When Donald Trump began his second U.S. presidential term in January, science policy experts expected federal funding priorities to shift. Still, the canceled grants came as a shock.
“This idea that you would go back over awards that have already been given and withdraw them because they don’t meet agency priorities—it’s just never happened,” says Mary Feeney, professor of public affairs at Arizona State University and former program director at the National Science Foundation.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants have been canceled across U.S. government agencies and scientific disciplines. Affected programs include research on COVID-19, transgender health and topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump administration terminated $400 million in grants to Columbia University, citing mishandling of antisemitism on campus; announced a review of Harvard University’s federal funding; and suspended funding at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
“While they do have a lot of leeway on the government side to do this, there are a lot of tools that grantees have in their toolbox to push back, or at least make sure they’re recovering the costs that they’re entitled to,” says Amanda Miller, president of Seventh Street Strategies, a policy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., and former deputy assistant secretary for higher-education programs at the U.S. Department of Education.
Here are five things you should know if your federal grant is terminated:
1. Institutions, not investigators, receive grants—so get your institution involved right away.
Even though investigators submit grant applications, navigate the review process and spend the funds, the grant is actually awarded to the institution. This means you should contact your institution’s office of sponsored research as soon as possible, Feeney says.
“The responsible party is the institution, and so an appeal has to come from the institution,” Feeney says.
Your program officer is a resource to answer questions, but grant terminations and appeals are not part of their typical duties. “They have a lot of expertise in the science, but they’re not legal scholars, and they’re not federal budget experts,” Feeney says—so let your office of sponsored research handle the intricate questions.
2. Several sets of overlapping rules govern how and why your grant can be terminated.
It’s important to understand these rules, because any deviations can be included in the arguments of a potential appeal or litigation, Miller says.
Some grants include termination rules in their terms and conditions, which may be located in a notice of award or in the initial funding opportunity posting.
A government-wide guidance recommends the ground rules for grant terminations; each agency can choose to adopt them or set their own policy. In 2020, the first Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget added a new rule: An award can be terminated if it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” Grant terminations from several different agencies have cited this rationale.
“Even though they do have a broad way to terminate these grants based on the current rules, there’s also specific processes they have to follow,” Miller says. “And so if they don’t follow that—that’s where we’ve seen a lot of the litigation benefit the grantee.” For example, a district court judge in Maryland ruled on 17 March that the Department of Education must reinstate canceled teacher-training grants because they were terminated through an improper procedure, Miller says. The decision doesn’t mean the government can never terminate grants, “but they do have to follow the rules.”
Here are some of the agency-specific termination regulations:
- National Science Foundation
- Department of Health and Human Services
- National Institutes of Health
- Department of Energy
3. The termination notice contains information you need if you want to appeal.
Make sure you “really review the letter” and understand the reason provided for the termination, as well as how it is communicated, because you might be able to appeal based on that rationale, Miller says. Some ongoing lawsuits argue that vague termination notices are arbitrary and capricious, a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act that dictates how federal agencies must behave.
Termination notices also include details about how to appeal the decision, which agency staff member to send the appeal to and the deadline for the appeal, which is typically 30 days after the notice was received, says Carrie D. Wolinetz, senior principal and chair of the Health Bioscience Innovations Practice at Lewis-Burkes Associates in Washington, D.C., and former senior adviser in the National Institutes of Health’s Office of the Director.
If the reason for termination does not seem to apply to your research—for example, if the notice mentions a research topic that is not related to your project—be prepared to share that with your institution, says Krystal Toups, director of contracts and grants administration at COGR, a Washington, D.C.-based association of research institutions that advocates for research policy. Institutions likely rely on investigators to make that determination, Toups says, “because they know their research the best.”
Researchers should also be prepared to articulate the public value of their work, Toups says, because it is another element that their institution can include in an appeal.
4. You may be able to use your terminated grant to cover “closeout costs.”
There are often loose ends and expenses when a research project winds down. Some of these expenses, called “closeout costs,” can still be charged to a grant after it ends—and even after it is terminated. Allowable expenses include “financial obligations” that cannot be canceled and costs that wouldn’t have been incurred had the grant not been terminated early.
For example, a monthly payment of a year-long contract for equipment maintenance may qualify as a non-cancelable financial obligation, says Cynthia Hope, director of costing and financial compliance at COGR. But it’s unclear if the salary of graduate students would count, she adds. “It really is going to come down to what your institution decides where it wants to draw those lines,” so ask your office of sponsored research if they have a policy that defines a non-cancelable commitment, Hope says.
The termination itself can spur extra expenses, such as animal housing and care. Normally, when a grant-funded research program ends as expected, investigators can plan ahead to make sure they finish up animal experiments before their funding runs out. But when a grant is terminated unexpectedly, your animals “don’t just disappear because you don’t need them anymore,” Hope says.
Even if you plan to appeal the termination, “I think you do have to prepare for the worst and start thinking through” the bills that could be charged as closeout costs, Hope says.
5. This is new for everyone, so be patient.
Before the events of the past few months, grant terminations typically happened only in cases of financial or scientific misconduct, Feeney says. Terminations are “really pretty rare, because there’s so many checks before a grant is issued,” she adds. “These sort of mass suspensions and terminations that are happening—no one has experience with this.”
That means it is important to be patient with everyone involved in the process, Feeney says. This is new terrain for investigators, research administrators, lawyers and federal employees. And after repeated layoffs and buyouts, “a lot of the agencies don’t have as many people there working on [appeals], either,” Miller says.
