Columbia University announced Tuesday that nearly 180 people whose salaries had been funded by federal research grants would be laid off, as the effect of the Trump administration’s cuts on the campus deepens.
Citing intense strain on Columbia’s finances and research mission, Claire Shipman, the university’s acting president, said in the announcement that Columbia would also be “running lighter footprints of research infrastructure” in some areas affected by the cuts. The university, she added, is continuing to negotiate with the federal government for the return of the grants and is seeking alternative sources of funding.
“We have had to make deliberate, considered decisions about the allocation of our financial resources,” Ms. Shipman wrote in a note to the campus, which was also signed by other administrators. “Those decisions also impact our greatest resource, our people. We understand this news will be hard.”
A Trump administration antisemitism task force cut $400 million in funding in March because of what it described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. It demanded that Columbia make changes in how it functions for the money to be restored. Columbia complied with a first round of demands, but negotiations on returning the money continue.
More than 300 multiyear research grants have been cut significantly, many of them in medical research. Columbia received about $1.3 billion in federal research funds in 2023, with the National Institutes of Health providing $747 million of that. An additional $206 million came from other programs within the Health and Human Services Department.
Columbia had been temporarily paying the salaries of some of the affected researchers as departments came up with plans on how to weather the cuts, but the announcement on Tuesday signaled that effort was ending. Moving forward, scientists at Columbia can apply for grants for a limited time to complete their research and support graduate students who would otherwise be laid off.
Tamara Sussman, a researcher in psychiatry at Columbia, had a federal grant canceled in March for research that examined the consequences of structural racism on substance use risk in Puerto Rican adolescents. The research assistant that she had recently hired was among those let go.
“This is a really hard time for anyone who wants to do research, but particularly for people who are starting out,” Dr. Sussman said Tuesday. “It is very disheartening to see the wheels of science kind of grinding to a halt in certain ways.”
