Clockwise from top left: Wayne State University, Michigan Technological University, University of Michigan and Michigan State University.
By Jason Owen-Smith and Britany Affolter-Caine
May 2025
Originally published on Crain’s Detroit Business
Congress is considering a new federal budget proposal that would decrease funding for America’s scientific, medical, and engineering research by $31 billion. It’s tempting to think these cuts won’t impact Michiganders’ daily lives. But federally funded research involves thousands of people and businesses all over our state. These cuts will hit home immediately in Michigan’s economy, jobs and the well-being of citizens.
Cutting research funding will hurt Michigan businesses by drying up revenue from grants that the state’s biggest universities use to buy the supplies needed to do federally funded projects. Specialty machining companies like Grandville’s ExtremeWire EDM or Jackson’s Alro Steel that have supplied projects that are pushing the boundaries of semiconductor and aerospace research will feel the pinch.
So will a UP healthcare provider, a Muskegon contractor, a Detroit architectural firm, a wildflower farm, a maple syrup producer, a Lake Superior fishing company, a Flint ice cream wholesaler that keeps scientific laboratories stocked with dry ice and more than 3500 other businesses. Federal research grants added more than half a billion dollars to the bottom line of suppliers in the last five years. Indiscriminate cuts to research funding today will increase economic pain in Michigan now and out into the future.
Federal grants paid almost 25,000 research employees at Michigan State, U-M and Wayne State last year. Less than 1 in 5 of them were professors. About half were students and post-doctoral researchers. The rest were professional staff. These jobs are at risk.
Cuts that imperil research jobs also choke the talent pipeline that feeds some of Michigan’s most important industries. Economic growth and innovation are driven by people who learn the craft of research on grant-funded teams. Right now, about 18,000 alumni of federally funded research teams from these campuses work in Michigan. They hold jobs in automotive and other manufacturing businesses, IT and healthcare, education, government, pharmaceuticals, consulting, and finance, to name just a few. Less research means fewer research-trained people, which increases the likelihood of longer-term economic slowdowns.
Cutting research funding to our three largest campuses will reduce opportunities everywhere else. Essentially all of Michigan’s higher education institutions take part in federal research projects at U-M, Wayne, and MSU. Subcontracts connect Michigan Tech, Western Michigan and all its siblings, Grand Valley, Ferris, and Saginaw State, and numerous other four-year institutions and community colleges.
Higher Education is just the beginning. K-12 school districts, government agencies, hospitals, community organizations, nonprofits, and engineering companies also play a role. Since 2020, more than $180 million of subcontracts have engaged 360 Michigan organizations in federally funded research. Cutting federal science funding will have ripple effects that harm students, employers, communities and jobs all over our state.
President Trump’s proposed cuts mean that Michigan State, Michigan Tech, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State stand to lose a big chunk of the nearly $2 billion of federal investments that support their research each year. They all belong to the University Research Corridor (URC), which recently released a study by Anderson Economic Group that estimates their federally funded research contributed more than $8.3 billion to Michigan’s economy.
The examples above show just the first, most direct part of how that impact happens for the three URC campuses the Institute for Research on Innovation & Science can analyze today.
Federal funding has allowed URC researchers to learn how to use realistic digital models of farms as labs to improve crop yields, develop new mineral separation and battery recycling technologies to reduce U.S. dependence on international sources of critical minerals, treat cancers with sound waves, and scale laboratory findings to ensure everyone has access to safe, clean water. What is really at stake in the proposed cuts is the research projects like these that will not be done and the things that could improve or save lives that we won’t learn.
Future Michiganders will lead poorer lives if these cuts materialize. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that all the effects will be years distant, far from home, or confined to university campuses. Our research universities are engines that add horsepower to the state’s entire economy in many ways. Cuts to their research should worry everyone because everyone is likely to feel their effects.
Jason Owen-Smith is the executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation & Science and a professor at the University of Michigan. Britany Affolter-Caine is the executive director of Michigan’s University Research Corridor.