See the alarming extent of NIH and NSF funding cuts in 2025
In 2025, the Trump administration froze or ended about 5,300 NIH and NSF research grants totaling over $5 billion in unspent funds, a decision that reshaped many fields of science.
In 2025, more than 3,800 research grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation were terminated or frozen as part of the Trump administration’s effort to realign funding priorities.
Cuts that reshaped U.S. science
As of November 2025, NIH has seen about $2.3 billion in unspent funds across nearly 2,500 grants frozen or terminated. At NSF, over 1,300 grants had about $700 million in unspent funds cut. The chart below estimates how these cuts have affected all research areas supported by both agencies While this doesn’t capture the full extent of government cuts — science-focused agencies such NASA, NOAA and the EPA aren’t included — it does highlight the breadth of the reductions and the ripple effects likely to be felt throughout the scientific community for years to come.
The cuts — totaling about $3 billion in remaining funds — targeted initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion; environmental protection; vaccine hesitancy; public health and more. These initiatives include:
- Cancer hub — The largest hit to any NIH grant ($77 million in remaining funds) froze support for Northwestern University’s Lurie Cancer Center, a national hub for cancer research, care and community outreach.
- STEM barriers — Within NSF, the largest terminated grant ($9 million in remaining funds) supported the coordination hub of the agency’s INCLUDES initiative, which aims to make the STEM workforce more diverse by supporting large-scale efforts to remove systemic barriers. The hub connects hundreds of researchers, organizations and community groups working toward this goal.
- Vaccine uptake — One terminated grant ($200,000 in unspent funds) aimed to understand and reduce COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among young Black adults in three Southern states.
- Diverse immune cells — A grant to investigate how neurons regulate specialized immune cells in the retina lost its $490,000 of remaining funding. While the reason for its termination is unclear, the grant mentions that these cells exhibit remarkable “diversity,” a term the administration has flagged as problematic.
- Education disparities — The University System of Maryland Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program aims to increase the number of underrepresented college students in Maryland. A grant to study the impact of these efforts by gender, ethnicity and transfer status was terminated, with $1.7 million still to be spent.
Methodology and caveats
All data come from Grant Witness, a project to track NIH and NSF grant terminations via government databases and researcher submissions. We used a large language model (OpenAI’s GPT-5 Nano) to categorize grants by agency research areas based on grant abstracts. Each infographic wedge shows “equivalent grants lost”: total cut or frozen funds remaining to be spent divided by the median. There may be inaccuracies due to delays in financial reporting and the rapidly shifting landscape; some funding may have been restored by the time you read this.
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