CASRAI Dictionary

Tag: hhs terminated grants

  • NIH Grant Terminations in 2026: What Was Cancelled, What Was Restored, and Why

    What happened: the 2025-2026 NIH termination wave

    Beginning in March 2025, the National Institutes of Health cancelled thousands of active research awards in one of the largest disruptions to federal biomedical funding in decades. A peer-reviewed analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2026 counted 2,291 active NIH research grants terminated in the initial wave, withdrawing an estimated $2.45 billion in committed funding. NIH grant terminations continued through the spring, and by late May 2025 Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers tracking the cuts put the cumulative total at roughly 2,100 grants worth approximately $9.5 billion.

    Independent counts diverged because institutions and awarding offices reported figures at different points in a fast-moving process. The Association of American Medical Colleges recorded 777 terminated grants representing $1.9 billion as of 5 May 2025, while an implementation-science analysis published in PubMed Central counted 702 terminations as of 5 April 2025. The variance reflects the pace of the cuts rather than disagreement about their occurrence.

    Which grants and research topics were targeted

    Termination notices sent to grantees cited a shift in agency funding priorities away from topics the administration characterised as “unscientific” or as promoting discrimination. Research areas disproportionately affected included:

    • LGBT+ health and gender-identity research
    • Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the biomedical workforce
    • Vaccine hesitancy and confidence studies
    • Health equity and racial health-disparities research
    • Climate change and environmental-health research

    Reporting by Applied Clinical Trials Online found that 20% of terminated grants were early-career training awards, a category central to sustaining the biomedical research pipeline. A subsequent analysis found the cuts fell disproportionately on Black, Indigenous, and other minority researchers, as well as investigators from sexual and gender-minority communities — a pattern that later became central to the legal challenges against the terminations.

    Court-ordered restorations: the timeline

    Multiple lawsuits challenged the terminations as procedurally unlawful and discriminatory. The table below summarises the major rulings tracked through mid-2026.

    Date Ruling / event Outcome
    16 June 2025 Judge William Young (D. Mass.), APHA v. NIH Ordered NIH to restore 367 grants worth nearly $3.8 billion; found the termination process “arbitrary and capricious” and discriminatory toward LGBTQ-related research
    25 June 2025 NIH response to court order NIH ceased issuing new terminations of “politically sensitive” grants while the ruling was contested
    August 2025 Federal court order, UCLA class action Ordered restoration of NSF grants suspended at UCLA from 1 August 2025
    September 2025 Federal court order, UCLA Ordered restoration of NIH funding suspended at UCLA from 31 July 2025; NIH reinstated the awards
    May 2026 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Upheld reinstatement of grants terminated under DEI- and environmental-justice-related executive orders, the first major appellate ruling on the issue

    The Department of Health and Human Services has pursued appeals against several of these rulings, so the restoration list is not static. Institutions should treat any given month’s figures as a snapshot rather than a final count.

    Answer-first: common questions about NIH grant terminations

    How many NIH grants have been terminated?

    Counts vary by source and date because the terminations rolled out over several months. Published figures range from 702 grants in early April 2025 to 2,291 grants worth $2.45 billion in the fullest peer-reviewed accounting, published in PNAS in 2026.

    Have any terminated NIH grants been restored?

    Yes. A federal judge ordered 367 grants restored in June 2025 following the APHA v. NIH ruling, and separate court orders restored NIH and NSF funding to UCLA researchers later that year. In May 2026 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld further reinstatements.

    How can a research office check if a specific NIH grant was terminated?

    Research offices should cross-check award numbers against NIH RePORTER, the HHS TAGGS terminated-grants list, and USASpending.gov, then corroborate against the crowdsourced Grant Watch database, which aggregates termination notices submitted directly by affected principal investigators.

    What is the Grant Watch database?

    Grant Watch is an independent tracker built by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researcher Scott Delaney and computational researcher Noam Ross, combining government data with crowdsourced submissions to document NIH and NSF grant terminations that agency reporting has not consistently disclosed.

    Monitoring exposure: RePORTER, TAGGS, and tracker databases

    For sponsored-programmes offices, the operational question is not just what happened nationally but which of an institution’s own awards are exposed. No single federal system currently gives a real-time, authoritative picture of terminations and restorations together, so offices need to triangulate across sources.

    Tool Custodian Best for
    NIH RePORTER National Institutes of Health Authoritative award status, PI, institution, and funding history lookups
    HHS TAGGS (terminated-grants list) U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Official, periodically updated PDF/CSV of terminated HHS awards by agency
    USASpending.gov U.S. Treasury / OMB Government-wide obligation and de-obligation records across all federal awards
    Grant Watch Independent researcher-run project Early, crowdsourced signal on terminations before official lists update

    A practical monitoring routine for a research office includes:

    1. Reconcile the institution’s active award list against NIH RePORTER monthly, flagging any status changes.
    2. Cross-check flagged awards against the HHS TAGGS terminated-grants file for confirmation of formal termination.
    3. Monitor Grant Watch and institutional legal counsel updates for early warning and litigation status, since court-ordered restorations can lag or precede official RePORTER updates.
    4. Maintain a standing register of affected PIs so restoration notices — which are sometimes issued quietly — are not missed.

    Because restorations have followed litigation rather than routine agency process, research offices that rely solely on award letters risk missing reinstatements that require the institution to formally re-accept funding within a compliance window. Building this monitoring into research administration workflows, rather than treating it as a one-off compliance exercise, is now a standing requirement for institutions with federally funded portfolios.

    Implications for institutions, PIs, and research offices

    The termination-and-restoration cycle has practical consequences beyond the immediate funding gap. Institutions have had to decide whether to bridge-fund affected projects, hold staff and data-collection activities in limbo, or wind down studies that may later be reinstated. Early-career researchers, who held a disproportionate share of terminated training awards, face particular career risk from even temporary funding gaps.

    The pattern of litigation-driven reinstatement also means compliance offices cannot treat a termination notice as final without checking litigation status — a departure from how terminations were historically administered. As appellate rulings such as the May 2026 Ninth Circuit decision accumulate, research offices should expect further reinstatements to arrive on a rolling basis rather than as a single resolution, making ongoing monitoring — not a one-time audit — the operationally necessary posture through the remainder of 2026.

  • NIH Reinstates South Africa Grant Funding: Inside the Subaward Policy Reversal

    The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reinstated South Africa grant funding that had been frozen for months, lifting a hold on payments for scores of existing awards after a policy change nearly collapsed one of its largest overseas HIV and tuberculosis research partnerships. The reversal does not undo the underlying policy — a ban on new foreign subawards — but it restores cash flow to active clinical trials and signals how the NIH intends to manage international collaboration going forward.

    For research administrators, sponsored-programs offices, and institutional leaders outside the United States, the episode is a case study in how quickly a funder’s compliance architecture can change, and how little advance notice foreign partners typically get.

    What happened: the subaward ban and its fallout

    On 1 May 2025, the NIH announced it would no longer permit foreign “subawards” — the standard mechanism by which a US-based principal investigator holding a “prime” NIH grant channels a portion of the funds to a collaborating institution abroad. Going forward, foreign partners would instead need to apply for direct awards from the NIH itself.

    The agency framed the change as an effort to improve financial tracking and safeguard national security. In practice, the shift landed on a system that was not ready for it: the NIH’s own staff guidance warned that the infrastructure for processing direct foreign awards might not be operational until 30 September 2025.

    South Africa was disproportionately exposed. The country hosts one of the NIH’s largest overseas research footprints, particularly in HIV and TB clinical trials run through institutions such as the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC). Disruption had begun even earlier: in March 2025, the NIH moved to freeze or terminate roughly 280 grants tied to South African projects, well before the formal subaward ban took effect.

    The scale of the exposure was significant. In the prior funding year, the NIH had supported approximately 3,600 subawards in foreign countries worth more than $400 million in total. South African institutions alone had been receiving an estimated $100–150 million a year in direct and sub-awarded NIH funding, according to analysis published by Physicians for Human Rights.

    Timeline: from termination to reinstatement

    The sequence of events matters for any institution assessing exposure to future funder policy shifts. The table below sets out the key dates drawn from contemporaneous reporting.

    Date Development
    March 2025 NIH moves to freeze or terminate roughly 280 grants for South African projects
    1 May 2025 NIH formally bans new foreign subawards; requires direct-award applications instead
    27 June 2025 NIH grants official Michelle Bulls confirms existing clinical-research subawards can continue via a new “supplement” mechanism; roughly 100 prime awards to South African researchers permitted to proceed
    30 June 2025 Staff guidance carves out an exception for human-subjects research submitted before the ban
    July 2025 NIH lifts the payment hold on scores of existing South Africa grants, without public explanation
    30 September 2025 (target) NIH’s new direct-award tracking system for foreign partners due to be operational

    Notably, the reinstatement applied to grants that had been frozen, not to the larger population of grants that had been fully terminated. Separately, the NIH has also been under court order to reinstate a portion of the more than 2,000 grants it cancelled nationwide over politically sensitive research topics — a distinct, US-domestic dispute that runs in parallel to the foreign-subaward story.

    Key questions answered

    Have NIH grants been reinstated?

    Yes, partially. In July 2025 the NIH lifted a payment hold on scores of existing South Africa grants and introduced a “supplement” mechanism letting foreign clinical-research subawards continue. It remains unclear whether grants that were fully terminated, rather than merely frozen, will also be restored.

    How many NIH grants have been canceled?

    Across all research areas, the federal government terminated approximately 2,100 NIH grants worth around $9.5 billion, according to tracking by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Within that total, roughly 280 South Africa-linked grants were separately frozen or ended starting in March 2025.

    Do South African universities face a funding crisis from the freeze?

    Yes. Institutions including the University of Cape Town and Wits University reported severe financial strain, staff layoffs, and applications for emergency government funding — with the Wits Health Consortium reportedly seeking over R1.8 billion from South Africa’s Treasury to offset the shortfall.

    What it means for foreign subawardees and research offices

    The reversal is narrow, temporary, and administratively burdensome — not a return to the pre-2025 status quo. Institutions that rely on NIH funding through US-based collaborators should treat the following as durable changes rather than transient disruption:

    • Subawards are being phased out for new and renewal applications. The direct-award model is now the NIH’s default path for foreign partners, and institutions should build direct-application capacity rather than assuming subaward continuity.
    • The supplement mechanism is a stopgap, not a policy. An NIH grants official described the conversion process as “a huge administrative lift” — sponsored-programs offices should expect delays and duplicated paperwork during the transition period.
    • Frozen and terminated are legally distinct categories. Institutions holding terminated (not just frozen) awards should not assume the July reinstatement applies to them without written confirmation from their program officer.
    • Compliance offices need contingency plans. Bodies such as NCURA, EARMA, and ARMA have flagged funder-driven subaward volatility as a growing risk category for institutional research administration — not unique to the NIH or to South Africa.

    For research administration teams managing sponsored programmes with US federal funders, the practical lesson is procedural: subaward agreements should now include explicit clauses addressing funder-initiated conversion to direct awards, and institutions should maintain the internal capacity to submit direct NIH applications on short notice.

    What to track going forward

    Three open questions will determine whether this remains a contained South Africa story or a template applied more broadly to NIH’s international grant portfolio.

    First, whether the 30 September 2025 target for a functioning direct-award tracking system holds, or whether the interim supplement mechanism becomes a permanent parallel process. Second, whether the reinstatement logic extends to grants that were fully terminated rather than frozen — a distinction the NIH has not yet resolved publicly. Third, whether other major NIH partner countries in HIV, TB, and global-health research face the same subaward-to-direct-award transition South Africa has already been through.

    For institutions with NIH-funded international partnerships, the prudent posture is to document funder communications carefully, confirm award status (frozen versus terminated) in writing, and monitor NIH policy notices for extensions or modifications to the direct-award transition timeline.