Penn president says federal government has halted $175 million in research funding to faculty

Faculty across seven of the University of Pennsylvania’s 12 schools have received stop-work orders on their federally funded research, totaling about $175 million, Penn’s president said Tuesday.

The orders followed comments from a senior White House official last week that $175 million in federal funding would be paused at Penn because the university allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women’s swim team several years ago.

» READ MORE: Trump administration has paused $175 million in funding to Penn for allowing transgender athlete to compete

Contracts affected include research on “preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, quantum computing, protections against chemical warfare, and student loan programs,” Penn president J. Larry Jameson said in a statement to the campus community. Jameson did not say how many faculty members at the seven schools were affected.

The funding pauses are separate from three National Institutes of Health grants that were outright terminated at Penn in recent weeks because they no longer fit with current NIH policy, according to an administrative source at Penn. NIH has been ending grants that deal with diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender identity, and vaccine hesitancy.

“We are actively pursuing multiple avenues to understand and address these funding terminations, freezes, and slowdowns,” Jameson said.

Jameson’s reference to student loans related to a $4.5 million contract via the Health Resources and Services Administration for scholarships and loans to disadvantaged students to become health-care professionals, the Penn administrative source said.

The statement from Jameson was the first detail the university has provided on the impact of the paused funding since President Donald Trump’s administration announced it last week.

Penn, which gets about $1 billion in federal funding annually, still has not received any official communication from the White House on the paused funding, though researchers whose grants were terminated by the NIH received letters in recent weeks. The Trump administration has not responded to questions on what it wants Penn to do to get its funding restored.

In his statement, Jameson asserted that Penn followed National Collegiate Athletic Association policy during the 2021-22 school year when it allowed Lia Thomas to swim on the women’s team. The NCAA has since changed its policy to bar transgender athletes on women’s teams, and Jameson said the university is in compliance with the new policy.

“We expect to continue to engage with [the federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights], vigorously defending our position,” he said.

Three NIH grants were terminated at Penn in recent weeks, according to a spreadsheet of canceled grants posted online by the Department of Health and Human Services.

The NIH usually terminates only a handful of grants a year, and typically only after the agency finds evidence of research misconduct or fraud. But HHS has posted a list of hundreds of terminated grants this month alone.

In a statement, an HHS spokesperson said the agency is “dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

Trump has targeted Columbia University in particular and canceled $400 million in funding from the university after claiming that it failed to adequately respond to complaints of antisemitism on campus amid protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Two of the terminated grants at Penn had been awarded to Andy Tan, the director of the Health Communication and Equity Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication.

In a letter from the NIH informing him of one of his grants’ termination, he was told that studies focusing on “gender identity” are “unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

Tan had been studying methods to prevent vaping among LGBTQ teens, who are more likely to use e-cigarettes, and his team had just launched a large trial testing the effectiveness of vaping prevention messages that it designed in collaboration with a youth advisory group. It is unprecedented, he said, for an NIH grant to be canceled with 24 hours’ notice, as his was.

”This will severely impact our ability to complete this randomized controlled trial. It means the efforts leading up to now will have been wasted,” Tan said. “It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and a waste of time for participants.”

There has been some confusion surrounding the information released by HHS on the cuts. The HHS spreadsheet said that the “anticipated amount canceled as a result of the termination” of Tan’s grant was $9, but Tan said he was expecting about $650,000 in funding through April 2026 for his grant, which was entering its final year.

HHS officials did not respond to an email asking for general clarification on how the agency is posting financial details on the canceled grants.

Tan is also worried about the effect on LGBTQ teenagers hoping to conduct or participate in research studies. “Future interactions or future invitations to join research will be impacted. LGBTQ youth will have lower levels of trust, because the efforts they put in were disregarded,” he said.

Penn is not the only area research institution where the NIH has terminated grants in recent weeks. Drexel University and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia also lost grant funding. In total, according to the HHS spreadsheet, the terminated grants in the region represent $8.8 million in federal funding.

Another researcher whose grant was terminated recently and declined to speak on the record because of fears of government reprisals said participants had already been recruited for a study that now may not go forward. Many study participants rely on stipends from researchers to compensate them for their time, the researcher noted.

Ayden Scheim, a Drexel professor studying how stigma around HIV shapes public policy, received a letter from the NIH saying that his research does “nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.“

”Worse,” the letter continued, “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (’DEI’) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”

Both Scheim and Penn’s Tan said the NIH’s characterizations of their work are inaccurate.

”[The letter] is full of outright falsehoods, intended to be insulting, and has no basis in reality,” Scheim said. “It’s not serious critique. Our research was already evaluated by the actual experts — scientists who peer-review grant applications and deemed it good enough to be funded.”

Scheim had only recently received funding for his grant, which focuses on public policy, laws, and societal norms that discriminate against people with HIV, and how they affect Latino populations and sexual and gender minorities. Scheim hoped to develop methods to measure this “structural stigma” at a state level, filling a gap in research into health disparities.

Tan said he is scrambling to find additional funding to cover the losses on his grants. He had not been asked to give back any money related to his studies and does not have immediate plans to lay off staff.

He and Scheim are planning to appeal his grants’ terminations.

Tan was also concerned about other attempts by the administration to delay or freeze funding for research grants. He said some colleagues have seen grant review meetings canceled with just a few days’ notice.

”The scientific infrastructure is being damaged irreparably,” he said.

Inquirer staff writer Lizzie Mulvey contributed to this article.