Gov. Shapiro meets with Penn Med leader amid ‘existential’ threat posed by Trump

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has met with the leader of the University of Pennsylvania’s Health System multiple times as Philadelphia’s largest private employer faces an “existential threat” from a loss of federal funding.

The meetings were described by the dean of Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, Jon Epstein, in a live-streamed message to the Penn Medicine community on Feb. 18 that was obtained by WHYY News. It remains unclear when exactly the meetings were held and whether Shapiro discussed with Epstein a statewide response to the challenges facing Penn and other state universities — including a precipitous decline in the National Institutes of Health’s support for research that has prompted schools to curtail graduate admissions and lay off employees.

In his message, Epstein — who was appointed to his position in a permanent capacity Feb. 11 — painted a dire portrait of Penn Med’s future amid a “chaotic pace of government regulations and executive orders,” many of which have placed the university directly in their crosshairs.

Penn has $2.6 billion in active NIH grants, and Trump’s attempted cuts would threaten $240 million of that funding annually along with the jobs of 529 employees, a senior research administrator wrote in a legal filing.

“Make no mistake, these times pose an existential threat to healthcare institutions, to academic medicine, and to the academy as we know it,” Epstein said.

As it fights a lawsuit opposing the NIH cuts and joins planning group discussions of its response to Trump’s actions, Penn Medicine has shown signs of belt-tightening. In the past two weeks, the school has rescinded offers to graduate students and moved to dissolve a six-year-old center in London, according to a Board of Trustees agenda.

But Epstein predicted the outlook would only worsen: “My own view is that challenges to our academic and healthcare institutions and to our culture will continue to intensify and that the simmering pot may yet come to a full boil.”

The newly minted leader added that he has met with Shapiro “several times,” while university leaders have also gone directly to Capitol Hill to plead their concerns to Democratic and Republican legislators. In response to a list of questions to a spokesperson, Epstein confirmed he and his colleagues had emphasized the “economic and workforce impact” of Penn Medicine with elected officials “in recent weeks” as the system maps out its response to the flurry of policy changes and executive actions brought about by Trump.

The spokesperson added in a separate statement that the structure of Penn Medicine London was “no longer required” for the health system’s goals, adding that its dissolution was a “formality that is unrelated to any current financial factors.”

Shapiro’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Caught in the middle of the political upheaval are graduate students, researchers and 49,000 employees of Penn’s health system — which the university says supports 79,990 jobs in the region and generates a $15.1 billion economic impact.

Penn’s graduate admission cuts are the difference between studying pharmacology and working at Costco for Keely Barton, a first-generation student whose research appointment at Georgetown University ends in the next month. She was rejected from Penn’s prestigious Biomedical Graduate Studies program Friday, even though she said she was told when she interviewed in early February not to worry about changes at NIH impacting admissions.

On Feb. 7, the NIH slashed the rate it pays universities to support indirect costs to 15%. The weekend she expected to be offered admission came and went.

“I feel a little hopeless right now, to be honest,” Barton said, emphasizing that she thinks she would have been accepted if the university was not anticipating a $240 million or greater shortfall.

“Due to the unusual challenges being face[d] at this time, we were unable to make as many offers as we hoped,” Director of Biomedical Graduate Studies Kelly Jordan-Sciutto wrote in a note to rejected applicants obtained by WHYY News.

The BMG program typically admits around 300 students out of 3,000 applications each year and was among many Penn departments ordered to cut the number of acceptances by 35%, according to The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper. Barton, who did not take fault with how Penn leaders communicated about the situation, said she agreed with how Epstein has characterized the situation.

“I think there’s an entire generation of scientists that could be lost to this,” she said. “We can’t survive as a society without an investment in science.”

The university has ramped up engagement with public officials in recent months as political threats have escalated since the resignation of President Liz Magill and board of trustees Chair Scott Bok in December 2023. Rep. Madeleine Dean, who serves on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee, met with Interim President Larry Jameson in February to discuss Penn’s NIH-funded research. Earlier this week, state lawmakers held an at-times contentious meeting with Jameson in opposition to the school’s scrubbing of web pages related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — with two officials walking out in protest of one top administrator’s referral to diversity as a “lightning rod.”

In the message obtained by WHYY News, Epstein acknowledged that scrutiny of DEI has caused “considerable anger and pain” in the Penn Medicine community.

“For now, it’s clear that we need to modify some of our programs and websites in response to explicit government directives indicating that such diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts violate the law,” Epstein said, while cautioning that the school was not departing from its “core values.”

Penn spent $388,000 on lobbying state lawmakers and $640,000 on lobbying federal lawmakers in 2024, up more than 30% each from the year prior. And the $180,000 which Penn spent on federal lobbying in the last fiscal quarter was its highest quarterly spending since 2019. NIH funding and graduate medical education are among the most frequent topics that Penn lobbies on.

The funding at risk “supports our communities and our important work, from scholarships to basic science, to clinical trials of potentially life-saving therapies, to the social safety net upon which so many depend,” Epstein said.

Editor’s Note: The University of Pennsylvania is a WHYY supporter. WHYY News produces independent, fact-based news content for audiences in Greater Philadelphia, Delaware and South Jersey.