Senators and students sound the alarm on National Institutes of Health cuts

A memo sent out to University of New Mexico researchers Friday urged them to spend all of their federal National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding as uncertainty looms over what income streams from Washington, D.C., to the largest college in New Mexico will remain.

That same day, a small crowd of citizens, students and faculty gathered at the UNM campus to send letters to their congresspeople asking them to “stand up” against funding freezes and cuts being implemented by the Trump administration. Approximately $36 million has been eliminated through NIH grant cuts at UNM in recent weeks, according to James Holloway, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs.

“These grants support our understanding of the health of New Mexicans and advance our capacity to improve health outcomes across our state. … Our dedicated faculty and research staff are assessing what work they can continue, but losses of this magnitude cannot be easily or quickly replaced,” Holloway said in a statement.

One of the students affected by those cuts was Khia Yang, a third-year Ph.D. student researching neurosciences via an NIH T32 Institutional Training Grant that she said was part of the federal funding slashes.

“This training program allowed students of underrepresented backgrounds to get three years of funding for their first three years of their Ph.D as part of the Biomedical Sciences graduate program,” Yang said. “It gives me a lot of concern for the future.”

The Trump administration has effectively cut $2.7 billion in NIH funding in the first three months of 2025, according to a new Senate committee report authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. New Mexico’s Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján criticized President Donald Trump’s preliminary budget request, which proposed cutting funds for the NIH by $18 billion.

Trump’s budget proposal says NIH has “broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies.”

“NIH research would align with the president’s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism,” the budget proposal reads.

Researchers at the university are “perpetually bobbing and weaving,” in response to updates from funding agencies, according to the UNM memo. The latest change is extensions on deadlines for spending NIH grants have been temporarily disabled, so the university is encouraging its researchers to spend their grant money by the original deadlines.

Kalina Fahey was one of the event organizers and is a postdoctoral researcher at UNM focused on LGBTQ health.

“It’s a group that experiences significant health burden because of their marginalization in society. So to just say that’s not a priority is really hard to hear and really frustrating,” Fahey said.

Because she doesn’t expect LGBTQ-related research grants to get approved over the next four years, Fahey is shifting gears, working on a grant application not focused on LGBTQ people. Instead, it looks at alcohol use in young adults.

Postdoctoral research fellow Nina Christie, another event organizer, is concerned about recruiting future scientists into the field.

“We’re now making it nearly impossible for early career people to see this as a stable or reasonable field to go into for their career,” Christie said.

While not a student, Jackie Hertel, a retired Albuquerque resident, came to UNM on Friday to support the effort.

“There’s not going to be much of a future for them, as far as having freedoms and democracy and having a government that they can vote in and hope to have some impact, if they don’t act now,” Hertel said.