Bill Penuel is waiting for the National Science Foundation to decide whether to grant him and his colleagues nearly $30 million in requested funds — money they rely on to pay staff, admit students and conduct education research at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“With the uncertainty of NSF, we can’t do any planning for the future,” he said.

Penuel is a distinguished professor in CU Boulder’s School of Education and Institute of Cognitive Science. He studies how to improve learning environments in schools for kids and teachers by partnering with schools nationwide.

Typically, at this point in the year, Penuel and other researchers who’ve applied for grants with the National Science Foundation will have already been notified whether they will be granted the funding. But so far, Penuel said, no new grants have been awarded.

“Basically, in the last month, there’s been a turning off at the spigot of all education research,” he said.

The lack of funding adds large uncertainty about whether the department can pay its staff and students who help conduct the research, Penuel said. Many research staff rely entirely on federal funding for their paycheck.

“We have decided to admit fewer students in our program because of all of this funding uncertainty,” Penuel said.Many federal organizations are laying off workers and cutting funds for various federal programs and research due to orders and actions from the Trump administration. At the National Science Foundation, the number of new grants awarded since President Donald Trump took office has fallen by nearly 50%, and funds awarded to researchers have been reduced by more than $400 million, according to reporting in the publication Science.

In 2024, 67% of CU Boulder’s research funding came from federal agencies, or $495.4 million, according to a report from CU Boulder’s Research and Innovation Office. The top federal funding agencies that CU Boulder receives research dollars from are NASA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

“CU Boulder leadership is closely monitoring how decisions from the federal government may impact the university’s funding sources,” CU Boulder spokesperson Deborah Mendez-Wilson wrote in an email. “Our leadership team carefully assesses new federal policies, regulations, and executive orders for potential impacts to CU Boulder’s academic, research, and public service missions, and we are updating the campus community as early and as often as possible on our CU Boulder federal transition webpage.”

‘Enormous uncertainty’

Physics professor Jamie Nagle is already being more conservative about taking on additional students and expenses in his research. This summer, unlike in years past, he won’t be able to pay additional undergraduate students to work in his lab due to funding uncertainty. He can’t promise the students a position if the money isn’t guaranteed.

“I feel quite badly about that,” Nagle said. “I think it’s a lost opportunity for the students.”

Nagle studies experimental nuclear physics, where he examines the highest energy nuclear reactions possible, with higher energy than a nuclear reactor or weapon. The reactions are somewhat similar to how the universe would have interacted in the tiny fraction of a second after the big bang.

“It’s really to understand the beginnings of our universe, and at the same time, it’s training a next generation of the workforce (that are) experts in nuclear physics,” Nagle said.

Nagle’s work is funded by a long-term grant from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. He’s effectively had the same grant for 22 years. But this year, part of his grant was frozen, and the money has yet to come in. He said it’s been stressful and frustrating.

“So far it has resulted in enormous uncertainty, and the implications are not so clear,” Nagle said.

Professor Angela Bryan said she worries every single day about her funding from the National Institutes of Health being cut, frozen or revoked. She’s currently working with about $12 million in federal funding across five different research projects regarding the public health implications of cannabis legalization.

“It’s really hard to predict what projects are going to keep their funding and what projects the federal government is just going to decide on a whim to not fund anymore,” Bryan said. “It’s really the uncertainty that’s the hardest. I have a number of full-time employees who depend on these research projects for their living. This is their paycheck.”

Bryan researches the potential harms and benefits of cannabis use. Since marijuana was legalized, she said, there are now thousands of products on the shelves people can use for recreation, pain, sleep, anxiety and more.

“We have absolutely no idea what works for any of those things,” Bryan said. “We also know very little about the potential harms of some the very high potency THC products that are on the market.”

One project looks at how cannabis affects anxiety symptoms over time. Another looks at the impact of cannabis use on metabolism, including inflammation, insulin production, diet and physical activity. One of her studies resulted in a finding that cannabis users are actually leaner, exercise more and have less inflammatory biomarkers than non-users. She also asks questions about whether cannabis can be used as a cancer treatment.

“If NIH stops funding grants, all this work goes away,” she said.

One major issue, Bryan said, is the federal government’s decision to cap indirect costs to 15% of a total grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health. Indirect costs are the amount of money the university gets to support a researcher’s work when they’re awarded a grant. The rate CU Boulder used to receive was up to 56% of the total grant amount, Bryan said.

“Even if you gave me my money to actually work with my participants, pay my research assistants and collect my data, if the university doesn’t have the money to pay the rent of the building that I do this work in, if they can’t afford to pay the ethics committee that allows me to do this work in a way that is ethical, then I can’t do the work,” Bryan said. “That reduction in indirect cost would just have an absolutely devastating impact on NIH research across the university.”

Once a researcher earns a grant, its university enters into negotiation with NIH for the amount of indirect funds it can receive to support the researcher’s work. The amount also varies by university.

“This infrastructure is critical to getting the research done,” Bryan said. “We literally can’t get the research done without it.”

Penuel studies school curricula and assessments and examines how schools can be more equitable and provide equal opportunities for students from different backgrounds. Schools throughout the United States look the way they do, he said, in part because of decades of education research.

“We’re able to better serve students to the extent that we’re integrating insights that help children learn (and provide guidance on) how to provide equal opportunity to students with different backgrounds,” Penuel said. “Research provides the evidence base for the foundation for improvement, and if we lose that, I think it’s going to be a big loss to the country.”

He said many people in education research do work that pertains to educational equity in some way, which is “under fire” due to anti-diversity, equity and inclusion mandates from the Trump administration.

“It’s the basis for the holdup at NSF, I think,” Penuel said. “A lot of it is how they evaluate (proposals) in light of the new executive orders where we’re not really allowed to pay attention to these concerns over equality or equity of opportunity.”

Training the next generation

One issue historically with federal funding is that sometimes money comes in late, which is not uncommon, Nagle said. When this happens, sometimes the university or department will front the money to pay its graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Then, when the money comes, the payment is transferred over.

In the current environment where so much funding is at risk, Nagle said, it calls into question whether the university can still do that with the funding environment being so uncertain.

“I think that’s one of the really big worries coming up is how many people could the university afford to pay on the assumption the funds become available — because they might not,” Nagle said.

Nagle is also worried about the impact on the next generation of scientists. If his lab and others can’t bring on students to do research and learn, there will be a real loss of expertise later down the line.

“I particularly worry about the effects on younger people,” he said.

Bryan said the actions of the federal government have been “devastating and disappointing” and “makes no sense.” It’s not based in science, she said, or what’s important for the public.

“There seems to be no rationale for what they’re doing,” she said.

For professional research assistants, graduate students and undergraduate students, working in labs supported by federal funding is how they learn science.

“If we don’t have these laboratories that are running studies, that are asking important questions … if we aren’t able to train the next generation of scientists, then the United States will simply lose our standing in the world,” Bryan said.

Penuel said that not admitting graduate students into research programs and dipping into internal funding to pay people already on staff is happening across disciplines. He sees the funding cuts as a “targeted effort to cripple universities” and believes it’s important to speak up.

“This is happening everywhere, and it’s a big crisis for the university at the end of the day,” Penuel said. “CU and other high-intensity research, or research one, universities don’t just depend on tuition revenue. We depend on some revenue from grants. All of our research depends on this funding, and the ability to provide opportunities for students to actually do science, to conduct research, depends largely on federal grants. That’s what’s at stake here.”