Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
How to ensure that funding decisions are expert-led and democratic.
Republished with permission from the fall 2026 issue of Academe.
© 2026 American Association of University Professors.
The political assault on nearly all aspects of the US research funding infrastructure since the start of the second Trump administration has had the higher education community reeling. Over the past year and a half, we have witnessed censorship of researchers and an ideological takeover of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal funders, culminating most recently with the proposed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) revised rule tightening political control of all federal grants and contracts. Meanwhile, mass layoffs and an increasingly hostile work environment have driven a significant depletion of the federal workforce. Social sciences, public health, and climate science may be among the most harmed areas so far, but the dire situation extends to all domains of academic research.
Historical parallels to autocratic regimes remind us of the consequences of politicizing science in service of partisan interests. Germany, once the dominant global force in medicine, physics, philosophy, and other fields, experienced unprecedented brain drain in the 1930s as scholars were expelled, murdered, or fled a Nazi regime bent on reshaping the institutions of science for its ideological interests. More recently, Victor Orbán’s regime attacked the foundations of intellectual freedom in Hungarian universities, leading thousands of scientists, artists, and intellectuals to emigrate to other countries with more promising prospects.
The United States now faces a similar threat of brain drain resulting from the diminution of academic freedom through policies that curtail federal funding for politically disfavored research and funnel dollars to insiders instead. The fundamental structure for evaluating merit and enacting policies is thoroughly broken, and the extent of the damage cannot be easily repaired. We cannot afford to wait for further destruction to begin mapping the future. In academia, frameworks of shared governance have provided one avenue for navigating crises at the university level and asserting our collective power as academic workers. In these frameworks, the responsibilities for governing institutions of higher learning are shared among faculty members, administrators, and trustees. We propose reimagining the principles of shared governance at the federal level as a way of formally establishing the central role of the academic community in ensuring that public investments in research serve the public good.
The urgency of the present crisis requires collective action even from those who normally consider their scholarly pursuits to be apolitical. Drawing examples from the NIH and the AAUP, in what follows we discuss opportunities to organize in defense of academic research funding.
The current administration’s reshaping of federal processes—grant terminations, censorship of research content, reduced numbers of new grants, and heightened political control—is already fracturing the academic enterprise. Researchers from the University of Arizona’s scientist opinion panel survey have found extensive evidence of self-censorship and signs that new policies have diminished workforce morale. Further, new policies restricting collaborations with foreign scientists may have a “chilling effect” on international partnerships, thereby isolating American researchers. Competition for federal funding was fierce even before 2025; the recent funding cuts and delays have eroded safety nets to the point where researchers are operating at performance-degrading stress levels. The higher education research infrastructure will require significant reconstruction after Trump leaves office.
It is tempting to hope that private funding could replace the federal government’s role, but history suggests otherwise. Since World War II, the federal government has dominated the funding of scientific research, allowing science to branch out in directions not previously supported by private philanthropy. For one, basic science, an area typically neglected by private funders, received up to 70 percent of its funding from the federal government at its peak in the 1970s. Even as pharmaceutical research and development spending expanded since then, work on stigmatized conditions like HIV and substance use disorders continued to rely on support from federal bodies, as did early-stage, fundamental research on conditions with small markets—rare diseases, for example.
What might we expect from a return to a pre–World War II funding landscape, when priorities were set by the preferences of individual donors rather than broader public impact? Private funding—whether from philanthropy or corporate research and development—follows idiosyncratic priorities, often focusing on subjects of personal relevance to the funders (such as specific diseases), areas expected to increase shareholder profits, or topics where corporations have direct expertise (for example, AI). These directions neglect wide areas of research and discourage follow-up studies that sometimes yield transformative findings. Basic research, which seeks to create new knowledge without focusing on immediate practical applications, is likely to be a main casualty in a shift toward reduced federal funding. Considered as a whole, private funding cannot cover the breadth of research directions currently driven by federal support.
Equity presents another compelling consideration. Compare, for example, research on cystic fibrosis, which largely affects white Americans, and sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects Black Americans. Historically, sickle cell has received less attention than cystic fibrosis from federal and private funding sources, despite having higher overall disease prevalence in the United States. Private funding is far more unequal, reflecting the advocacy and fundraising capital of disease populations. A shift toward increased private funding may exacerbate existing health disparities.
Beyond the qualitative case, the math is not favorable. Take the NIH, which had an annual budget of $48.86 billion in fiscal year 2024. Assuming a 5 percent annual payout rate, the standard minimum for private foundations, the private endowment needed to match federal funding would be close to a trillion dollars. Even replacing only half of the federal presence would require an endowment of around $489 billion, equivalent to more than five Gates Foundations. Moreover, we would need to reinvent the review and grant funding infrastructure, all of which would require prohibitive amounts of time, resources, and coordination. Finally, a shift toward greater private funding would also risk further increasing the financialization of higher education institutions and add to the pressure to prioritize revenue-generating fields.
How can we stabilize public funding for research while strengthening it against future attacks? Our proposal is to foreground a pluralistic democratic politics based on the same principles of shared governance that allow academics to ensure that their priorities are reflected in institutional decision-making. Key decisions about policy directions and the distribution of resources at the federal level must be grounded in substantive, representative involvement by academic experts with training in the relevant fields. In addition to returning to the long-standing norms of expert-led decision-making, we must permanently enshrine the indispensable role of the academic community in the procedures of federal grants administration. In exchange, experts who participate in peer review, scientific advisory bodies, or grants administration must understand their obligation to make federal funding for academic pursuits accountable to the public interest.
Until 2025, federal funding for academic research, from the natural and social sciences to the arts and the humanities, shared a common administrative approach. Funding agencies primarily disbursed grant awards to individual investigators in academia based on how peer reviewers assessed the merit of their proposed studies and their fit with the mission of the funding agency. Career civil servants, trained in the disciplines their agencies supported, developed grant portfolios and managed the peer review system, using their bird’s-eye view of the discipline to guide research in new and promising directions. While experts have critiqued some of the NIH peer review system’s flaws, such as its tendency to favor more senior scholars and to balk at high-risk research, the system’s strengths lie in its reliance upon expert judgment. The Trump administration rejects this vision of governance and has instead instituted a system where political appointees prioritize the presidential agenda.
Rather than merely calling for the restoration of the old system, academics should focus on building collective power to advocate for making research funding resilient and shielding it from future political attacks. An analogy is instructive: If the country were run like a university, Congress would play an investment and oversight role much like a governing board, while civil servants working in federal agencies would function similarly to university administrators who pay attention to the whole portfolio while ensuring that agencies remain compliant with any relevant laws and policies. Academics would have necessary space to assert their role in determining how funding would sustain high-quality scholarship with intellectual integrity, all the while maintaining a vision of the public good the disciplines serve.
Academics need to be actively engaged to make such a pluralistic governance structure a reality. This engagement begins with learning how to organize within higher education—a necessary complement to active participation in the political process. Organizations like the AAUP have fought hard for academic workers to have a voice in university decision-making. Achieving a permanent place for faculty participation at the level of federal research funding will require concerted action to combat democratic backsliding in federal agencies and to preserve a formal role for experts in peer review and advisory bodies.
Collective responses to recent political attacks on academic freedom and expert-led policymaking have shown the power of community organizing. Rank-and-file civil servants and academic workers have stood up to confront top-down political attacks on federal funding in ways that have strengthened their collective power. Below we highlight a few examples.
The onslaught of recent political attacks has caught many off guard. When an attack is viewed in isolation, it is easy to dismiss it or fail to recognize its seriousness. However, these attacks are part of a coordinated effort to dismantle academic institutions and to create the legal and governance framework for partisan actors to bring those who remain to heel. To those who have yet to get involved in the fight to defend academic institutions: Do not abdicate your responsibility; join with others and take action before it is too late.
The best way to get involved is to join an organization like the AAUP that is already effectively responding to political attacks. Being organized helps you remain informed and determine how best to respond based on the type of attack you face and your shared capacity to react. The three examples below illustrate how groups have come together in different ways to defend institutions from political attacks. In doing so, they have built the power needed to restructure academic involvement in federal funding of institutions.
Our first example comes from inside the NIH, where the political attack initially came in the form of Department of Government Efficiency “reforms” aimed at shrinking and controlling the federal workforce. These attacks were met by an organically formed, grassroots group of NIH workers. What came to be known as the Bethesda Declaration movement started with a public letter of dissent written by a group of rank-and-file civil servants about harmful policies they observed inside the NIH, including grant terminations, firings, political overreach, and other disruptive actions. This group (including two of the authors of this article, Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou and Vani Pariyadath) was the first among various federal agencies to blow the whistle, in June 2025. The issuance of the Bethesda Declaration was a galvanizing event that brought concerned staff members together, and the group has steadily expanded its activism since then. The group recognized that NIH leadership and Congress could not be counted on to save the integrity of the institution. After extensive discussions about risks, partnerships, and strategies, the group steadily learned how to build strength in numbers and develop alliances with academic, media, and legislative partners.
The Bethesda Declaration inspired other civil servant groups to speak out, and even today, the movement continues to raise awareness of the plight of the NIH and the US academic research enterprise. The lessons learned in organizing the Bethesda Declaration can be a starting point for future organizing. The signers represent diverse roles, disciplines, experience levels, and employment statuses; as a result, the process of organizing resembles a democratic governance model. The community also provides a critical forum to better understand and collectively respond to the current political dynamics, including the prominent antiscience narrative and disinformation campaigns against the federal workforce, academia, and vulnerable groups, such as transgender and immigrant communities.
In the second example, the political attack took the form of the OMB’s proposal to make legally binding changes that would severely limit the ability of academics to participate meaningfully in funding decisions at the federal level. It would allow presidential priorities to override peer review judgments, thus marginalizing the role academic expertise plays in the distribution of federal funds to support research.
In contrast to the muted response to some other administrative actions, the OMB proposal was met with a huge backlash from close to half a million responders. (For comparison, the typical federal rule change receives fewer than six comments.) Preliminary analyses in July 2026 of the roughly fifty thousand comments then viewable at regulations.gov indicated that 90 percent of individual responses and close to 80 percent of organizational responses to the proposed rule change were negative. The scale of this reaction likely reflects galvanizing and coordinated efforts from professional associations, and it suggests a tipping point in the academic community’s willingness to speak up. Moreover, this comment process shows that academics are not alone in the fight against political interference: Universities and professional societies finally stood up on their behalf after a long silence. The backlash demonstrates that the assault on the US research infrastructure is an issue that resonates with many academic workers, and that these workers and their professional associations are willing to organize to resist political attacks. We suggest that these groups make such organizing a permanent feature of their political strategies to ensure that a pluralistic governance model grounded in expertise can be permanently established through legislation when a more democratically inclined Congress is restored.
In our third and final example, the political attack took the form of a deal. In October 2025, the Trump administration asked nine high-profile universities to sign the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” an agreement that offered select institutions preferential access to federal grants, contracts, and research funding in exchange for those institutions’ limiting academic freedom and free speech in ways that “closely aligned with conservative priorities.” The compact also required universities to submit to oversight by the Department of Justice that would have extended far beyond what is required by existing federal law. Had it succeeded, the compact would have turned the US academic funding infrastructure into a system of political patronage within which political appointees would determine university funding based on compliance with partisan directives. For institutions to agree to tying funding to political ideology rather than expert judgment would constitute a violation of shared governance and academic freedom in the pursuit of expert knowledge.
The response at the University of Virginia demonstrates one way this attack was defeated. Soon after receiving the offer, UVA Interim President Paul Mahoney established a hand-picked working group that operated outside of the system of shared governance. When addressing the UVA faculty senate, Mahoney said he felt honored that UVA was among the initial nine institutions selected by the Trump administration. Widespread consternation among faculty, staff, students, and members of the broader Charlottesville community quickly turned into action. Within two weeks, the UVA AAUP chapter organized a diverse coalition that then hosted a “No Compact Rally” on the university’s historic Lawn. With more than one thousand people in attendance, the rally was reported in local, state, and national news. It made such a forceful and decisive statement to the university’s administration that within hours of the rally Mahoney announced that UVA would not sign the compact. UVA was the fourth university to reject the compact and the first public university to do so.
The coalition at UVA effectively unified faculty, students, staff, alumni, and members of the broader Charlottesville community under a single demand: Reject the compact. The rally defeated the compact because its numbers made it untenable for the university’s administration to accept the deal. When UVA’s leadership attempted to exclude the academic community from deliberation over the compact, the academic community organized in protest to demand a voice in decision-making. Across the country, campus rallies illustrate a principle that organizers have understood for a long time: More people means more power. When people attended the No Compact Rally, they joined a majority, and collectively they won.
The Trump administration’s attacks on academia are meant to overwhelm us and make us feel powerless. We are not powerless. The four of us have seen a sense of despair among colleagues turn into camaraderie, clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose. As organizer Mariame Kaba has famously said, “Hope is a discipline.” We find it when we come together and work to defend and strengthen our communities and workplaces. We have chosen to organize, and we have hope for the future because we have seen the power we hold when we unite in a common cause and work toward a shared vision for higher education and academic research more broadly.
Our capacity to defend and transform the research ecosystem depends on more people joining the movement. While some colleagues would prefer to focus on their research and stay out of politics, we must help them see that their ability to continue pursuing their research depends on their getting involved in the fight now. We cannot wait out the federal government’s attacks and assume that higher education will return to business as usual in two or three years, because our institutions no longer exist as we once knew them. As academics, we have a responsibility to protect our institutions, now and into the future.
We can start by asserting our central role in science, humanities, and arts institutions for the sake of both our academic communities and the public good. As we advocate for the inclusion of broader publics in the democratic process, we must also recognize that we are a public of our own and are beholden to the welfare of our fellow citizens. We can then use our expertise and positions to expand our vision of shared governance at our own institutions and on the national stage. Everyone can take several actions immediately:
Stand with the troublemakers. When asked by Science’s editor in chief what scientists can do at this moment, historian Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, advised, “There have to be some troublemakers. There have to be some [scientists] who are publicly fierce and risk taking, changing the terms of the conversation. . . . In return [the rest] have to give them the quiet love and support, and the solidarity.” He added, “Please, everybody do something.”
Engage in honest conversations. Becoming truly informed about the plight of higher education and academic research will require going beyond information intake. It will require candid and fact-based conversations about our values and cultural norms across disciplines, including the role of expertise in a civil society and the current reality of censorship, antiscience sentiment, disinformation campaigns, and antidemocratic backlash. These conversations may be hard, but they help clarify why academics must have a voice in federal research-funding decisions.
Get involved as a matter of self-defense. Our conversations need to be paired with actions, including on-the-ground organizing work. Academics—college and university faculty, professional societies, and all workers in the higher education sector—must assume a more active role in political processes. We must explain and justify our roles and our contributions to society and advocate for laws, policies, and rules that advance and preserve faculty expertise as a basic principle in federal funding. Identify your fight and define the key goals together: restoring academic freedom, ensuring methodological rigor, and preserving democratic accountability and a system of checks and balances. People need to find their own “compact fight” and commit to winning it.
Contribute to the planning network for a new governance model. Workers across academia can and should join this planning work. This process is just beginning, and each of us can make an important contribution here at the outset.
Join with others on your campus and nationally. At the AAUP, our strength lies in our numbers. When you join or collaborate with the AAUP, you are joining an organization whose collective power far exceeds that of any individual.
The assault won’t stop just because we won one fight. The Department of Education has already announced a second compact—Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards”—in another attempt to exert political control over the basic functions of higher education, and the Trump administration continues to coerce institutions (such as Yale University) into negotiating over principles of shared governance and academic freedom that we consider nonnegotiable. We must stay organized in defense of academic freedom and work toward a future where we shape knowledge generation as a common good.
Wen-Ying Sylvia Chou is a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and a cofounder of Mosaic Research Frameworks. She resigned as program director at the National Cancer Institute in January 2026 following a fifteen-year tenure. Vani Pariyadath is executive director of the International Brain Laboratory and a cofounder of Mosaic Research Frameworks. She resigned from her position as chief of the Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Branch at the National Institute of Drug Abuse in June 2025. Natalie Aviles, associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, studies US federal science governance. Ian Mullins is associate professor of sociology at UVA and president of the UVA AAUP chapter.
© 2026 American Association of University Professors.