Trump issues ‘stop notices' to defund UK university research projects
Days after taking office on January 20, Trump signed a flurry of executive orders that froze or cancelled billions of dollars in US research grants. Since then he has proposed slashing the annual $47 billion budget of the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest funder of biomedical research, by 40 per cent.
Nature, a leading journal, has accused his administration of an ideologically driven 'assault on science' marked by 'Orwellian restrictions' on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and the US National Academies has warned that the nation's scientific enterprise is being 'decimated'.
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At least nine UK-based teams have been issued stop notices — formal notifications that work should cease because funding is being halted — by US federal agencies as a result of the policy shifts. A further 14 have lost funding that had been flowing through American collaborators, according to freedom of information responses from the 24 Russell Group universities, obtained by Research Professional News.
Five universities — Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham and Southampton — confirmed that projects had been directly affected.
One cancelled initiative at the University of Liverpool focused on helping smallholders in Ethiopia raise chickens to improve child nutrition. The project had completed a successful pilot, but when USAid, the US government's overseas aid agency, was dismantled by the Trump administration in the spring, funding was cut.
At the University of Nottingham, a project tied to the US Institute of Peace was stopped after Trump ordered the institute's closure in February, which is now being challenged in the US courts. A separate Nottingham study on forced child begging in Niger was halted earlier in the year, though it has since resumed.
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The University of Southampton confirmed the suspension of a project under its WorldPop programme, which produces global population datasets used in health and development planning. The University of Leeds acknowledged receiving a stop notice but did not provide further details.
Durham University reported four grants being suspended or cancelled, including one tied to the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). That grant, which came through the US embassy, was withdrawn after the BAAS refused to strip DEI considerations from its funding decisions. The money would, in part, have helped introduce Durham schoolchildren to the history of the global black diaspora via talks, films and artworks.
Michael Collins, chair of the BAAS and a reader in American studies at King's College London, described the US embassy's demand for it to drop DEI criteria as an effort 'to bully and silence' academics whose views on history and politics differed from those of the president.
The restrictions were part of a strategy to 'provide a lever to allow the removal of funding and the frightening of people who are in certain kinds of positions doing certain kinds of work', Collins said.
Several institutions reported indirect terminations of research, where US-based collaborators informed their UK partners that joint projects were being defunded. Cambridge University said that ten of its projects had been affected and Queen Mary University of London identified four cancelled collaborations in health and medicine.
Although 13 of the 24 Russell Group universities said they had not received formal stop notices, others, including Oxford, UCL, and King's College London, did not respond to the freedom of information requests.
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