According to its own website, the mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability. Despite NIH being regarded as one of the world’s foremost medical research centers, the current Administration has terminated hundreds of NIH biomedical research grants totaling more than $2.4 billion. These funding terminations have had (and are likely to continue to have) a significant effect on research as well as research training. This article explores the scope of the Administration’s cuts to research at NIH and efforts in the courts to halt those cuts.
According to the American Public Health Association (APHA), “In February, the NIH began a reckless purge of federal grants, halting application processes midstream, and stripping funding opportunities from its website. Hundreds of research projects—many of which have been underway for years, representing thousands of hours of work and billions of dollars in investment—were abruptly cancelled without any scientifically based explanation.”
Subsequently, on April 2, 2025, a complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts for declaratory and injunctive relief challenging the NIH’s decisions to abruptly terminate hundreds of grants, totaling more than $2.4 billion. Plaintiffs, including the American Public Health Association; Ibis Reproductive Health; International Union; United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers (UAW); and scientists Dr. Brittany Charlton, Dr. Katie Edwards, Dr. Peter Lurie, and Dr. Nicole Maphis, who were affected by the grant terminations, allege that the grant terminations are unconstitutional because they violated the separation of powers, the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause and the Administrative Procedure Act.
According to the April 2 complaint, “As a result of the Directives, hundreds of NIH-funded research projects, representing millions of hours of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment—have been abruptly cancelled without scientifically-valid explanation or cause. Grant application processes have been abandoned midstream and funding opportunities have been removed from NIH’s website… Plaintiffs request that the Court declare unlawful Defendants’ Directives; declare Defendants’ termination of grants in this manner unlawful; order Defendants to end their arbitrary and capricious, unconstitutional, and unlawful actions; and order Defendants to restore funding to the terminated NIH grants.”
In response to the case filed by the APHA, on June 16, U.S. District Judge Willaim Young directed the NIH to restore many of the terminated research grants with a research focus on race, gender, and sexual orientation. Judge Young ruled that the cuts to funding are “void and illegal.”
To demonstrate the impact of NIH grant terminations, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) has published data concerning the impact of NIH grant terminations. According to the AAMC, as of May 20, 2025, 1,424 grants awarded to U.S. institutions have been terminated, representing $2.5 billion of lost funding (total unliquidated funding). Fifty-one percent of these grants were awarded to U.S. medical schools and hospitals, representing $1.4 billion (55%) of all lost funding. Roughly 63% of all terminated grants were research and development grants, and 34% supported research training.
The NIH’s R01 grants, which support independent research projects, represent nearly $565 million in lost funding. An additional 10%, totaling $2.5 million in lost funding, were F31 grants or Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Awards, which provide predoctoral individuals with supervised research training in specified health and health-related areas leading toward the research degree. Two other research training and development grant mechanisms—the R25 and the T32—together accounted for an additional 186 terminated grants totaling $238 million in lost funding.
The cuts that will likely affect individual patients the most are those to grant funding for clinical trials. Ninety-one of the terminated grants (9%) were associated with 160 active clinical trials and represented 30% of lost NIH funding ($739 million). Furthermore, of these terminated grants, 50 (38%) focused on mental or behavioral health, 49 (38%) focused on chronic diseases, and 19 (15%) focused on cancer. Ninety-five grants (73%) funding active clinical trials mentioned LGBTQ+ populations, 74 (57%) mentioned racial or ethnic subpopulations, 32 (27%) mentioned women, and 31 (24%) mentioned low-income populations.
A May 9, 2025, research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) described the grant terminations as impacting nearly all of the NIH’S 27 institutes and centers. The greatest number of terminated grants was administered by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) (128 grants) and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) (77 grants).
The President’s Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26) budget request proposes cutting the NIH budget from $47 billion to $29 billion, in addition to consolidating the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into eight bodies. The National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and National Institute on Aging would be retained. New NIH bodies would include:
Arguably, the NIH grant terminations are resulting in unprecedented consequences for nationwide and worldwide human health and scientific research with such consequences reverberating for years to come. The loss of funding and the proposed restructuring have also raised concern among various stakeholders about the potential impact on clinical and basic research and research training. According to the AAMC, “This loss of critical funding for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars has had an immediate and harmful impact on the biomedical research workforce and the ability of academic medicine to attract and retain the best and brightest scientists.”
