As the federal government shutdown entered its fourth week Wednesday, some colleges, universities and researchers are feeling the added strain on a system that’s faced a string of major disruptions since Donald Trump retook the presidency in January.

“What always happens is the longer it goes on, the more impacts you start to see,” said Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said the shutdown means continued financial uncertainty, not just for institutions and researchers—who may struggle with financial planning if grants aren’t being renewed, as well as with cash flow—but also for students who rely on Federal Work-Study and other student aid.

“It adds to the uncertainty with respect to who gets hired [and] what programs are going to move forward in the next academic year or the next semester, even,” she said.

The furloughs at the Education Department might cause students “to either drop out of college or not attend in the first place because there are fewer staff to respond” to their questions, she said. That’s one major worry among “a whole host of concerns that are raised by the current situation.”

Senate Democrats are refusing to agree to Republicans’ proposed short-term funding bill that would reopen the government but not fulfill Democrats’ demands to extend health insurance subsidies and reverse the GOP’s Medicaid funding cuts. The funding bill requires 60 votes in the Senate, and the Republican majority stands at 53. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, the Education Department said, “Democrats should vote to fund the government so that Department staff can return to work and provide technical support.”

Just two weeks into the shutdown, the Georgia Institute of Technology said payment was delayed for federally funded research, which represents more than $100 million in monthly expenses for the institution. Georgia Tech said it would have to cut back on spending to “preserve cash” if the shutdown went on much longer.

It did, and the university announced Monday it had begun “significantly limiting” consulting services, job offers, “significant non-personnel” expenses and “non-essential” travel, regardless of the funding source for those costs.

“Research institutions like Georgia Tech must take measures to plan for long-term financial health and research continuity,” the university said in a statement on its website. “As a result of the continued shutdown and delayed payments from federal sponsors, the Institute is now activating mitigation strategies to help preserve cash, maintain campus operations, and fulfill our academic and research mission.”

Abbigail Tumpey, vice president of communications for Georgia Tech, told Inside Higher Ed that the university is No. 3 in the nation in the amount of federal funding it receives annually. Much of the money is for Department of Defense work, she said.

“In some circumstances, we’re still receiving payments for some of the work that we do for the federal government, and in other cases that has slowed or stopped,” she said.

Tumpey also said that “as a culture, our leadership team is very fiscally conservative,” so the university is reducing expenses to “delay any sort of action that could result in people being furloughed or having any sort of other reduction in force.”

Smith, of the AAU, said that “universities certainly have some gap funding they can usually provide, but the longer the shutdown goes, the more impact it may have on actually being able to fund the research.”

Local Hawai‘i media reported that the University of Hawai‘i system, which includes 10 institutions plus community-based learning centers, is spending $20 million every two weeks out of internal funds to pay thousands of federally funded workers during the shutdown. System president Wendy F. Hensel told the Board of Regents that the challenge is “primarily cash flow.” It’s unclear what will happen if the shutdown goes past Oct. 31.

The furloughing of federal workers, including program officers who oversee federal grants and federal researchers themselves, is also hindering university researchers directly.

“Nobody’s at home at the agencies to talk to on anything,” Smith said.

At New Jersey’s Passaic County Community College, President Steven Rose said his college can’t get approval to spend the roughly $600,000 left in a $2 million Labor Department grant to train workers for the solar energy industry. Rose said he wants to use the money to purchase equipment to sustain the program after the federal funding expires.

“We’ve got only until December to spend these funds, and we don’t know if we’re going to be able to,” Rose said. The federal employees his college works with are supportive and want the program to succeed, “but, obviously, when they’re not there, they’re not there.”

“It would just be terribly unfortunate if we can’t get the equipment that we need right now only because the government is closed,” he said.

Luke Oeding, an associate professor of math and statistics at Auburn University in Alabama, said his research funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research is being disrupted.

“We have to send [AFOSR] invoices, and we have communications with them such as reviewing papers for public release and so on, [and] we have a couple of papers … that can’t be reviewed right now because the people who would review them are out of the office due to the shutdown,” Oeding said. “So the shutdown is impeding progress on work that was already funded by these agencies, and started from these great programs that connect faculty and [Department of Defense] researchers.”

Oeding also said that because the shutdown occurred as the new federal fiscal year began on Oct. 1, “We cannot ask for the next allocation of funding for the next fiscal year because there’s no one in the office to ask.” And when the government does reopen, if he doesn’t end up getting funded, he’ll have less time for his research and be forced to “shift gears.”

“We just want to do our science and find ways to get that science funded,” Oeding said.

Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, a physics professor at Ohio State University, is in a similar situation.

He’s been working with government researchers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, but all of that work has been on pause since the shutdown began. While the project, which is focused on quantum information, isn’t acutely time-sensitive, he’s worried that if the shutdown continues for another month or two, he won’t receive the federal funding he needs to help pay for graduate student stipends and operating expenses.

Such a scenario also has broader implications for the United States’ global competitiveness and talent pipeline.

“While we’re slowed down and paused on various things because of the shutdown, researchers in Europe, Asia and the rest of the world are pushing forward,” Johnston-Halperin said. Additionally, “Ph.D. students have a limited window to do research as part of their education and career development. If they’re slowed down by a month or so it’s not truly dire, but a delay of a couple of months or a semester could significantly impact their future job prospects if they don’t get their research projects finished before they have to graduate.”

And given all the other grant terminations and budget cuts to research and higher education the Trump administration has enacted or proposed, “this shutdown adds to that confusion and concern and discourages students from pursuing this as a career,” he added. “People are worried about what the future holds.”