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 seven graduate and postdoctoral students 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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Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Carrie Bearden's lab lost 20 people.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.