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American research science is in crisis. The federal government has canceled grants en masse across agencies, with prospects of more cuts to come. Scientists in public service are facing widespread layoffs. Universities are pausing hiring and admissions—not because talent is lacking, but because career pathways and business models have unraveled. Renowned professors are fleeing to industry, and institutes are winding down entire bodies of work due to newly fragile grants and contracts. Future Nobel Laureates are asking if the United States remains the best place in the world to do science.
These changes reveal more than a momentary budget or political challenge. They expose a system under duress. In an honest accounting, many issues and trends laid bare predate this administration: from high rates of “indirect” administrative costs at universities to long-term reductions in public spending on research and development to the constant existential churn of grant applications for researchers. We are unlikely to go back to how things were, and it’s not clear that we should want to.
Philanthropic strategies tend to take the long view; they unfold over years and are patient by design. But without decisive and timely action, the resulting damage itself will take decades to repair. And if philanthropy doesn’t step into the breach, others will. Private equity and venture capital firms have already begun funding research labs. Even assuming the best of intentions, those are investments, not charity: They expect substantial returns. Do we really want research science at our nonprofit institutes and universities to be increasingly dependent on funding that seeks market-rate returns? The philanthropic challenge is thus urgent and adaptive: how to help shape, amidst the unraveling of our current system, a better one.
Science funders can never fully fill the gap left by government cuts. But they still have ways to make a real difference right now—especially if they look beyond grant budgets to the other 95 percent of their assets. Below, we lay out a range of actions that foundations, family offices, and private donors can take to alleviate the fallout today while laying the groundwork for tomorrow. We start with solutions that only require a traditional grant toolkit, before proposing a few social investment tools that are relatively new to science philanthropy.
What Philanthropy Can Do Today
Most researchers we talked to express a mix of surprise, frustration, and resignation that private funders have not tried to fill gaps left by government cuts—if even temporarily. We understand where they’re coming from. If the public image of foundations is, at least in part, rainy day funds, then it’s reasonable to expect them to step up during a hurricane. We suspect that most foundations are overwhelmed by the scale of the gap: one that is, by the numbers, far beyond their ability to cover with existing grant budgets. But science funders can still make a huge difference by using traditional tools in creative and targeted ways, beyond just increasing payout. These strategies are (unlike the research itself) not rocket science and are urgently needed to prevent long-term damage to our research system.
Solution #1: Design a Better System
Our system didn’t become fragile overnight, and it won’t be fixed by any one emergency response. That fragility is not simply political: It results from structural and economic challenges that go beyond overreliance on public funding to include how we think about IP rights, academic training and careers, the relationship between universities and funders, and even the default funding mechanisms for research. Rather than trying to resurrect a broken system, we need a bipartisan vision for what comes next: for how the system could and should work to ensure American science leadership for decades to come.
That won’t happen on its own, and it means tackling a number of third rails with creativity and credibility. Philanthropy can meet the moment by chartering a time-limited, bipartisan commission of leaders from across sectors—governments, universities, industry, nonprofits—and committing to support their solutions with cold hard cash. The opportunity is to create “a market of new ideas and alternative futures for research” (to quote a researcher we interviewed) that builds on promising new efforts and existing collaborative networks. Working with urgency over the coming year, that commission should take up the hardest issues: from the structure of indirect costs to the distribution of intellectual property rights, from the biases of existing federal programs to the broken career paths of next-generation scientists. The silver lining of this crisis is the chance to build something better.
Solution #2: Keep Research Afloat
The whirlwind of changes out of Washington is taking a toll on many scientists. Projects, labs, and careers with decades of momentum face sudden, destabilizing uncertainty. “We’re like any organization,” said one researcher, “if funding is up in the air and we don’t know if commitments will actually be honored, things quickly fall apart.”
“I’m thinking about it in terms of the survival of my life’s work,” said another, a prominent infectious disease doctor. “I’ve spent two decades on it and don’t just want to give up on it or on our patients by going into industry, even though my salary would triple.”
Philanthropy can provide vital stopgap support. If funders aren’t willing to increase payout to provide meaningful ($100k+) emergency grants to at-risk research and labs, they should at least consider using recoverable grants as a hedge for suddenly uncertain federal funding. If those dollars materialize, funders will get their money back; in the meantime, critical projects and promising careers can be salvaged.
Solution #3: Offer Support Beyond the Lab Bench
It is not just career paths in the abstract that hang in the balance; they translate to jobs, incomes, and the immigration status of thousands of scientists. If the United States is to remain the destination of choice for the world’s greatest minds (be they American or foreign-born scientists), we need to do more than just write checks for research. That means offering forms of support provided in the past to nonprofits in other sectors, from mental health resources and career coaching, to development consulting and legal assistance—such as for brilliant scientists whose immigration status hangs in the balance. In the process, funders should also consider helping researchers and labs build capacity and access training to address the other great destabilizing force of this moment: artificial intelligence that is revolutionizing research methods, academic training, and infrastructure across fields.
Solution #4: Protect the Pillars
Finally, funders can protect particularly vulnerable and vital parts of our research ecosystem without spending a ton of new money. Science Philanthropy Alliance President France Córdova, writing in these pages, highlighted two priorities in particular that offer tremendous long-term value per dollar and have high issue discount rates given their path-dependent consequences: preserving data infrastructure and prioritizing early-career scientists.
There is a long history of philanthropic support to upkeep and (if necessary) safely transfer government datasets and information repositories—efforts that need not be particularly expensive, while protecting decades of ongoing efforts and investments. In turn, when even tenured professors worry about the future of their work, early career scientists are truly at a disadvantage. As public funding shrinks, what money goes out will likely be even more biased towards "proven" projects and labs; we risk losing a generation of talent and with them, crucial new ideas and breakthroughs. Córdova points to several important new grant programs to address that risk. Yet even foundations unable (or unwilling) to put new resources behind those efforts can help by tweaking their own agendas: for instance, restructuring existing grant programs to more heavily prioritize junior researchers, or being flexible with grant terms and durations to help stabilize careers at a vulnerable time.
The Power of a Broader Toolkit
Scientists don’t need saving; they need viable funding. Most private foundations disburse only a fraction of their assets every year (typically around 5 percent). It’s time for science funders to put the rest of their balance sheets to work by using debt, equity, guarantees, bonds, and other tools mission-driven investors have long deployed to support affordable housing, community development, and climate resilience.
Solution #5: Provide a Social Investment Bridge
When a federal grant is delayed, curtailed, or likely (but not guaranteed) to be reinstated, foundations can provide investment capital instead of, or alongside, traditional emergency and recoverable grants. Traditionally structured as zero‑ or low-interest loans or grants that only need to be repaid if funding materializes, this offers an immediate runway for researchers and universities. Because any such note can be collateralized against future revenue or licensing income, funders can recycle investments and even embed public‑interest conditions such as open‑access data agreements or IP held in the public trust.
Solution #6: Smooth Cash‑Flow Potholes
Even endowment-rich universities today face cash-flow challenges that are resulting in layoffs. Yet nearly all universities have streams of expected income that include estate gifts, campaign pledges, and other forms of revenue. Commercial banks will lend against that future income, but typically at only 60-70 percent of value. A foundation guarantee—a tool that has been used for everything from expanding the lending power of CDFIs to helping schools get loans to build classrooms—has the potential to unlock a meaningfully higher percentage of those resources today, potentially closer to 80-90 percent. It’s easy to see why many large foundations have turned to this tool for other social challenges: It provides additional collateral to lenders while allowing a funder (the guarantor) to keep those assets invested, offsetting any losses if a call is ever made on the guarantee. The net impact is helping universities stabilize payrolls and research programs for pennies on the dollar of risk capital.
Solution #7: Establish and Invest in Public Benefit Corporations
There may not be a light at the end of the tunnel for federal science funding. In that case, the field will need new, sustainable sources of research support. One such mechanism could be public benefit corporations (PBCs). They could take multiple forms, and there are already PBCs in the research ecosystem. In essence: Funders would supply subordinated equity or patient loans to support research, and a university would contribute some pool of its IP pipeline (while remaining a preferred shareholder), potentially also agreeing to mission covenants focused on public benefit. Funder investments would not necessarily be focused on a specific lab or project. Rather, that new capital would be pooled to also help cross-subsidize basic research more focused on testing important ideas and hypotheses than on delivering IP or financial return.
Funders would earn a modest return on their support for research or share in the upside of licensing agreements, while universities and labs would unlock entirely new, mission-aligned resources. Large universities may be able to support their own independent research-oriented PBCs, while other institutions could conceivably share a PBC or participate in issue-based PBCs in partnerships with nonprofits—say, for cancer or neurological research—spreading risk across multiple institutions, labs, and areas of study. Major universities have long had technology transfer offices; this approach is a natural outgrowth of that model. Institutions would continue commercializing research, but would share ownership with mission-aligned investors over the capital vehicle enabling that monetization.
Risks and Values
We shared these concepts with researchers, university leaders, and other funders to pressure test them and explore if they have already been tried (and if not, why not). One common theme we heard was that scientific research can and should be about getting findings out into the world as quickly as possible, motivated by advancing knowledge and human flourishing rather than making money or maximizing IP. In turn, several worried that adding profit motive to funding decisions might skew the research priorities of funders and institutions—putting basic research (particularly in fields like cosmology and biodiversity studies) at a further disadvantage.
We share these ideas not in spite of those themes and values, but inspired by them. The seal separating science research from our market economy was broken long ago– certainly since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which gave institutions and researchers ownership of IP resulting from federally funded research. Technology transfer offices already exist. Private equity is already investing in university labs. Our hope is that new forms of social investment can help recycle relatively more of the resources generated by research back into supporting other research (including basic research). We believe they can add critical stability to America’s research ecosystem, creating more funding sources to help buffer shocks like the one we’re experiencing today. There is no reason why they should be anything but additive: helping to deploy the other 95 percent of funder assets on top of the grants, federal funding, industry partnerships, and market-rate investments already in the system.
We have seen social investments have a transformative impact on other social priorities: from microfinance programs in the global south to affordable housing funds and renewable energy development. Those investments have all been structured to use the tools of finance to expand social benefit in a sustainable way—without being extractive. The same approach is possible for research science. Even if those sorts of investments seemed less urgent for science philanthropy during the still-recent heyday of government funding, well, the world has changed, and they strike us as immensely urgent today.
Every concept above shares two virtues. First, each can be deployed with standard financial tools and processes, albeit with plenty of room for innovation (we’re especially excited to see several of the latter concepts more fully fleshed out). Second, critically, they align incentives for scientists, universities, funders, and the public interest: Labs remain open, talent stays in the academy, universities avoid fire‑sales, philanthropists recycle capital for their mission, and vital—often world-changing and life-saving—research endures. This is not to discount the value of grants, which remain a vital tool. But they should not be treated like the only philanthropic tool available to funders. If we want a better, more resilient scientific research system, we need to consider both new models and new sources of funding.
Meeting the Moment
Funders don’t need to reinvent themselves or their missions to get started. A recoverable grant. An initial guarantee for a university. A bipartisan convening. These are first steps funders can take to stop watching our research system fall apart from the sidelines and instead help stabilize one of the crown jewels of our society and shape what comes next.
Great foundations have stepped up in similar inflection points of the past: Ford in the civil rights era; Rockefeller in the Green Revolution; Gates in the AIDS pandemic; the public-private coalition of funders in the Detroit Grand Bargain. Times like these play to philanthropy’s strengths: its ability to take risks, to take the long view, to convene critical conversations. The risk today is not that foundations will overreach by trying new things but that they will solve for a system that no longer exists while self-rationalizing that there is nothing else they can do. The philanthropic malpractice of this moment, the true breaking of faith with mission, would be to just keep chugging along.
Read more stories by Ariel Simon & Aaron Seybert.