During a visit to the renowned medical campus in Aurora, U.S. Rep. Jason Crow sounded the alarm Tuesday over proposed Trump administration health and research cuts. The loss of federal funding could lead to a brain drain of health providers who also conduct research, the Democrat said.
CU Chancellor Don Elliman said the forecast is still cloudy since cuts were first announced after the new administration started.
“It's a tremendous amount of uncertainty, a lot of anxiety,” he said. “We've had some job eliminations, not a huge number yet because we've increased what we call our ‘bridge programs’ to carry people over when their grant is not funding their position.”
Scientists who study things like cancer and Alzheimer's disease often also treat patients — and research funding helps pay to employ them.
Crow toured labs at the CU Anschutz medical campus and met with scientists and top administrators. Thanks to federal research funding, Colorado can attract world-class health providers.
“Coloradans will be directly impacted by the proposed cuts because we will not have that talent anymore if this happens,” Crow said.
The representative said the potential cuts cause “a chilling effect…on the talent pipeline for both the clinical work and the research work that's done here on campus.”
He said millions of Americans could be impacted by the research cuts, and that includes Coloradans whose health has benefited from advances made by its scientists.
At CU Anschutz that includes “teams researching how to cure blindness, how to treat diabetes, how to stop the transmission of infectious diseases, just to name a few, right?” Crow said. “All of these things would be catastrophically impacted if some of the proposed cuts actually go through.”
The economic impact could be considerable.
Funding to Colorado institutions from the National Institutes of Health is more than $575 million a year. That’s according to United for Medical Research, a coalition of research institutions, patient and health advocates and private industry.
The federal research investment directly supports more than 7,000 jobs in the state and supports $1.56 billion in economic activity, the group reported.
The agency responsible for much of the nation’s investment in research is the National Institutes of Health, which is a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. Last month, the administration announced a major restructuring of HHS and cutting of 20,000 full-time jobs, about a quarter of its workforce.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. characterized it as part of a push for efficiency.
"We aren't just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic," Kennedy said in the news release. "This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer."
The outlook for research funding in Colorado: uncertain
What that means for research institutions like CU Anschutz, Colorado State University, National Jewish Health and the University of Denver is unclear. In February, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser sued the administration, saying it was "unlawfully cutting funds that support groundbreaking medical and public health research.”
A CU Anschutz spokesperson was unable to provide specific details of cuts to research funding when this story was published.
“We've had a number of grant terminations. We've had a number of stop-work orders. We've had a bunch of areas in sensitive areas that we knew were threatened that had been pulled,” Elliman said. “The bigger issue is what's coming down. There've been almost no grant meetings since the inauguration. So the delay in all the future funding, we've lost at least a quarter (of the year) in terms of timing of when those grants are going to be awarded and new grants and renewals when they will be starting to flow through.”
Still, Elliman said though some research has stopped or been curtailed, the focus of those working on the medical campus is unchanged.
“Our message to the people on campus is that we have a mission, and we're going to figure out a way to continue to do our mission to the best of our ability. To the people beyond this campus, I would say the same thing,” Elliman said.
Other research institutions, like Harvard, have begun fighting back against potential funding cuts. Harvard University announced Monday that it had filed suit to stop a federal freeze on more than $2 billion in grants, saying it would defy a Trump administration push to limit activism on campus.
More than 200 college presidents signed a letter backing Harvard, including the leader of Colorado College, calling the administration’s efforts “unprecedented government overreach.”
CPR News asked whether CU might sign it as well. “We don't have $50 billion in the bank. I mean, I'm respectful of Harvard's position. I understand it. If I were in their shoes, I might do the same thing, but I'm not,” Elliman said. “We can't live without federal funding. I mean the clinical side of the house could, but it would suffer mightily over time and even in the near term by the degradation of the research enterprise.”
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