When UT Austin Professor John Wallingford found out the National Institutes of Health had suspended meetings to review grant applications for scientific research, he, like many scientists, was concerned.
“I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. So, obviously it’s troubling,” Wallingford told KUT while speaking on behalf of himself, not UT Austin.
The NIH canceled the grant-review meetings after the Trump administration told federal health officials to stop their external communications last week until at least Feb 1. Wallingford, who is the Doherty Regents Chair in Molecular Biology, said the freeze also halted council meetings used to determine which research actually gets funded.
While the acting director of the NIH, Dr. Matthew Memoli, offered more clarity to staff this week on which activities are still allowed under the agency's freeze, Wallingford said there is still confusion. He added the economic impact of any interruption to funding has the potential to be so significant because the NIH spends billions of dollars on research each year. According to the agency’s website, it is “the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world.” The NIH’s annual budget is more than $47 billion.
NIH funding supports nearly 30,000 jobs in Texas
Wallingford said about 80% of the NIH budget supports researchers like him throughout the U.S. He has run an NIH-funded lab at UT Austin for more than two decades. His research focuses on the genetic basis for human birth defects.
“The thing to know about that, that’s really important is birth defects, which are basically problems that go wrong with the embryo, are the No. 1 cause of death for infants in the United States,” he said.
Wallingford’s lab is not just dedicated to life-saving research, it’s also part of a broader economic ecosystem the Trump administration’s freeze is potentially threatening. He said people should think about his lab, and others like it, as being similar to small businesses.
“I’ve got a small business. I’ve got 12 employees. I need to pay my 12 employees, but also we need goods and services,” he said. “So like within the last couple of months, I’ve paid carpenters to fix cabinets in my lab.”
Wallingford said he has also paid for HVAC technicians, plumbers, veterinarians and delivery drivers.
“We get deliveries every single day. We get antibodies from Iowa, we get frogs from Minnesota, enzymes from California,” he said.
All of these people, he said, have a role to play in keeping his research lab up and running. His lab is just a microcosm of the impact of these federal dollars. According to the advocacy group, United for Medical Research, NIH funding supports more than 29,000 jobs and nearly $6 billion in economic activity in Texas alone.
“I think people just don’t understand the scale of the research infrastructure in this country and it’s, I think, one of the things that makes America completely awesome,” Wallingford said. “We’re the world leader in biotechnology, for sure, and this is part of the reason.”
Wallingford said if the Trump administration’s freeze that’s currently affecting the NIH only lasts a week or two, the impact will not slow the entire industry down. Memoli, for his part, has described the ongoing freeze as a "short pause," as reported by the outlet Science.
But, Wallingford said, if disruptions to meetings that determine which projects get funded persist, the impacts will be harder to reverse.
“This is a massive industry and you can’t just turn it off and turn it back on again,” he said.
UT Austin says research on previously funded projects can continue
Separately, UT Austin told faculty and staff this week it was monitoring how Trump administration policies may impact research on campus after the president issued an executive order late Monday to temporarily halt payments for federal grants and other programs. A federal judge blocked it before it was set to take effect Tuesday. His administration then rescinded that order on Wednesday, but said it was still going to examine federal spending.
UT Austin’s Vice President for Research Daniel Jaffe said in an email on Tuesday, before the order was blocked and then rescinded, that researchers could continue working on projects that were already funded unless they heard directly from a “federal sponsor” that they needed to stop.
According to Jaffe's email, UT Austin fronts most of the money for federally-funded research and then submits invoices for reimbursement. In fiscal year 2023, 60% of the $1.04 billion the university spent on research were federal dollars.
Jaffe added UT Austin will continue tracking policy updates.
“Our research mission is critical to our state and the people who live here and beyond,” he wrote.