More than 40 research grants and contracts — totaling about $12 million — at the University of Maryland have been cancelled, paused or are still in “deliberations” due to Trump administration cuts, university president Darryll Pines told The Diamondback Wednesday.
Some losses have been attributed to broad federal budget cuts since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, Pines said. The university president said the Trump administration is in other cases “using a filter of DEI as a lens to cancel, pause or delay the funding of a proposed research topic for one of our faculty or a group of our faculty.”
Trump’s administration has emphasized cutting funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as a part of the president’s promises to cut federal funding.
Pines said the grants and contracts cancelled or paused at this university include funding from the National Institute of Health, the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.
“We are working to re-establish some of these, but some of them, of course, are not going to come back,” Pines said.
The university considers graduate students funded by research grants the most vulnerable after these cuts, Pines said. College deans, provosts and other officials are working with graduate students who lost their funding to help the students complete their degrees, he added.
[UMD faculty, researchers criticize planned NIH research funding cuts]
The university is working with the federal agencies to attempt to unpause certain grants, Pines said.
Pines said this university does not plan to disclose which grants were cancelled.
“We’re continuing to do research and we’re continuing to work with the new priorities of this administration to continue to make contributions in a variety of fields of research that help advance knowledge gain as well as advance society,” Pines said. “Our mission at that level doesn’t change.”
Pines also signed a Tuesday public statement from the American Association of Colleges and Universities standing against the “coercive use of public research funding” and “undue government intrusion” of university researchers. About 300 leaders from universities across the country have signed the statement.
The statement comes as Harvard University sued the Trump administration for freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants, the Associated Press reported.
News editor Natalie Weger contributed to this report.
