It has been hard to quantify the scope of grants canceled by Trump administration health agencies, but in a paper published Thursday, researchers are putting forth one topline number: $1.8 billion in grants from the National Institutes of Health terminated in just over one month, including $544 million that had not yet been spent. The figure is imperfect and is likely an undercount, outside researchers noted, but points to an unprecedented disruption to science in the U.S.
The authors did not analyze grants by topic because there is no standardized way to do so. Instead they looked at the type of funding program the grants were a part of and the NIH institute or center awarding them. That analysis highlights the administration’s focus on grants it deems related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities saw the largest percent of its portfolio cut — 29.6% of the dollar amount of active grants — followed by 13.4% for the National Institutes of Nursing Research, which awards many grants related to treating marginalized patients.
The study also found that 139 of 694 of the terminated grants were training grants, which support early-career researchers and are sometimes intended to promote diversity in the sciences.
“This paper is an important accounting of the current moment, important accounting of one facet of what is getting lost,” said Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has assembled a database of canceled grants but was not affiliated with the new study. “It’s a critical piece of the puzzle, but the puzzle is much bigger.”
Delaney said the study lays a foundation, but to understand the full impact of cuts requires learning about “individual grants and individual discoveries that will no longer be made because the government chose to burn down our scientific research establishment.”
The paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed grants terminated between Feb. 28 and April 8 that were reported in the Health and Human Services’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grant System.
“There has been an incredible amount of recent news about grant terminations at the NIH. However, most of this has been anecdotal in nature and has caused substantial uncertainty and unease among researchers, academic institutions, and patients. We wanted to provide transparency and clarity by objectively characterizing the scope of terminations, the types of grants affected, and the differential impact of these terminations across career states,” said Michael Liu, a student at Harvard Medical School who was an author on the study.
There are several sources of data for terminated grants, which are incomplete and at times contradict each other. In addition to the TAGGS database, these include NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORTER) database and the USASPENDING website. Delaney’s database uses a combination of REPORTER and the TAGGS database along with self-reported terminations from the scientific community. Over the same period the JAMA study measured, his database says the total value of canceled NIH grants is around $3.3 billion.
Jeremy Berg, who previously led one of the NIH institutes and has been tracking delays in grant funding being spent, said grant cancelations are a moving target. “There are grants that are terminated, that are being reinstated, so they’re no longer terminated, and it’s just messy,” he said.
Grant terminations also don’t provide a complete picture of the disruption to research funding, which also include delays in grant payments and reductions in the awarding of new grants. A STAT analysis found that the cumulative amount of new grants awarded in the first 110 days of 2025 was $2.3 billion less than the average awarded during the same period from 2016-2024 — a 28% contraction.
The results of the JAMA study align with a recent analysis by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which used Delaney’s database. It found 45% of the grants terminated had been awarded to medical schools and hospitals. The terminations impacted 113 clinical trials on conditions including HIV/AIDS, cancer, and mental health.
Two separate lawsuits have been filed seeking to reverse the grant terminations. A U.S. District Court judge in Boston will hear arguments Thursday over whether to grant a preliminary injunction in one of the cases, filed by state attorneys general.
While the figure presented in the JAMA paper worried researchers, given how rare grant terminations have been in the past, they were more concerned about future, larger cuts to medical research.
“What’s being discussed in the paper, has important implications for biomedical research, and I’m sure it’s terrible for the PIs and the universities that are seeing this funding cut, but this is a drop in the bucket compared to what the administration is proposing for the next fiscal year, which is an of order magnitude larger in cuts, a 40% cut to NIH research funding,” said Andrew Fieldhouse, an economist at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School who has published work on the benefits of national spending on research and development. He recently published a paper on historical spending on research, which found Congress has largely “insulated” research spending during times when the government is clamping down on spending.
If larger cuts were to come, it could hurt the country’s overall GDP for years to come, according to other research. A recent white paper found that cutting federal research spending by 25% could have a similar effect on GDP as the Great Depression.
“This is not just an adjustment in the budget without consequences, which I think is what the administration is trying to say to the public, that this is just savings in the federal budget,” said Ignacio Gonzalez, an economist at American University, who was an author on that paper. “It might be savings in the short run, but in the long run, it’s a really, really bad policy.”
