Since April 2025, University of Iowa researchers have received emails stating their funding had been cut, while others are navigating a loss of funding for the first time this academic year. Though researchers can appeal the decision, such funding fluctuations are resulting in ongoing uncertainty for future projects. 

In fiscal year 2025, UI’s external funding totaled around $705 million, a drop from $811 million during fiscal 2024, tied to federal policy changes affecting research funding, according to data provided by the university. 

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David Schwebel, vice president of research at the UI, said it is hard to pinpoint the cause of the decrease with many factors playing into funding.

“What causes it?” Schwebel said. “Federal government changes. Industry changes. The faculty that are here, the faculty that retire. There’s all sorts of factors that are going into the ups and downs.”

However, many researchers have pointed to the Trump administration as the cause of funding cuts. 

Over the last year, President Donald Trump has released several executive orders aimed at federal research funding, prompting concern among universities and scientists nationwide. The orders direct political appointees to oversee grant approvals and impose stricter scrutiny on research programs.

Matthew Brown, associate English professor at the UI, had funding cut for he developed and was quick to call out Trump and his “illegal” executive orders.

“Legislators and authoritarians are behaving like whiny narcissists. They take it personally when any course is not about their narrow world,” Brown wrote in an email to The Daily Iowan. “They stand in the way of student learning and student success.”

Brown won a three -year grant in 2022 through a blind review process involving multiple layers of vetting. The grant supported a new course showing students “the power of books in societies across the globe, through a study of publication, artistry, and craft.”

Brown said he lost funding to furnish undergraduate lab space and support their teaching assistant. 

When looking at the total research budget, Schwebel said the cuts make up less than 5 percent of UI funding.

“They were employees from the university that were working on this project, really devastating for the science they were doing,” Schwebel said. “For the big scheme of things, there’s still so much happening.”

Another reason the UI has seen a decline over the last five years is due to the large amount of money universities got during COVID-19, Schwebel said, with the UI receiving a record external funding of $867 million in 2022.

Once grants were cut, Schwebel said researchers would receive an email from the federal government telling them they had to stop work immediately.

The Office of Research’s legal team talks to researchers whose projects are cut. Schwebel said some of the cases are won nationally, among universities, or by reminding the government that a contract still has to be fulfilled.

Christopher Merrill worked as director of the International Writing Program at the UI from 2000 until December 2025. In February 2025, the program had nearly $1 million in grants terminated under the Trump administration and lost three full-time positions.

Beginning in 1967, U.S. embassies and consultants around the world were invited to nominate writers who had published at least one book that had achieved some level of national acclaim and were interested in a three-month residency at the UI, Merril said.

Merrill said he knew there was a problem when their program officer called every day with new requests from the State Department.

“They would ask, could we provide language to describe how our program made America safer, stronger, and more prosperous,” Merrill said. “We spent a lot of time trying to come up with that kind of language. We would say things, for example, 90 percent of the funds that we were granted by the federal government were then spent either in Iowa or in the United States.”

Due to cuts, Merrill said the program lost 20 writers for their fall 2025 residency. Typically, the program would have around 40 writers; the program has 23, Merrill said.

Merrill said this is part of the job, something he has come to expect in federally funded programs.

“I will say that for the 25 years that I directed the program, I was basically full of anxiety 24/7,” Merrill said.

Going forward, Merrill does not expect research funding to increase, pointing to the president’s budget suggestions to Congress, which recommend a $5 billion reduction for the National Institute of Health, as a sign.

“I don’t see funding increasing in any way,” Merrill said. “The onus will be on everyone to try to do more private fundraising.”