The Trump administration’s pause on federal grants could have put a halt on research and innovation efforts taking place at Oregon universities.
On Jan. 27, the Trump administration ordered the temporary pause of federal financial assistance, grants and loans until agencies and organizations receiving federal funds could provide evidence that the money wasn’t going toward anything that defied the president’s stream of confusing executive orders.
According to a memo from the Office of Management and Budget, federal funding could not be used for “financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology and the green new deal.”
Until organizations could prove they would not use “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies,” the memo reads, government funding would not be dispersed.
“‘Transgenderism’ is a term appropriated by opponents of transgender equality to inaccurately and harmfully imply that being trans is a political ideology, rather than an authentic aspect of one’s personhood,” according to LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLAAD.
Public research universities such as the University of Oregon and Oregon State University rely heavily on a mixture of federal and state funding for their research and innovation programs.
“We’re looking closely at each executive order and agency request to understand the potential impacts on the groundbreaking research conducted by our faculty and benefiting the citizens of Oregon and beyond,” Eric Howald, UO’s assistant director of issues management, writes in an email to Eugene Weekly.
According to the OSU’s 2024 Research and Innovation Annual Report, the university received $370 million in federal research awards. In 2023, the OSU received more funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation — an independent federal agency established by Congress in 1950 — than any other Oregon university combined.
In response to the pause on federal funding, the OSU released a statement to community members written by Irem Tumer, OSU’s vice president for research and innovation, and Jennifer Creighton, OSU’s associate vice president for research administration, finance and operations.
“The university is gathering information and guidance from federal agencies on immediate and potential impacts to sponsored research,” they write. “Given Oregon State’s reputation and preeminent status as an institution dedicated to advancing research of utmost importance to the state, the nation and the world, even a temporary pause on the issuance of new awards and on the disbursement of federal funds for open awards has broad impacts across the university.”
The UO, by comparison, received $177 million in research awards in 2024, 91 percent of which came from the federal government.
EW reached out to Oregon Research Institute, a Springfield-based nonprofit behavioral science research center that receives federal funding and is a research partner of the UO, via phone and email and have not heard back. The facility appeared closed Tuesday, Jan. 28.
Gov. Tina Kotek said in a press conference Jan. 28 that she could not speak to the specifics of how different programs would be affected by the freeze, but that Oregon wouldn’t “do anything until we know exactly what that means.
“The messages coming out of the federal government are completely unclear,” Kotek says. “We have no guidance. Those executive orders are very broad. We are getting one and a half page memos about how we must stop all things.”
On Wednesday, Jan. 29, the Trump administration rescinded the temporary freeze it had imposed, but agencies receiving federal funding are still expected to evaluate and prove that they’re not using government resources to further anything “woke” in nature.