Nearly 180 USC professors, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students gathered inside Taper Hall on Monday. Even after a year of funding reductions for many research units, the energy in the room remained high as attendees greeted colleagues and took their seats for a discussion on the challenges facing research.
The event, a town hall titled “Kill the Cuts,” warned that universities nationwide are in crisis as a wave of stalled research projects, shuttered lab cores and rescinded grants limit their ability to conduct studies. Alongside widespread federal funding cuts, several researchers at the event said they faced pressure to strip references to diversity, disparities and discrimination from grant proposals in order to restore funding.
The town hall, hosted by United Faculty-UAW, USC Researchers and Fellows United, the Adjunct Faculty Alliance and UAW Local 872 — a union representing USC graduate student workers — urged lawmakers to support California’s Senate Bill 607, which would create a state-run science funding agency intended to stabilize research in the state.
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Researchers spoke to one another onstage, as well as a field representative from the office of California Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, a Democrat representing Culver City.
“Six thousand of us grad workers, postdocs, [and] non tenure track faculty are coming together for a stronger USC,” said Saumya Khanna, a Ph.D. candidate in public policy. “As individuals, we have little power to fight these attacks, but as a movement, we have real influence over what happens next.”
Morgan Lindback, a postdoctoral scholar studying marine and environmental biology who co-hosted the event, said the magnitude of federal cuts has forced researchers across USC to halt experiments altogether.
“In early 2025, the Trump administration terminated over 1,700 active research grants, cutting $1.4 billion in existing project funding,” Lindback said. “By May 2025, new [National Science Foundation] grant funding had dropped 51% below the 10- year average.”
Seeta Rajpara, a Ph.D. student studying cancer biology and genomics at the Keck School of Medicine, said during the town hall that federal funding cuts, combined with the attacks on diversity and inclusion, have created immediate and compounding setbacks.
She said her research on early-onset colorectal cancer has slowed dramatically after core staff members were laid off and routine lab processes became backlogged.
Much of Rajpara’s work focuses on understanding why cancer outcomes differ across populations. She said that continuing to overlook disparities — or pushing research further from historically excluded groups — undermines the science itself. She said restricting researchers from collecting or analyzing disparity-related data undermines the science itself.
“We cannot understand cancer if we ignore the biology of entire populations,” she said. “When you cut scientific funding, you are not just cutting data. You are cutting people’s lives.”
Neil Gleason, a clinical psychologist and postdoctoral researcher studying HIV prevention, said during the town hall that diversity, equity and inclusion restrictions have created a paradox for his field. Although National Institutes of Health program officers told researchers that HIV prevention remains a national priority, the guidance researchers received discouraged addressing demographic risk factors — even though HIV disproportionately affects men who have sex with men, especially Black queer men.
“That just doesn’t work. … You simply cannot do this work without considering disparities,” Gleason said.
Gleason said his lab, which also studies mental health disparities among veterans of color and women veterans, did not receive funding for months over the summer after the NIH delayed the renewal of its grant. When the grant was reinstated, Gleason said researchers were instructed by the NIH to delete all references to diversity and disparities — the central focuses of the study — which resulted in missing data, lost participants and gaps, threatening the validity of the research and jeopardizing years of prior investment.
Steve Desir, an assistant professor of research at the Rossier School of Education, said during the town hall that these disruptions will have sweeping effects far beyond campuses: cutting off training pipelines, weakening workforce development and shrinking the talent pool in science and health fields across the United States.
“This isn’t an abstract university budgeting issue,” Desir said. “Our state depends on the university research ecosystem to train the next generation of scientists. … I think about all of the technology that will be lost, all of the treatments that will be lost if we do not keep our current student bodies intact.”
Nina Eliasoph, a professor of sociology in the Dornsife School of Letters, Arts and Sciences, said the town hall underscored that research funding is needed not only for developing scientific solutions for issues such as climate change and disease, but also for studying why society fails to implement those solutions in the first place.
“For a lot of scientific problems, we have solutions. We just don’t have the political will to do anything about them,” Eliasoph said in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “Why don’t we as a society have a political will to do something about climate change? That kind of research also needs to be funded.”
Carlos Penilla, the field representative for Smallwood-Cuevas, said researchers should contact lawmakers directly to advance SB 607.
“If you don’t communicate with them, [they] don’t know,” he said during the town hall. “Call the district office, let them know that you’re interested in this issue, and hold [them] accountable.”
SB 607 will require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the California Legislature in early 2026 before appearing on the November ballot. Lindback said Thursday’s town hall was only the beginning.
“People outside of here don’t know and understand until we tell them,” Lindback said. “When we fight, we win.”