Last summer and again in March, the Centers for Disease Control warned Americans to take precautions against dengue fever, a painful and potentially deadly virus common in the tropics and now on the rise in the United States.
Between 2023 and 2024, cases of dengue, also known as breakbone fever for the excruciating joint and muscle pain it causes, jumped from 3,352 to more than 10,000.
While the majority of cases in the continental U.S. were related to travel, locally acquired cases were also reported in a few states, including California. Farther south, there is a much higher rate of local transmission, with Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands declaring recent outbreaks.
For decades, Berkeley Professor Eva Harris, PhD ’93, has been studying mosquito-borne viruses like dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, all of which increasingly threaten public health in parts of the U.S. as warming trends favor the spread of the mosquitoes which carry the diseases. The research her lab is doing could be critical to devising better treatments and vaccines to protect public health.
Under the Trump administration, however, that work—and vast amounts of other health-related research being done in universities and medical schools all across the country—is suddenly in jeopardy as the White House works to slash the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funder of biomedical research in the world.
In the University of California system alone, NIH funded some $2.6 billion of research in the 2023–24 academic year.
Harris, a professor of infectious diseases and vaccinology and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called “genius award”—relies heavily on funding from the NIH. For her team, the looming cuts pose an existential threat. “If I were to lose the people in my lab, I could not restart it,” Harris said, citing the breadth of technical knowledge required to do the work. “Once you lose that expertise, you can’t [reassemble] it. It’s much easier to destroy than to rebuild.”
The driving force behind the cuts is the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, overseen by billionaire Elon Musk, which initially proposed cutting trillions of dollars from the federal government by weeding out waste, fraud, and abuse. Under Trump-appointed leadership, and in keeping with that effort, NIH announced in February its intention to cut an estimated $4 billion in NIH spending, largely by capping “indirect costs”—which go toward overhead expenses like laboratory facilities, maintenance, heat, and electricity—at 15 percent. The current rate is typically 27 to 28 percent, although top-tier universities, including Berkeley, have negotiated rates as high as 60 percent or more.
Critics see this as a waste of tax dollars. Musk calls it “a rip-off.” But a seemingly arbitrary rate of 15 percent is flatly “inadequate,” insists Berkeley professor and Nobel laureate Randy Schekman. (He also points out that Musk’s companies have received considerable federal funding, a figure the Washington Post pegged at some $38 billion.)
In a press statement, UC President Michael Drake wrote that “a cut this size is nothing short of catastrophic.” The system’s medical schools would be particularly hard hit. According to an analysis by the New York Times, UC San Francisco alone would have lost more than $120 million in 2024, had the change been implemented that year.
For now, the NIH funds have been protected thanks to a permanent injunction issued in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 22 attorneys general, including California’s Rob Bonta.
In her preliminary decision, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley called the cuts a “unilateral change over a weekend, without regard for ongoing research and clinical trials,” adding that her injunction was necessary because of “the imminent risk of halting lifesaving clinical trials, disrupting the development of innovative medical research and treatment, and shuttering of research facilities, without regard for current patient care.”
Still, damage has been done to NIH itself. More than 1,100 employees, or 6 percent of the institute’s workforce, were laid off in February, followed by an additional 200 or so workers in May. Even if funding were restored, researchers fear there may not be sufficient staffing to handle proposals and administer funding.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed cutting NIH’s budget by nearly $18 billion, or roughly 37 percent, as well as consolidating its 27 institutes and centers into five focus areas. “The University of California and universities across the country are already feeling the negative impacts from federal grant cancellations and funding disruptions that have hindered lifesaving research, limited critical patient care, and jeopardized the development of our future scientific workforce,” Drake responded in a press release, concluding that “[t]his of course marks just the first step in the federal budget process.”
Mere uncertainty over funding at both the federal and state levels (facing deficits, Sacramento has proposed cutting state support of the University of California by more than $270 million) has triggered a system-wide hiring freeze, and the effects have rippled outward.
“We accepted fewer [molecular and cell biology PhD] students than anticipated when we started our admission cycle,” Schekman said in an email. The number, he wrote, is “smaller than we need to sustain the research programs of our younger and mid-career faculty members and fewer than we will need to support our undergraduate teaching responsibilities.”
And Kelley’s injunction notwithstanding, Harris says the Trump administration has used underhanded methods to impede funding, such as restricting the NIH from posting new notices on the website that publishes meeting schedules for grant reviews. Delays in the review process and terminations of already-issued grants prompted the attorney general of Massachusetts, along with a coalition of 15 other AGs, to file another lawsuit against the Trump administration and the NIH for “unreasonable and intentional delays.”
“It’s frightening,” Harris said. “I don’t know what resources we have to respond if court injunctions don’t matter.”
Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky echoed that concern, warning of a slide into authoritarianism.
“If the Trump administration ignores court orders, then our constitutional democracy is at an end. The Trump administration literally could do anything, including lock up you and me, and ignore any court order to release us,” Chemerinsky wrote in an email. “Every university, and all of us, would then be at the mercy of a lawless dictator.”
The NIH cuts are just a small part of what many see as a full-scale attack on higher education, as evidenced by other aggressive measures, such as freezing billions of dollars in grants to Harvard after they refused to comply with White House demands and taking similar actions against other Ivy League schools, including Columbia and Princeton, over allegations of unchecked antisemitism on campus. Berkeley, too, is one of four UC campuses on a list of 60 universities being investigated for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from harassment.
The onslaught could have been anticipated. John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow and research professor at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, notes that Project 2025, the 900-page policy proposal that Trump disavowed connection to during his campaign, included plans to eviscerate or dismantle the Department of Education, order an end to DEI programs, and revoke certain foreign students’ visas—all of which is now being carried out.
In early April, UC acknowledged that dozens of students and recent graduates had their visas terminated. Local news outlets reported that more than 20 at Berkeley were affected. (Later that month, the administration reversed course, restoring legal status to more than 1,500 international students.)
Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna addresses the crowd at the Stand Up for Science rally. (Photo: Martin do Nascimento/KQED)
Douglass wrote in an email that the moves are all part of a “larger agenda of attacking and imposing MAGA’s political will on America’s academic and scientific community. Universities like Berkeley are viewed by Trump and his administration as not simply ‘the enemy’—a play that works with Trump’s base—but a source of political opposition to the emerging regime.”
While UC administrators have by and large remained cautious in their public statements thus far, Drake and the chancellors of nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, recently joined more than 600 university and college leaders around the country in cosigning a letter that pushes back “against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” writing that “we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”
Meanwhile, vocal opposition has emerged at the faculty level. In a Stand Up for Science rally on Sproul Plaza on March 7, several prominent professors spoke, including Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, who stressed the importance of government-funded science to her own career. “A training grant paid for me to go to graduate school at a time when my family from a small town in Hawaii could have never afforded it,” she told the more than 1,000 gathered.
In the Rally to Defend Our University on March 19, Berkeley Law Professor Claudia Polsky, J.D. ’96, told hundreds that “the moves from the fascist playbook are so obvious that, if deeds were words, we would call it plagiarism.”
And during the National Day of Action for Higher Education that took place on April 17, days after Harvard became the first major university to firmly reject the administration’s demands, professor emeritus of public policy Robert Reich said, “Now, if the best or near-best private university in America or the world can say no, if it can defy the Trump regime, even at the expense—and a big expense … then the best public university in America and the world must do the same!”
PhD student Tanzil Chowdhury, who serves on the executive board of the graduate student union, thinks the union also has an obligation to fight back.
“We have folks who work on cancer and Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and we don’t do that work just because it’s a job,” Chowdhury told California. “We do that because we really want to have a broader impact on our communities in our country.”
In late April, the Berkeley Academic Senate approved a resolution that calls on the University of California to protect academic and political freedom for its students and scholars. First among their demands: “The University and the several campuses must be prepared to challenge in court all illegal demands presented by the Federal Government, including termination of research grants not in accord with contractual terms and required administrative processes, in consultation with the affected researchers.”
Eva Harris, right, oversees the collection of samples from children in Nicaragua as part of her studies on dengue. (Photo by Alejandro Belli)
Harris may be one such researcher. Her NIH grants have helped her run the longest continuous study of dengue in children. It follows a pediatric cohort in Nicaragua, where there are enough cases to better understand how the disease works and how to potentially combat it around the globe.
She’s had a particular grant support this work for 10 years, but its future is now uncertain. In addition to the funding cuts, the Trump administration has also directed the NIH to scrutinize applications for certain words it deems suspect.
“They [could] take out the Nicaragua component because it’s a foreign component,” Harris said. “They could also just stop the whole grant because it says the word ‘vaccine.’”
Not only are the scientific ramifications huge, Harris said, but there’s a legal and ethical problem with stopping in the middle of a trial involving children. And then there are the 25 to 30 people in her lab whom she employs with NIH funds, some of them international students reliant on visas.
“It looks grim,” wrote Douglass of the threats against higher education. “But there is also some room for hope. If America, and its university sector, is to once again thrive, we need to see a major political backlash that includes some critical mass of Republicans in the House and the Senate to reassert congressional authority and rein in the emerging imperial presidency.”
In the meantime, Harris is planning on fighting to keep her lab alive. Possibilities include asking European institutes for funding or focusing on “safer” study subjects like obesity or genetic markers for Alzheimer’s. For now, she remains defiant.
“Excuse my language, but like, fuck if they’re gonna get me down,” Harris said. “Absolutely not, you know. Just going forward, day to day, is resistance.”