GoKawiilPranay Shah (presenter on left) of the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency gives a talk alongside Jean-Paul Chretien (right), programme director of Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big if True Science Accelerator.Credit: Renaissance Philanthropy
At the start of 2025, federal funding cuts rippled through the US research ecosystem. At the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, chief science officer Alonzo Plough watched as scientists turned in droves to the foundation and other philanthropic funders. According to Plough, “it felt like I was back in my old public-health director role of emergency response”: the foundation was racing to provide stop-gap funding for databases and research projects.
According to data from the US National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, roughly US$937 billion was spent on US research and development in 2023. The Science Philanthropy Alliance, a non-partisan coalition of funders working to increase private research funding, estimates that philanthropic funding contributed $27 billion to university and non-profit research organizations in 2024, about 21% of the total funding of these institutions. Of that, $18.3 billion came from non-profit sources, whereas $8.8 billion was paid through legacy philanthropy in the form of annual endowment payouts. By contrast, the federal government spent $63.6 billion on research at academic institutions in 2024.
Nature Spotlight: Philanthropy and awards
When the Science Philanthropy Alliance launched in New York City in 2014, it had six members. The number has now grown to 45, including 7 that joined last year. It’s one of many philanthropy collectives internationally that mentor and connect private funders with research opportunities — but it formed to increase private support for basic research. “One of the purposes of our organization is to bring people together to discuss what is urgent and important — and form strategic interest groups around some of those areas,” says president France Córdova.
Philanthropic funders are changing to match the times. “Federal funding cuts in science have made our work even more critical, and we’re doubling down to meet new needs,” says Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation in Palo Alto, California. “We’re not replacing government funding or government agencies. We are taking the risk that comes with innovation,” she says, noting that philanthropic organizations have more freedom to fund risky projects than do governments, which are spending taxpayers’ money. To that end, private funders are exploring creative models to identify and support overlooked research. These include venture philanthropy — a multi-year, strategic, hands-on approach to achieve social impact — as well as joint funding calls between various non-profit organizations, and sometimes with government agencies, to pursue complicated research on global issues such as climate, health and artificial intelligence. Another goal is for these endeavours to bolster transparency and trust in the scientific process.
For most philanthropies, the aim is to identify projects in which funding can lead to breakthroughs — often by supporting blue-sky or interdisciplinary research, which many researchers think is getting harder to secure funding for. “The greatest discoveries come where there are porous boundaries between disciplines,” says Naomi Azrieli, a Science Philanthropy Alliance member and chair of the Toronto-based Azrieli Foundation — the largest non-corporate philanthropic organization in Canada.
Shoring up support
Last year, the administration of US President Donald Trump terminated more than 2,200 active research grants, totalling $2.5 billion in already-allocated funding, according to a March study1. Within that, almost $400 million in funding for students and early-career researchers was cut.
A survey of Science Philanthropy Alliance members found that around a dozen changed or considered shifting their grant making in response to federal cuts. Several established flexible mechanisms to help protect current and past grant recipients, including extensions and gap funding to keep a project alive. Others bolstered funding streams for early-career researchers. In February, in response to Trump administration funding cuts, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Palo Alto, California, made a one-time investment to fund more postdocs at institutions at which it had provided historical support. Foundation president Aileen Lee says that the organization deployed $55 million to 30 universities “to give flexibility to deal with near-term uncertainty”, given the vulnerability associated with this career stage. The current estimate is that it will fund about 400 postdocs across 25 fields.
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