With federal budget cuts threatening to cancel satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide emissions, U-M climate scientist Gretchen Keppel-Aleks fears for the future of her research projects. | Mark Bialek
Hanging on a wall of Nils Walter’s office in the U-M Chemistry Building is a poster for one of his seminars, entitled “Can RNA Do It All? From Spawning Life on Earth to Fueling Modern Personalized Medicine.”
Walter, a biophysical chemist, has been exploring this theme for more than three decades. Over that time he’s seen what he calls an “explosion” of RNA research, including the Nobel Prize–winning work that enabled the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. The future for RNA medicines, he says, is bright—including at U-M.
But there’s an imminent threat to this promising research: massive cuts to the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed by President Trump, which Walter says “would really devastate the progress that can be made.”
That fear is rippling across campus. The federal government, which funds over half of all U-M research, disbursed $1.25 billion in the 2025 fiscal year. But the U-M is budgeting for 11 percent less overall federal support for the current year as the Trump administration shrinks the agencies that provide the grants.
Last summer, the Department of Health and Human Services terminated at least fifteen U-M grants totaling $5.4 million, mostly for ethnic minority and transgender health studies, and for vaccine and pandemic research. The U-M School of Public Health canceled new epidemiology PhD program admissions for 2026. Layoffs and resignations at funding agencies, sudden policy changes, and a federal budget that remains in limbo despite the November reopening of the government have made the future of scientific research on campus precarious. And speaking out publicly runs the risk of government retaliation. “We will decline any interviews,” writes Michigan Medicine senior director of public relations Mary Masson. “I don’t have any information to share regarding your questions [on cancer research funding].”
Many of the U-M’s 8,000-plus faculty members and roughly 6,000 PhD students are now experiencing a previously unknown level of anxiety and uncertainty. “We are all in this situation,” writes mechanical engineering professor Jesse Capecelatro.
Climate scientist Gretchen Keppel-Aleks was chair of her department’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee until its recent disbandment. Now she fears for the future of her research projects on the natural global carbon cycle and on wildfire risks and climate feedbacks in northern Canada and Siberia.
The threat to her work exists irrespective of the U-M’s budget: her research relies on the two Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellites, which measure plant growth and land and ocean carbon dioxide emissions from space. These ongoing missions could be canceled, pending the final 2026 NASA budget. Europe should launch a similar satellite late this decade, but Keppel-Aleks says “having gaps in the data record right now is particularly dangerous” for the rapidly heating high latitudes that she studies.
Other researchers rely on the satellites for modeling and predicting permafrost melting, hurricane activity, Amazon rainfall, and other effects of global heating. This research also relies on ground-based CO2 detectors in Hawaii and Alaska. But the NSF may terminate those, too.
In a September speech at the United Nations, President Trump called climate change a “con job” and a “green scam,” amid other falsehoods. His agency heads are behaving accordingly, with science itself the casualty.
“It’s a huge danger,” says Keppel-Aleks. “We would not be able to do greenhouse gas or carbon cycle science without those observatories. … It still shocks me that the current administration is willing to shut all this down.”
Fortunately, most current grants are still funded. “There has certainly been chaos, but it hasn’t affected the university in the most severe way, as it could have,” says Walter.
He did have to wait seven anxious weeks over the summer for the annual installment of a $3.5 million NIH grant to come through. The holdup had nothing to do with science—instead, the money was withheld because the NIH demanded the U-M comply with newly reinterpreted
antidiscrimination laws, a demand that was later withdrawn.
Walter co-leads the U-M’s Center for RNA Biomedicine, “the biggest aggregation of RNA researchers in the world,” he says. Many work on messenger RNA (mRNA), the basis for most Covid-19 vaccines. Long considered an inert carrier of information from DNA to proteins, RNA in various forms is now known to regulate a vast array of cellular processes.
And RNA, in addition to Covid-19 vaccines, is the backbone of FDA-approved drugs for vision loss, muscular dystrophy, and several rare genetic disorders. The U-M is strong in this area of RNA medicine, says Walter, whose lab also works on RNA antibiotics. For example, Walter’s colleague Michelle Hastings developed a personalized RNA drug that is now being used to treat twin girls with Batten disease, a rare neurological disorder that usually leads to death in the late teens or early twenties.
Fundamental research, says Walter, delivers insights that promise to transform medicine. But President Trump recently proposed a 40 percent cut in the budget of the NIH, by far the U-M’s largest research funding agency. If enacted, “those cuts will be devastating to discoveries in the health sciences,” Walter says.
Already, the NIH, besides canceling or pausing many mRNA vaccine–related grants, has asked for an accounting of all mRNA research, which could lead to more cuts due to the politicization of such work. And the NIH recently started paying out grants in lump sums, instead of yearly installments. That leaves less new grant money available, at least for the next several years.
In response, the U-M’s RNA center, which is planning a new mRNA initiative focused in part on anticancer medicines, is pivoting to nonfederal sources for possible funding, including the state of Michigan and private companies. But NIH funding isn’t easily replaced, because companies and foundations don’t have the budgets—or the mission—to support fundamental research on anything approaching that scale.
Walter says that with NIH grant scoring thresholds “dropping like crazy,” young scientists in the U.S. are looking abroad for opportunities.
“It might devastate a whole generation of assistant professors,” he says.
Trump has proposed cutting the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U-M’s second biggest federal funding source, by a staggering 57 percent next year. “That would be devastating,” says U-M physics professor Keith Riles, who hopes that Congress ultimately approves much smaller cuts, if any.
The gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity were finally observed a century later by the U.S.’s two detectors, located in Louisiana and Washington state, a discovery that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. Riles has worked on the project since 1997. His work illustrates the kind of team effort that produces these transformational scientific discoveries—and that these budget cuts are threatening.
Riles and his colleagues fear that the cuts will cause the NSF to shut one detector down, which would cripple the field’s future prospects. By continuing to improve and operate the detectors, says Riles, “we could look further back in the universe and understand the formation of these objects like black holes and neutron stars. The more of these that we see, the better we’ll understand the history of stellar evolution in our universe.”
Why should that matter to the average person? “Those of us who do this sort of research, we do it because we want to understand how the universe works,” Riles says. “But in order to make these kinds of measurements, to push the frontier, one has to make technological advances that can yield payoffs to the broader economy.” He cites lasers and the internet as examples.
Such breakthroughs also inspire students to pursue technical careers. “Just driving the frontier of science, revealing what has previously been unknown to us, is something that a lot of people find exciting,” says Riles. “And it certainly is a motivation to young people, who might have the interest and the talent to succeed in science or engineering.”
The funding crisis has left these researchers worring about the next generation of scientists. Riles says he’s been “leery” about recruiting new members, and Keppel-Aleks probably won’t offer any new PhD positions in her lab next year, because she can’t be sure of funding. “We’re destroying our space pipeline,” she says, “and I think we’re also destroying the infrastructure of this [career] pipeline.”
Vanishing job prospects in U.S. science are also turning students away.
“Making a case to the best and brightest to come [to U-M] to and get a PhD while national labs are being decimated is going to be a hard lift,” says Keppel-Aleks. “Even if we had the funding to bring new PhD students on, the PhD students here are definitely feeling a lot of stress and uncertainty about what they’re going to be able to do with their degree.”
Given these cuts, says Walter, the critical global role of U.S. science, combining generous support for curiosity-driven research and an entrepreneurial ecosystem, could end.
“If the U.S. doesn’t want to play this role any more, that will hurt everyone,” he says. “That will hurt the entire world.”