Baylor, MD Anderson among Houston research institutions that could lose millions under NIH grant policy<\/a><\/p>\nA spokesperson for the National Science Foundation, which distributed $7 billion in research funding in 2024, attributed the delay to the\u00a0government shutdown earlier this year that persisted for more than two months after Congress failed to reach a budget deal.<\/p>\n
“With full-year funding now in place, NSF expects award activity to proceed while continuing to support critical research through its rigorous, merit-based review process,” the\u00a0foundation said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The exact impact on research\u00a0in Texas is difficult to gauge.<\/p>\n
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Universities and research centers contacted for this story generally declined interview requests.\u00a0Some offered their own count of how much research funding they’d been approved for, saying the federal databases can be slow to update and might not capture the full range of grant spending.<\/p>\n
Others\u00a0offered statements acknowledging the funding decline, but said they are hopeful awards will pick up through the last three months of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Until the distribution of funds for the year is complete, we won\u2019t know where we stand,” Lori Williams, vice president of communications and community outreach at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in an email. “We are confident the numbers for the current year will go up.”<\/p>\n
But others are not so sure. Last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it was reducing the number of graduate students it would take on due to the delay.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There is a palpable concern within many Texas universities regarding the future of federal research dollars, which represent the majority of funding for academic research in this country.<\/p>\n
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In May, the Office of Management and Budget released a proposed rule that would overhaul how the money is distributed. The Association of American Universities said the change would\u00a0require political appointees to decide whether research grants represent \u201cGold Standard Science\u201d or promote \u201canti-American values,\u201d shifting decision making away from the independent boards that currently make those decisions.<\/p>\n
David Sholl, executive vice president for research of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice University, the only university to agree to an interview for this story, said the changes stood to “harm American competitiveness.”<\/p>\n
“We’re fortunate (in the United States) to be the number place in the world for technology development and science,” he said. “Congress appropriated a very health budget for the NSF and it\u2019s a great service to the nation when the NSF can actually spend that money.”<\/p>\n
Not all Texas universities are feeling the pinch.<\/p>\n
The University of Texas-Austin has received $207.3 million in NSF funding so far this year, almost triple what the school got last year, according to federal data.<\/p>\n
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The spike came almost entirely from two research grants from NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure,\u00a0for the construction of of the largest supercomputer for academic research in the country, a project first announced in 2024.<\/p>\n
Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has identified supercomputing \u2014 along with artificial intelligence, biotechnology and other fields with clear commercial applications \u2014 as priorities for federal research spending.<\/p>\n
That is likely to mean less money for scientists in fields like mathematics and physics, so-called pure sciences, experts say.<\/p>\n
“The impacts are challenging to quantify because its hard to say what would have happened with a new discovery or technological innovation,” said Sara Partridge, associate director for higher education policy at the liberal think tank\u00a0Center for American Progress.\u00a0“We may never know the full scale, but in some fields it could set us back years and not decades.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A research fellow\u00a0works in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, Tuesday, Jan 21, 2025, in Bethesda,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-362409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}