The Trump Administration’s first month in office has brought a flurry of executive orders and cutbacks coming from the White House, all of which are finding their way to Pitt’s campus.

Pitt’s faculty, staff and graduate student unions, which together represent a large portion of employees at Pitt, are concerned that federal cuts in NIH funding and the federal rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion could impact faculty and staff jobs at the university. 

On Feb. 7, the Trump Administration announced a huge National Institutes of Health funding cut, slashing the amount of indirect funding for research projects to 15%. The University of Pittsburgh receives about $700 million from federal funding. 

Tyler Bickford, the unit president of the Pitt faculty union, said he is worried that university budget cuts will directly impact the availability of undergraduate programs and class sizes. 

“If there is a [large] hole in Pitt’s budget, the administration is going to have to cut costs, and they’re gonna have to cut costs rapidly. And they are not only gonna be cutting costs in research administration areas,” Bickford said. “They’re gonna be cutting costs wherever it’s the easiest and fastest for them to cut costs.” 

Shawn Alfonso-Wells, a member of the bargaining committee for the Pitt staff union, said while the union is still evaluating what these cuts could mean for Pitt staff, she is concerned that these reductions will restrict student access to research grants.

“We’re a research university. And I don’t think people are focusing on what these cuts mean for students,” Alfonso-Wells said. “There could be a cure out there that we’re this close to getting to, and people are gonna die because they don’t have access to this type of research.”

Alisa Omelchenko, who is on the bargaining committee for the Pitt graduate student union, is a graduate student at Pitt studying computational biology and relies on NIH funding for both her education and research. Omelchenko said the overall feeling in the graduate community is one of uncertainty, especially with the new pause to Ph.D admissions at Pitt and other universities across the country. 

“These new restrictions make a lot of graduate students worried about the future,” Omelchenko said. “Not only about whether we will be able to finish our degrees but also about whether we can continue our scientific careers and whether there’ll be a career when we graduate.” 

In addition to the NIH funding cuts, the White House has released rollbacks on DEI initiatives and has placed a new emphasis on “merit-based hiring.” These decisions have also caused worry in the Pitt community about the potential repercussions of these policies. 

Omelchenko said both the funding cuts and DEI rollbacks are an assault on the scientific field as a whole, calling the uncertainty surrounding funding a “very scary situation.” 

“It makes grad students worried,” Omelchenko said. “We’re seeing an attack on an entire generation of science, from multiple fronts, in a matter of weeks that stands to set us back decades.”

Alfonso-Wells said this order shows an obvious attempt to dismantle DEI programs.

“It is not getting rid of non-meritorious people, because everybody who has been part of any type of diversity, equity and inclusion program are people that are highly qualified. It brings them to the table,” Alfonso-Wells said. “We find that restructuring university funding based on these purely destructive tactics does not make meaningful systems. It just destroys the infrastructure that we have and it destroys building a robust community.”

Bickford said work related to equal opportunity is important, and the information from the government has been vague. Multiple federal research agencies have announced that activities funded by awards or grants related to DEI have to be canceled immediately, but Bickford says DEI has been used in such a nonspecific way in these announcements that it is hard to enforce these changes.

“A lot of the directives that I have seen from the administration so far have been worded so broadly that it is impossible for people to determine what exactly they’re being ordered to stop doing,” Bickford said.

Bickford also said concern for the future of DEI and university funding is causing many faculty at Pitt to stop their research in anticipation of “repercussions or enforcement by the federal government or by the university.”

Alfonso-Wells called upon the University to protect the rights of the Pitt community amid these changes as the university, and the country, begin to truly understand what all of these policy changes will mean for the future.

“It’s very important that the University has a really strong response against these different types of policies. I’m so glad that we have unionized,” Alfonso-Wells said. “We are a community. And as a community, I think we need to stick together and support each other. That is the only way we will be able to go forward.”