NIH Grant Termination Study: What the Data Show

Independent tracking studies of the National Institutes of Health’s 2025 grant terminations show the cuts did not fall evenly across the biomedical research portfolio. This NIH grant termination study review of four separate tracking efforts finds early-career investigators, women-led projects, infectious-disease and health-equity research, and a small cluster of NIH institutes and institutions absorbed a disproportionate share of the losses.

An NIH grant termination study, in this context, is an independent, data-driven analysis — built from crowd-sourced trackers such as Grant Witness and NIH’s own Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORTER) — that quantifies which grants the agency cancelled and who held them, because NIH has not published a single consolidated breakdown of its own.

• How independent studies measured the terminations
• Which career stages absorbed the deepest cuts
• Which fields and institutes were hit hardest
• Which institutions and regions felt the impact
• How the four tracking studies compare
• Answer-first Q&A
• What this means for institutions and funders
• Outlook: restoration, litigation and ongoing tracking

How independent studies measured the terminations

NIH has not released an official, comprehensive tally of terminated awards, so researchers and journalists have relied on independent trackers to reconstruct the picture. Four efforts now anchor most public analysis:

• Fregolent et al. (2026), published in PNAS, matched the crowd-sourced Grant Witness database against NIH RePORTER records for grants cancelled between February and August 2025.
• Patel, Liu and Jena (2025), published in JAMA Internal Medicine, linked NIH ExPORTER data with the HHS Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System for a narrower 28 February–8 April 2025 window.
• The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) published a running snapshot of terminations as of 5 May 2025.
• A PubMed Central review (Faiman et al., 2025) tracked cumulative losses across the calendar year, including clinical-trial detail by disease area.

Because each study samples a different date range and data source, the headline totals diverge — but the pattern of who was affected is remarkably consistent across all four.

Which career stages absorbed the deepest cuts

Training and early-career funding took a disproportionate hit. Under the PNAS analysis, women held 60% of the 530 cancelled grants among assistant professors and doctoral students, while men lost 59% of the 1,410 cancelled grants held by professors and associate professors — meaning losses skewed toward more junior investigators even as senior researchers lost more total dollars.

Predoctoral and undergraduate pipeline awards were hit hardest of all: women held 58% of cancelled F31 and F30 predoctoral fellowships and 66% of cancelled T34 undergraduate research awards. NIH terminated $56.8 million across these early-career programmes and a further $329.6 million in T32 institutional training grants. Separately, the AAMC tracker found 29% of all terminated grants were research training or career-development awards, versus 61% classified as standard research-and-development grants — a training-pipeline share roughly double what its overall funding weight would predict.

Which fields and institutes were hit hardest

By institute, the National Institute of Mental Health recorded the highest number of terminations (128 grants), followed by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (77 grants), according to the JAMA Internal Medicine analysis. By dollar value, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases lost the most funding ($505.9 million), with NIMHD second ($223.6 million).

Clinical-trial data tell a parallel story: infectious-disease trials were the most affected topic area, at 14.4% of active trials disrupted, compared with 2.2% for neurologic and reproductive-health trials. Prevention-focused trials lost funding at more than four times the rate of basic-science trials (8.4% versus 2.0%). A separate PubMed Central review tallied at least 160 disrupted clinical trials spanning cancer and HIV/AIDS research, within a cumulative $3.8 billion in terminated NIH funding tracked across 2025.

Which institutions and regions felt the impact

Terminations touched 210 recipient institutions, but concentration was high: Columbia University recorded the most terminations of any single institution (157 grants) in the JAMA Internal Medicine sample. Geographically, trials based in the Northeast US were terminated at 6.3%, the highest of any US region, while multiregional US trials saw none. International trials lost funding at a higher rate than domestic ones (5.8% versus 3.4%), suggesting non-US collaborators carried a heavier share of the disruption than US-only projects.

How the four tracking studies compare

Reading the totals side by side clarifies why headline figures vary so widely in news coverage — each study samples a different window and a different data source, not a different underlying event.

Answer-first Q&A

Which universities get the most NIH funding?

Johns Hopkins University has historically led all US institutions in total NIH support, with other top recipients including the University of Washington, Stanford and the University of Michigan. Institutions with large NIH portfolios are not automatically those hit hardest by terminations — Columbia University topped the termination count despite not leading in total funding received.

How much did the Trump administration cut from the NIH budget?

The administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request proposed a roughly 40% reduction to NIH’s overall budget, alongside the direct termination of thousands of active awards earlier in 2025. Congress has not enacted a cut of that scale, and litigation over specific terminations remains ongoing into 2026.

Who is considered the biggest funder of biomedical research?

NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioural research in the world, with an annual budget exceeding $47 billion. That scale is why even a partial termination round — a few thousand of the roughly 50,000 active awards — produced measurable, trackable disruption across the sector.

What this means for institutions and funders

For research administrators, the consistent finding across all four studies is that training and early-career awards carry outsized termination risk relative to their share of total NIH spending. Institutions with concentrated early-career or health-equity portfolios should treat independent trackers such as Grant Witness and NIH RePORTER as live risk-monitoring tools, not just retrospective journalism sources, when advising principal investigators on contingency funding and bridge support.

The divergence between studies also carries a methodological lesson for anyone citing termination figures: always state the snapshot date and data source alongside any total, since “NIH grant terminations” without a date range can mean anywhere from 694 to over 2,291 awards depending on which tracking effort is cited.

Outlook: restoration, litigation and ongoing tracking

Not all terminations have proved final. Litigation challenging terminations tied to diversity, equity and gender-related research topics has led to court-ordered reinstatement of some awards during 2025, and appeals continue into 2026. Independent trackers, including Grant Witness and the Impact Project, are continuing to log both new terminations and restorations, meaning the totals in this piece are a snapshot, not an endpoint.

Researchers and administrators should expect further peer-reviewed analyses through 2026 as tracking teams extend their datasets — particularly on downstream effects for publications, collaborations and workforce retention, which the PNAS authors flag as their next research target. For institutions building sponsored-research risk frameworks, this body of independent tracking work is now a more reliable source than any single news report of the terminations themselves.