The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Proposed federal funding cuts could be devastating for Ohio colleges and universities.
President Donald Trump’s budget proposes cutting NASA’s science funding by 47% and the National Science Foundation by 56%. The budget has to be passed by Congress, something lawmakers are trying to do this week.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration announced the National Institutes of Health is limiting indirect-cost funding to 15%, but this has been blocked by a federal judge.
“We’re going to lose people from Ohio to other states that might have more resources in the space that don’t rely as much on federal funding,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors.
“That is part of the ripple effect as well. We are going to lose faculty members. We’re going to see a decrease in research production at our institutions. … This is going to set back advancements in medicine, advancements, and all other kinds of fields potentially for decades.”
More than 1,600 National Science Foundation grants totaling more than $1.5 billion in research investments have been eliminated since April, according to Grant Watch.
National Institutes of Health cuts
Ohio’s seven Research 1 universities could lose more than $106 million through NIH cuts, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Ohio State University could lose nearly $50 million.
- Case Western Reserve University could lose nearly $39 million.
- The University of Cincinnati could lose nearly $16 million.
- Kent State University could lose about $1 million.
- Ohio University could lose about $662,000.
- The University of Toledo could lose about $518,000.
- The University of Dayton could lose $148,000
“Recent federal government directives have had an immense impact on our university, especially on research funding and, consequently and unfortunately, on many teams,” Case Western Reserve University said in a statement.
“We are grateful for the research support we receive from our federal partners as these investments literally save lives right here in Ohio,” said Ohio State Spokesperson Ben Johnson. “We are closely monitoring and managing federal notifications that have impacted a number of our faculty and laboratories.”
The NIH funding cuts were projected to be almost half a billion dollars in Ohio, Kilpatrick said.
“Shutting down this money is going to have grave consequences,” she said. “It’s going to make not just Ohio weaker, but the entire country weaker because we have always been at the forefront of research development, of scientific discovery, so we are putting ourselves in a weaker position globally by having these kinds of research cuts.”
NASA and National Science Foundation funding
Ohio State University’s Astronomy Chair Todd Thompson is waiting to see what will happen with the funding.
“If those were to go forward, there would be very substantial reductions in our ability to get grants,” he said. “Those grants fund our graduate students, and they also fund some aspects of our undergraduate research program.”
The Ohio State Astronomy Department has 30 graduate students and slightly more than half of them are funded through federal grants, he said.
“If you decrease that funding by a factor of three, then there you go,” Thompson said. “That would basically almost eliminate our ability to fund graduate students off of grants.”
Ohio State Spokesperson Chris Booker said “it would be premature to comment at this point in the process” when asked how these potential cuts could affect the astronomy department.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the next flagship mission for NASA — something the Ohio State Astronomy Department is heavily involved in — but the White House’s proposed 2026 NASA budget would cut its funding in half. The telescope is almost fully built and is scheduled to launch in October 2026, Thompson said.
“You have a mission that’s basically ready, you want to launch it, you want to get data,” he said. “You want to figure out new things about the universe. … The idea that it wouldn’t go forward, or that it would be very substantially hampered by a lower budget, by lower operating costs are all bad for science, all bad for training students in science.”
The funding cuts would be devastating for all the astronomy programs across the country, Thompson said.
“We would not be able to train students, which means that we would not be able to do as much research which means that we would not be putting in this steady pipeline of highly trained, very agile and very able students into the workforce to do these types of things, and we also would not produce the type of science that you see,” he said.
That means the pace of new space discoveries — ranging from new galaxies to black holes — would substantially decrease, Thompson said.
Scientific discoveries by Americans will slow down, said Ohio State Astronomy Professor David Weinberg.
“Americans have become used to a steady stream of medical miracles that cure previously fatal diseases, advances in physics and chemistry that produce astonishing new technologies, and Nobel-Prize winning discoveries that rewrite our understanding of nature,” he said. “If things proceed along the administration’s proposed path, then that era is basically over.”
