$1.8 billion in NIH grant cuts hit minority health research the hardest

The headlines keep coming: Another federal grant funding medical research terminated. Another lab devoted to mental health losing its funding. Another clinical trial stopped.

It’s all part of actions the Trump administration says are needed to make government more efficient or to eliminate funding related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Opponents say the cuts undermine crucial medical research, gut careers and damage U.S. leadership in science.

“When policies shift this frequently, it creates an environment that is simply not conducive to conducting great science or solving big problems,” says Harlan Krumholz, a cardiovascular medicine specialist at Yale School of Medicine. 

But pinning down the numbers undergirding these anecdotes of widespread cuts and their effects has been hard to do. Now Krumholz and colleagues have tried, taking a hard look at the impact at the National Institutes of Health.

Between the end of February and early April, the federal government terminated almost 700 NIH grants equaling $1.81 billion. That’s about 3.3 percent of the NIH’s total operating budget, the researchers report May 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Those cuts have not been evenly distributed, the team found. Scientists working with 24 of the NIH’s 26 institutes have seen their funding terminated. So far, the federal government has not terminated any grants administered by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health or the NIH Clinical Center, though the preeminent medical research center has reportedly struggled with staffing shortages. But the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities lost almost $224 million of its roughly $755 million in grants — or 30 percent of its NIH funds.

“The institute that’s tasked with funding really critical health and equity research was hit the hardest,” says policy and equity researcher Michael Liu of Harvard University.

What such cuts mean for the future of research in the United States remains unclear. So, too, does the fate of participants in clinical trials terminated midstream. It’s also unclear whether the portion of that $1.81 billion that’s already been spent — about 70 percent of it — will be taken back or if the terminations recoup only the 30 percent not yet used.

Science News spoke to Liu and Krumholz about how the team tallied the toll and why it matters. The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

SN: What prompted your team to do this work?

Liu: Most of the authors are early career researchers and work in institutions that receive NIH grants. We’ve been following the news but also have friends and colleagues and mentors who have personally received grant termination letters, which has been obviously very upsetting and disruptive. There’s been a lot of uncertainty around this. As scientists and researchers, we wanted to add some objectivity, some numbers, to the conversation.

SN: How did you dig up those numbers?

Liu: We collected data from the TAGGS [Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System] database. This dataset was actually released in accordance with the presidential memo on radical transparency around wasteful spending.

It provides a very comprehensive dataset of terminated grants, which prior to this current year was actually quite a rarity. And so we were able to take and extract all this information about grants. Then we linked [that dataset] to the NIH RePORTER dataset, which is a repository of all active NIH grants. So that gave us a denominator for our analyses.

SN: What surprised you in the numbers?

Liu: We came in saying that it might be the private elite, coastal East Coast institutions that would have been affected. But what we saw were both public and private institutions were affected. And that was interesting.

Second … when you look across institutes, the effects weren’t felt uniformly. We found that the National Institutes on Minority Health and Health Disparities … was hit the hardest. About 30 percent of their funding was cut. And that’s tenfold higher than the average cut. That was really striking to us.

Finally, we wanted to characterize not only which grants were cut, but also the career stage [of recipients]. That really kind of caught us off guard. One in 5, or about 20 percent of grants that were terminated, were classified as early career grants. These grants are really critical for early career researchers and the next generation of researchers to become independent investigators.

SN: What do these cuts mean for the future of U.S. science?

Krumholz: It’s hard to know the full impact yet. In the short term, these cuts are deeply disruptive. Teams in motion have been halted, people’s lives and families are affected, and significant investments are at risk. On a human level, this is a shock, with real personal fallout.

Over the long term, the message being sent is one of retreat from full-throated support for science and scientists. That kind of uncertainty reverberates across the research community. It affects morale, discourages talent and makes it harder to train the next generation.