Federal funding cuts strip millions from Iowa’s research universities

Foreign-born “influence campaigns” aimed at spreading propaganda, disinformation, and manipulative content on social media are a growing threat to national security — with Meta from 2017 to 2021 removing nearly 50,000 pages or accounts tied to domestic and foreign influence operations.

University of Iowa Professor Brian Ekdale — alongside a team of investigators and research assistants — for years has been studying ways to identify groups most vulnerable to those operations, predict how users commonly engage with influence campaigns, and devise intervention strategies.

“Our findings will be vital to the U.S. Department of Defense’s integrated deterrence efforts by providing a guide for understanding current and future (strategic information operations) and mechanisms to mitigate foreign influence campaigns,” according to Ekdale’s research proposal that in 2023 received $1.7 million in federal research funding.

That research was supposed to continue through 2026. Until it wasn’t.

“On the morning of March 12, I received an email from my program officer that said, essentially, I have just learned that your grant will be terminated, so keep your eye out for that message,” Ekdale said. “And within a couple of hours, I received the official termination notification.”

Ekdale is among thousands of researchers nationally who’ve been dealt funding blows this year in the wake of the Trump administration’s widespread grant and contract cancellations for projects that no longer align or effectuate the government’s priorities.

Grant Watch — a project tracking National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grant terminations — recently reported the termination of more than 1,600 NSF grants totaling more than $1.5 billion in research investment.

The Association of American Universities this month reported the NIH has terminated 777 grants to U.S. institutions, representing $1.9 billion in lost funding. Nearly half those amputated grants were awarded to medical schools and hospitals — representing $1 billion of all lost funding.

While University of Iowa officials declined to share details of how many grants and contracts have been terminated across campus — noting the UI Office of the General Counsel’s involvement excludes the information from open records laws — U.S. Health and Human Services and NSF disclosures indicate millions of UI research funding has been lost.

Iowa State University — while it didn’t offer specifics either — told The Gazette it has received 54 termination, stop, or pause-work orders, 20 of which have been rescinded. And the University of Northern Iowa — which does less federally-funded research — said three grants have been terminated.

“On January 30, the Office of the Vice President for Research launched an effort to provide tailored guidance to principal investigators with questions regarding grants and proposals that were or could be impacted by changes in federal priorities and funding,” according to an ISU federal-funding update. “To date, the team has triaged and responded to more than 400 (investigator) inquiries.”

‘It's just awful’

Nationally, research topics most affected by the NIH grant terminations include HIV and AIDS, mental and behavioral health, cancer, and COVID — with many of the curtailed active clinical trials mentioning LGBTQ+ populations, racial or ethnic subpopulations, women, or low-income populations.

“I’m hugely concerned,” said Joseph Cullen — a UI professor of surgery and radiation oncology and senior author of a clinical research trial showing high-dose intravenous vitamin C paired with chemotherapy can double the overall survival rate of late-stage pancreatic cancer patients.

“It's so short sighted. It's just awful,” Cullen said during a recent panel discussion on cancer research for The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas in-depth week on Cancer in Iowa.

  Buy Photo

Serving on the National Cancer Institute-required committee that evaluates the scientific merit of investigator-initiated trials at the UI Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center, Cullen said NIH budgets for studies and trials — even without being reduced or curtailed — often are so small compared to the work demands, that they require philanthropic support too.

“It's just going to be devastating,” he said. “And you're not going to see the results in a year, but you're going to see it five years, 10 years down the road … I'm very adamant about this that it's just a huge mistake. It's a huge mistake.”

Among UI grants that have been terminated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — which encompasses the NIH — is a $1.6 million award to strengthen health care infection prevention and control and improve patient safety nationally.

Of that award total, just $293,950 had been spent — meaning a loss of $1.3 million.

Another $1.6 million NIH grant supporting UI research into “a novel approach for equitable characterization of gender and its use in exposing subgroup discrepancies in polygenic score associations” — used to predict disease risk based on genetic traits — also was terminated.

Because $1.3 million already had been spent, the loss is estimated at $302,343.

A list of NSF grants that have been terminated identifies seven at either Iowa State or UI — all including words referencing some minority group or population, like “diverse,” “underrepresented,” “indigenous,” “women,” and “Black and Latinx students.”

Affected grants include a $1.4 million award to Iowa State for its collaborative research as part of a “National Alliance for Inclusive and Diverse STEM Faculty,” along with a half-million award for an ISU project titled, “Social justice training in graduate engineering education through critical civic engagement.”

Terminated UI awards include one worth $538,026 for a project titled, “Fostering Black and Latinx student STEM efficacy, interests, and identity: A participatory study of STEM programming and practices at one community-based organization.”

Another terminated UI award for $207,685 was titled, “Journeys in World Politics, a mentoring workshop for junior women in international relations.”

And then there’s the historic 58-year-old UI International Writing Program that in February lost its nearly $1 million in grants from the U.S. Department of State because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities.”

“We are devastated by the abrupt end of this 58-year partnership and are working closely with the Office of General Counsel and the university’s grant accounting office to review the terminations, understand their full impact, and respond in the best interest of the organization,” International Writing Program Director Christopher Merrill said.

  Buy Photo

‘Not even looked at’

Beyond grant terminations, cancellations, and stop-work orders are new applications being denied or ignored by the funding agencies.

“A very nice nursing project here done at the University of Iowa was going to look at mental health throughout the state, specifically in rural communities,” UI professor Cullen said. “And in their abstract, the short summary of what they're doing, they use the word diversity. And it was refused to get even looked at. It would have been huge for the university. It would have been huge for the state of Iowa … and it was not even looked at because it had the word diversity.”

Cullen noted the project wasn’t investigating racial or ethnic diversity.

“It was more the diverse areas of mental health in a rural state,” he said.

The journal Nature last week reported NIH grant rejections nationally have more than doubled under Trump — with at least 2,500 applications for research funding denied so far this year.

Looking just at the National Institutes of Health — which accounts for the largest portion of UI federal research funding annually — UI and Iowa State awards are way down this budget year, with just one month left until its end June 30.

Where the NIH in fiscal 2024 issued 469 awards to 13 entities in Iowa worth nearly $218.2 million, in fiscal 2025 it has issued awards to just UI and Iowa State worth a combined $82.2 million.

That total includes 161 awards worth $77.2 million to the University of Iowa, compared to UI’s 402 NIH awards in 2024 worth $190.9 million — a figure that had been fairly consistent year-to-year, including in 2023 with $182.1 million in NIH awards, and 2022 with $182.7 million.

Iowa State in 2025 has received 14 NIH awards worth $5 million — compared to its 52 awards worth $18.5 million in 2024, its 61 awards worth $20 million in 2023, and its 57 awards worth $20.3 million in 2022, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Additionally, both the NIH and NSF in recent weeks and months have tried to cap indirect research expenses for things like facilities and administrative staff at 15 percent — potentially depriving researchers of funding to cover the “actual cost” of “safely and securely” continuing their work.

But a federal judge April 4 issued a final judgment on the NIH indirect cost cap — permanently blocking implementation of the 15 percent, pending appeal. A month later on May 15, another federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing the 15-percent cap at the Department of Energy; and the National Science Foundation on May 19 agreed to pause its 15-percent indirect cost cap through June 13 — when a federal judge is expected to impose a more permanent order.

‘Completely different funding environment’

When Ekdale in March learned his federal grant to study foreign influence operations on social media was being terminated, he wasn’t entirely surprised. The project had been funded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Research Initiative — established in 2008 to help the department, through university-based social science, better understand “the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.”

Ekdale had been hearing rumblings of its demise before the defense department in early March announced an end to all its social science funding — including the entire Minerva initiative — halting 91 studies tied to things like climate change, extremism, and disinformation, according to the journal Science.

“[DOD] does not do climate change crap,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X at the time, echoing the sentiment spelled out in a Pentagon press release touting $30 million in savings in just the first year of cuts.

Once Ekdale had the termination notice in his inbox, he reached out to UI grant support for more details about what he could and could not spend of the $1.7 million he’d been awarded. And the message, essentially, was don’t expect reimbursement for any more of your research expenses.

“There were the immediate issues of like, what do we literally do? We had some research being conducted in Kenya,” Ekdale said, highlighting issues with research assistants planning on the work. “Our primary concern was certainly the graduate students. We weren't going to leave them high and dry.”

The research study was the second of two Ekdale was pursuing on the topic — and the cuts left him and his fellow researchers in a lurch before effectuating their work. In hopes of continuing, Ekdale said his team is pursuing other funding options.

“We're certainly looking at private funding,” he said, adding, “I think there will certainly be changes for our group, because in the private funding environment, we're not going to find something of the size and scale of what our Minerva grant was. We're not going to find a $1.7 million two-year grant.”

He suggested the idea of breaking up the research into smaller components.

“But it's just a completely different funding environment than it was three, four months ago,” he said. “It creates a heightened uncertainty, not only professional uncertainty but research uncertainty. We think that the work we’re doing has heightened value to society, but we cannot do it without some amount of funding.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com