Research universities are opening their checkbooks wider to fight for research funding that used to require much less defending. But this increase in spending is not the problem itself — it is a symptom of a changing relationship between the federal government and higher education. At the University, the Office of Federal Relations, led by Julia Smith, executive director for federal relations and special assistant to the president, works with the Virginia Delegation to primarily lobby for the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and NASA appropriations. Smith’s own account notes that research funding was last year’s defining battle. The University’s lobbying spending jump did not happen in a vacuum — the University has been hit hard by federal funding cuts and now finds itself bargaining for its institutional autonomy. A public research university having to negotiate for its independence is, on its face, an indictment of the system it operates within.
By May 2025, the University had lost over $60 million in federal research grants due to cuts from the Trump administration. By July, that figure had grown to $64 million. Moreover, the University experienced the largest increase to funding cuts in Virginia, with $85 million affected and two $20 million grant terminations. The Cavalier Daily recently reported that the University spent roughly $250,000 lobbying the federal government in 2025, an estimated 25 percent increase over each of the last two years. This jump, however, is not an anomaly. Cornell University spent just over $1 million on federal lobbying in 2025, a 66 percent increase from the year prior, and the University of Pennsylvania hit a record high in the fourth quarter of 2025 — largely due to facing NIH funding losses and scientific research cuts.
It is evident that the University’s lobbying expenditures jumping 25 percent in a single year is not simply a budget line, but a symptom of a larger problem. When a public university is forced to fight for a seat at a table that it once occupied by right — lobbying Congress to protect funding it has always depended on — that is evidence the public funding system itself has grown deeply unstable. All members of the University community are downstream of that instability, whether they realize it or not.
This money does not only touch research — the need for a 25 percent spending jump is evidence of a funding relationship that students, faculty and the wider University community cannot continue to rely on. When the lobbying budget grows by a quarter in a single year, that growth is a rough proxy for how much less certain that research funding has become. In late April, the Trump administration abruptly removed all advisers from NSF’s board, one of the nation’s premier science agencies, and asked Congress to cut scientific research by an additional $44 billion — 22 percent — in a single year. In addition to this, Pell Grants and Federal Work-Study were both targeted in the very budget proposals that defunded NIH and NSF. These include aid packages that enable students to afford tuition, work jobs on Grounds and participate in fellowships. Teaching and research assistantships that keep class sizes manageable and labs staffed run on the same federal dollars the University is now fighting to protect.
To Charlottesville, the wider Virginia community and to numerous neighboring states in the South, the work that the University does is vital. U.Va. Health, an academic medical center, is critical to both regional and national healthcare — it combines groundbreaking research, advanced clinical care and specialized medical education to deliver services that standard community hospitals cannot provide for some of the region’s most ill patients. Yet, so much of the funding that the University currently depends on is vanishing in the name of politics that have little to do with the University itself. This federal administration’s FY26 budget request proposed cutting NIH spending by 37 percent and NSF funding by more than 50 percent — cuts that analysts believe would set the country’s research and development landscape back more than 25 years.
Work this vital to the region's health, research and education should not be exposed to the politics of a single budget cycle. It is a possibility that the University's research budget survived because a lobbyist advocated for it in rooms largely inaccessible to students, against a threat that could resurface in the next budget cycle. This does not constitute stability. Rather, it reflects a university that remains one appropriations cycle away from a markedly consequential loss to research — a margin whose narrowness students have little means of assessing.
The impact of funding is observable, and the fight for it is necessary. While the University should not have to be victim to a proxy war for funding, it is even more important that we participate in a broader reckoning, one that extends beyond Grounds. Public higher education cannot continue to secure its funding through a cycle of year-to-year triage, depending on which administration is in office and which cuts lobbyists can beat back, given how heavily our region depends on funding. $250,000 is a rounding error against the $60 to $85 million the University has already lost.
Farah Eljazzar is an opinion columnist who writes about identity and culture for The Cavalier Daily, and previously served as an Opinion Editor during the 136th term. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
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