Email sent March 7, 2025
This message applies to all direct reports to the President and Provost
In January, we initiated the Together We Thrive program aiming to put the University on a path to reduce expenses, increase revenues, and focus on operational and administrative alignment opportunities to improve the UW’s long-term financial health. Since this initiative began, significant and rapid policy changes have occurred at the federal level. The current federal funding trajectory, while not completely clear, is nevertheless dire; and the state of Washington faces a significant budget shortfall. Either of these conditions alone would be challenging, and together they are significant and material risks to our financial health.
As a result, it is necessary to implement the first stages of significant University wide financial risk mitigation efforts now. The measures below are escalations of our previous requests to you to limit non-essential spending that now require your action. Importantly, these measures serve to ensure we meet our stated goals of reducing our adjusted net losses during this period of elevated and growing financial risk. For the purposes of this memo, “essential” refers to recruitments, requests, travel or training that are mission-critical to university academic, administrative, and clinical operations (as opposed to employees performing an essential service and required to report to work in the event of suspended operations).
- All in-progress staff recruitments, except for those deemed essential by a Dean, Chancellor (or designee), or Cabinet level official, must be paused.
- We are limiting in-flight faculty and academic personnel recruitments to the most essential as previously communicated by the Provost. If an extended offer is declined, authorization to move to a subsequent candidate must be reviewed and approved by a Dean, Chancellor, or Chancellor’s designee.
- All new staff hiring requests, except for those deemed essential by a Dean, Chancellor (or designee), or Cabinet level official, must be paused.
- We are limiting new faculty and academic personnel positions to the most essential as previously communicated by the Provost.
- All planned travel or training that is not essential to operations must be cancelled.
- Travel or training that was approved and purchased prior to this directive and is critical to the University’s operations can occur if deemed essential by a Dean, Chancellor (or designee), or Cabinet level official.
- All food purchases and discretionary spending, such as spending on branded goods, must be curtailed significantly.
- All non-essential existing service contracts must be renegotiated, focusing on scope critical to the University’s operations, or concluded.
- In alignment with our existing policy framework (e.g., APS 2.3), local software licenses that may be duplicative of central, enterprise licenses must be reviewed and consolidated with central ones over the next year.
- All non-core activities that do not directly support instruction, research, and public service missions, including programs launched with one-time funding, must be reviewed and constrained.
- Reach out to central unit leadership in FPB, UWIT, and UWHR to explore shared services, especially where there are vacancies on your finance, information technology and human resources teams.
- We are not planning to implement rolling furloughs institution-wide at this time.
We are actively modeling a range of financial scenarios and expect that each of you will proactively explore ways to reduce expenses in your units by 5 and 10 percent on core funds. These are preliminary exercises for strategic planning and should not be interpreted as definitive targets or indications of future decisions.
In addition, units are encouraged to review activities on all other fund types and identify areas to reduce expenses or gain efficiency. We urge you to rethink business processes and structures to improve efficiency where possible rather than simply reducing the volume of activities your business processes are intended to support, or passing on costs to other units in the form of additional recharge or taxation.
We will keep you informed as we receive credible and actionable information that may necessitate budget reductions and actions in addition to those outlined above. Last week, the Governor proposed utilizing statewide furloughs as a strategy to save state operating funds. For higher education, this strategy requires specific legislative authorization. Implementing “across the board” furloughs in the method proposed by the Governor presents implementation challenges for the university that significantly limits actual budget savings. We are working directly with the legislature on next steps and are not planning to implement a furlough strategy at this time.
The University continues to advocate strongly at the state and national levels for policies and funding to sustain the priorities they have supported for decades. While we do, our shared goal is to continue the vital work that saves lives and provides positive impact while balancing unknowns and our university’s financial stability.
Sincerely,
