New awards from the National Science Foundation are running 39% below historical pace as of July 13, and NIH new awards are 22% below pace — figures University of California President James B. Milliken laid out in a July 29 letter to Congress urging lawmakers to force science agencies to process awards, renewals and funding opportunities on time. Yet UC Davis, a top recipient of both agencies' funding, says its overall federal research portfolio has held near $1 billion for five straight years, and its vice chancellor of research projects the just-ended fiscal year landed close to that mark.

"The sky is not falling. Turns out our research funding has been pretty resilient, but with some exceptions," Simon Atkinson, UC Davis vice chancellor of research, said of the campus numbers. Federal research funding averaged more than $1 billion annually over the last five years, dipping to $961 million in 2024-25. Official figures for the new fiscal year are not yet released, but Atkinson projects they will come in "very close" to the prior year — "a number that would have surprised me if you'd asked me."

The exceptions are concrete. USAID's dissolution terminated UC Davis international research programs in agriculture and nutrition, and that money "hasn't come back from the federal government," though Atkinson hopes California state funding will restore part of it. He also expects DEI-adjacent work and climate or sustainability research to remain difficult: "That's become a much more difficult funding area under the current administration."

The appeals playbook

For research managers, the practical takeaway from Davis is that terminated grants are not always terminal. Atkinson said the Office of Research has advised faculty on several routes: direct appeals to the funding agency — UCD has had "a couple of cases where terminations were overturned"; conversations with program officers, which in some cases produced grant modifications that restored funding; participation as plaintiffs' information providers in lawsuits, "many of which have been successful"; and diversification toward foundations, industry and non-federal sponsors.

The DeCarli case illustrates the appeal path. NIH had awarded $36 million to Charles S. DeCarli, co-director of UC Davis Health's Alzheimer's Disease Center, for a study of incidental white matter lesions on MRI in a diverse population with cognitive complaints. The agency pulled the grant on grounds it "related to DEI" and no longer matched agency priorities. With help from "some of our friends in Congress who also talked to NIH for us," Atkinson said, "that grant was restored pretty quickly within two or three weeks of being terminated."

Litigation has also blunted funding threats. In November 2025, U.S. District Court Judge Rita F. Lin granted a preliminary injunction — in a 76-page decision — blocking the Trump administration from denying, withholding, freezing, suspending or terminating federal funds to UC based on alleged discrimination related to race, color, national origin or sex. The administration had threatened to withdraw $584 million in research grants unless investigations were completed, including a $1 billion threat to UCLA.

Proposal strategy

UC Davis is telling principal investigators to read the funders' priorities and write accordingly — standard practice across administrations, Atkinson argued, though unusually consequential now. The Office of Research's development team is coaching investigators through that alignment process.

New wins suggest the strategy works. NIH awarded UC Davis Health a seven-year, $40 million Clinical and Translational Science Award to continue and expand its Clinical and Translational Science Center — one of the campus's largest grants last year, submitted in the first months of the new administration. And in the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission program, which made 278 awards from more than 5,000 applications, two went to UC Davis engineering professors: Issac Kim, associate professor of computer science, and Mingwei Zhang, assistant professor of materials science. Both gain access to the Genesis Mission Platform, including AI agent frameworks and advanced AI models. The campus nominated 31 teams through an internal selection process run by the Office of Research.

The workforce risk

Atkinson's sharpest concern is not the current budget but the pipeline. Undergraduates are reconsidering graduate school, and graduate students are weighing careers outside academic research. National PhD admissions declines approach 20% at leading research universities, he noted — a leading indicator of future research capacity that no grant appeal can fix. With NIH's award rate improving but still below pace, and agency priorities shifting, the question for R&D managers is whether resilience at the portfolio level can outlast erosion at the talent level.