photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod is pictured on Nov. 7, 2023.

In a matter of weeks, the University of Kansas is expected to make decisions about a campus-wide hiring freeze and whether future graduate class sizes should be reduced as leaders grapple with federal policy changes.

“We haven’t just immediately pulled the trigger, but we are evaluating every one of those now,” KU Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Journal-World in a brief interview on Wednesday. “In the next, more likely, weeks rather than months, we are going to have to make some decisions because it is just coming at us so fast and at such a magnitude, that to not do so probably would be negligent.”

The Journal-World specifically asked Girod about a hiring freeze and whether KU would begin placing new limits on the number of students it accepts for certain doctoral programs because those are actions several research universities across the country have taken as uncertainty has grown about the future of federal research funding.

“Let’s just say everything is on the table right now as we are trying our best, like everybody else, to assess the landscape,” Girod said. “But it doesn’t appear to be getting better.”

Blake Flanders — president and CEO of the Kansas Board of Regents, which oversees KU and other state universities — said the schools will have difficult decisions to make about layoffs as well, if federal research grant funding does change significantly. He said there is uncertainty about whether some federal research programs have been permanently defunded or whether they will be funded again as policy further shifts.

“How do we deal with that in terms of employee transition?” Flanders said of one of the bigger questions facing universities. “Do we keep someone on for awhile in a temporary state, or are they terminated forever and we need to move past that? It is a difficult time, but I’m confident we will be able to manage through it.”

Girod told the Journal-World that he is not aware of any layoffs occurring yet at KU related to the federal policy changes. But KU has received “stop work orders” from the federal government on a handful of research projects funded by the federal government. Girod said most of that work has been related to projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education. He said job cuts haven’t yet been needed because many of those researchers and associated staff members have other duties beyond their research functions.

But proposed policy changes related to other federal funding programs could create significant job cuts at KU, Girod said, Universities and states across the country have filed legal challenges to a new Trump administration policy that would place a cap on how much federal research grants can be used to fund administrative expenses.

Currently, that new policy only applies to research grants from the National Institutes of Health. But Girod — who has been involved nationally in the legal fights as the vice chair the of Association of American Universities — said there is an expectation that the policy will expand to all federal research grants.

“I think the NIH is a test balloon for every other federal agency,” he said.

As proposed, the new policy would limit universities to use no more than 15% of a federal research grant for administrative and overhead costs, such as utilities and research lab maintenance. KU has estimated that the policy would create a $30 million to $40 million budget problem at KU, if it were only applied to NIH funding that KU and its Medical Center receive. Girod said such a policy shift would require a complete reorganization of KU, especially if it is expanded to other federal grant funding.

“If they go forward with what was initially proposed, that would be devastating,” Girod said.

Any reorganization would include job cuts. KU estimates that current research funding helps support the salaries of more than 5,000 university employees, or about one-third the total on the Lawrence and Medical Center campuses.

“If we are doing less, we need less people,” Girod said of potential cuts to research activity.

Those fewer people also could include graduate students. Many graduate programs, especially doctoral programs, are heavily dependent on research programs. Universities elsewhere have contemplated reducing the number of new doctoral students they are accepting due to uncertainties about whether there will be enough research projects to support their studies.

Proponents of the new federal policy argue that the changes won’t result in less research activity at campuses, but rather will limit how much universities spend on administrative and overhead costs. But Girod said it will be very difficult for the universities to find other university funds to pay for those needed administrative, overhead and indirect costs that would no longer be covered by the federal dollars. As a result, universities simply will do less research, he said.

Flanders, the Regents president, said a caveat to that belief would be if the federal government also reduces the amount of regulation that comes with many of the federal grants. If such reporting requirements and other regulations were reduced, that might be a way for the universities to reduce employee totals without directly reducing research activity. But Flanders said it is not assured that is the direction the federal policy will move.

Uncertainty surrounding that issue and other federal matters has caused universities including MIT, Stanford, North Carolina State, Northwestern and others to implement hiring freezes until future federal funding streams are solidified. Flanders stopped short of saying any Kansas universities would implement such a freeze, but he said he understands why it is a consideration.

“I don’t think that is a bad strategy,” Flanders said, saying that it is difficult to add new employees when funding levels for the next three to six months are uncertain.

News on Tuesday of planned layoffs that would reduce the workforce at the U.S. Department of Education by approximately 50% also has created a new category of uncertainty for universities, Flanders said. But he said it is too early to know what impacts a dramatically smaller department might have on university operations and programs like federal student loans and civil rights enforcement.

Flanders said a key consideration will be whether some programs currently housed within the Department of Education will move to other federal agencies or departments. If that is the case, though, there will be concerns about whether those new agencies will be equipped to help students and universities with sometimes complex topics such as student loans.

“Will there be DNA in that department to answer those questions?” he said.