Weeks after President Donald Trump's administration ordered the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pull $250 million in biomedical research grants to Columbia University, the agency is freezing all remaining grant money owed to the university until further notice, according to internal documents seen by Science.
Last month, White House began to pressure Columbia over its handling of anti-Israel protests and other allegations of antisemitism at the university, saying it was killing $400 million in federal grants to the school, including the NIH money. NIH terminated approximately 400 grants to Columbia on 12 March and ordered their researchers to stop work on them.
Yesterday, NIH raised the stakes: At the behest of its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH will not only block new funding for the university, but also stop paying investigators working on all existing NIH projects. Although these researchers will not be ordered to stop work, they will need prior approval from NIH to draw from existing disbursements, according to an NIH source. A Columbia spokesperson declined to comment.
In an 8 April email seen by Science, NIH's Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration Director Michelle Bulls told grant administrators that HHS had initially ordered NIH to terminate the first "wave" of grants to Columbia and hold others while the school negotiated with the government. Now, she said, no NIH awards can be made to Columbia until the restriction is lifted. In 2024, Columbia received about $690 million in grant funding from NIH.
