The Abridged version:
- Federal cuts from the Trump administration have affected programs and research at UC Davis.
- The university lost about 10% of its overall grant funding over the past year, a steeper decline than all but one of the other UC campuses.
- The funding cuts make some programs less stable and limit the university’s pipeline of top-tier scientists.
A program that encourages undergraduates to become research scientists. A center that helps disadvantaged communities access green transportation options like electric cars. A lab that improves access to healthy fruits and vegetables for impoverished communities abroad.
Those are just a few of the programs at UC Davis targeted by federal funding cuts in the last 18 months.
UC Davis received less grant money in fiscal year 2025 than during any of the previous 15 years, after adjusting for inflation, the latest UC system data shows.
Federal, state, nonprofit and private awards totaled $961 million in fiscal year 2025, down about 10% from the previous year.
Among the 10 UC campuses, only one, the University of California at San Francisco, saw a larger decline in award funding than UC Davis. The entire system saw a 6% decrease in grant funding.
“All of this has created a very unpredictable, unstable environment,” said Simon Atkinson, UC Davis vice chancellor for research.
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The federal government remains, by far, the largest source of grants to UC Davis. It has recently slashed research budgets and, critics say, politicized the process of supporting research. Trump administration officials argue that they are reducing wasteful spending.
Awards from the California state government to UC Davis also declined, though that was largely due to a drop in pass-through funding from the federal government, Atkinson said.
Grant funding in fiscal year 2026 will likely be similar to the relatively low levels seen in 2025, Atkinson said.
UC Davis remains a research powerhouse, consistently ranking among the 40 American universities spending the most on research. UC Davis scientists recently helped Alzheimer’s patients remain active, crafted a potential vaccine against a deadly disease in cats and assisted farmers looking for safe, abundant groundwater supplies.
But it is more difficult to produce scientific breakthroughs without adequate, reliable support.
“Researchers thrive on predictable funding,” Atkinson said. “You do research because you don’t yet know the answers.”
Vital research threatened
One of the first research programs targeted by the Trump administration was the UC Davis National Center for Sustainable Transportation. Along with its partners, the center studies the effects of transportation on the environment and tries to make sure green technology reaches disadvantaged communities, among many other projects.
In early 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that he was terminating seven “woke university grants,” including $12 million in funding for the UC Davis center.
In October, a federal judge halted the funding cuts.
Even with court intervention, funding opportunities have narrowed. In an interview earlier this year, Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, said the Trump administration told him and others that federal funding could not support research into climate change, equity, decarbonization, electric vehicles or environmental justice.
Much of Tal’s research focuses on those topics. Citing an example that he said “makes me kind of cry,” Tal said he was told to remove references to reducing vehicle miles traveled from research into improving bike infrastructure. The Trump administration has focused more on making cars with combustion engines more affordable by reducing fuel economy standards than on reducing the number of cars on the road.
In another prominent example, UC Davis shut down its Feed the Future Innovation Labs about a year ago. The labs helped increase the resilience of small farms in Africa and Asia, tested and released new types of drought-resistant crops, developed tools for safely storing food and trained farmers from around the world.
The labs were largely funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was gutted early in the Trump administration. Atkinson said UC Davis had a large number of programs dependent on USAID grants, which is one possible reason why the university lost a higher proportion of its funding in 2025 than many other UC schools.
Training future scientists
Besides the hit to research, the funding cuts have hampered UC Davis’ ability to produce world class scientists.
Atkinson said that the number of graduate students in many research fields starting at UC Davis in the fall will likely decrease by about 20% to 30%, though official data is not yet available.
“If students have been anticipating going into one of those programs and they are no longer available, that will make someone think seriously about whether a career in research is right for them,” Atkinson said.
For instance, the National Institutes of Health cut about $1.3 million in funding for a number of student programs in the College of Biological Sciences.
The cuts included funding that helped students transition from community college to UC Davis, a program that prepared undergraduate students for graduate study in aging research and a program that gave post-undergraduate students extra time and lab coursework to improve their chances of earning a doctorate degree, said Mark Winey, the outgoing dean of the College of Biological Sciences.
Some of those programs have continued in a more limited capacity using donor and industry funds, Winey said.
“We don’t have the type of money that came with the NIH grants for the extra staff, for the tutoring and the other types of support that the students receive,” Winey said. “What we’re able to maintain puts more work on the faculty, and we’re just serving fewer students.”
Winey said some of the graduate programs at the college are seeing a decline in new students and “maybe have a quarter of the students they would have brought in during recent years.”
Graduate students often rely on fellowships or teaching assistant gigs to help pay their bills, but decreased funding and a push for higher wages has led to fewer opportunities.
“The strategy largely has been to reduce the number of graduate students,” Winey said.
Looking ahead
The UC system is pushing hard for a Senate bill that would put a $12 billion research bond measure on the November ballot to make up for federal funding losses. The deadline for getting the measure on the ballot has passed but supporters said in late June a deal may still be possible.
In the meantime, UC officials are encouraging faculty to look for other sources of revenue, like corporate funding. But that funding has historically not been as reliable or as expansive as federal funding.
“Industry — they have a bottom line,” Atkinson said. “It is very targeted toward strategies that support the bottom line. It is hard to get funding for fundamental research, nor does industry tend to support workforce development.”
Atkinson and Winey do still see reasons for optimism. Atkinson said that Congress and the federal court system have blocked many of the funding cuts proposed by the Trump administration. “If you had asked me in April of ’25, I would have expected things to be much worse,” he said.
Winey said funding cuts will not erase the demand for good science, so he continues to encourage students to pursue advanced study.
“There will be opportunities,” he said. “There may be some tough patches, but there’s going to be careers there for sure.”
Phillip Reese is a regular contributor, writing Numbers Matter for Abridged.