In recent years, one could lob a variety of critiques at the firmament of higher education with little fear of being wrong.  Targets of criticism have included the escalating costs of higher education, campuses roiled by corrosive political strife, swelling endowment coffers that seem to rarely benefit students, and outsized investments in corporate architecture manifested as Colosseum-like football stadiums and training facilities. Despite both real and perceived shortcomings in higher education, our nation’s universities have been instrumental in establishing and maintaining our country's global leadership in medical research and scientific development. Through the largess of federal grant funding coupled with the ingenuity of academic researchers, universities have produced world-changing discoveries, trained generations of scientists, and created a research network that has served as a benchmark for others. But alliances that require the university to be joined at the hip with government or industry always carry risks. Publications may constitute academic currency, but the one who holds the gold still makes the rules outside of the ivory tower. And how the gold is spent may be subject to ill-conceived policy changes or capricious decisions by those in power. Universities are now discovering that the erosion of their independence is the steep cost to be paid for the reliance of funding sources that buckle under the weight of political change.

Figure 1. A visualization of cancelled and delayed NIH grants. (Kolata, G. The disappearing funds for chronic diseases. The New York Times, June 4, 2025) 

The frontal assault on federal funding for scientific grants has been striking. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated or delayed thousands of research grants (Figures 1 and 2), representing more than $2.4 billion in lost funding. What began as an effort by the current administration to scrutinize funding support for the mere 6.6% of NIH grant recipients who are underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities (FY 2020; Nguyen et al. 2023) has now expanded to affect research funding for cancer and other chronic diseases. Moreover, the impact of the proposed National Science Foundation (NSF) budget cuts may reduce the number of funded investigators from 330,000 to 90,000. Since World War II, U.S. investments in basic research have contributed an estimated 75% of global economic growth, with the majority of technical advances since 1990 driven by fundamental science. To be sure, every research project isn’t a world-changing idea or a key step in the next big technological breakthrough. After all, that’s not how science works. Nevertheless, universities have become major regional employers and economic anchors in Colorado and throughout the country. In recent years, the university-industry nexus has resulted in annual invention disclosures and issued patents exceeding 24,000 and 7,000, respectively (World Economic Forum 2018). U.S. institutions have consistently filled the top ranks of global universities involved in biomedical research, and over 250 Nobel laureates have received NSF support during the course of their careers. This shift in our national priorities, if one can truly call it that, will take generations to fully unwind in its implications on our research infrastructure and scientific leadership.

Figure 2. NIH grant mechanisms with five or more terminated grants. (National Institutes of Health. NIH grant terminations and funding impact report. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2025)