ 53 billion, she added: “Why are American taxpayers subsidizing a university that already has billions of dollars in the bank?”
Harvard is still processing the warnings received and has not yet disclosed the exact amount that was cut. Even short -term reductions can be devastating for work that helped the United States to stay competitive and even keep lives, college leaders and researchers said.
Walt, the ALS researcher, who received a presidential medal last year for his work, said the order put at risk “a transformative diagnostic test that may never see the light of day.” He added: “If this project is closed, which is the most likely result, and other projects are also closed, people will die.”
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Even before the Harvard explicit attack, the Trump administration had already cut off campuses in the country, as part of a broad effort to reduce federal government spending and end projects that contradict their political goals, including works that touch gender and race.
Harvard had already lost millions. An analysis last week by The Harvard Crimson found $ 110 million in cuts, many of them in projects involving sexuality or gender. The cancellations have been executed so quickly and with such little warning since Trump took office that academics had difficulty accounting for them.
University leaders have been running to set up internal lists of work suspension orders that were sent to individual researchers. Complicating the situation, the White House has announced in some situations cut much larger than what schools receive from the federal government in any year. The Association of Public Universities and Land Concession said on Wednesday that it could not account for the consequences for its members, noting that the number was “constantly changing.”
Some administrators wondered if the government was inflating their estimates, speculating that it was including money spent earlier on its totals. The White House refused to comment on the concerns of campus administrators.
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Penn State, Princeton e Cornell
In some cases, there were no official announcements that cuts were coming. The president of the University of Pennsylvania, J. Larry Jameson, said the first news about a $ 175 million reduction to the university came through media reports. Eventually, Jameson said, members of the faculty in seven of Penn schools received work suspension orders that totaled about $ 175 million.
The experience was very similar in Princeton, where researchers received notifications suspending dozens of subsidies without any formal word from Washington to the university about “complete reason,” said his president, Christopher L. Eisgruber. He said last week that he would not make concessions to the White House.
Princeton and Cornell are among about a dozen universities, along with large university associations, who processed administration together due to research cuts.
With the deepest cuts now lurking in Harvard, Garber, a doctor, is aware of the risks. In a statement this week explaining why Harvard was refusing to comply with government demands, he argued that federal research partnerships with universities are beneficial for both schools and society. “The government moves away from these partnerships now, risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals, but also the economic security and vitality of our nation,” he said.
Ingber said he found the government’s decision to terminate $ 20 million contracts for his work on space travel and disconcerting radiation. “They are canceling these two programs at a time when the government is announcing that it will build nuclear reactors across the country to provide energy,” Ingber said. “And they also want to go to Mars. They know how to destroy,” he added. “They don’t know how to create.”
Despite the consequences, scientists whose projects were cut agreed that Harvard was doing the right thing. Walt said he would begin to seek alternative financing. “I am pleased that Harvard had the courage to do that,” he said, “and I am willing to accept him.”
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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