University of Vermont researchers are starting to get notice of grant terminations, changes and funding pauses — fallout from President Donald Trump’s cutbacks that take aim at federal funding for institutions of higher education.
About a dozen grants have been terminated recently, according to Kirk Dombrowski, UVM’s vice president for research and economic development. His office sent a message to research faculty on Thursday asking them to forward any notices of cutbacks they’re receiving.
The notices have been arriving in a variety of ways: informal emails, agency memos and grant amendments. Dombrowski said he’s been holding large community meetings to keep faculty and staff updated on developments as they happen.
“We think we’re just seeing the start of this,” he said on Friday.
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The impact is largely related to the cancellation of grants at other institutions where researchers were partnering with UVM, Dombrowski said. The school has about 1,000 active grants, and its faculty and staff are the leaders, or primary investigators, on about 70 percent of them. On the other 30 percent, he said, they are working on grants made to other schools and are known as “subs.”
One of those partnering institutions is Columbia University, which learned on March 7 that it is slated to lose $400 million in federal grants and contracts. The Trump administration said it’s pulling the funding because of Columbia’s actions during on-campus protests last year over the war in Gaza.
With the dozen grants that have been terminated so far, most were for projects on which UVM researchers were subs.
“We’re seeing the fallout from Columbia and Maine,” Dombrowski said. “When the Department of Education and the federal government cancels the grants to Columbia, Columbia cancels our sub awards.”
Dombrowski declined to say which programs had been affected as not everyone involved had been informed yet. Most of the terminations related to the Maine project were at UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the ones related to Columbia were National Institutes of Health grants that hit UVM’s Larner College of Medicine.
Dombrowski, who was hired in 2020 to increase federal research funding at UVM, said he’s spending most of his time these days assessing where the school might be vulnerable to cuts. UVM had been expecting to receive more than $260 million in research funding this year.
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He said his office is examining UVM’s grants, using keywords and title searches, to find language that might prompt action from the Trump administration — such as projects aimed at gender, race and equity. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights pledged to rescind federal funding for race-based programming and spending at colleges and universities.
“We want to know how big our risk exposure is,” Dombrowski said. While UVM does have work underway in environmental research and diversity programs, he added, much of it is funded from internal sources, not federal grants.
“We don’t think our risk exposure is enormous,” Dombrowski said.