Trump-Era Budget Cuts Suspend UCLA Professor’s Mental Health Research Grant

UC Los Angeles Psychology professor Carrie Bearden is among many whose work has been stalled due to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to universities across the country.

“I just feel this constant whiplash every single day,” Bearden said. “The bedrock, the foundation of everything that we're doing, is really being shaken on a daily basis … To see that at an institutional level is really shocking. Yes, we saw it coming with these other institutions, but I think everybody's still sort of in a state of shock.”

She researches early risk factors for developmental neuropsychiatric disorders in her lab with several undergraduate and graduate students. Still, her lab lost almost 20 people after their training grant had been suspended. Though she has enough people to continue her research, Bearden said the lab’s work has been paused as she and other professors attempt every avenue to keep their student researchers and assist professors whose entire work has been stalled by funding cuts.

UCLA is the first public university to face funding cuts from the Trump administration. And though a judge restored the university’s lost grant funding from the National Science Foundation, funding cuts from the National Institute of Health and the Department of Energy remain in place. A total of 700 grants were suspended, and 300 were restored after the judge’s ruling.

The federal government has been cutting funding from multiple universities, including Harvard, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins University, citing alleged antisemitism on campuses and demanding changes to admissions practices, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, as well as the curriculum.

“This is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants. It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do,” UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk wrote in a press release from July 31.

The administration is requiring $1 billion and several policy changes to restore funding to UCLA. Trump’s unprecedented intervention within higher education is forcing many universities to reckon their principles of academic freedom with their budget. And while Harvard University took its battle with the administration to the courts, Columbia University acquiesced to their demands. UCLA has yet to decide how to proceed against the Trump administration’s grant suspensions, though the university is in the middle of negotiations with the administration.

Third-year graduate student Dylan Hughes had been working on Bearden's research project since 2024. However, the administration’s grant suspensions revoked the training grant that had funded his participation. Now, Hughes must pause his research and, instead, serve as a teaching assistant to maintain his stipend from the university.

“I have so much on my plate as a clinical psychology student. A lot of my time is spent in clinical work, and I also have all these other research responsibilities,” Hughes said. “So an additional 20 hours of teaching, even though it's very fulfilling to me, is taking away from the time that I can be doing that research and pushing this forward — this goal of bringing early intervention to kids at risk for psychosis.”

He said the university is looking to reorganize its budget to provide labs that have lost their funding with “bridge funds” acquired internally. If sufficient bridge funds can be provided, Hughes may be able to return to the lab in the future.

Amid a mental health crisis in this country, Bearden said her work goes toward understanding the causes and mechanisms of developmental neuropsychiatric disorders, and that the Trump administration’s budget cuts come at a time when her lab is focused on critical developments.

“This is why it's so frustrating, because I think we're poised at a really, incredibly important time in research. Our research is really on brain diseases and psychiatric disorders, and then at the exact same time, this axe is being dropped on the work,” Bearden said. “It's not an understatement that we are in a mental health crisis in this country, in terms of an epidemic of suicide, serious mental illness, and the way that this is affecting adolescents, and how this is affecting brain development.”

She added that the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to UCLA don’t bode well for the rest of the University of California system’s schools and said she hopes the university doesn’t cave to Trump’s demands.

“We all want this to resolve as quickly as possible. We don't want it to resolve by saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you're right. We need to give up our academic freedom in order to put a band-aid on this,” Bearden said. “It's a mafia shakedown. [Submitting to the administration’s demands] doesn't solve the problem. Then it just goes down the list. OK, now we're gonna go hit UC Berkeley.”

Hughes said the administration’s grant suspensions come at a time when there’s a divide between scientists and the public, and that oftentimes, community and public interests are missed by researchers.

“There's distance. I think there needs to be more community engagement, whether that's having focus groups with the community, whether it's bringing scientific education to high schools from researchers or something,” Hughes said. “Science is a really important tool, and it involves the community, and I think there just needs to be just more face-to-face interaction with the community, and especially, more community engagement, where we check in with the community to see what they want to study.”

Many researchers and professors worry about the financial consequences in the near future, and what that might mean regarding layoffs. In a press release from Aug. 15, Frenk wrote that the university was already facing budgetary challenges prior to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions.

“Unfortunately, the challenges we now face come on top of a difficult few years for our university’s finances,” Frenk wrote. “Even before the suspension of our research funding, we were undertaking efforts to reduce operational costs — instituting a hiring review process, limiting travel expenditures, and putting in place a 10 percent budget reduction for administrative units.”

Even a university like Columbia, which acquiesced to the administration’s demands, laid off employees as a result of budget deficits. The cuts from the administration have altered the ability of UCLA’s professors and researchers to continue their research at the country’s number one public university.

"All these things that you take for granted day-to-day — that you're gonna have a lab, that you're gonna have a job, it's all very much in question,” Bearden said. “It's very hard to do science under those in that context."

Atmika Iyer is a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs reporting program. Atmika is also a journalism intern with the Fulcrum.

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