A sudden halt in funding from the National Institutes of Health has resonated deeply through America’s scientific research world.
For many, the cuts have had a direct impact — from lost jobs to closed labs to halted clinical trials.
After the government slashed $400 million in funding to Columbia University, one postdoc student whose grant to study schizophrenia was canceled told Nature that his academic career was “effectively over.”
The indirect toll is also becoming clear. Plans for a new 11-story building that would have housed biotech office and lab space in New Haven, Conn., have been put on hold by the rippling effect of government funding cuts, local media reported. Although developers were gunning to open the building this year, Yale University yanked its leasing at the site amid a pullback in NIH funding, throwing the building’s fate into limbo.
Nearly 800 NIH grants have been terminated, according to a public database managed by Scott Delaney, a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Noam Ross, executive director of rOpenSci. The sweeping changes, which started in February, are rolling into almost every state, according to an analysis from KFF Health News.
Many of the cuts have impacted DEI-related research and grants with keywords like “transgender” and “diversity.” But programs involving infectious diseases such as HIV and COVID-19 have also been hit particularly hard.
Insights into the specific initiatives being gutted continue to come to light.
A landmark NIH-backed research program that shaped the way hormones are prescribed to menopausal women is now on the chopping block. The long-running Women’s Health Initiative said this week that HHS is terminating contracts for regional centers, which will “significantly impact ongoing research and data collection” and severely limit the ability to generate “new insights into the health of older women.”
Legal challenges to the NIH cuts are also mounting. So far, 16 states, along with universities and nonprofits, have sued the Trump administration over the cancellation of grants that were already awarded. Some of the plaintiffs claim the NIH did not follow its own regulations and procedures for terminating awarded grants, while others are taking a constitutional approach by arguing the cancellations violate the separation of government powers.
An internal budget draft has revealed the Trump administration’s vision for the future of NIH. The proposal, reported by The Washington Post last week, would drastically reduce the agency’s funding while consolidating many of its offices.
