PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: How to navigate recent funding cuts

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer, your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands.

These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands.

If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better – and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic!

Writing research proposals has never been easy. A good proposal needs an important research question, a convincing methodology, a realistic budget, a capable team, and a clear explanation of the project’s broader relevance. You need to show that the work is ambitious but feasible, innovative but grounded in existing research. Even when you get all these elements right, success is never guaranteed. Rejections are very common.

Proposal writing therefore requires persistence, but it also requires strategy. We need to learn from reviewers, understand the priorities of funding agencies, and decide carefully which calls deserve our limited time. When funding becomes scarcer, simply submitting more proposals may not be the best response.

The current funding landscape makes these decisions increasingly difficult. In the United States, the number of new grants awarded by the National Science Foundation in 2025 was 25% below the average of the previous ten years. The National Institutes of Health awarded 24% fewer grants than its ten-year average. These reductions, summarized in an analysis by Nature, meant that fewer researchers received federal support.

Universities in the United Kingdom are also under financial pressure. Evidence submitted to the UK Parliament indicated that 19% of surveyed universities were already reducing their investment in research, while 79% were considering future reductions. The financial challenges facing universities can therefore affect research even when national research budgets are not formally reduced.

The Netherlands has not escaped these pressures. In April 2025, the Dutch Senate approved structural cuts of approximately €500 million per year to higher education and science. Although some earlier proposals were softened, universities warned that the remaining measures would affect students, staff, research positions, and institutional support. Universities of the Netherlands described the decision as a major blow to Dutch higher education and research.

Funding plans and political priorities may change again, but universities must still manage the consequences of decisions that have already been made. Researchers therefore need to approach funding more strategically. Here are five ways to navigate the changing landscape.

• Develop good connections to build strong consortia. Start building research relationships before a call is published. Attend conferences, participate in networks, and stay in touch with researchers whose expertise complements yours. A strong consortium is not a collection of impressive names assembled just before the deadline. It is a group of people who trust each other, understand their roles, and can demonstrate that they are able to work together. Building these connections also makes it easier to respond quickly when a suitable opportunity appears.
• Be flexible with your research topics. Flexibility does not mean abandoning your expertise or adding fashionable keywords to every proposal. Instead, consider the different ways your knowledge can contribute to emerging priorities, such as security and defense at this moment. Keep your central research skills, but remain open to changing the application, scale, framing, or disciplinary context of your work.
• Look beyond traditional calls and strengthen ties with the public and private sectors. National research councils are not the only sources of funding. Explore international programs such as Horizon Europe, as well as foundations, charities, municipalities, government departments, professional organizations, and industry partnerships. Collaborations outside academia can provide funding, data, facilities, practical expertise, and access to real-world research questions. They can also help you demonstrate the societal relevance of your work.
• Avoid taking poorly funded projects just to keep busy. An underfunded project may require almost as much administration, reporting, meeting time, and intellectual effort as a properly funded project. Before accepting, calculate the actual staff time, facilities, travel, equipment, and overhead required. Then ask what you and your team will need to stop doing. A project that relies heavily on unpaid work, exhausts junior researchers, or produces few meaningful outputs may weaken rather than strengthen your research program – and simply may not get the institutional approval to move ahead. Being busy is not the same as building a sustainable research portfolio.
• Get university support and understand your university’s strategy. Speak with your research office, department chair, finance team, and experienced grant holders. Ask which calls align with the university’s priorities, whether internal seed funding is available, and what support exists for proposal development. Resources such as the European Commission’s funding and tender portal can help you identify opportunities, but your university should also help you assess whether a call is worth pursuing. Find out how your institution plans to deal with the cuts and what those plans mean for staffing, laboratories, doctoral researchers, and proposal support.

Funding cuts can make us feel that we should apply for everything, accept every small opportunity, and work longer to compensate for shrinking resources. This reaction is understandable, but it is rarely sustainable. A better response is to become more selective: protect your strongest ideas, invest in reliable relationships, and focus your proposal-writing energy where there is a genuine fit.

At the same time, individual researchers cannot solve structural underfunding through better time management or personal productivity. As researchers, we can make deliberate choices, collaborate widely, and avoid allowing scarcity to push us into projects that undermine the quality of our work.Universities must communicate openly, set realistic workloads, provide meaningful support, and do the political activism to put research funding back on the agenda.

How are recent funding cuts affecting your research, and which strategies are helping you navigate the changing landscape?