Gregory Phillips, PhD’s, week ended on a Friday afternoon last spring with two emails from Northwestern University's Sponsored Research office telling him that two of his National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants had been terminated.

The reasons were brief and, he said, never fully explained. “One was because of gender ideology, one was because of DEI,” said Phillips, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine whose research centers on LGBTQ+ health. One grant examined links between alcohol use and HIV risk among LGBTQ+ youth; the other aimed to improve how research measures sexual orientation and gender identity. For Phillips, who is gay, the blow was also personal. Being told that research on LGBTQ+ populations doesn’t matter, he said, felt like being told “you as a gay person don’t matter.”

With the money gone overnight, his lab collapsed from a team of 20 to a team of four. The undergraduates, master’s students, postdoc, and research faculty on the grants were the first to go because they were the easiest to let go. Teaching income covered his own salary; many colleagues had no such cushion.

Marielena Sosa, PhD, learned of her own termination in a stranger way: She didn’t. Sometime last winter, the web page for her award simply vanished, replaced by an error message. “I never actually got a formal termination notice,” she said. An assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Sosa’s funding was a BRAIN Initiative career-transition award created to draw more researchers into the biomedical sciences — but, she noted, “this study has nothing to do with diversity.” Her research focused on how the brain forms and retrieves memories, work she hopes will eventually illuminate diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Both scientists were, in a sense, among the lucky ones. In spring 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union joined the American Public Health Association and a union representing many postdocs in suing the NIH, arguing the terminations were arbitrary and capricious — issued, as Sosa put it, without legal basis. Courts agreed in early rounds, and grants began to be restored. Phillips said his were reinstated because of the APHA lawsuit. Sosa “finally got the second year of funding in July,” she said, and started her own lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in August.

Reinstatement, researchers say, is not the same as being made whole. And for some, there was no reprieve at all.

The future remains in question. In late May 2026, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a proposed rule — now open for public comment and closing on July 13, 2026, (with nearly 66,000 comments as of June 26) — that would reshape how federal grants are awarded. It would require senior political appointees to sign off on grants for consistency with presidential and agency priorities, and it specifies that scientific peer review “remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion.” 

Effectively Unfundable

Aaron Scherer, PhD, associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa’s Carver School of Medicine, studies why people do or don’t get vaccinated. On April 1, 2025, his career-development award — which covered most of his salary — was abruptly terminated. The reason he was given, he said, was that “it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize vaccine hesitancy.” With vaccine-preventable diseases resurging, he said, the decision made no sense.

The fallout reshaped his career. His project manager left; his department had to absorb his and his graduate student’s salaries. Because his planned next grant was also on vaccine confidence — now effectively unfundable — the award meant to launch his independence instead left him starting over. He has since submitted three proposals on unrelated topics; the earliest, he said, might be funded in April 2027, if at all. “95% of my salary is supposed to come from grant funding,” he said.

Even where the money returned, the disruption lingers. Phillips worries about a cost few outside science see: “There’s a whole generation or so of people who are having to start over again,” he said, researchers who spent years building expertise that was suddenly declared invalid.

Laws and Accounting Tricks

The toll is visible in the numbers, said Jeremy Berg, PhD, an associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning for Pitt Health Sciences and a former NIH institute director who tracks the agency’s funding. By his accounting, NIH has issued only about two-thirds as many continuation awards as it would in a normal year, and barely half as many new and competitive grants. Even though the agency must, by law, spend its full appropriation, he said, delays interrupt projects and scatter staff who can take years to replace. He also pointed to what he called “an accounting trick” — counting all years of a multiyear grant against a single year’s budget — that further shrinks the number of new awards. The result, Berg said, is “real science that will not get done and real investigators who may be lost from the system.”

Just as corrosive, he said, is the erosion of trust. Scientists now spend time planning for contingencies — how to survive a grant renewal that may never arrive — instead of doing research. He believes the damage is reversible, but it will take time. “It is always easier to maintain trust than to restore it once it has been broken,” he said.

The toll also reaches patients. Vishal Patel, MD, a physician in the department of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, led a study in JAMA Internal Medicine that put numbers to it: Grant terminations disrupted 383 clinical trials, enrolling more than 74,000 patients. “The immediate consequence is straightforward: their care is interrupted,” he said. About a third of the trials, he said, were actively recruiting when the cuts hit, meaning people were in the middle of receiving experimental treatment. 

“When you abruptly halt a trial, you’re not just pausing paperwork,” he said. “You’re stopping medications, ending monitoring protocols, and severing the relationship between patient and research team.”

The harder cost to see, Patel said, is “what we’ll never learn” — studies that peer reviews had judged capable of answering important questions about cancer, infectious diseases, and more, now lost or indefinitely delayed. And interrupting a trial can do more than delay it. “You may invalidate the entire study. The data become uninterpretable,” he said, rendering years of patient participation and millions in prior investment useless. 

Like Berg, Patel talks about the damage to trust — patients enroll believing the research enterprise is stable, he said. “When funding disappears overnight, we erode that trust,” he noted.

The NIH disputes the scale of disruption. Director Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, told senators in February that the number of affected trials was “maybe only a dozen.” Patel stands by his count, their analysis drawing on two public federal databases — NIH ExPORTER and the HHS grant-termination system known as TAGGS — and is, he said “transparent and replicable.” Patel could not say how the agency arrived at a dozen. “If the NIH has data showing a different count, they should publish it,” he said.

Why the New Rule?

Now researchers fear the ground is shifting again. The proposed OMB rule would also bar federal awards from being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or what it calls “gender ideology,” and would broaden the government’s power to terminate grants whose priorities no longer align. The OMB has said the changes ensure “spending will be aligned with current law, Executive Orders, and agency priorities.”

The administration casts the overhaul as overdue stewardship. The proposal carries out an executive order President Trump signed in July 2025, Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking, and the OMB proposed rule says its aim is to “improve transparency, accountability, and oversight for how Federal taxpayer dollars are used in the context of Federal grantmaking.” Deficiencies across the life of a grant, the proposal argues, have allowed wasteful spending and let funding drift from the national priorities.

OMB Director Russel Vought wrote on X that the rule is meant “to keep the bureaucracies from leaking out spending that is woke, wasteful, and contra to the policies of the Trump administration.” (The OMB did not respond to requests for comment.)

In a statement to Medscape, the NIH said its mission “to support the best biomedical and behavioral research remains unchanged” and that it “remains committed to investigator-initiated research,” with most NIH-funded work still beginning “with ideas generated by the scientific community.” It pointed to a new Unified Funding Strategy “designed to provide a more consistent, transparent, and coordinated framework for funding decisions.”

The NIH also noted that it supports research weighing factors such as race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status “when their use is scientifically justified.”

“Every presidential administration reserves the right to change research funding priorities,” Scherer said. His objection is not that priorities shifted, but how it was done: abruptly, midstream, and with too little warning.

For Berg, the more fundamental change is who would decide what gets funded. Peer review, he explained, has always been advisory, with career civil servants — not political appointees — making the final call. His fear is that appointees “may not have much relevant scientific expertise or may be driven by purely political, rather than scientific, considerations.” They could, he said, fund studies on something like “regret about vaccination” regardless of scientific merit — the mirror image of the vaccine research the government just defunded.

Phillips said colleagues are scrambling to keep their work alive within ever-tightening limits. “How do we do HIV research when all we can talk about is men, and not talk about gay men or black men?” he asked. Scherer said he had not seen “any compelling arguments for how a small number of political appointees with limited or no expertise in the areas they are overseeing is going to improve, rather than hurt” the work American researchers do.

“Medical Progress Comes to a Grinding Halt”

The move away from social and behavioral research troubles Holden Thorp, PhD, editor-in-chief of Science and former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Abandoning it is a big mistake, he said, because understanding how humans interact with one another, their environment, and disease may be “the one thing we can be sure artificial intelligence won’t be able to do.”

Sosa, the neuroscientist, points to the long, unglamorous road from basic science to medicine. For example, the ubiquitous GLP-1 drugs “were discovered partly because somebody was doing curiosity-based research into lizard venom,” she said. Cut that curiosity-driven foundation, she warned, and “medical progress basically comes to a grinding halt.” 

The University of Iowa’s Scherer frames it in returns: He cites United for Medical Research’s 2026 Annual Economic Report that found every federal dollar spent on NIH research generates roughly $2.57 in economic activity, turning the agency's $37 billion budget into more than $94 billion. And he worries that falling vaccine confidence is a canary in a coalmine for public trust in medicine itself.

What, then, can researchers do? Thorp said the most urgent steps are concrete and political: “Filing comments on the OMB regulations and contacting their members of Congress.” The rules, he noted, are a direct contravention of constitutional authority and lawmakers of both parties need to hear from constituents.

Thorp’s deeper worry is harder to legislate. The financial cuts, he said, can eventually be reversed; what may not recover is the world’s confidence in American science — “the changes to international collaboration and the ability to attract the best students from all over the world to do science in the United States.” 

Money comes back, but goodwill, he warned, is harder to recover once it’s gone.

The experts quoted in this article report no relevant financial disclosures.