University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay Perman appeared before a state legislative committee Monday afternoon with a dire warning: “Crippling” government funding cuts are imperiling the state’s public universities and could lead to layoffs.

In the last two years, the state has cut the public university system‘s budget by $233 million, according to Perman. The university system’s total budget is almost $8 billion.

The sharp cuts by the state, he said, have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s reductions in federal grants, financial aid, program funding and support for international students, leading to the likelihood of further cost-saving actions.

“We’ve already slashed nonpersonnel operating expenses to address earlier state cuts, meaning future cuts would harm our people,” Perman told state legislators. “We don’t want to do it and we know you don’t want it either, but pressure on our revenue is real and it’s crippling.”

The public university system isn’t the only one struggling. In an email to the campus community Monday evening, the Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels said the Baltimore university will continue its hiring freeze announced in June.

That’s partially because of a “significant decline in the number of new research awards across all federal agencies,” coupled with the cancellation of more than 80 existing federal grants. From January through mid-September, as compared to the same period in 2024, Hopkins received 40% fewer awards, representing a decline of about 50% in research funding.

The total value of the university’s federal research grant portfolio has declined by more than $500 million compared to this time last year, excluding the $800 million Hopkins lost from USAID cuts.

Federal actions have had a devastating impact on the state’s public university system as well, Perman said.

The widespread cancellation by the federal government of research grants has hit most corners of the state. The University of Maryland, Baltimore, lost 37 grants worth $48 million. At the University of Maryland, College Park, 60 grants worth $30 million were canceled. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, had 30 grants canceled worth $22 million, according to Perman. Some universities are seeing drops of up to 54% in grant continuations awarded, he said.

In total, the system is projecting losses of $70 million to $150 million annually, depending on where reimbursement rates land, Perman said. There are 2,200 graduate research assistants in the system whose positions are threatened if the grants to support their work fall through.

“This will do real damage to our pipeline of [the] next generation of researchers,” Perman said.

The university system hasn’t yet finalized its budget for this coming fiscal year, and therefore officials don’t know how much state funding they will ask for, said Ellen Herbst, the system’s vice chancellor for administration and finance.

“There’s so much uncertainty right now,” Herbst said in an interview, “both with the larger economy and the presidential administration.”

The U.S. Department of Education announced this month the cancellation of discretionary grants for minority-serving institutions and is seeking to cut other programs that serve minority and first-generation college students. Locally, the end of those grants affected the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the University of Maryland Global Campus; and the University of Baltimore, which is likely to see additional staff cuts.

The state’s university system is seeing a 5% decline in its roughly 12,000 international students this fall. Perman said he expects that figure to worsen next year with “a dramatic drop in international enrollment.”

That’s the same at Hopkins, which educates the most international students in the state. According to Daniels, there has been an 8% decline in enrollment of new international graduate students universitywide.

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