The Trump administration has terminated $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, spurring the nation’s top spender on research and development to plan layoffs and cancel health projects, from breast-feeding support efforts in Baltimore to mosquito-net programs in Mozambique.
The economy in Baltimore city, where the university anchors the innovation sector and is the area’s largest private employer, is likely to see more ripple effects as a result, according to local groups.
It is a preview of what university administrators across the country expect at their campuses if the Trump administration prevails in court challenges and continues to target institutions of higher education through cuts to federal grants. The administration already canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia University last week over the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, part of a series of recent moves aimed at institutions.
“Johns Hopkins has bet very heavily on a century and a quarter of partnership with the federal government,” said Dr. Theodore Iwashyna, a critical-care physician at Johns Hopkins who is currently overseeing an NIH grant to study how best to send pneumonia patients home so they don’t end up re-hospitalized. “If the federal government decides it doesn’t want to know things anymore, that would be bad for Johns Hopkins and devastating for Maryland.”
The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment. Johns Hopkins’s work received scrutiny from Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk on his X platform last month, when he remarked on the closure of a transgender health clinic in India that the school helped run. “That’s what American tax dollars were funding,” he wrote.
Universities are already challenging some of the Trump administration’s cuts to institutions. In February, 13 schools including Johns Hopkins sued health agencies over a plan to severely cut how NIH support dollars for research, known as “indirect costs,” are awarded. The university stands to lose another $200 million if the cuts go through, a university administrator estimated in court filings. The NIH cuts are on pause while the legal challenge, from various universities, medical centers, and multiple state attorneys general, plays out.
Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 “to foster independent and original research” and now spends more than $3 billion annually on that effort—more than any other U.S. school, according to data from the National Science Foundation. Scientists at the school invented cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, confirmed the authenticity of the Dead Sea Scrolls, introduced the rubber glove to surgery and landed the first spacecraft on an asteroid. Twenty-nine people with links to the institution have won Nobel Prizes.
Now the sprawling institution is among big U.S. research centers bracing for wide-ranging changes.
Nearly half of the school’s incoming funds last year were from research done on behalf of the federal government, said Johns Hopkins President Ronald Daniels said in a March 4 letter.
“The breadth and depth of this historic relationship means that cuts to federal research will affect research faculty, students, and staff and will ripple through our university,” he wrote.
The nonprofit JHPIEGO worked to improve health in more than 20 countries in Africa, nine countries in Asia and Ecuador and Guatemala.
A long list of Johns Hopkins’ USAID-funded projects have already been halted, including a nearly complete eight-year effort with half a billion dollars in funding to convince people in more than 50 countries to adopt behaviors such as sleeping under mosquito nets in Mozambique, breast-feeding in Baltimore and using contraception in Nigeria.
Another project halted: An effort to provide chlorine tablets and soapy water and messages about good hygiene to help prevent diarrhea deaths in Bangladesh.
“A lot of what has been broken in the last six to eight weeks is not repairable,” said Dr. Judd Walson, who chairs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s department of international health, which oversaw the Bangladesh hygiene project. “It’s going to look very very different structurally, and it’s going to look very different in terms of our financial model.”
The local impact would reach far and wide: In 2022, Johns Hopkins affiliates accounted for over 93,600 jobs and over $15 billion in economic output in Maryland, according to the figures in the institution’s latest economic impact report.
Cuts to research “would be devastating for the commercial ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem in Baltimore,” said Mike Rosenbaum, a university trustee and founder and CEO of Arena Analytics, a company based in Baltimore that applies AI to the healthcare job market.
“The kind of work that other companies like us in Baltimore do are heavily reliant on the kinds of innovation that comes out of universities like Hopkins, and the relationship between Hopkins and the federal government.”
Write to Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com and Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com
