This story originally published online at The Assembly.
Duke University aims to reduce costs by $350 million, or about 10 percent of its expenses, due to threatened federal funding cuts under President Donald Trump, according to a recording obtained by The Assembly of a faculty webinar Wednesday afternoon.
Duke officials said at the meeting that the school will initiate a voluntary separation program for certain employees beginning next week. Daniel Ennis, the university’s executive vice president, said the goal is not to offer a broad-based retirement incentive but rather to target positions that leaders expect to eliminate for at least the next three years.
Ennis said the university plans to discuss voluntary separations with hundreds of employees by May 21. The results of that program will be known by mid-July, he said, after which the university would turn to layoffs. That number would depend on how many people take the voluntary separation agreement.
“It’s hard to get to that $350 million target without having significant impact on our employees,” Ennis said at the meeting.
Duke officials said the target cost-reduction amount was based on projections that the federal funding cuts and policy changes could result in losses as much as $500 million to $750 million. It will be met via a “bottom-up” process in which various schools and other units are tasked with finding savings, with the goal of reaching the $350 million mark over the next three to five years.
The university had already said it would reduce spending and implement cost-cutting measures in response to federal funding cuts. Duke President Vincent Price announced in March that he had tasked senior administrators from the university and health system to develop a “strategic realignment and cost-reduction planning process.”
Shortly after Price’s message, Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, reported that three senior administrators sent an email to faculty and staff outlining a hiring freeze and additional measures, including the suspension of capital spending, a pause on mid-year salary adjustments, and a review of hiring practices. The administrators also said they would assess off-campus real estate, on-campus space consolidation, and employee benefit programs.
Duke officials have previously said the university planned to have an update on their progress by May for the Board of Trustees, and decisions on staff reductions would be finalized by the end of the summer.
Between the university and its health system, Duke is the second-largest private employer in the state and the largest employer in Durham County. In total, the university has more than 44,500 full-time and part-time employees in the state, and it paid $4 billion in salaries and wages in 2024.
“The potential threats in federal funding touch every corner of this institution,” Ennis told faculty and staff at Wednesday’s meeting. “There’s no part of our mission, there’s no part of our enterprise, that would not be impacted.”
‘Difficult Tradeoffs’
Unlike some of its peers, Duke has not been singled out for funding cuts from the Trump administration. Other elite private schools, like Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Pennsylvania, have seen big swaths of research grants and federal funding pulled in response to Trump administration demands.
Instead, the administration’s proposed cap on indirect costs tied to research funding—portions of federal grants used to pay for salaries, equipment, and supplies—poses a threat to Duke’s financial stability. While the floated cap on National Institutes of Health grants has been halted by a federal judge for now, Duke officials have said some anticipated federal research funding has not come through, and other policy changes proposed by the Trump administration could affect the school’s finances.
According to a transcript obtained by The Assembly, Price said during a webinar for faculty and staff on April 15 that Duke has been most affected so far by changes to research grants, including the cancellation of some in-progress grants, as well as “significant delays” in the typical process used for awarding and processing grants. Jennifer Lodge, the university’s vice president of research and innovation, said later in the meeting that the university had received about 50 percent of what it would have expected to earn from grants in a typical year.
If indirect cost cuts come to fruition, Price said Duke would face a $200 million shortfall. Combined with other potential policy changes, like Trump’s proposal to hike the tax rate on university endowments from 1.4 percent to as high as 21 percent, Price said losses could add up to around $500 million per year. Price and other administrators also expressed concerns about changes that could hurt the university’s health system, pointing to proposed cuts to Medicaid floated by House Republicans in recent weeks.
“Every school and unit at Duke is going to be impacted in this environment,” Provost Alec Gallimore said at that meeting.
Across the country, more than a dozen public and private universities have implemented hiring freezes and other cost-cutting measures, though few institutions have responded with layoffs. Johns Hopkins University laid off more than 2,200 workers following the Trump administration’s cuts to the USAID.
Duke officials have made it clear that cuts are inevitable in the current environment.
“We will need to make some difficult tradeoffs,” Price said in his annual address to faculty in late March. “If we are smart and serious about pruning and perhaps thinning now as needed, we can position ourselves well for a vigorous response when conditions more conducive to growth return.”
Matt Hartman contributed additional reporting.
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