Harvard School of Public Health Begins Layoffs As Trump Slashes Funding

The Harvard School of Public Health is laying off employees, shrinking its campus footprint, and making targeted cuts to departmental budgets in response to the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on Harvard — including pulling more than $2 billion in federal funding and threatening the University’s eligibility to enroll international students.

The budget-tightening at HSPH, the Harvard school most reliant on federal funds, comes after the school received three stop-work orders worth more than $60 million in the last two days and as its neighbor, Harvard Medical School, warned employees of impending layoffs on Wednesday.

The layoffs at HSPH have already begun taking place and have mostly impacted staff and researchers whose projects at the schools have lost funding this year. HSPH is not targeting a specific number of layoffs and intends to honor existing commitments to faculty.

HSPH spokesperson Stephanie Simon wrote in a statement that the school is facing a “significant budget crisis” and is taking a targeted approach to fiscal austerity by working to “identify strategic priorities and make sustainable budget cuts.”

“Unfortunately, this will lead to layoffs,” Simon wrote.

The school is also exiting their leases on two buildings and evaluating their agreements with other buildings to cut expenses “by consolidating onto our core campus,” according to Simon.

The first building is located at 90 Smith Street and houses HSPH’s human resources office and the Harvard University Police Department’s office for the Longwood campus. The second lease is for the fourth floor of the Landmark Center, a 40,000 square-foot space which houses laboratories, faculty and graduate student offices, and classrooms.

HSPH has not issued across-the-board cuts to departmental budgets yet, but it has asked departments to model potential budget scenarios and estimate how each would impact their research and educational operations.

The moves follow several cost-cutting measures HSPH instituted last month — including shrinking the admissions pools for several of its Ph.D. programs and pausing its search for a dean of research — in anticipation of budget pressures. Federal research funding composed 46 percent of HSPH’s revenue in fiscal year 2025.

As of last month, at least a dozen grants at HSPH had been terminated. One of the three stop-work orders received in the last two days affects HSPH professor Sarah Fortune’s $60 million contract which supported an international collective of tuberculosis researchers. The two other grants focused on breast cancer tumor sequencing and the relationship between coffee drinking and cancer.

The purse tightening comes as the White House has ramped up its pressure campaign against Harvard in the last two days. The Internal Revenue Service is planning to revoke the University’s tax-exempt status, CNN reported Wednesday.

And on the same day, the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to Harvard threatening to pull its eligibility to enroll international students on the condition that the University share information about international students’ disciplinary records and participation in protests.

Roughly 40 percent of HSPH’s student body is international. Simon cited the DHS’s threats to international student enrollment as a factor contributing to the school’s growing budget crisis.

“We are working to minimize the impact on our outstanding workforce while protecting the heart of our research and educational missions,” Simon wrote.

Clarification: April 17, 2025

This article has been updated to clarify that layoffs have been concentrated at labs that have been affected by the loss or stalling of grants so far this semester, not specifically following Trump’s most recent freeze of $2.2 billion in funding commitments.

Correction: April 17, 2025

A previous version of this article misspelled the surname of HSPH spokesperson Stephanie Simon on one reference.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.