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Nearly two weeks after a federal judge ruled the Trump administration’s freeze on Harvard’s federal funding was unconstitutional, Harvard’s researchers are still waiting to get their money back.
In the days after U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ order, researchers began receiving notices of reinstatement. But well after the ruling, scientists at Harvard said their grants had yet to be processed.
On Tuesday evening, a spokesperson for Harvard referred to a statement from last week that reinstatement notices have been received for many previously terminated grants, but no payments had yet been made on the awards. The University often expects a wait time of several days after it requests to draw down funds.
Harvard Medical School professor Molly F. Franke, whose four National Institutes of Health grants facilitate drug-resistant tuberculosis research in three countries and HIV intervention research in Peru, had her grants terminated in May.
She was notified late Friday night that the terminations on all four of her grants — collectively worth more than $1 million — were reversed. But no money on her grants has been restored.
“When the grants were terminated, we had to come up with a plan to sunset projects and really maintain only essential activities,” Franke said. “And we’ve been advised to stick with that plan until further notice.”
Harvard School of Public Health professor Walter C. Willett helps run the Nurses Health Studies I and II, a nearly 50-year-long project studying chronic disease risk factors in nearly 300,000 participants, which has received more than $200 million from the NIH since its inception. Willett said he received notices of grant reinstatement last week but still has not received any money.
Willett said the study has been running on a “skeleton staff” since the cuts. Researchers initially feared they would have to destroy their samples — which cost $300,000 a year to chill using liquid nitrogen — but they have secured interim funding to keep the specimens frozen.
“We’re supposed to keep working, but there’s no money to support that,” Willett said. “Our project staff at NIH say, according to them, nothing’s been terminated — so we’re having to send in progress reports, financial reports, as though there’s actually real money flowing, but it's not.”
The NIH has been awarding grants to some Harvard researchers since at least July after an earlier court order reversed a separate round of grant cuts. But the funds did not reach Harvard labs, because federal employees did not allow them to flow through a payment system that is controlled by Department of Government Efficiency officials.
The funding freeze has hit the life sciences, which pull in hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government each year, especially hard.
HMS lost grants and contracts worth $230 million as a result of the Trump administration’s funding cuts, according to the school’s website. At HSPH, research funding was reduced from $200 million to $100 million for the 2025 fiscal year — essentially cutting the school’s federally funded research portfolio in half. To replace lost federal dollars, HSPH has drawn on its own reserves, debt and loans taken out from the University, and bridge funding out of a $250 million pool allocated by Harvard’s central administration.
Harvard School of Public Health Professor Sarah M. Fortune, who is chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at HSPH, says she has been advising faculty in her department to assume that money from federal grants is not coming back.
“The government does not show us any intent of honoring financial commitments that they made previously,” Fortune said.
Despite the promise of restored funding, researchers say it may be hard to rebuild trust in their projects as long as funding sources remain unstable.
Fortune said that the funding freeze had jeopardized Harvard’s ability to attract and retain post-doctoral and graduate talent, since postdoc and grad student salaries are largely funded by federal grants.
“When those people disappear, even if the money comes back, that expertise does not come back, and it is extremely damaging, and it will take us years to recover,” Fortune said.
HMS otolaryngology professor Jeffrey R. Holt is a principal investigator at a Boston Children’s Hospital lab that conducts research on the genetics of hearing loss and develops related treatments. He estimates that 75 percent of the lab’s funding comes from the NIH, with the remaining coming from philanthropy and private foundations.
At least in the short term, Holt said, his lab’s work will continue — but the postdoctoral research program that fed into his lab is slated to be cut next year because of funding losses. The continued unpredictability of access to federal funds, he said, was making researchers “uneasy.”
“We’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and we’re really at the cusp of making a big difference in people’s lives,” Holt said. “It’s like the rug is being pulled out from under us.”
“It’s just gut wrenching,” he added.
–Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at abigail.gerstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.
—Staff writer Ella F. Niederhelman can be reached at ella.niederhelman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @eniederhelman.
