In 2025, greater than 3,800 analysis grants from the Nationwide Institutes of Well being and the Nationwide Science Basis had been terminated or frozen as a part of the Trump administration’s effort to realign funding priorities.
The cuts — totaling about $3 billion in remaining funds — focused initiatives associated to variety, fairness and inclusion; environmental safety; vaccine hesitancy; public well being and extra. These initiatives embrace:
- Most cancers hub — The biggest hit to any NIH grant ($77 million in remaining funds) froze assist for Northwestern College’s Lurie Most cancers Heart, a nationwide hub for most cancers analysis, care and neighborhood outreach.
- STEM obstacles — Inside NSF, the most important terminated grant ($9 million in remaining funds) supported the coordination hub of the company’s INCLUDES initiative, which goals to make the STEM workforce extra numerous by supporting large-scale efforts to take away systemic obstacles. The hub connects tons of of researchers, organizations and neighborhood teams working towards this objective.
- Vaccine uptake — One terminated grant ($200,000 in unspent funds) aimed to grasp and cut back COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy amongst younger Black adults in three Southern states.
- Various immune cells — A grant to research how neurons regulate specialised immune cells within the retina misplaced its $490,000 of remaining funding. Whereas the explanation for its termination is unclear, the grant mentions that these cells exhibit exceptional “variety,” a time period the administration has flagged as problematic.
- Schooling disparities — The College System of Maryland Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program goals to extend the variety of underrepresented faculty college students in Maryland. A grant to review the impression of those efforts by gender, ethnicity and switch standing was terminated, with $1.7 million nonetheless to be spent.
Methodology and caveats
All information come from Grant Witness, a mission to trace NIH and NSF grant terminations by way of authorities databases and researcher submissions. We used a big language mannequin (OpenAI’s GPT-5 Nano) to categorize grants by company analysis areas based mostly on grant abstracts. Every infographic wedge exhibits “equal grants misplaced”: complete reduce or frozen funds remaining to be spent divided by the median. There could also be inaccuracies because of delays in monetary reporting and the quickly shifting panorama; some funding might have been restored by the point you learn this.
