The Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” continues to make headlines. Nine selective institutions were originally asked to agree to reduce transgender and foreign students’ rights and make other changes in exchange for federal funding priority and other unspecified benefits.

All of these universities either rejected the compact or gave noncommittal responses, while a few relatively unknown, non-research-intensive institutions have publicly expressed interest in signing. If the current top research institutions all refuse to sign, but up-and-coming colleges do, and the administration makes good on its promises to reward signatories, the compact could start to shift billions in research funding from the haves to the have-nots.

And the compact isn’t the only way the president can make that shift. Back in August, he issued an executive order directing “senior appointees” to take charge of awarding, or denying, new grants. He also told them to apply certain principles in their award decisions, which could sap money from the top research institutions.

“Discretionary grants should be given to a broad range of recipients rather than to a select group of repeat players,” the executive order said. It also said that “to the extent institutional affiliation is considered in making discretionary awards, agencies should prioritize an institution’s commitment to rigorous, reproducible scholarship over its historical reputation or perceived prestige.”

Federal agencies have yet to reveal how they will implement these parts of the executive order or its other provisions, such as its bans on awarding grants that “promote” racial preferences and “the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.” Amid the shutdown that began Oct. 1, the White House Office of Management and Budget hasn’t released the uniform guidance to agencies that the order called for. Research advocacy groups have condemned the broader order for instituting political review of funding decisions.

The National Institutes of Health is the biggest federal funder of university research. The Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research, which tracks NIH funding, reported that Johns Hopkins University was awarded the most NIH grant and contract funding in federal fiscal year 2024, at roughly $860 million. That East Coast institution was followed by a West Coast one: the University of California, San Francisco, at $815 million. (Although if you add Harvard University’s haul to that of its affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, it ranks No. 2.) Both universities were also the top two academic institutions in 2023 and 2022.

Other selective institutions—including some in Republican-controlled states, such as Washington University in St. Louis—round out the top earners. As of 2023, the Association of American Universities, a prestigious group of top research institutions, said its members represented 64 percent of total federal academic research and development expenditures. As of 2025, the AAU has 69 U.S. members, a small fraction of American institutions.

Current NIH director Jay Bhattacharya has expressed support for diversifying who receives funding—including geographically. During his March confirmation hearing, he said the NIH needs to welcome more diverse ideas to solve the nation’s chronic disease problems, which is “so broad that we need to have a lot more tolerance [for the idea] that the top scientists who controlled the ideas in their fields may be wrong. We need to allow other scientists who have other ideas—and food is medicine might be one of them—to have support.”

At the hearing, Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, complained about a concentration of research funds among a few states and asked Bhattacharya for a “commitment for us flyover states to spread the love a little bit.”

Bhattacharya replied, “I hear your concern that the NIH ought to be more committed than it has been to making sure that every scientist, no matter where they are—they don’t have to be in California or the Northeast Corridor to get support.”

Bhattacharya later said, “We talked already with some of the other senators about making sure scientists from smaller states get access to NIH support.”

“If I’m confirmed as NIH director, the job will be to decide how to set processes [for] making those allocations,” he said. “I want to make sure that those processes allow early-career investigators to have support. I want to make sure that it allows scientists from nontraditional universities, not just the Stanfords and Harvards, to have support. I want to make sure that the people with different points of view about scientific hypotheses … have some capacity for support.”

The GOP-controlled Senate confirmed Bhattacharya that month. But it remains unclear how his agency will carry out Trump’s August executive order. NIH spokespeople didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview for this article. 

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, the Health and Human Services Department said the NIH “follows longstanding policies and a rigorous peer-review process to ensure that research grants are awarded based on scientific merit, public health relevance, and program priorities.” It said it “routinely reviews its funding distribution and works to expand opportunities for early-stage investigators, underrepresented institutions, and innovative research proposals. While some institutions receive more awards due to the scale and scope of their research programs, NIH’s process remains highly competitive and guided by expert peer review to support the most promising science.” 

Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations for the American Council on Education, which represents institutions across the country, drew a connection between the compact’s demands of universities and the executive order’s. She noted that parts of the order made it into the compact, which she thinks is a way of enforcing the order.

“I don’t know how the compact is going to be implemented,” Spreitzer said. “But I almost see these going hand in hand.”

Existing Efforts to Spread the Wealth

Before Trump retook the presidency, the federal government had already implemented some programs to distribute more research funding to states, institutions and researchers that have historically won less. One is the National Science Foundation’s Estab­lished Program to Stim­u­late Com­pet­i­tive Research (EPSCoR), which benefits 28 states and territories including Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Tobin Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities, said merit must be the primary basis for funding decisions. Mentioning institutions such as Harvard University, he said, “There’s certain things where they are just the world experts, and they’re the ones getting the federal money—versus let’s distribute it and spread it around like peanut butter and make sure everybody gets a little bit.”

However, Smith did note that there’s been “concern that by funding only where the best science happens, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and you never can build a system now that the system’s been built.” He also said there’s value in ensuring that “we’re not shutting out the new investigators—because the old investigators always have a leg up … they’ve written more proposals, they have more background, they’ve published more papers. We do need to make sure that we’re bringing in new talent, and that often means bringing in that talent from different places.”

He further said that, historically, there’s been a question of whether to fund science by merit or by geography. Nevertheless, “the U.S. has been well-served by the fact that we did go with a majority of the funding being based upon merit and funding the best science where it was being conducted.”

“When it comes to programs like EPSCoR, I think they’re important,” Smith said. “I think there is value in re-examining how we distribute funding. But we ought not to turn our backs on the notion that funding science based upon the quality of that science is critically important and has led to U.S. leadership in the world.”

Both he and Spreitzer expressed broader concerns about other parts of the executive order and the compact moving research funding decisions away from merit-based peer review and toward rewarding political loyalty to the administration.

“I don’t think currently the peer-review process prioritizes a certain group of institutions over other institutions,” Spreitzer said. “It’s based on the grant application. And so, again, this seems to turn the merit-based process that we have on its head.”

And, as for the compact, Smith summed it up as saying, “‘If you don’t agree to certain nonscientific conditions as an institution, we’re not going to give you research funding.’” He said that “seems to go even further away from science altogether, and really politicize these funding decisions.”