Think about the disease that bothers you the most – the one that runs through your family. Or maybe someone you love lives with it. Whether that’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or depression, chances are the US government has been funding research to cure it.
That research is a big reason for us to have the drug that he did avoidable malignant blood cancersthat treatment he turned HIV from a death sentence into something people live full lives withand a coverage that all but prevents cervical cancer.
But last year, the United States funded very few grants to conduct clinical research that could lead to such breakthroughs. New data released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from such cuts is devastating.
The numbers are impressive across the board.
New grants for Alzheimer’s and aging research cut in half – from 369 in 2024 to 177, all time America’s population is aging rapidly. Grants for mental health research fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent – even cancer rates are on the rise among Gen X and millennial Americans. Across the board, the NIH went from funding about 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.
“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,” said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH’s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.
The NIH funding system was already under stress – many researchers were looking for fewer research dollars. That has meant that ambitious and unconventional ideas struggle to get funding.
But the Trump administration’s policy decisions have made the problem worse in just one year.
NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their proposals, a panel of outside experts finds and ranks them, and then each NIH institute — each focusing on a different area of medicine — funds as many high-scoring proposals as its budget allows. In a typical year, approximately 5,000 new grants are funded.
Last year, one policy change did more to reduce that number than almost anything else.
In July 2025The White House’s Office of Management and Budget urged NIH to begin paying the full cost of pre-approved grants — all at once, rather than year after year, as it has done for so long. Basically, funding grants make them less vulnerable to future budget cuts.
But here’s the problem: When the NIH funds a research project, it’s usually a commitment that lasts three to five years. That means in any given year, about 80 percent of the agency’s budget has already been earmarked — paying for grants it promised in previous years. Only 20 percent of the remaining budget is available to fund new research.
When the agency has to pay the full cost of each multi-year grant, that means each new grant costs several times more than it did before. Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH grantmaking for nearly a decade before leaving the agency in early 2025, put it simply: “Instead of funding five grants, now you’re only funding one, and that means the other four grants that would have been funded are not funded.”
Berg, a former NIH institute director, estimates this single change eliminated about 1,000 new grants.
But it was not the only reason. The Trump administration too it ended thousands of existing subsidies in the past year — something Lauer said he’s seen happen only twice in his entire 18-year tenure at the agency. The money left over from the moratorium went to the US Treasury, not back to NIH. Berg estimates that about $500 million left the system this way.
On top of that, about 12 percent more grant applications were submitted in 2025 than in 2024, all competing for a shrinking pool of funds.
The Trump administration has been open about wanting a smaller NIH; it is recommended cut the agency’s budget by 40 percent by 2026, although Congress has not passed the cut. Meanwhile, the White House has pushed for policy changes it says are targeted restore accountability at NIH — but the effect of those changes has been to reduce the agency.
“I think it’s very easy to start wondering if there’s a relationship between the two things,” Carrie Wolinetz, a former NIH official, said. he told STAT News.
The NIH did not respond to specific questions about the institute’s decline, or what happened to the money from the terminated grants.
But is better research still underfunded?
With fewer grants to go around, you might think the system is more selective – funding the best ideas and cutting the rest. But that’s not how it works.
Philippe Aghion, the economist who shared last year’s Nobel Prize, found that beyond a certain point, more competition actually inhibits innovation rather than stimulating it. When the NIH can only fund the top 5 or 6 percent of proposals, what remains is good but conservative science — established labs carrying out well-established research.
“The main thing you leave there is new ideas,” Berg said.
Researchers in England recently discovered that people vaccinated against shingles had about a 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia seven years later. The discovery came from an original trial in Wales, where people born before a certain date were not eligible for the vaccine and those born later were – and the group that got the vaccine had lower rates of dementia.
To understand why measles vaccine works against dementia, and if it could lead to new ways to prevent dementia, it’s the kind of observational research that would now struggle to get funding.
Katalin Karikó, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for the mRNA work behind the Covid vaccine, had his grant. from time to time rejected long before Trump was cut. The window for unconventional ideas was already narrow. Now it is decreasing even more.
And most of the damage can be permanent. When funding dries up, researchers leave — to other countries, to the private sector, to careers outside of science altogether. “Researchers who leave a farm or a country to work elsewhere can’t come back,” said Joshua Weitz, a University of Maryland professor who songs science funding.
There are early signs that 2026 could be even worse for medical research. The White House budget office has delayed NIH spending its 2026 funding, even after Congress approved it, and NIH has about a third Many new awards as usual at this point in the year.
The hardest thing to measure, Berg said, is research that never had a chance to begin. “It’s like we started across the ocean to see what we could discover and the journey was interrupted. There might be a beautiful island with very important things, but we’ll never know about it.”
