iPhones and GPS owe their existence to US government-funded research. What’s at stake with Trump cuts to university funding

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — Imagine a world without the internet, or GPS, MRNA vaccines or the touchscreen on your iPhone. The science and technology that have become integral to our daily lives may never have existed, experts say, were it not for research funded by the federal government at American colleges and universities.

But as President Trump’s administration threatens to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from colleges across the nation, the future of innovations like those – and America’s global leadership in research and development – could be at stake.

“It’s not hyperbole to say we could destroy a generation’s worth of scientific progress in this administration,” Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, told CNN.

“The implications are huge for every American, regardless of your political viewpoints.”

The Trump administration appears determined to bring America’s most elite universities in lockstep with his political ideology by threatening to withhold research funding that has proven critical for the universities.

Harvard University is locked in a standoff with the administration over $2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts for the school. The Ivy League school “will not surrender its independence or its constitutional rights” by giving in to a bevy of demands from the administration in order to maintain its funding levels, the university’s president, Alan Garber, has said.

But other universities have struck a less defiant tone. Fansmith said some colleges can survive without federal funding – but not for long.

“When you get to hundreds of millions, billions of dollars – no institution, no matter how big their endowment, could sustain that kind of a loss over an extended period of time,” he said.

Tuition, donations can leave gaps in university research funding

Universities are like small cities with thousands of faculty members, students and researchers depending on the school to survive. But no two colleges are funded in the same way.

Public universities often rely on revenue from tuition and donations as well as money from state and local governments to provide the bulk of their funding.

Private universities are different. Because they don’t receive financial support from the state, private schools lean heavily on donations.

Take Harvard, for instance. Last year, philanthropy accounted for 45% of the school’s revenue. But the majority of that money came from one source: the university’s centuries-old endowment.

Harvard, founded in 1636, is the oldest private university in the country and the school has received donations for nearly four centuries. Those gifts have helped the university amass an endowment worth $53 billion in 2024 – the largest of any university in the country.

But that doesn’t mean Harvard – or any other school with an endowment – can access and spend that money freely.

Endowments are meant to literally fund a university forever. So there are rules limiting how much money a school can withdraw from its endowment each year.

Last year, a $2.4 billion distribution from Harvard’s endowment accounted for more than a third of the university’s funding. But crucially, the university said 80% of that money was restricted for specific purposes, like financial aid, professorships and specific scholarships within certain schools.

“If I decide to endow a chair in the English department, the institution is legally not allowed to use that money for some other purpose,” Fansmith said, adding universities “don’t have the flexibility to just shift (donations) to other purposes if they think it’s a more pressing need.”

That’s where the federal government – and its commitment to funding academic research – comes in.

Federal funding has massive impact on R&D

Johns Hopkins University “receives more money than any other entity in the US” from the National Institutes of Health. Last year, Hopkins received $1 billion in funding from the agency.

Harvard received $686 million in federal funding to conduct research in fiscal year 2024.

But all of that could vanish overnight if the Trump administration follows through with its threats to withhold funds. Hopkins has already cut thousands of employees after dramatic cuts to USAID cost it $800 million in funding.

But the federal government hasn’t always played such a critical role in academic research. World War II fundamentally changed the relationship between the government and colleges and universities in the United States.

Before the war, American industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller created their own universities and financed research.

But President Franklin Roosevelt believed scientific advancements would be crucial to winning the war. So, in 1941, he signed an executive order to create the Office of Scientific Research and Development. He tasked Vannevar Bush, the former dean of the MIT School of Engineering, with marshalling the country’s top scientists and researchers to create more advanced weapons and technology.

The OSRD funded research programs at universities across the nation – including the Manhattan Project – and the work of these scientists and researchers led to the creation of not only the atomic bomb but also radar and crucial advances in medicine and other military technology.

The office was disbanded after the war, but the partnership between the federal government and colleges and universities helped place the nation at the forefront of global scientific innovation. And that relationship has endured for more than 70 years, until now.

What’s at stake: life-changing innovations

Today, agencies like the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy are the largest funders of academic research at universities across the nation, said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations at the Association of American Universities.

But the money doesn’t go straight into Columbia or Harvard’s bank accounts. Instead, the colleges and universities across the nation apply and compete for federal grants to conduct research, which Fansmith said enables the government to fund the best researchers at the lowest cost.

Federal funding also helps cover the majority of costs for maintaining research facilities, a cost-sharing system that has been in place since Bush and the creation of the OSRD.

In essence, Smith said, universities are akin to national laboratories.

“When you take money away from a Columbia or a Harvard or research or other institutions, you’ve just taken away funds from the best researchers who were judged by other scientists to do that research on behalf of the American people – in areas like cancer, Alzheimer’s, pediatrics, diabetes, and other critical research areas,” Smith said.

Many advances in science, he added, were discovered inadvertently by researchers who received federal grants. In fact, the annual “Golden Goose” award recognizes these innovations that have had life-changing impacts.

Thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, economics researchers who were studying markets helped develop the chain model for kidney donations. In 2012, researchers Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley shared the Nobel Prize for economics.

Scientists studying rats at Duke University, funded by the NIH, uncovered a breakthrough that led to the practice of “infant massage” and forever changed neonatal care for premature infants. It has saved countless lives.

That is what’s at stake, Smith said, if the US were to halt its federal funding to colleges and universities.

“At the end of the day, (the US) won’t have that knowledge,” he said. “Other countries will overtake us in science and resulting technology, if we don’t recognize and protect the unique system that we have in place.”

And ultimately, he said, the American people will lose.

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