Academic Unions Fight Public Health Funding Cuts at NIH

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Jeff Rosenberg: We are joined today by Neal Sweeney. Neal is an Organizer in the UAW Higher Education Department, and was formerly the President of UAW Local 5810, the union of postdocs and academic researchers across the University of California system, which has since merged with UAW Local 2865 (student workers) to form UAW Local 4811.

You work with academic workers at national research labs, including the National Institute of Health (NIH), as well as members across some of the largest research universities – many of which rely heavily on National Institute of Health (NIH) funding to carry out their work. The Trump administration’s attacks on federal programs and funding – which have included everything from Medicaid and Free School Lunch to Social Security and Head Start – have recently hit research funding hard including at NIH.

What have the attacks on NIH and other research funding looked like so far and what has this meant for these workers?

Neal Sweeney: Federal research funding totaled about $200 billion last year, about a quarter of that going to NIH. These funds are mostly distributed via grants to universities, while some of it funds projects at federal facilities run by NIH and the Department of Energy. Federal funding in many ways acts as a subsidy to private companies — supporting the basic research that later leads to marketable drugs and inventions — but also allows space for vitally important research that does not have an immediate profit motive.

One example of this is the development of the triple-cocktail of HIV drugs (each patented by a different company) which was developed by NIH-funded researchers in the 1990s that changed the course of AIDS from a death sentence to a more manageable condition. At the time, several pharmaceutical firms were searching for their own “silver bullet” drug and refused to combine their drugs with those that would benefit a different company.

The attacks on research funding from the Trump administration have taken several forms including cuts and and freezes to NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF) research grants as well as attacks on federal employees who work at NIH facilities. We’ve seen grants frozen or cancelled based on clearly political reasons — such as grants that fund environmental protection efforts and those examining the impacts of racism and gender-based discrimination — while at the same time the process of approving any new grant has ground to a halt. You can see this by looking at grant approval rates. For the week of February 3-10, 2024 NIH issued 513 grant awards totalling $218 million that funded cancer research, clinical trials and much more. Over the same week in 2025, they only issued 11 grants for a total of $5 million.

These disruptions and attacks in many cases came without warning and have caused fear and chaos. For researchers funded by the National Science Foundation, in late January they realized that their online payment portal — the system for receiving monthly pay — was suddenly taken down. For researchers at NIH facilities, just hours after the inauguration they were ordered to cancel all meetings and communications, stop ordering any lab supplies and stop all hiring, even for job candidates who were in the final stages of a months’ long hiring process.

Trump also announced on February 7 that he was immediately cutting the NIH budget by $4 billion (about an 8% cut) by slashing the parts of grants that support lab overhead. These funds are essential for labs to function and include funding for staff salaries, lab health and safety protections, facilities maintenance and lab equipment. These cuts would impact a huge portion of the funding that makes academic research possible. The University of California system received $2.6 billion in NIH funding in 2024, making up about half of all research funding across UC. While this funding cut is currently blocked by a court order, the order is only temporary and academic workers have been organizing to make sure the cuts don't go back into effect. A coalition of academic worker unions — Labor for Higher Education — is holding coast-to-coast demonstrations in a day-of-action on February 19th to demand: Hands off our healthcare, research and jobs!

JR: How do you anticipate university administrations will respond to this crisis and what does that mean for what our unions can do?

NS: When faced with a crisis — and a major cut to NIH funding definitely qualifies — university administrations are often two-faced. They say the right things publicly — calling for an end to the cuts in this case, or decrying attacks on immigrants in another — but behind these scenes it’s a different story. Time and time again they have used Trump’s attacks to further their agenda. Like using the assault on federal Title IX regulations in attempts to weaken contractual protections against discrimination and harassment. Or claiming that Trump’s attacks on science budgets mean they need to cut salaries and jobs, despite holding billions in “rainy day funds” or continuing to pay executives bloated salaries. While universities want the workers to believe that they are “not the bad guys here,” it’s important we as organizers to draw this out and make sure the workers see the bosses for who they truly are and how they use a crisis to their advantage.

In this case, university executives certainly don’t want to see NIH funds cut – especially concerning Trump’s caps on grant overhead or “indirect costs” that fund many parts of university operations. While we may regularly argue with the university’s budgeting process and priorities in negotiations, the reality is that these caps on overhead spending will result in massive cuts to overall funding which support our research work, and only contribute to a crisis of austerity on our campuses. Whenever there is an austerity crisis, the boss will make decisions to prioritize where those cuts are felt. Our unions need to be ready to organize and fight to ensure we don’t bear the brunt of these attacks, and, of course, to fight them from coming down in the first place.

JR: What is the real motivation behind these cuts?

NS: While the attacks on universities have intensified in the past few years — in part due to the convenience of academia as a political enemy and scapegoat — Trump’s agenda on cutting research funding has remained essentially consistent from his first term. Each year in office he has proposed drastic reductions to research funding. While the stated motivation of cutting NIH funding is to “save money”, this is demonstrably false. The impact of such drastic cuts will lead to job loss and other negative impacts to the economy that will negate any potential “savings.” Instead, it’s important to see these as a political attack using research funding as a tool. The announcement of caps to indirect costs lines up nearly word-for-word with a section of Project 2025 that claims research budgets help fund universities’ “leftist agendas.”

In addition, I think we can see this as part of an attack on public health more generally. Especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, business interests have increasingly seen public health measures as antithetical to their interests and bottom line. This has long been true when we consider the efforts by communities to stop companies from polluting the air, water, and land or poisoning our food and communities. However, the pandemic drove this into stark contrast when corporate interests pushed to reopen and attempted to keep the economy running full steam during a global health crisis. Attacks on public funding for health research is another way in which corporations are attempting to operate with total impunity and remove any of the measures that hold them back from doing whatever they want.

JR: Academic workers have been organizing in record numbers in recent years, reaching an incredible 60% union density in the private sector and nearly 40% overall among graduate student-workers, and nearly as high among postdocs now. As Trump attacks academia and the right of grad workers to unionize, how do you think this battle will unfold and how will it be different from Trump’s first term?

NS: When Trump took office in 2017, one his first actions was to impose a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries that ended up impacting a number of UAW academic workers. The day this was announced, I was traveling back to San Francisco from Los Angeles with other union members after attending a union meeting. At the meeting, we had planned and strategized about the new political terrain and how to fight back against the coming attacks. Both LAX and SFO airports were filled with protesters and we joined them, chanting for hours until our throats were sore. The protests caught on like wildfire across the country and a court soon blocked the travel ban. While there was a lot of fear as to what Trump might do, this showed to me how we can organize to stop him.

Eight years later, our unions are much stronger now, both numerically and organizationally. The ranks of unionized academic workers have swelled and fought to win contracts by creating strike threats or going on strike, including my local in 2022 and again in 2024. While university management previously tried to scare academic workers into thinking striking “would hurt their careers” and “wouldn’t work” this lie has been thoroughly smashed. It’s now clear that the strike weapon is just as important for academic workers as in other sectors. After the groundswell of organizing with many unions building a strike threat to win contracts, academic unions are even more ready to fight back than eight years ago.

With the flurry of attacks coming down against all working people, we as organizers and union members have a special duty to fight for all working people and bring others into the fight too. For academic workers, our next step in this fight will be the nationwide protests on February 19th where we’ll be demanding “Hands off our healthcare, jobs and research!” These actions will be a stepping-stone to further organizing because that’s what it will take to stop these cuts and to win fair working conditions on college campuses.