Federal Cuts Become ‘All Consuming’ at Harvard’s Public Health School

In a windowless conference room at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health last Thursday, Amanda Spickard, an associate dean, sat with half a dozen colleagues, improvising a plan for the havoc about to unfold.

Within a few hours, more than 130 researchers at the graduate school would receive emails canceling the federal funding for their work. No other division of the university relies as heavily on government support, and Ms. Spickard’s team was all too aware that the loss of tens of millions of dollars would end careers, halt progress toward medical breakthroughs and reshape the institution.

As recently as a few weeks ago, everyone at the table had been consumed with other tasks in the Office of Research Strategy and Development, smoothing wrinkles with lab equipment or scientific journals for faculty members, who number nearly 200, and other researchers. Those concerns now seemed quaint and distant.

“Other work has ground to a halt, because this is all-consuming,” Ms. Spickard said. “We’re professional troubleshooters, but now for 190 people at the same time, all facing an existential crisis.”

Since April 14, when Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands from the Trump administration, the Chan School had braced for a crackdown. The administration promised to freeze more than $2 billion in grants and contracts to the entire university; the public health school had been slated to receive more than $200 million in federal grants and contracts in the current fiscal year.

The administration has argued that wealthy universities like Harvard, which has a $53 billion endowment, should be able to fund their work without the help of the federal government. In a recent letter to Harvard, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, wrote that the university “should have no sorun using its overflowing endowment to fund its bloated bureaucracy.”