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Eleanor Dehoney doesn’t remember exactly where she was when it happened. But she does remember how it felt.

Dehoney is senior vice president of Policy and Advocacy at Research!America, one of the largest nonprofit advocacy organizations for biomedical research — an alliance with more than 300 members including dozens of universities, disease-focused groups, and professional associations. In the course of nearly 15 years spanning four different presidential administrations, she’s seen the ups and downs, and she’s the first to admit it: The turn away from science — ideologies aside — is in some ways understandable.

“Research is not sexy…it’s not on social media,” Dehoney said. “It’s easy to abandon.”

Even so, Dehoney recalls feeling demoralized when word came down in early March that — as part of a bigger effort by the current administration to revoke numerous “radical” Biden-era actions to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion — the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was canceling scores of grants that no longer met “agency priorities.”

In the ensuing months, the scale of that effort has become increasingly clear. By July 16, according to GrantWatch, a database that tracks cuts at the NIH, the administration had canceled over $2 billion in funding. Among the most common keywords in the terminated grants were “community,” “disparities,” and “social,” GrantWatch noted. And the NIH cuts don’t include over $1.5 billion canceled via the National Science Foundation (NSF), nor the estimated tens of billions lost with the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development.

Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee in April, Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), spoke about the potential impact of these cuts. “There is a breaking point — and we are close to reaching it.” Parikh said . “If we allow it to break, we cannot simply put it back together.”

More recent analysis by the AAAS suggests that the numbers could get even worse. As of July 9, appropriations for 2026 would slash overall government spending on research by some $50 billion — about one fifth of the total, AAAS data show. The cuts are so drastic they “would mean the loss of America’s global leadership in biomedical research for a generation or more,” Parikh said.

Philanthropy in Flux

Faced with the loss of government support, scientists are already turning elsewhere. And increasingly they only have one place to go: philanthropy.

Philanthropic foundations normally provide just a small percentage of research funding — an amount described by one senior officer at a major foundation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as “not quite a rounding error.” According to the NSF, philanthropy accounted for 6% of all university research funding in 2023, the most recent year for which data are available. In contrast, the federal government accounted for 55%, and the institutions themselves covered 25%.

Still, philanthropy plays an important role during moments of tight budgets and uncertainty. A December 2024 briefing from the Council on Governmental Relations, a nonprofit association of universities, medical centers, and research institutes, highlighted the flexibility of foundation funding — often to support indirect costs such as facilities and administrative expenses — during fallow periods.

“Philanthropy has an ability to smooth these oscillations,” the senior officer said. “Some of [the cuts] can be backfilled with philanthropic funding.”

Efforts to deal with the current crisis are taking multiple forms. In February, for example, the MacArthur Foundation increased its annual payout by 14% for the next 2 years. “The cliff of funding from federal programs has sent budgets underwater in field after field…the need for a surge in funding is plain,” John Palfrey, the organization’s president, wrote in an announcement of the initiative.

Foundations Turn to ‘Rapid Response Bridge Funding’

In March, a poll of the nonprofit Council on Foundations’ members found that over one quarter of nearly 200 respondents had increased their grantmaking budgets, and almost one fifth were working with “anchor” institutions to provide additional support. “Times like these are precisely what philanthropy is built for,” Kathleen Enright, the Council’s president and CEO, wrote in response to the survey’s findings.

And in May, the Spencer Foundation, the Kapor Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation launched “rapid response bridge funding” to provide grants to researchers whose NSF funding was cut. “The uncertainty of these times and the dizzying pace of attacks on the things we hold dear can be paralyzing,” Na’ilah Nasir, president of the Spencer Foundation, noted in a press release kicking off the effort. “Still,” Nasir added, “It is our collective mission to keep moving.”

But some worry that the effort to help scientists in the short term may have long-term drawbacks.

According to Adam Falk, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society, philanthropy has historically served a role in the funding landscape that is qualitatively different from that of the government. This includes supporting projects that “don’t quite fit into the disciplinary silos” of federal agencies, Falk wrote in an editorial for Science.

This includes “risky projects aimed at pushing technological boundaries, or speculative projects for which the chances of a discovery are slim but the possible consequences profound.” And both could eventually suffer because of the current crisis.

Grantmaking Priorities Are Shifting

There’s already evidence that the reallocation may alter the niche that philanthropies have traditionally occupied in the funding ecosystem. The Council on Foundations survey noted that 44% of respondents were “shifting grantmaking priorities to address new or worsening funding gaps.” Some 10% described rethinking geographic priorities, as when the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh launched and repeatedly replenished a fund for local nonprofits affected by federal cuts.

To Joseph Betancourt, a physician and president of The Commonwealth Fund, the longer-term consequences of the pivot are worrying. As healthcare costs continue to skyrocket and population health numbers — from maternal and infant mortality rates to deaths from chronic diseases relative to peer countries — move in the wrong direction, Betancourt maintains that it’s essential to invest in the kind of ambitious research that will start to flip those trajectories upside down. But it may not be possible.

“In normal times, we’d be advancing work and moving work forward,” Betancourt said. “Now, we’re trying to prevent the backslide — and stop the bleeding.”

“It’s coming at the cost of greater advancement,” he added, “but we don’t have any choice.”

Eli Cahan is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the intersection of health policy and public health. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post. He is also a pediatrician at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford University School of Medicine.