The threat of a freeze on all federal funding from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget last week sent much of the nation into a frenzy to interpret the order and understand its ramifications. While the office and Trump administration have since walked back that initial effort – and two judges having issued court orders to block the move – uncertainty about the future of such funding remains.
How have Orange County’s local governments and UNC been responding and adjusting since the initial news? Largely by preaching patience and preparing for any outcome.
Chapel Hill Mayor Jess Anderson quickly hopped onto social media to share a message with her constituents following the initial memo shared by the Office of Management and Budget saying all federal grants would be frozen. In her post, she wrote the town was in regular contact with the office to get clarifications – and criticized the move as “irresponsible.”
Although the action has since been put on hold, Anderson said it provides a good opportunity to remind people of all the ways federal grants and allocations help the local government function and provide key services.
“At the town level,” said the mayor, “we rely on federal funding for our transit system, for affordable and public housing, for greenway projects, for new clean energy projects, for library programming. Then there’s the funding for our community partners who are doing incredibly important work, and a lot of that is federal.”
Similarly for the county government, federal grants heavily support its housing efforts, Department of Social Services, health department, and aging initiatives. Chair of the county commissioners Jamezetta Bedford said the board met the day after the memo was released, and Orange County’s manager and staff are already exploring what potential budgets would look like without parts of – or all – federal funding. The result, she described, would be bleak.
“There’s no way with our county taxes to make up for all of that,” Bedford said. “We weren’t as panicked [by Tuesday] because of the stay, but it would take an entire reworking.
“It would be really dismal,” Bedford continued, “and we weren’t even thinking about our [broader region]. That was just county government – we started thinking about our farmers, what about the university… it would truly just destroy our economy.”
At UNC, much interest and anxiety came from faculty involved in research, according to Chancellor Lee Roberts. The university quickly established a webpage with all communication from the Office of Management and Budget to best explain what was known about affected funding plans. With Carolina recently becoming a top ten university in total research funding ($1.55 billion), Roberts said his administration would stand behind UNC’s work and advocate for it to continue.
“We and our colleagues at the UNC System – and the other large universities around the country,” said Roberts, “are not just tracking the updates coming out of Washington relating to the availability of research funding, but also actively trying to lobby…to convince policymakers of the importance of research funding and the benefits it provides.”
The majority of UNC’s research funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, which report giving more than $66 million through 109 different grants to the Chapel Hill campus for fiscal year 2025. Many of those projects contribute to the university’s wellness research efforts – like vaccine development, cancer treatments, and maternal and child health.
“That’s life-saving research,” Roberts said. “It’s creating groundbreaking innovations that are going to advance human knowledge as it relates to medicine, biomedicine, public health…and we think we’re doing really exceptional work here at Carolina in that regard, and we think those are wise investments.”
Beyond any potential operational changes, the local institutions are also monitoring changes Trump’s administration is seeking to make on social or civil issues. The president’s executive orders requiring the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion practices – and the Department of Defense’s early statement saying it would not recognize “identity months” – caused several questions into how such efforts locally could be impacted.
In Carrboro, Mayor Barbara Foushee pledged that nothing would change in how the town government would reflect its constituents’ values. Shortly after reading a proclamation declaring February as Black History Month, Foushee shared an additional message to the community about the town leaders’ intention to stay the course.
“One thing I can put my finger on is that the town of Carrboro and its elected leaders will continue to provide the same day-to-day services and operations for our community,” said the mayor. “We also will share information with the community should there be some type of direct impact for us as a result of these changes at the federal level. Our town manager and staff are keeping track of what’s happening, as are your elected officials before you.
“We’re on it,” Foushee concluded. “We’re not going to panic, we’re not going to show any fear, we’re going to continue to do what we were doing before this change at the federal level.”
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Orange County Leaders React to Threat of Funding Freeze, Impact of Executive Orders from Trump Administration Chapelboro.com.
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