The Johns Hopkins University is pausing pay increases for higher-income employees and freezing staff hiring due to a steady stream of cuts to research grants and other federal policy proposals expected to hurt its bottom line, according to a university email.

Pay increases for employees usually effective July 1 will instead be paused for those earning more than $80,000 per year. The hiring freeze will be imposed across the university for new jobs, as well as filling open positions.

The Baltimore-based university will also slow capital construction and renovation plans by as much as 20%. Discretionary spending on travel, food, supplies and professional services will also be reduced.

The university did not say how much savings the cost-reducing measures are expected to yield.

“We fear that this downward trend may be laying the groundwork for deep cuts to the extramural research programs at the NIH, NSF, DOD and DOE — further fraying the extraordinary and longstanding research partnership between universities and the federal government, and significantly curtailing Hopkins’ capacity to undertake our core academic and research mission and to sustain the people who allow us to realize it," President Ron Daniels, Provost Ray Jayawardhana and Laurent Heller, executive vice president for finance and administration respectively, wrote in Monday’s email.

Hopkins, which enrolls more than 24,000 students, was founded as the nation’s first research university. Because of its medical school, hospital and the Applied Physics Laboratory, the university employes tens of thousands of people, making it the biggest employer in the city of Baltimore.

Since January, federal agencies have cut 90 grants, resulting in the loss of more than $50 million in research funding for the university. That’s on top of the loss of $800 million from the elimination of USAID grants, which led to 2,000 layoffs.

There has also been a decline in new federal research awards at the university, which are down by nearly two-thirds since January, compared to the same period last year, according to the email sent by the university‘s top leadership to the Hopkins community on Monday afternoon.

There are 600 National Institutes of Health-funded trials underway at the university with more than 3,000 patients enrolled. Every year since 1979, Hopkins has been the federal government’s top university research partner.

There are a “host of proposed actions that are gaining steam in Congress” that university leadership say will “seriously impair our ability to carry out our mission.”

That includes the proposed cap on the reimbursement rate for research-related facilities and administrative costs, which could reduce the university’s federal research funding by more than $300 million annually.

The university is also “deeply concerned” about the Trump administration revoking visas for international students, the three Hopkins leaders said in their email. Hopkins accounted for more than 40% of Maryland’s international students last year, educating more than 10,000 during the school year. This spring, 37 international graduate students also lost their visas, although they have since been reinstated.

The university said last month that it would tap into earnings from its $13.2 billion endowment to help address the federal funding cuts.

Proposed cuts to Medicaid risk reducing the number of patients served at the university’s health system while increasing the cost of care.

University leadership said they are “continuing to advocate and take steps to address the impacts” of federal actions on Hopkins.

“We know that these are uncertain times, and we appreciate your unwavering commitment to research, teaching and clinical care; to academic excellence; and to the well-being of the Hopkins community,” the leadership team wrote.

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