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Rutgers warns research, NIH grants and clinical trials are already being disrupted by federal pauses and staffing cuts
Summary
Rutgers officials told the joint committees that reduced federal staffing, paused grant actions and executive guidance are delaying NIH and other federal research processes, threatening clinical trials, research jobs and university services that serve millions of residents.
Rutgers University officials told New Jersey legislators that federal staffing reductions, funding pauses and uncertainty over executive guidance are causing immediate disruptions in research, clinical trials and grant administration.
Francine Pfeiffer, Rutgers' senior vice president for government relations, told the joint Senate–Assembly higher education committees that the university receives roughly $286 million a year in NIH funding and nearly $70 million from NSF. She said that across the university there are more than 4,500 active clinical trials and that delays in grant review and council meetings — many cancelled or postponed — are slowing awards and, in some cases, pausing research activities.
Pfeiffer said Rutgers has received stop‑work requests and funding adjustments on some grants and reported cases where researchers could not access federal data sets they rely on to complete work. She gave examples including maternal‑health research and cancer studies that have had to pause data collection or laboratory work because of funding or data access interruptions.
Witnesses warned that proposals to cap facilities and administrative (F&A) cost reimbursements — the negotiated overhead rate that helps pay for research facilities, administrative support and compliance — would be harmful. Pfeiffer said a policy capping F&A at an arbitrary rate would force universities either to subsidize research with other funds or to reduce research activity; she called the F&A reimbursement process a negotiated, fact‑based mechanism and said an arbitrary cap would undermine research capacity.
Rutgers officials also described operational impacts to patient care and VA benefits processing tied to federal agency workforce decisions; Pfeiffer said delays in VA processing are causing multi‑week waits for GI Bill benefits that some student veterans rely on for cost of living support.
Committee members asked Rutgers to provide follow‑up details about which grants had stop‑work orders, the scale of paused clinical trials and the economic multiplier effects of research funding. Rutgers said it would supply more granular data to the committees.
