It was a conversation neither wanted to have. Last month, University of Maryland professor Anne Simon broke the difficult news to Xiaobao Ying that she didn’t have funding to extend his assistant research scientist position beyond July as they had originally planned. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had agreed last year to fund a field trial for their team’s work on citrus greening, an economically important crop disease, which would have covered his salary for 2 years. But after President Donald Trump’s administration took over, the funds were frozen. “It’s very hard because you’re devastating people’s lives,” Simon says of the conversation with Ying. “I’ve never had to do this in 38 years.”
Ying, a single father who has worked in Simon’s lab for 5 years, is now scrambling to find another research job. He’s only seen one position that he felt qualified to apply for. “I don’t think it will be easy,” he says. “Everywhere funding is short.” In the meantime, he plans to try to get by as an Uber driver.
Similar conversations are taking place across the country as the federal government has paused or terminated billions of dollars of grants, proposed slashing research funding by more than 40% for key research agencies in the next fiscal year, and tried—so far without success—to cut overhead payments to universities. In response, graduate schools have reduced the size of their incoming cohorts and faculty have been anxiously watching their budgets and worrying about their own careers. “My lab is definitely going to shrink,” says Arthi Jayaraman, a chemical engineering professor at the University of Delaware.
