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Researchers have noted inconsistencies in the types of awards the NSF and NIH have terminated.
The federal government has terminated thousands of grants it deemed unworthy of scientific study in the months since President Donald Trump started his second term. But scholars still aren’t clear why or how the government made those determinations.
Although the Trump administration and its allies have spotlighted National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation–funded projects on politically charged topics—including transgender people’s health, HIV prevention, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion—as examples of canceled projects, those are far from the only research areas that have lost funding since January.
The agencies have also axed funding for research on cancer, maternal mortality and internet freedom without much explanation. And lacking comprehensive data from the government, the scholarly community has been tracking the cuts on their own terms in an attempt to understand the scope and scale of the losses.
“It’s super arbitrary and there’s not a lot of transparency,” said Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University and former lawyer who’s been tracking grant cancellations. He’s noticed that only about half of the grants on targeted topics, such as transgender health, have actually been terminated so far.
“If we don’t have a record and don’t know what’s happening, it’s hard to fight back,” he said. “If anyone wants to bring a lawsuit, they need to know what’s going on. And even if they don’t want to bring a lawsuit, broader advocacy efforts require this information, too.”
When the NIH first started canceling grants a few months ago, Delaney said “the government wasn’t providing” any specific information about terminated grants. And when the Department of Health and Human Services—which oversees the NIH—released a spreadsheet of terminated grants in early March, it was “somewhat useful,” but also “incomplete and inaccurate in some small and moderately meaningful ways,” he said.
Delaney and his colleagues were aware of terminated NIH grants that weren’t on the HHS spreadsheet. So, they put out a call for submissions on social media and created their own publicly accessible spreadsheet documenting the canceled research projects they could verify through those submissions as well as from news reports, social media posts and available government data.
The culmination of those efforts is available on Grant Watch, a website Delaney helped launch last week. It tracks and lists grant terminations at the NIH and the National Science Foundation—which has also canceled more than 1,000 grants over the past month as it undergoes ideologically driven priority shifts similar to those reshaping the NIH. The goal, he said, is to give academic researchers and their advocates another tool to resist policy decisions that many argue will hamper university budgets and local economies, slow scientific innovation, and weaken the United States’ global competitiveness.
“A central aim of the tracker is to organize the chaos into information that’s usable for scientists, institutions and advocates, and anybody else who’s interested,” Delaney said. “Part of that organizing requires some level of analysis to make sense of the mechanisms behind the terminations.”
According to Grant Watch’s tally, as of late last week the NIH had canceled some 789 research grants—totaling roughly $2 billion—and the NSF had canceled 1,042, worth more than $780 million. Inside Higher Ed reached out to both the NIH and NSF last week, but both agencies declined to specify the total amount of federal funding they’ve canceled so far this year. An NSF spokesperson declined to produce a detailed list of the grants the agency recently terminated, and HHS sent Inside Higher Ed a link to the HHS spreadsheet that partly inspired Delaney and his colleagues to create Grant Watch.
While Delaney said the HHS spreadsheet, which is updated regularly, has improved over the past two months—now including some grants he and his team weren’t already aware of—he and many other researchers are still trying to understand why the government has terminated certain grants and not others.
‘Secretly Banned’ Topics?
Eric Wustrow, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, was shocked when the NSF canceled his $569,000 grant on fighting online censorship last month amid the agency’s pledge to stop funding DEI or misinformation research.
“My grant isn’t related to either of those topics,” he said. “It’s been a very odd and not at all transparent process.”
Wustrow said he reached out to the NSF in an attempt to understand why it terminated his grant. He discovered that the agency did look at his grant during its review of possibly misinformation-related grants but determined it didn’t fit into that category. Yet, the NSF terminated it anyway.
“The really concerning thing for me—as a researcher and American citizen—is that the government is saying they’re cutting grants for one particular reason, but in actuality they’re far exceeding that scope,” said Wustrow, adding that he knows other colleagues who did not lose their NSF grants to study topics similar to his. “Can we really trust what they’re saying they’re cutting? Is this actually what they’re doing or are they just using it as an excuse to cut things they happen to not like?”
In the meantime, losing the grant has jeopardized his own research funding and ability to fund students he’d planned to hire, in addition to leaving him “uneasy” about the future of his work.
“The hard part is knowing what to do next with the NSF, which is a large funder of research in this area,” Wustrow said. “The big question now is: Can I submit grants to the NSF on fighting internet restrictions, or is that now a secretly banned word they won’t tell me about? I haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of NSF.”
But what he and scores of other scholars have been able to do is submit evidence of grant termination to the Grant Watch database, which Wustrow hopes will help to identify particular patterns. So far, though, the inconsistencies the database has documented have “raised more questions than provided answers,” Wustrow said.
Grant Watch isn’t the only project academics have undertaken in an attempt to create a robust record of the scope, scale and consequences of gutting federal support for research. Abby Andre, a graduate student at Ohio State University who previously worked as an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, recently launched the Impact Project after finding it difficult to keep track of the deluge of reports about mass federal worker firings, funding freezes and grant terminations.
The need for the Impact Project—which is far broader in scope than the database Delaney and his team at Harvard created to document NIH and NSF cuts—stems from the unprecedented “pace of change in the federal government,” she said.
“Even if the administration were using every opportunity to communicate with the public about what it’s doing, they would have a hard time keeping up because so much is happening at once,” Andre said. “Increasingly, because of some of the staffing reductions, there’s concerns that government sites like the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget may no longer be an authoritative source about what the government is doing.”
While she has used some available government data, she also cross-references it with news reports and crowdsourced information to build out and update the Impact Map, which categorizes funding cuts by location, sector—including education, housing and academic research—and type of cut, such as funding cancellations or federal worker firings.
It offers a visualization of the “severe” cuts to federal research funding and the implications they have for hundreds of higher education institutions and the communities they serve, she said. Indeed, not one state in the country has been spared.
“Academic institutions are one of our primary sources of research and drive knowledge across sectors,” Andre said. “The concern is not only that we’re losing knowledge, resources and future answers to complex problems, but that we’re also going to be diminishing the value of higher education as funding is diminished.”
A ‘Historical Reckoning’
Neither Andre nor Delaney and his collaborators at Grant Watch are getting paid for their efforts to document the cuts to federally funded research. But pushing for transparency during an era of American politics marked by obfuscation, half-truths and faulty narratives is keeping them motivated.
While the information they’re collecting now will support immediate efforts to challenge—through litigation or other means—the Trump administration’s assault on scientific research, it’s also creating a record for the historians and policymakers of the future.
“As we see what happens in coming months and years, we’re going to want a record of all the things that have been cut back in order to prioritize what to rebuild,” said Noam Ross, executive director at rOpenSci, who helped Delaney launch Grant Watch. “At some point there’s going to be a historical reckoning. Our collective historical knowledge is going to need a lot of things reassembled, given how much information the Trump administration is trying to disappear from websites, records and so many other sources.”
