President Donald Trump’s wave of executive orders targeting funding for education sent shockwaves through Harvard this week, briefly jeopardizing thousands of research jobs and more than 10 percent of the University’s operating revenue.

Though the most sweeping order — a temporary freeze on all federal funding to universities — was blocked by a judge and later rescinded by the Trump administration, future funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation remains temporarily frozen and stop work orders for diversity-related projects are still in effect.

The saga exposed Harvard’s deep reliance on federal support and clarified the impact of proposed funding cuts that have been looming over the University for more than a year.

In fiscal year 2024, the University received $686 million from federal agencies, accounting for two-thirds of its total sponsored research expenditures and 11 percent of the University’s operating revenue.

“We could not carry out our mission the way we do now without substantial federal research support, nor could we provide the benefits to the nation that we do now without that support,” Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said in a December interview with The Crimson.

Despite the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the memo announcing the freeze, many of the new executive orders that restrict federal funding are still enforceable, as are the department-level stop work orders.

Neal F. Lane, who served as the Director of the National Science Foundation under President Bill Clinton, said the freeze was unprecedented and will be difficult to reverse.

“The freeze was sort of in part a surprise because it was such a blunt instrument that it had really never been used before, not in that way,” Lane said. “Once you start something like that, it’s very hard to unwind it immediately. So a lot of damage has already been done.”

‘If the Money Doesn’t Come’

Harvard’s research machine runs on federal dollars, and even a partial cut to funding from the NIH or NSF would be immediately felt by Harvard’s scientists.

Most of the $684 million in funding goes to four of Harvard’s nine faculties – Harvard Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. These four faculties, in addition to the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, make up 88 percent of sponsored expenditures.

The School of Public Health is the most reliant on sponsored support, which makes up 59 percent of its operating budget. Sponsored support, which includes both government funding and private grants, also makes up 35 percent and 37 percent of the HMS and SEAS operating budgets, respectively.

Most of Harvard’s federal research funding comes from the Department of Health and Human Services, which gave Harvard $520 million in fiscal year 2024. The NIH alone accounted for $488 million, making it the University’s most important funding source.

Many of the NIH’s institutes, including the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, each fund dozens of Harvard research centers.

Some of the largest Harvard-affiliated recipients of NIH funding include the Harvard University Center for AIDS Research, the M.D.-Ph.D. physician-scientist program jointly hosted by Harvard and MIT, and a large clinical research center focused on diagnosing rare conditions.

Future NIH funding is still paused, as are grants awarded by the NSF, which awarded Harvard researchers $56 million last year.

Over a third of sponsored expenditures go toward salaries, and the loss of federal funding could endanger entire research labs. More than 6,200 Harvard employees, including 1,673 faculty members, relied on sponsored expenditures for at least part of their pay in fiscal year 2024.

“The researchers are paying salaries for their students, postdocs, they’re buying reagents, they’re buying equipment, they’re turning on the lights in the laboratories,” Lane said. “If the money doesn’t come, then it’s all on the University’s back, and they have no choice but to find the money or shut down the activity.”

Finding the money, despite the size of Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, will be a challenge should the freezes become permanent. The majority of the endowment has already been spoken for, earmarked for specific programs, departments and professorships.

Only 20 percent of Harvard’s endowment is not set aside for a specific purpose. Pierre Azoulay, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said that while Harvard could temporarily sustain research programs without federal support in the short term.

“Harvard has the wherewithal to kind of float its investigators,” Azoulay said. “Use a little bit of endowment money to make sure that we don’t fire people, we don’t stop projects.”

But that strategy, which would gradually shrink University investments, would also trade off with Harvard’s long-term financial health.

A University spokesperson declined to comment on whether Harvard would use endowment money as a substitute for federal grant funding.

Financial Aid

While the Department of Education carved out an exception for Pell Grants and federal student loans in the rescinded Wednesday freeze, Federal Work Study Program funds were not exempted and could affect graduate student financial aid if the freeze is reinstated.

In his message addressing the order, Garber wrote directly to students who receive federal funding to attend the University.

“If you are a student, you should continue to register for and attend classes unimpeded,” Garber wrote on Wednesday.

Garber’s emergency message highlighted the stakes of future executive orders that are not accompanied by specific financial aid carve-outs.

“It’s a little bit dicier there because you’re dealing with a lot of relatively young, inexperienced people, 18-, 19-year-olds, even those who are still in high school, thinking about applying for financial aid, and they read the headlines and they may be a little bit more dissuaded,” said Donald E. Heller, former University of San Francisco provost.

Harvard College's admissions and financial aid office is located at 86 Brattle St. By Kathryn S. Kuhar

At least at Harvard College, federal funding plays a relatively small role in financial aid.

The University’s need-based grant program covers most financial aid, with 80.8 percent of undergraduate assistance coming from Harvard grants. Pell Grants and federal loans make up less than a fifth of the aid awarded to undergraduates.

Graduate and professional students depend slightly more on federal aid. At Harvard Law School and HMS, where Harvard grant funding is less common, federal loans make up a significant portion of financial aid packages — 23.7 percent and 26.2 percent, respectively.

Harvard’s financial aid model, which blends institutional grants and federal assistance, remains threatened by future orders, including a policy proposal by House Republicans that would require graduate students to pay taxes on their scholarships and fellowships.

Financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz said both scholarship taxes and a proposed end to student loan forgiveness to graduate students pursuing public service careers would hurt Harvard’s graduate programs.

At HMS, 67.8 percent of aid is grant-based, but loans still account for 32.2 percent, meaning medical students pursuing public service careers — who often graduate with significant debt — are especially vulnerable to an end to student loan forgiveness.

‘Illegal DEI’

Trump’s attempted funding freeze is only an escalation of his directive to eradicate federally funded diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives — an order that is still in place and could hurt any number of Harvard initiatives depending on how DEI is defined.

The order, signed on Jan. 21, requires Harvard and other federally funded educational institutions to remove any “illegal DEI” policies and race or gender-based diversity programs. It also asks federal agencies to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”

Research policy experts say it is unclear what Trump’s directive means.

Anna M. Quider, Director of the Quider Group — a STEM research development consulting firm — said that because DEI has yet to be explicitly defined by the federal government, its relatively amorphous designation is sowing greater confusion amongst researchers.

“Diversity, equity, inclusion and access is about ensuring that all people have the opportunity to participate in and lend their talents to and thrive in the American research enterprise,” Quider said. “So of course, race and ethnicity and gender are ways that we can measure the diversity of individual characteristics of the researchers and participants in the research enterprise.”

“What about programs for low income students of all races and genders and geographies?” Quider added. “What about programs for first generation college students, which are also underrepresented in the research enterprise?”

NSF and NIH grants are required to have a public impact statement explaining how the proposal will contribute to “desired societal outcomes,” listing inclusion as an example. Many Harvard-associated research proposals mention diversity, equity, inclusion or similar language in their statements.

“Some of them will have said it’s going to enable underrepresented minorities or low income first generation college students to benefit them in some way,” Kantrowitz said. “You don’t know whether the Trump administration is going to say, ‘Oh, these are DEI. We shouldn’t fund them.’”

With tens of thousands of grant proposals, Lane said it would be particularly difficult for the Trump administration to even enforce these policies.

“You would have to go out somehow into the tens of thousands of budget lines in different agencies and try to find those you think might have these kinds of activities that the president doesn’t like,” Lane said.

Regardless of the funding freeze’s legal merit or implementation, Lane said the “damage has been done.”

“You don’t want to be constantly clutching at pearls and claiming the sky is falling down. It gets old,” Azoulay said. “But maybe this time, the sky is falling down.”

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.