{shortcode-9b585b10d4b57f6ea5c1b118853f86bbbe35c133}
Ari Ne’eman, an assistant professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, had been studying disability income and employment for five months before his funding through the National Bureau of Economic Research was cut by the Trump administration.
He said the decision, announced after Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “fraudulent and wasteful initiatives and contracts” by the federal government, was an extreme disappointment.
“We really see an unfortunate missed opportunity for the federal government to garner critical insights that can lead to resources being spent more impactfully and more efficiently,” he said.
Ne’eman hoped his project — one of hundreds of grants that have been canceled by various federal agencies amid a wave of governmental austerity measures since Trump’s inauguration — could have traced the impacts of economic shifts on support for people with disabilities.
“By being able to more closely monitor the impact of the Great Recession and the Covid recession on employment outcomes for people with developmental disabilities, we would have been able to produce really important, actionable insights that would support improved employment outcomes and greater economic independence for people with developmental disabilities,” Ne’eman said.
Based in Harvard Square, the NBER is a private, nonprofit, and non-partisan research organization that funds research initiatives to inform policy makers and business leaders.
Funded through a mix of grants from private contributions and federal agencies, the organization was one of hundreds to experience significant cuts under Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order, which vowed to eliminate spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
When the Social Security Administration cut the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium in accordance with the order Feb. 21, several NBER grants — including Ne’eman’s — went with it.
NBER President James M. Poterba ’80 said the funding cuts mainly impacted researchers focusing on disability, aging, and retirement.
“There’ll be less research on that because doing these research projects requires funding,” Poterba said. “It requires money to be able to hire research assistants, to be able to purchase data, and to make the time to work on these things.”
But Poterba also said the cuts will indirectly affect education and training at Harvard.
“A lot of the research support goes to cover the cost of research assistance, support PhD students. Sometimes it supports undergraduates who are working on these projects,” he said. “There’s a pipeline of training for scholars and researchers in these areas.”
He warned that NBER will now be forced to compete for the remaining private sector grant opportunities for social science research.
“The relative size of the private sector pool versus the public pool in many of these areas is much smaller, and there is also heightened demand at a time when the federal research budget is pulling back,” Poterba said.
Ne’eman joined hundreds of researchers across the country in protesting the RDRC’s termination in an open letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee last month.
In the letter, the researchers challenged the SSA’s claim that the projects were “fraudulent and wasteful.”
“This rationale could not be further from the truth of the work conducted by the RDRC,” they wrote. “The $15 million annual cost of the RDRC is a small investment in research to improve the efficiency and accountability of an agency with a $14 billion administrative budget charged with delivering $1.6 trillion to beneficiaries.”
“The agency serves all Americans over their life course, providing necessary documentation and tracking earnings,” they added. “The RDRC helps SSA discover ways to make its programs and services work better for the American public and run more efficiently.”
The NBER also lost funding from the National Institutes of Health through the National Institute of Aging. These cuts will affect how NBER will be reimbursed for indirect costs and cost reimbursement rates for facilities and administrative costs. And, according to Poterba, the organization is expecting further cuts in the coming months.
Ne’eman plans to apply for outside grant funding, but he said support from federal agencies will be impossible to replicate.
“This is definitely a setback, but there is no doubt in my mind that disability in general — and disability employment — will still be at the center of my research agenda,” he said.
“It’s just become more difficult than it once was to access funding,” Ne’eman added.
Correction: April 11, 2025
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that hundreds of grants to the National Bureau of Economic Research had been canceled. In fact, the number is considerably lower.
—Staff writer Victoria D. Rengel can be reached at victoria.rengel@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VictoriaRengel_.
