UPDATE: Judge rebukes Trump administration, orders NIH to resume paying canceled grants
Massachusetts has seen more grants terminated by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation than any other state, due in large part to the outsize impact of the Trump administration’s targeted attack on funding for Harvard University.
Scientists here say the cuts have had a devastating effect on research and have decimated support for the next generation of researchers. And beyond the cuts to currently awarded research grants, many worry about the future of scientific discoveries in the United States as the federal government signals it will significantly reduce support in the years to come.
“Science is really quite a fragile ecosystem. It’s not something that can just be turned off and then turned back on again. These projects take years to develop,” said Michael Paasche-Orlow, vice chair for research in the Department of Medicine at Tufts Medical Center.
About a thousand individual grants — backed by $2.6 billion — have been canceled in Massachusetts through the NIH and NSF since President Donald Trump took office, according to an independent grant-tracking database Grant Watch. Many of the 733 NIH grants were already underway, meaning that $1.3 billion was left unspent. Among the roughly 250 NSF grants in progress, an unknown sum remains.
Those topline numbers obscure an overwhelming trend: per Grant Watch data, the vast majority of those grants were based out of Harvard. About $2.3 billion of total canceled grant allocations were at Harvard institutions.
A federal judge in Boston will hear arguments Monday in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s legal authority to terminate billions of dollars in research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
“This is waste, by the way. You terminate a grant before you get a chance to actually reap the benefits of the grant.”Scott Delaney, co-founder of Grant Watch
NIH cuts in court
Monday’s hearing combines two lawsuits — one filed by the American Public Health Association, and the other by a coalition of states led by Massachusetts.
Attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union are representing the American Public Health Association in its suit against the NIH.
“The ACLU took on the case because the unprecedented and destructive impacts of NIH’s actions on public health, and because the NIH is really taking these actions both out of an ideologically driven attempt to purge science of what it considers to be disfavored topics without even really defining what those disfavored topics are,” said Olga Akselrod, an ACLU attorney.
In filings, the public health association’s attorneys argue it’s ideology — not science — that’s leading the Trump administration to pull the plug on these research projects. They argue the terminations disregard congressional mandates that “NIH fund research to address health equity and health disparities, include diverse populations in its studies, improve efforts to study the health of gender and sexual minorities, and enhance diversity in the biomedical research profession.”
“Defendants attempt to justify this ongoing ideological purge of hundreds of critical research projects because they assertedly have some connection to ‘gender identity’ or ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ (‘DEI’) or other vague, now-forbidden language,” the lawsuit states.
The terminations, they say, go beyond those now-taboo topics.
“Directives also seek to cancel research deemed related to ‘vaccine hesitancy,’ ‘COVID,’ and studies involving entities located in South Africa and China, among other things. Additionally, NIH has stopped considering submitted applications to programs designed to diversify the backgrounds of those in tenure-track positions at research universities,” attorneys for the American Public Health Association wrote.
Nationwide, the NIH has canceled $8.7 billion in grants, according to Grant Watch. Scott Delaney, co-founder of Grant Watch, told GBH News about $5 billion has already been spent, and the remaining $3.7 billion is no longer available.
“Many of those grants, nearly all of them, were terminated midstream,” Delaney said. “This is waste, by the way. You terminate a grant before you get a chance to actually reap the benefits of the grant.”
A mass termination of Harvard grants
At Harvard alone, roughly $2.3 billion in NIH and NSF grants have been terminated, regardless of whether or not they focus on topics that are unpopular with the Trump administration. That figure includes grants to the university, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. In total, the university is facing a loss of nearly $3 billion in federal funding.
The Trump administration has said the termination of Harvard’s grants are in part because of what it sees as the university’s failure to address antisemitism on campus, as well a range of other complaints, including the university’s diversity practices.
“Given these and other concerning allegations, this letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek GRANTS from the federal government, since none will be provided,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber in May. “Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni.”
In April, Harvard filed its own lawsuit challenging the legality of the Trump administration’s targeted attack on the university’s federal funding.
“Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield,” Garber said in a statement at the time.
“As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes. The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively,” Harvard’s president went on.
Last week, 12,000 Harvard alumni signed on to an amicus brief in support of that lawsuit.
Among Harvard’s canceled NIH grants is one that supports Delaney’s own research, studying the impact of extreme heat on patients with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
He thinks the lawsuit filed by Harvard over grant terminations will be successful.
“I also don’t think, despite that optimism, that the funding will come back in time to save my job,” Delaney said. “So, I don’t think that I’ll be working at Harvard in November. It is possible. Hope springs eternal, but I don’t think so.”
David Corey of Harvard had a grant terminated, too, which was supporting basic science into the genetic mechanism of hearing.
“I have one NIH grant that got canceled. My colleague next door has four, and they’re all canceled,” Corey said. “And that’s her only source of support. And so, you know, we’re looking at letting go a lot of our staff. Maybe some labs will be shut down. So, the specific targeting of Harvard is very difficult and, of course, it’s so arbitrary.”
Corey has two more pending grant applications focused on gene therapies to treat a rare disorder called Usher Syndrome Type 1F, which causes deafness in patients at birth and, over time, blindness.
“But even if they are scored very highly by a review committee, it’s unlikely that those grants would ever be awarded to Harvard,” he said. “That will really slow down the research.”
Other Massachusetts institutions see cuts
While the Trump administration has made a point of targeting Harvard, the grant terminations are impacting a wide spectrum of institutions.
“This is something that has been felt at big and small universities, private and public universities, land-grant institutions, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving, tribal institutions, all across the United States,” Delaney said. “There isn’t really any corner of academic research that has gone untouched.”
Terminated NIH grants in Massachusetts include research at Northeastern University on malaria transmission, Boston University research on the impact of racism on the brain health of older Black Americans, Boston Children’s Hospital research on reducing suicidality in transgender youth, UMass Boston research on early interventions in children with autism, and Boston College research on reducing vaccine hesitancy, to name a few.
At Tufts Medical Center, Paasche-Orlow and his colleagues were four years into a five-year grant that was terminated. They had recruited 600 research subjects for a study on the use of a smartphone app to promote exercise and healthy lifestyle choices.
“It was an investment of a tremendous amount of effort by a lot of people,” Paasche-Orlow said. “That trial is ruined. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, we’ll get the last part funded again in a year.’ People’s lives just continue going forward. You can’t stop time.”
A hit for the next generation of scientists
For many, the most troubling impact of the grant terminations is the devastating impact on the next generation of scientists. Several grants that supported early-career research fell victim to the cuts.
Delaney explained that a federal program designed to increase diversity among health research scientists, known as Diversity F31 grants, was canceled.
“And if you applied for a Diversity F31, there’s a good chance that your grant has been terminated, not because your grant was on trans health or DEI, or some topic,” Delaney said. “You could be studying the genetics of a fruit fly. But because you’re a person of color, your grant got terminated. If you had been a white guy, like me, your grant wouldn’t have been terminated because I wouldn’t have applied to the diversity F31 mechanism.
“I could have submitted the same grant, and mine would have stayed,“ he said.
Another training program supported by the NIH called the Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, or IRACDA, was also cut. More than 21 IRACDA programs around the country that supported hundreds of postdoc researchers have been canceled — including one at Tufts University.
These kinds of postdoc programs generally focus on research training, said Claire Moore, who is one of the directors of Tufts’ IRACDA program and is a professor in Tufts Medical School’s Department of Developmental Molecular and Chemical Biology.
“The goal of this program is to train the scholars not only how to do outstanding research but how to succeed at all of these other skills that you need,” she explained. “So the grant writing, the teaching, the mentoring, the time management, all the scientific presentations, how to engage an audience. And so that’s what makes the program really different from other training programs for postdocs. It’s not just focused on the research.”
Scholars in the Tufts IRACDA chapter also taught undergraduate courses at Bunker Hill Community College, UMass Boston and Suffolk University.
“We had an inkling that there might be problems down the road,” said Mitch McVey, the Tufts program’s co-director who is also a biology professor. “Our program, I would call it ‘diversity adjacent.’ So, we are not bound to accept scholars according to any category. But we try to make sure that we have a diverse cadre of scholars. And the scholars are also teaching at universities where there are diverse student populations. And so we were a bit worried that we might potentially be targeted.”
Sure enough, they got an email from the NIH in March.
“And the email simply said that, because of changing priorities at the NIH, our program was going to be terminated as of August 31, 2025,” McVey said.
“We had just gotten renewed for another five years last fall,” Moore added. “So that was quite a surprise.”
Among the 12 scholars in the Tufts IRACDA program who were informed they had lost their funding was Giles Blaney, who was four years into the five-year grant program.
“It was upsetting, very upsetting, obviously,” Blaney said. “It’s kind of a big roadblock that leaves me unsure of what to do next in my career because, you know, all the career plans were based upon having this last year of funding that now I’ve lost.”
Blaney’s research focuses on “biomedical applications of diffuse optics” — meaning, how light moves through human tissue — and its use in technologies like the pulse oximeter, the finger clip that measures blood oxygen levels.
“[It’s] just making it very difficult for us to continue in this career,” he said. “Because if it was just one thing, if it were just IRACDA being canceled, we could fall back into something else. But having so many things canceled, it’s difficult and we don’t really know what to do.”
In March, UMass Chan Medical School rescinded Ph.D. admission offers to some incoming students as a result of uncertainty around biomedical research funding.
“We find ourselves at a moment when the nation’s historic commitment to biomedical research appears to be challenged, where the commitment to continue to have the nation support biomedical research in some minds, seems doubtful,” said Michael Collins, chancellor of UMass Chan Medical School.
“Particularly in the younger scientists — who we have recruited, who we are nurturing, who we are educating — there is a lot of doubt. And I think some low morale at the moment, because they really are worried about what the future brings.”
Future funding uncertain
Beyond the cancellation of current grants, there’s considerable concern about what research funding will look like down the road, particularly when the federal government’s next fiscal year budget begins in October.
Trump’s budget blueprint — known as the “skinny budget” — included a proposed 55% cut to NSF funding and a roughly 40% cut to the NIH.
“The ‘skinny budget’ that’s been proposed with a massive cut — that would mean that only the top, very, very few percent of grants would be funded,” said Paasche-Orlow of Tufts Medical Center. “Most investigators will fail in that context and we won’t be able to bring new people in.”
At UMass Chan Medical School, Collins isn’t giving up hope for future funding.
“I’m optimistic that the nation will continue to choose to be number one in the world in its commitment to biomedical research,” Collins said.
He hopes that if scientists and those impacted by clinical trials come together, change can come.
“I am mindful that in America, that it requires both the Congress and the administration to come together [to approve a budget], and that these folks work for the people,” Collins said. “I am hopeful that if we do our advocacy efforts well, all of us will come to the position of recognizing that NIH funding into the future is critical.”
