Dive Brief:
- The National Institutes of Health's abrupt termination of nearly 2,300 federal research grants last year disproportionately affected women researchers and those early in their careers, a new peer-reviewed paper found.
- Women grantees lost access to a higher percentage of their funding, while early-career researchers faced lost advancement opportunities that could have long-term career effects, according to the analysis, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- The cancellations also highlighted that early-career and women researchers are more vulnerable to funding instability and underscored "the need for sustained investment to protect the future scientific workforce," researchers said.
Dive Insight:
The analysis looked at 2,291 research grants terminated by NIH between February 2025 and mid-August. They valued nearly $5.1 billion in total.
The onslaught began following an anti-DEI directive from President Donald Trump for federal agencies to weed out “equity-related” grants or contracts. Shortly afterward, NIH issued internal guidance to pull federal funding for research on certain topics, including transgender issues or diversity, equity and inclusion.
When NIH abruptly canceled the grants, nearly 52% of affected funds had already been spent, meaning the federal agency managed to nix just under $2.5 billion, researchers found. NIH also froze an additional 1,534 grants.
Academia has persistent gender gaps, with fewer women researchers than men. In line with that trend, women only represented 46.1% of the researchers who had grants terminated.
However, they had a larger share of unspent funds at cancellation than men did and lost more "unrealized scientific output,” the analysis said.
Women grantees also tended to have smaller projects, receiving $940,000 in federal funding on average compared to $1.4 million for men-led projects.
Both women and early-career researchers were more likely to be conducting work financed by a single grant, the analysis found. That left these researchers — including assistant professors, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows — with “fewer resources and less security” on average, making it difficult to weather a tempestuous funding environment.
Women-led projects were also more likely to receive NIH grants designated to create research training opportunities, according to the analysis. Those funds help pay for stipends and tuition for students and post-doctoral researchers.
"Because women led a larger share of training and early-career grants, the terminations disproportionately disrupted stages of the biomedical pipeline where women are most represented, intensifying risks to research continuity and workforce development," the researchers said.
A recent STAT News survey of NIH-funded researchers backed those concerns. Of 989 respondents, 66% said they had advised trainees over the past year to consider careers outside of academia, and 53% encouraged trainees to consider opportunities outside of the U.S.
That insight comes as legal battles over NIH's canceled grants wind their way through the courts.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office in August found that the Trump administration had illegally interrupted the flow of NIH grants and interfered with congressionally allocated funds. A U.S. district judge ruled similarly in June, striking down NIH’s anti-DEI guidance that led to mass grant cancellations and ordering those awards to be reinstated.
But the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled that the U.S. district court didn't have jurisdiction to order the grants restored. The justices left the ruling against the NIH guidance intact but ordered the U.S. Court of Federal Claims — which hears monetary claims against the federal government — to handle the future of the grants. The case is ongoing.
