As the new school year begins, Georgia researchers are still reeling after the Department of Government Efficiency made deep cuts to federal university research funding earlier this year.
Many universities have canceled research that was already underway and reduced work opportunities for students and early career scientists while they navigate the fallout.
“We are going to lose a generation of scientists, engineers and medical professionals,” Emory University professor Eri Saikawa told Channel 2’s Michael Doudna. “The U.S. had the capability to lead, and now I just worry that that’s not going to happen.”
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As an environmental scientist, Saikawa’s research reaches far beyond the classroom. From sampling for lead in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhood to working with Atlanta COPD patients to study their exposure to chemicals to collaborating with farmers in north Georgia to find new methods for weed control, her work is deeply integrated in Georgia communities.
When Channel 2 spoke to Saikawa in July, her office in Emory’s Mathematics and Science Center was doing double duty as a storage unit for boxes of research equipment that she says should be in farmers’ fields.
“I’d like to be a part of being a good steward of the land,” Laura Bramblett said.
Her and her family operate a 600-acre farm in North Georgia in Hart County.
“We didn’t spray any herbicides, no pesticides. We wanted to produce a clean product, one without chemicals,” she said. “I value that, and I think that as a society we’re moving more towards that.”
In addition to their beef business, the Bramblett’s farm is now growing vegetables like squash and tomatoes for the first time ever thanks to funding from a grant given to Saikawa’s lab.
“We’re learning what works, what doesn’t work,” Bramblett said.
Under the program, Bramblett would get support for supplies and equipment to study the effects of using a new weed management method experimenting with using a plastic mulch layer near the plants’ roots to potentially fight weeds and capture greenhouse gases in the field.
That project was well underway when the grant was cut.
“It left us in limbo unfortunately,” Bramblett said. “I had planned to use that money towards labor. Things are out of pocket.”
Bramblett had expected a payment in spring that never came, and she said that the uncertainty after not anticipating those costs has been difficult. Her farm eventually did receive the plants and put them in the ground, but the financial support beyond that has stopped.
Now, the equipment for the project is in storage scattered across the state: in Saikawa’s office, in Emory hallways and in farmers’ sheds.
In all, $2 million worth of tools are now collecting dust instead of data.
In the past, federal funding made it possible for Saikawa to offer students part time work in her lab, where they would assist with research and train to be scientists. Without the grant money, Saikawa says her lab can’t pay people to use the equipment to keep the study moving.
“The research scientist Alex Avramov, he built everything from scratch,” Saikawa said. “For that to be just taken away and sitting then, like here some of them in my office, it’s just such a waste of money and time and resources.”
When the federal government revoked funding they had promised to support projects that Saikawa’s lab works on, she had to rethink how to offer students opportunities in her lab over the summer and into the new school year.
“I think what I’m most worried about is the students and the young trainees and the early career scientists, because they are the ones that were going to form the future,” she said.
Federal research funding can support university projects in multiple ways. While Georgia universities lost over $80 million in direct grant cuts, they also lost additional funding from collaborative projects when universities were sharing funds with other grant recipients like state agencies and nonprofit groups.
Because this money is often distributed through a second grant process led by the initial grant winner, this funding is called sub-award funding, and it isn’t tracked by DOGE’s savings dashboard.
This downstream money is much harder to track in general despite how much researchers rely on this money to fund their projects.
“I think that the Trump administration has taken a global look at federal spending across the board and has made smart decisions about where you need to make these targeted cuts,” Georgia GOP chair Josh McKoon said. “They’ve looked at every aspect of government to be fair, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s education — these are huge slices of the federal government’s spending. You can’t simply say they’re going to be off limits if you’re actually going to make any progress in fiscal discipline.”
Conservatives have long pushed to reduce the scope of federal spending and to only allow funding for projects that are explicitly authorized by Congress. Under the second Trump administration, universities have seen funding pulled in sweeping actions targeting specific administration priorities.
Many grants were targeted for including language about issues like gender identity, diversity — all key political issues that drove President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.
In some instances, projects that even mentioned these words in their research proposals ended up having to pull the plug.
After the cuts began earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the NIH, representing a slew of plaintiffs including the American Public Health Association and the United Auto Workers union.
The lawsuit challenged a wave of cuts that came following Health and Human Services directives. According to one of the directives issued February 10, 2025, former acting HHS head Dorothy Fink instructed staff to begin “avoiding the expenditure of federal funds on programs, or with contractors or vendors, that take part in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”
The ACLU lawsuit, along with another brought by 16 state attorneys general, came to a head in late August when the Supreme Court overturned a district court ruling that would have blocked the National Institutes of Health from making broad cuts to that research.
According to analysis from the Association of American Medical Colleges, its members had already lost an estimated $3.8 billion in cuts by June 10, largely due to the NIH cuts challenged by the ACLU.
In all, Georgia universities saw $80 million in direct cuts according to Channel 2 Investigates analysis of publicly available savings data on doge.gov at the end of June. Emory University received almost half of those direct cuts at $38.4 million, with the Georgia State Research Foundation losing $22.7 million.
Of the grants cut at Emory, most were for projects funded by agencies under HHS, which governs both the NIH and the Atlanta based CDC. Savings data shows that they cut nearly $35 million worth of HHS money promised to Emory that will now be halted or returned to the federal government. That accounted for more than 90% of all direct cuts at Emory University at the time.
More recently in August, Emory was included in a wave of HHS cuts as part of the federal government’s wind down of mRNA vaccine development, adding to the list of at least 30 other direct grants Channel 2 investigates identified in the DOGE savings data.
The full effect of these cuts won’t be felt this calendar year. Many grants are promised to the university over a several year period to complete various projects that the federal agencies deem important enough to provide financial assistance toward. Saikawa’s lab had projects get cut even though they were already under way.
To access those funds, universities and researchers in the past would apply to open calls for projects from a federal agency.
Those open calls have slowed dramatically under the Trump administration which has used executive action to block this spending despite Congress allocating budgets to fund projects that the agencies deem important.
“I think we’ve got to be smart about how we invest these resources,” McKoon said. “It’s not that the federal government is totally abandoning grantmaking for higher education.”
But outside the halls of government and in the fields of north Georgia, abandonment is the least of Bramblett’s concerns.
“It’ll be time to get other things in the ground before long, no matter what route we take,” Bramblett said. “We thought, if we can do things better, if we could try something new, then let’s do it. We want to make good decisions that are better for everybody.”
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