‘Too important to fail.’ UTA monitors impact of federal orders on $155M in research

In a 48,000-square-foot university research facility in east Fort Worth, there are no signs — at least yet — of Trump administration executive orders and their impact on federally funded research. But with 17% of its budget coming from the federal government, the University of Texas at Arlington is already testing out scenarios where there could be “significant impacts,” university officials said, should some executive orders that are now on pause go into effect.

For now, at the University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute, also known as UTARI, research goes on same as it ever was since the institute’s beginnings during the Reagan administration in the late 1980s. UTARI, off Handley Ederville Road, is like a high-tech workshop for developing later-stage research ideas.

“Our mission is to conduct applied research activities that can benefit society,” said Eileen Clements, interim executive director of UTARI. She obtained her doctorate in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. “They’re a little further along in the development cycle, but there’s still research that needs to be done in order for them to be useful to that community stakeholder, industry partner, whatever that might be.”

The institute focuses its research in three major areas: automation, biomedical and materials. Imagine a fleet of unmanned drones communicating with one another; a silicone glove with tubes to apply drugs to severely burned hands that still allows the hand to move; or design material that is as light as a foam board but strong enough to be used on an airplane wing. All of these things are not just ideas but projects that UTA faculty and students are turning into reality.

The research hub is about 10 miles west of UTA. Over the past five years, it’s received $14 million in new awards from 15-plus government agencies. And that’s just some of the research happening at UTA, a Carnegie R1 research institution with “very high” research activity and spending. In the 2024 fiscal year alone, total research expenditures at UTA were $155 million, a 5% increase from the previous year, according to Joe Carpenter, the university’s chief communications officer.

The price tag of that research is hard to picture in real-world terms, but think of it as more than double the purchase price of Fort Worth’s new City Hall building. The city bought the former Pier 1 tower for $69.5 million in 2021.

Forty percent of that $155 million — or $62 million — is federally funded, a 10% increase from the previous year, university officials told the Report. But whether those numbers for research dollars will continue on an upward trajectory during the Trump administration is unknown.

“We’re operating kind of as normal. It’s business as usual: working on our projects, working on the research, coordinating with our program managers in all the same ways that we have,” said Clements, who has worked at the institute for 18 years.

Since President Donald Trump took office, universities across the nation have been targets for cuts, with major policy changes to college funding unfolding at a constant clip. Early on in the administration, the National Science Foundation froze payments to existing grants — a move that has since been lifted.

Federal agencies have also begun an ideological review of grants to see whether they support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, among other things. The Trump administration has called DEI programs “radical” and “wasteful,” accusing institutions of violating the spirit of federal civil rights laws. “Health disparity” is among the hundreds of terms the Trump administration is telling federal agencies to avoid or scrub from federal websites.

In February, the Trump administration announced plans to change the funding formulas that the National Institutes of Health uses to allocate funding. The proposal would cap the indirect cost rate, or the money used to fund buildings, utilities and support staff, to 15% of the grant dollars it hands out. That move is on hold and is being challenged in federal courts.

During his Senate confirmation hearing in March, new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said he would commit to ensuring that NIH scientists and NIH-funded scientists would have the support and resources they need. He would not commit to eliminating the agency’s plan to cut indirect costs by more than $4 billion, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Universities typically negotiate indirect cost rates with the federal government. Many research institutions have rates above 50%. At UTA, the negotiated rate for on-campus research is 56%, according to a UTA website. UTA could lose around $1.3 million with an indirect cost cap, according to analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A group of university researchers mapped out county and state economic impact related to the proposed cuts to NIH indirect cost rate. In Tarrant County, the loss could be $31 million, while in Dallas County it’s estimated at $116 million. The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth stands to lose $3.4 million annually from its $150 million Alzheimer’s study under a 15% cap, according to previous Fort Worth Report coverage.

Statewide, the university researcher group estimates an $856 million loss, with an anticipated nearly 3,700 jobs lost across Texas.

“There’s an army of people at UTA that allow me to do what I’m doing. And guess what they’re supported by? They’re supported by those indirect costs,” said Michael Nelson, an associate professor in kinesiology in UTA’s College of Nursing and Health Innovation who is working on a number of NIH-funded projects. He said indirect costs cover crucial elements like lights, equipment and maintenance, but also administrative tasks for the lab.

“They really make research happen. That’s the model that we’ve had for decades and decades, and that’s not going to change overnight,” he said.

At UTA, with major programs in engineering, nursing and social work, the top federal agency funders are the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

A few weeks into the Trump administration, UTA President Jennifer Cowley announced a task force that will monitor federal orders and develop guidance on the changing legal terrain. The university also created a comprehensive webpage for guidance on executive orders, from developments in different federal agencies to general research questions.

“I think for a lot of our institutions, they are trying to communicate as much as possible — to their faculty, their staff and students — about what is happening,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of government relations at American Council on Education, a membership organization with over 1,600 institutions that lobbies on key public policy issues in higher education.

“They’re trying to provide information to faculty who may be trying to decide, ‘Am I going to be applying for this NIH grant, or am I going to be looking for a graduate student to come into my lab, because I’m going to be applying for one of these grants?’”

UTA is a member of the American Council on Education, and the council was one of the organizations that filed a case against the National Institutes of Health for their indirect cost cap.

In a March 5 email to the UTA community, Cowley said higher education institutions across the nation are facing “significant uncertainty” as administrators try to plan and react to “the constantly changing environment.” Cowley said there would be no hiring freeze or pause in recruiting doctoral students this fiscal year, which ends Aug. 31, 2025. But the university is looking past the current school year.

“While we do not know what the federal budget will hold, there is the potential for cuts in federal funding, which could have a significant impact on UTA,” Cowley wrote in her email. “To ensure that we continue to thrive, we must be prepared for potential budget reductions in the next fiscal year due to changes in the federal budget, downward pressure on other revenue sources, and rising inflationary costs.”

Cowley noted that 17% of the university’s budget comes from the federal government: 8.8% for student financial aid and 8.5% for grants and contracts. She has asked the university’s budget office to engage in scenario planning and enter the budget-planning process knowing “cuts may be necessary.” To date, however, the economic impact of executive orders have been “minimal,” she wrote.

“I think you’re immediately going to see some job loss as institutions tighten their belts,” said Spreitzer, who said her organization is looking at both immediate and long-term effects of these orders. “I think the long-term concern is that you’ll have businesses, rather than being willing to locate near an R1 institution that’s pushing out innovative research that can be used to spin off businesses, they’re now going to start looking at other countries.”

Nelson hasn’t seen an impact on the research projects he’s been working on at the university. He’s studying exercise intolerance for heart failure patients, the impact of aging on human health and women’s heart health. Nelson submits over a dozen grant applications a year to the NIH and, on the university side, he hasn’t slowed down his submissions or how he submits grant applications.

“We submit what we think is going to move the community forward and move society forward, and if reviewers don’t like it, well, I don’t really want to be investigating it,” said Nelson, who has been at the university for nearly a decade. “We haven’t changed the way we do it.”

NIH employees have been warned not to approve grants that included words such as “women,” “trans” or “diversity,” according to nonprofit news organization The 19th.

“From a women’s health perspective, I hope that that’s not a dirty word. Right?” said Nelson. “I would hope that’s not a controversial thing for me to be studying, but we will see.”

Nelson hasn’t seen heightened concern on the state of research from people working in his labs. But Nelson did note that his scheduled grant reviews with the NIH got punted to a month later than the initial review date.

As a researcher, Nelson is working on the long game. He needs to focus on his projects, monitor new developments and document effects.

“It’s a waiting game,” he said. “We’re only a few weeks into all of this, and this is going to take months if not years to flesh out.”

With the data he has right now, he said, he remains “hopefully optimistic.”

“Research in the United States is too important to fail,” Nelson said.

Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report, in partnership with Open Campus. If you have a tip on the effect of executive orders on research in Tarrant County, contact her at shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.

The Report’s higher education coverage is supported in part by major higher education institutions in Tarrant County, including Tarleton State University, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M-Fort Worth, Texas Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Arlington and UNT Health Science Center.

At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.

This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.