North Carolina could take a $3 billion hit to its economy if a White House request to slash National Institutes of Health funding ends up in the final federal budget.
In its discretionary budget proposal for next fiscal year, the Trump Administration recommended a 40% cut to the agency’s funding and consolidation of several of its centers.
The NIH is the largest public funder of medical research. It currently has a nearly $48 billion budget — money used to fund studies and treatments for infectious diseases, cancer, mental health, and various other illnesses and disabilities.
President Donald Trump wants to whittle down the agency’s 27 centers and institutes to five “focus areas” and reduce its funding to $27 billion for research. Some U.S. senators are pushing back on the proposal, and instead advocating for a slight increase to the current NIH budget. Congress is expected to resume budget talks next month.
The economic loss estimate for North Carolina comes from SCIMaP, an interdisciplinary research project. It includes a team of researchers from the Universities of Maryland, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Utah, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The project is made up of two main interactive maps: one focusing on NIH grant terminations and the other on potential losses stemming from the White House budget proposal. Both maps separate the data by state, county, and congressional districts.
The researchers estimate proposed cuts will negatively impact North Carolina's 2nd and 4th Congressional Districts the hardest. Both are represented by Democrats.
Rep. Deborah Ross (NC 2) represents Wake and part of Durham counties — a district that has already lost at least $12 million economically from grant terminations. The White House’s proposed budget could grow this number to more than 2,000 jobs and $537 million in potential loss.
The projected loss is twice as high for Rep. Valerie Foushee’s district, which is estimated to take a $1.2 billion economic hit and lose more than 5,000 jobs if the budget proposal goes through. NC 4 encompasses Durham, Orange, and a portion of Wake counties and has already lost at least $38 million economically from grant terminations.
The researchers also collected data on the types of institutions facing the most potential loss. In North Carolina, three of the top five are universities: Duke (projected $741 million economic loss), UNC-Chapel Hill ($606 million), and Wake Forest ($143 million).
"Relative to other states in the region and other southern states, we're seeing much greater losses in North Carolina," said SCIMaP Co-founder and UPenn researcher Alyssa Sinclair.
Sinclair recently spoke with WUNC higher education reporter Brianna Atkinson about the potential impact of the Trump-proposed cuts. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How would such a large cut of NIH research funds affect a university's operations?
"It could make a huge difference, because we already see that these research grants are super competitive. You know, many people apply. The best ideas are funded. But now, if we see a great reduction in the number of awards that can be given out or the dollar amounts associated with those awards, it's going to greatly reduce the amount of research that can be done.
Many schools that have a medical school with health researchers, part or all of their salaries are covered by these federal grants. So, those are staff and their livelihoods that are on the line. And that's not just the investigators, but all of the people who work with them or under them — staff members in their lab or graduate students who work on these grant-funded projects. All of those jobs would be directly impacted potentially by these grant cancellations and just loss of funding opportunities in the future."
What's the methodology behind the research that you all are doing? It comes from multiple different angles — potential indirect cost cuts, the proposed 40% cut, grant terminations. Where are y'all gathering this information from?
"We're doing a couple of special things to try to account for this downstream economic impact. First, we are multiplying those direct loss estimates by a multiplier of 2.56. This is coming from an economic report from a group called United for Medical Research, where they did an economic analysis and found that every dollar invested in local economies through the NIH actually produces about $2.56 in return.
So that's a huge multiplier. It's a great gain and it demonstrates that research is a good investment. It results in innovation, new products. It brings people into local areas, who move there specifically to work on that research. And then they live and rent in the area, they go out and support local businesses, things like that. And so overall, this infusion of research dollars from the government is really a good thing for local economies and local communities. But the flip side of that is that when we have losses, we would expect that to lead to multiplied harm to local communities as well. So we're using that estimate to try to track what the downstream impact might be to local areas.
And lastly, we're using some data from the U.S. Census on where people live and work to try to proportionally spread around those research dollars according to commuter flows. And this is really important. For example, if you look at the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, because as many of us who have lived in that area know, a lot of people migrate around. They might live in Orange County but work in Durham County and so on. And so it's important to think about where people live and work if you want to understand how the impact to one particular institution like Duke (University) might actually spread around to impact adjacent counties as well."
Could you tell me more about North Carolina specifically, what are the stakes?
"From NIH grants alone, with those cancellations that we're seeing, the downstream economic impact to North Carolina is estimated at about $89 million and about 382 jobs that would be lost as a result. But in addition to that immediate impact that we're already seeing with canceled grants, there would be an annual future loss that would take place if we lost this funding for research infrastructure with that other policy that's been proposed. So if that happened, we would see annual future losses in North Carolina of nearly $660 million and nearly 3000 jobs."
With these millions of dollars of possible losses, what are the stakes for higher education institutions? For professors, for students, for the institutions or universities themselves?
"These funding cuts are leading to a real crisis for higher education and also for science, particularly this idea of a training pipeline like our new generation of scientists growing up in America. We're seeing the loss of some undergraduate research opportunities that were funded by federal programs that supported, for example, students from underrepresented groups to go and get research experiences over the summer.
We're also seeing that there are fewer spots available in PhD programs. That's because PhD students don't pay tuition out of pocket. Rather, they get a tuition waiver and they are paid a stipend to live on. So, not only are they receiving training, but they are a really core part of this science ecosystem and universities currently are concerned that they won't be able to financially support these students for the five or more years that it takes to complete a PhD program.
So with the crisis happening right now, already this spring during the PhD admission cycle we saw a widespread disruption where many schools, including some in North Carolina like Duke, were reducing the number of PhD students they were able to admit, because they can't commit to supporting them over the next few years.
We're seeing a similar thing with postdoctoral researchers. There are postdoctoral fellowships that come from the government that have been canceled or revoked, fewer funding opportunities. Postdocs are often paid for out of research grants. So, if those big grants are being eliminated, then that results in a loss of opportunities there as well. And then finally, at the higher stage we're seeing that there are fewer opportunities for people to become a professor and start their own lab as a scientist. So again, in the spring period when these funding cuts were first being announced, we saw widespread hiring freezes at universities across the country.
Could you talk about some of the cuts that Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill are facing?
"UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke are reporting very high losses, both in terms of canceled grants already impacting them, as well as sort of projected future losses. UNC (Chapel Hill) currently has 24 grants that are canceled or frozen, totaling about $16.8 million. And those are raw values, not even the downstream economic impact to the local area. Next door at Duke, we also see 24 grants that are currently canceled or frozen, with over $9 million in funding there.
But it's not only Duke and UNC. Within that region, we see some grants canceled at RTI, nearly a million dollars. We see some local businesses like Equity Foods, which was doing some community nutrition programs, they've got funding that they've lost. And if you look at other parts of the state, you'll see impact too. Like there's a grant canceled at UNC Charlotte. There are impacts at Wake Forest University and UNC Greensboro."
Whenever grants are frozen for a scientist, what does that mean? How does that impact someone's research?
"When you take away funding unexpectedly when someone's in the middle of doing a research project, you're actually wasting taxpayer dollars that were already spent to do the first half of that research project. When you interrupt it, you finish the project when it's not done — when you don't have all your data and you can't make inferences. So now, you don't get to learn anything from all of the work and the money that you invested in that project before the funding was pulled.
In addition to that, people might be losing their jobs because of it. Many people like lab staff, sometimes graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, they're hired to work on a particular grant-funded project. If you suddenly cancel that partway through, there may not be any alternative funding source to cover their salaries. And so, it's really a waste of people and effort and all of the work that was put into a project leading up to that cancellation, where now it can't be completed and you no longer have the staff support that you would need. So even if it were overturned and restored later, sometimes it's really hard to pick up where you left off."
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