USC calls for hiring freeze, austerity efforts amid budget woes and Trump investigations
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Roiled by multiple investigations from the Trump administration, USC has announced a slate of cutbacks — including a staff hiring freeze — as it braces for what it called “federal funding uncertainty” in a letter released Monday.
Among the nine austerity measures are a reassessment of capital spending projects and restrictions on discretionary spending, according to the letter signed by university leaders including outgoing President Carol Folt.
The USC actions come at a time of unprecedented threats against universities by the Trump administration. It has vowed to cut federal funding — including key medical and science research grants — to institutions that do not comply with its directives. Trump has ordered campuses to squelch antisemitism; eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“Recent developments require us to take additional steps to increase our financial resilience in the face of exceptional financial uncertainty,” said the letter, which noted that USC received about $570 million in research funding in fiscal year 2024. “Taking bold action now will help us to meet the challenges facing us while protecting and advancing our important academic and research missions for generations to come.”
The belt-tightening plan, effective immediately, comes just months after an internal financial planning task force said in November that USC’s $158-million budget deficit required various “cost containment measures.”
The Trump administration has announced that USC faces investigations from the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights over alleged antisemitism — and will be visited by a federal antisemitism task force. The scrutiny largely stems from allegations against pro-Palestinian protests last spring and an encampment that was cleared by police, who arrested some demonstrators.
The university has already made substantive changes: In February, USC deleted the website for its schoolwide Office of Inclusion and Diversity and merged it into another operation, scrubbed several college and department-level DEI statements, renamed faculty positions and, in one case, removed online references to a scholarship for Black and Indigenous students. Last spring it enacted restrictions on campus protests.
USC is not alone in enacting cost-cutting plans under the threat of losing research funding. Earlier this month, the University of California — also under investigation by the Trump administration, which accuses it of campus antisemitism — announced a hiring freeze and other measures. Dozens of additional universities are subject to inquiries by the U.S. Department of Education over alleged antisemitism or race-based discrimination.
As the Trump administration threatens to pull federal funds from universities, including for medical and scientific research, the University of California has announced a hiring freeze and additional cuts.
Several faculty members at USC said they had been bracing for Monday’s announcement in light of Trump’s recent actions.
“Candidly, there have been plenty of reasons to be annoyed with USC in the last 15 years, but this is not one of them,” said Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor. “I think everyone recognizes this is universal to research [universities] across the country. The Trump administration is behaving with such hostility and capriciousness. ... There is so much malevolence.”
Sanjay Madhav, an associate professor of practice at the USC Viterbi engineering school, said he was most worried about the hiring freeze and how it could upend longtime plans and projects across the university, such as an ambitious computing initiative that is in the interviewing phase for faculty positions.
“We have ... candidates scheduled to fly in over the next few weeks,” he said. “There is a lot of concern we could be interviewing all these candidates and potentially there could not be a job for them.”
Yet Madhav, who is involved in a union organizing effort for non-tenure track professors, lamented that he and other similarly situated faculty “have no seat at the table and we have no input in terms of what decisions are made.”
USC declined to comment, referring The Times to the Monday letter and the financial planning memo from November.
Trump — who has railed against universities’ “Marxist” diversity administrators and “radical left” accreditors — has moved swiftly to remake the collegiate landscape in a country that is often said to have the best system of higher education in the world.
Amid President Trump’s attack on DEI, California schools and colleges aim to keep diversity efforts intact while skirting clashes with the administration.
Among other actions, the administration’s National Institutes of Health issued a rule in February that slashes funding tied to medical research, which universities have said is integral to their operations and scientific discoveries. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction earlier this month that puts the cuts on hold.
Saxbe said the letter from Folt and others was the subject of discussion on a Slack group chat with colleagues who expressed “confusion” over how some of the cuts would be implemented and how far they could go.
“We are just in this very bewildering landscape,” she said. “We don’t know how far to tighten the belt or for how long because there is so much uncertainty.”
