The Trump Administration has announced a $1 billion funding freeze for Cornell “‘The money was frozen in connection with several ongoing, credible, and concerning Title VI investigations,’ a Trump admin official told Fox News.”
Cornell now joins Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, which have all been subject to federal government funding cuts. Only Yale and Dartmouth have not been subject to such cuts.
According to the New York Times, the cuts will mainly affect “grants and contracts with the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, and Health and Human Services.” While the full impact of the cuts are not known, Cornell conducts a significant amount of agricultural research and can be particularly vulnerable to this freeze. In comparison, Harvard is at risk of not receiving $9 billion in federal funding. To address this shortfall, it plans to borrow $750 million for “general corporate purposes.” Cornell could similarly be forced to increase its debt burden, which currently stands at $2.3 billion.
