By Joshua Weiner and Logan Volkert

The national research funding climate changed dramatically in January 2025, bringing significant new challenges for institutions such as ours. Federal agency policies and priorities have shifted, long-established indirect cost reimbursement models have been challenged, and funding to some universities and agencies was pulled. Additionally, many individual funded projects were targeted for termination, including a few dozen across the University of Iowa, a small number of them in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS). The longest-ever shutdown of the federal government in October and November 2025 added to the growing concern felt by many faculty, administrators, and advocates for U.S. scientific research, humanities scholarship, and the visual and performing arts. Indeed, at the time of this writing, another shutdown deadline looms, though Congress is making progress towards passing the 12 appropriations bills needed to keep the government functioning.

Despite these challenges, CLAS faculty and research staff have been resilient. With the help of the CLAS Grant Support Office (GSO) and the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), they redoubled their efforts to seek appropriate funding mechanisms, submitted hundreds of competitive proposals, and secured new awards to advance their important research, scholarship, and creative activity. 

Fiscal year (FY) 2025 was another strong one for grant proposals, with 515 proposals totaling $126.9 million submitted by 28 CLAS departments across all disciplines. If we omit data for the Department of Physics and Astronomy (a quick way to avoid the distorting—but welcome—effect of the $172 million NASA TRACERS mission when comparing year-over-year data), FY25 was a new record year, with $82.9 million proposed from every other department! Importantly, the disruptions discussed above did not diminish our researchers’ resolve: while they submitted 255 proposals totaling $53.1 million during the first half of FY25 (July through Dec. 2024), this rose to 260 proposals totaling $73.7 million during the second half of FY25 (Jan. through June 2025). The table below lists the top five CLAS departments by grant dollars proposed in FY25: