It wasn’t long after President Donald Trump was elected when Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an epidemiologist at UC San Diego, knew that she would be feeling the impacts of his election firsthand.
Fielding-Miller explains that the system used to review grants hinges on meetings in which a group of scientists looks over applications to decide on their scientific merits and whether they should be funded. “People started noticing that … those meetings seemed like they were starting to get canceled,” she adds. “[It was] not something that anybody had ever seen. It hasn’t happened before. That was the first indication that something scary was happening.”
Around the same time, an expected federal funding freeze was announced, then paused a few days later. “Except when the actual funding freeze was lifted, this freeze by bureaucracy was still in place, and it has still been in place,” Fielding-Miller says. “And so pretty much the process of reviewing and funding grants has been halted since January.”
That’s just one impact that researchers in San Diego and across the country are experiencing. San Diego is a hub for scientific research, and its local economy is fueled in part by research institutes and biotech companies, so questions over federal funding cuts are causing uncertainty across the region.
UC San Diego is one of the county’s biggest research institutions. The university declined an interview but referenced a statement saying changes to federal funding could mean it will lose more than $150 million a year. The school recently froze faculty hiring.
“In addition to several executive orders and funding agency staffing cuts that profoundly impact higher education, the National Institutes of Health recently announced a significant policy change, imposing a 15 percent cap on indirect cost reimbursements for Facility and Administration costs associated with research grants. In [fiscal year] 2024, the NIH reimbursed UC San Diego approximately $210 million for Facility and Administration expenses,” the university statement says. “These funds play a critical role in partially reimbursing for costs associated with the substantial infrastructure, specialized equipment and support services—including IT, lab space, utilities and equipment—that are necessary to facilitate and support cutting-edge research.”
In 2024, UC San Diego received around $561 million in federal health and science research funding—the third-highest of any California research institute. Beyond UCSD, the Scripps Research Institute took in $163 million and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies received $66 million in NIH funding.
It’s unclear how much could end up being cut in total. Other local universities, including SDSU and USD, have not said how much they stand to lose. A new report from USD found that government funding also accounts for 30 percent of the revenue at local nonprofits and that 72 percent report direct or anticipated impacts by federal executive actions.
Part of the problem, Fielding-Miller argues, is the uncertainty and lack of clear communication. While she has not yet had a grant pulled, she has one “stuck in review limbo, and another foundation grant that we suspect wasn’t funded because the foundation is worried about falling afoul of current federal priorities, but that’s nothing but a suspicion,” she says.
She adds that her statements reflect her individual views and “not the views of the University of California, the Regents of the University of California or UC San Diego, its officers, agents, or employees.”
And while she hasn’t officially lost a grant, the cancellation of grant review meetings essentially means the cessation of funding for her work. Fielding-Miller tells SDM that the process has always been Byzantine. “The way to do something evil is to make it boring, right?” she says, highlighting that the disruption has been hard to follow from the outside.
Her salary, like her staff’s, is supported by grants. Yet, grants can’t move forward without a meeting of a group of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deciding which studies should get funded.
“If these groups don’t meet, then the grants can’t get a score, which means there can’t be a decision about what to fund, which means nobody gets funded, which means the research salary and their staff salary is suddenly in question and in limbo,” Fielding-Miller says. In good times, the grant process has a five-year timeline: It takes about six months to a year to write a proposal and at least another year for it to go through the review phase for funding.
“We’re constantly submitting these,” Fielding-Miller adds. “And a delay of even six months has the possibility to be catastrophic, because people will lose their salaries.”
Fielding-Miller says there’s more uncertainty around existing grants that use words such as “gender” and “women” that have been labelled DEI terminology.
“The latest fresh hell that came out is maybe they will pull these active funds in the middle of the process,” she tells SDM. “So there’s just a lot of fear for our own work, our science, but also our jobs and our staff’s jobs who are dependent on these grants.”
She references reporting from Nature that shows NIH staff are looking for and could potentially cancel grants for research on “transgender populations, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion in the scientific workforce, environmental justice and any other research that might be perceived to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.”
That would mean active grants—not only ones that have been proposed and have reviews on hold—could be canceled.
The Trump administration and NIH did not return requests for comment. During his confirmation hearing, Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for NIH director, said he will ensure scientists who receive NIH grants have the funding to do their work. In a statement, the White House called DEI “discriminatory” and said it would “return to merit-based hiring.”
Cancelling DEI grants would impact researchers like Ana Duenas, who works in the Special Education Department at the College of Education at San Diego State University.
“My research is focused on the transborder community. So I study the experience of transborder families in the Imperial Valley who … experiencing disparities in service access for their autistic children,” she says. “There’s DEI all over my work.” So far, Duenas has not heard anything about her grant, and no one in her department has had funds frozen.
“There’s nothing we can do but wait and see,” she adds. According to Duenas, she and other researchers have been told by the university to prepare to defend themselves. “It is really difficult to continue to do work when you’re afraid that you might be losing your funds at any moment.”
Along with the impact on morale, Duenas says it’s hard to know whether her department can bring on additional PhD students. “It’s really difficult to invite students on campus without being able to guarantee that we’re going to be able to fund them for at least a certain amount of years,” she explains. “A lot of these students, they’re highly competitive. They’re amazing and doing great work themselves. And I’m competing with other universities who might have other mechanisms of funding.”
But Duenas adds that she is undeterred.
“I’m committed to this work. I’m not going to scrub off things from the research websites that I have around this work,” she says. “I’m not going to stop doing this work. And so I’m just trying to figure out ways of how I can continue the work without the funding, if it happens.”
In addition to local research institutes, other San Diego County programs are impacted by federal funding freezes. For example, San Diego County is reviewing more than $30 million in funds from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for projects such as the Public Health Workforce and Infrastructure Modernization Project, San Diego Covid-19 Health Disparities Project, and the County of San Diego Tuberculosis Project “to determine if recent federal directives require halting any related activities,” according to Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer.
Frozen and stalled housing grants and FEMA grants and cuts to Medicaid could also have ripple effects on the economy, she adds.
“The resources are stretched even more thin, which then impacts emergency rooms, the availability of specialty care, staffing levels, and all of these other issues that are necessary for a functional system. That therefore impacts the healthcare of everyone, even if you have private insurance,” she says. “Plus, of course, [there may be] significantly fewer jobs in the healthcare sector and lower pay. What’s going to happen if you lose 33 percent of the funding for a third of the county? That’s a major hit.”
Meanwhile, Fielding-Miller is still waiting to hear about her grants, but she says she will continue to press on. “If a bully is telling you to stop doing something, I think the best thing to do is just do more of it,” she adds.
Her biggest worry is the long-term impacts of eliminating grants that study marginalized people. The scientists who study those communities are more likely to be from those communities themselves, and, without funding, they could be pushed out of research altogether.
“When we are left with an academy that is cisgender, straight, white men with family wealth to fall back on, the science is going to be less good,” she says. “And it’s not even going to be because they’re canceling diversity mechanisms. It’s going to be because they have driven out everybody who wants to do something interesting.”
Because one of the Trump administration’s first actions was to create chaos around scientific research, Fielding-Miller sees the move as trying to “dismantle the profession, the people whose job it is to systematically help us know what’s real.”
“Fundamentally, science is a way of deciding what’s true and what’s not. It’s our way of describing the world accurately,” she says. “When the things that we can accurately describe are taken away, when the words that we can use to accurately describe the world are taken away, it’s fundamentally an attack on our ability to say what’s true. I am really worried about what it means that this administration’s goal is to take away our ability to say what’s true and what they want to replace that with.”
