NIH

Appeals court agrees that Congress blocked cuts to research costs

Appeals court, Grant funding, indirect costs, NIH, Policy, Science / DJ Henderson / January 6, 2026

While indirect rates (the money paid for indirects as a percentage of the money that goes directly to the researcher to support their work) average about 30 percent, many universities have ended up with indirect cost rates above 50 percent. A sudden and unexpected drop to the 15 percent applied retroactively, as planned by the Trump administration, would create serious financial problems for major research universities.

The district court’s initial ruling held that this change was legally problematic in several ways. It violated the Administrative Procedures Act by being issued without any notice or comment, and the low flat rate was found to be arbitrary and capricious, especially compared to the system it was replacing. The ruling determined that the new policy also violated existing procedures within the Department of Health and Human Services.

But the Appeals Court panel of three judges unanimously determined that they didn’t even have to consider all of those issues because Congress had already prohibited exactly this action. In 2017, the first Trump administration also attempted to set all indirect costs to the same low, flat fee, and Congress responded by attaching a rider to a budget agreement that blocked alterations to the NIH overhead policy. Congress has been renewing that rider ever since.

A clear prohibition

In arguing for its new policy, the government tried to present it as consistent with Congress’s prohibition. The rider allowed some exceptions to the normal means of calculating overhead rates, but they were extremely limited; the NIH tried to argue that these exceptions could include every single grant issued to a university, something the court found was clearly inconsistent with the limits set by Congress.

The court also noted that, as announced, the NIH policy applied to every single grant, regardless of whether the recipient was at a university—something it later contended was a result of “inartful language.” But the judges wrote that it’s a bit late to revise the policy, saying, “We cannot, of course, disregard what the Supplemental Guidance actually says in favor of what NIH now wishes it said.”

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Lawsuit over Trump rejecting medical research grants is settled

dei, funding, grant evaluation, grants, NIH, peer review, Policy, research funding, Science / 9u50fv / December 30, 2025

The case regarding cancelled grants moved relatively quickly. By June, a District Court judge declared that the federal policy “represents racial discrimination” and issued a preliminary order that would have seen all the cancelled grants restored. In his written opinion, Judge William Young noted that the government had issued its directives blocking DEI support without even bothering to define what DEI is, making the entire policy arbitrary and capricious, and thus in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. He voided the policy, and ordered the funding restored.

His decision eventually ended up before the Supreme Court, which issued a ruling in which a fragmented majority agreed on only a single issue: Judge Young’s District Court was the wrong venue to hash out issues of government-provided money. Thus, restoring the money from the cancelled grants would have to be handled via a separate case filed in a different court.

Critically, however, this left the other portion of the decision intact. Young’s determination that the government’s anti-DEI, anti-climate, anti-etc. policy was illegal and thus void was upheld.

Restoring reviews

That has considerable consequences for the second part of the initial suit, involving grants that were not yet funded and blocked from any consideration by the Trump Administration policy. With that policy voided, there was no justification for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) failing to have considered the grants when they were submitted. But, in the meantime, deadlines had expired, pools of money had been spent, and in some cases the people who submitted the grants had aged out of the “new investigator” category they were applying under.

The proposed settlement essentially resets the clock on all of this; the blocked grants will be evaluated for funding as if it were still early 2025. “Defendants stipulate and agree that the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2025 does not prevent Defendants from considering and/or awarding any of the Applications,” it states. Even if the Notice of Funding Opportunity has since been withdrawn, the grant applications will be sent off for peer review.

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Trump admin axed 383 active clinical trials, dumping over 74K participants

clinical trials, grants, health, JAMA, NIH / Kelly Newman / November 18, 2025

“A betrayal”

Jena and colleagues examined the greater context, comparing the number of canceled trials in each treatment category to the total number of all funded trials in those categories. For instance, while cancer trials made up 30 percent of the 383 canceled trials, the 118 canceled cancer trials accounted for only 2.7 percent of the total 4,424 cancer trials funded in the study period. The canceled infectious disease trials, on the other hand, accounted for over 14 percent of all infectious disease trials funded (675). The categories most disproportionately affected were infectious diseases, respiratory diseases, and cardiovascular diseases.

The researchers also looked at the purpose of the canceled trials—for instance, for treatment of a disease, prevention, supportive care, or diagnostics. Of the 383, 140 were for treatments and 123 were for prevention.

The authors note that they weren’t able to determine the stated reasons for the cancellations (if any) or compare this year’s trial cancellations to trends from previous years, which could offer more context to the cuts. There simply isn’t the same comprehensive data on clinical trial cancellations for past years, the authors said, noting “termination of federal grant funding was rare prior to 2025.”

In the accompanying editor’s note, Teva Brender and Cary Gross blasted the revealed cancellations. To cancel trials already underway is to “squander participants’ and investigators’ valuable time, effort, and resources,” they write, since there have already been “substantive sunk costs.” It also “stifles scientific discovery and innovation.”

But “there is a more direct and sobering impact of premature and scientifically unjustifiable trial terminations: the violation of foundational ethical principles of human participant research,” they write. “First and foremost, it is betrayal of the fundamental principles of informed consent for research.” And “participants who have been exposed to an intervention in the context of a trial may be harmed by its premature withdrawal or inadequate follow-up and monitoring for adverse effects.”

Over 74,000 trial participants entrusted researchers with “their health and hope,” but even if the trial funding is restored—as it may be for some—it would “at best mitigate the harms.”

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Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue

doge, Grant funding, NIH, Policy, Science, science funding, Supreme Court / Shannon Garcia / August 22, 2025

The dissents

The primary dissent was written by Chief Justice Roberts, and joined in part by the three Democratic appointees, Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor. It is a grand total of one paragraph and can be distilled down to a single sentence: “If the District Court had jurisdiction to vacate the directives, it also had jurisdiction to vacate the ‘Resulting Grant Terminations.’”

Jackson, however, chose to write a separate and far more detailed argument against the decision, mostly focusing on the fact that it’s not simply a matter of abstract law; it has real-world consequences.

She notes that existing law prevents plaintiffs from suing in the Court of Federal Claims while the facts are under dispute in other courts (something acknowledged by Barrett). That would mean that, as here, any plaintiffs would have to have the policy declared illegal first in the District Court, and only after that was fully resolved could they turn to the Federal Claims Court to try to restore their grants. That’s a process that could take years. In the meantime, the scientists would be out of funding, with dire consequences.

Yearslong studies will lose validity. Animal subjects will be euthanized. Life-saving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.

Jackson also had little interest in hearing that the government would be harmed by paying out the grants in the meantime. “For the Government, the incremental expenditure of money is at stake,” she wrote. “For the plaintiffs and the public, scientific progress itself hangs in the balance along with the lives that progress saves.”

With this decision, of course, it no longer hangs in the balance. There’s a possibility that the District Court’s ruling that the government’s policy was arbitrary and capricious will ultimately prevail; it’s not clear, because Barrett says she hasn’t even seen the government make arguments there, and Roberts only wrote regarding the venue issues. In the meantime, even with the policy stayed, it’s unlikely that anyone will focus grant proposals on the disfavored subjects, given that the policy might be reinstated at any moment.

And even if that ruling is upheld, it will likely take years to get there, and only then could a separate case be started to restore the funding. Any labs that had been using those grants will have long since moved on, and the people working on those projects scattered.

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Judge: You can’t ban DEI grants without bothering to define DEI

dei, lawsuit, NIH, Policy, Science, science funding, Trump / Mike M. / July 4, 2025

Separately, Trump v. Casa blocked the use of a national injunction against illegal activity. So, while the government’s actions have been determined to be illegal, Young can only protect the people who were parties to this suit. Anyone who lost a grant but wasn’t a member of any of the parties involved, or based in any of the states that sued, remains on their own.

Those issues aside, the ruling largely focuses on whether the termination of grants violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the executive branch handles decision- and rule-making. Specifically, it requires that any decisions of this sort cannot be “arbitrary and capricious.” And, Young concludes that the government hasn’t cleared that bar.

Arbitrary and capricious

The grant cancellations, Young concludes, “Arise from the NIH’s newly minted war against undefined concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion and gender identity, that has expanded to include vaccine hesitancy, COVID, influencing public opinion and climate change.” The “undefined” aspect plays a key part in his reasoning. Referring to DEI, he writes, “No one has ever defined it to this Court—and this Court has asked multiple times.” It’s not defined in Trump’s executive order that launched the “newly minted war,” and Young found that administrators within the NIH issued multiple documents that attempted to define it, not all of which were consistent with each other, and in some cases seemed to use circular reasoning.

He also noted that the officials who sent these memos had a tendency to resign shortly afterward, writing, “it is not lost on the Court that oftentimes people vote with their feet.”

As a result, the NIH staff had no solid guidance for determining whether a given grant violated the new anti-DEI policy, or how that might be weighed against the scientific merit of the grant. So, how were they to identify which grants needed to be terminated? The evidence revealed at trial indicates that they didn’t need to make those decisions; DOGE made them for the NIH. In one case, an NIH official approved a list of grants to terminate received from DOGE only two minutes after it showed up in his inbox.

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RFK Jr.’s health department calls Nature “junk science,” cancels subscriptions

doe, health, NASA, Nature, NIH, USDA / Mike M. / July 2, 2025

The move comes after HHS Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on a May 27 podcast that prestigious medical journals are “corrupt.”

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” he said. He accused the journals collectively of being a “vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda.” He went on to say that “unless these journals change dramatically,” the federal government would “stop NIH scientists from publishing there” and create “in-house” journals instead.

Kennedy’s criticism largely stems from his belief that modern medicine and mainstream science are part of a global conspiracy to generate pharmaceutical profits. Kennedy is a germ-theory denier who believes people can maintain their health not by relying on evidence-based medicine, such as vaccines, but by clean living and eating—a loose concept called “terrain theory.”

Access to top scientific and medical journals is essential for federal scientists to keep up to date with their fields and publicize high-impact results. One NIH employee added to Nature news that it “suppresses our scientific freedom, to pursue information where it is present.”

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NIH budget cuts affect research funding beyond US borders

budget cuts, health, NIH, Science, syndication, Trump / Kelly Newman / June 30, 2025

European leaders say they will fill the funding void. Is that realistic?

Credit: E+ via Getty Images

Rory de Vries, an associate professor of virology in the Netherlands, was lifting weights at the gym when he noticed a WhatsApp message from his research partners at Columbia University, telling him his research funding had been cancelled. The next day he received the official email: “Hi Rory, Columbia has received a termination notice for this contract, including all subcontracts,” it stated. “Unfortunately, we must advise you to immediately stop work and cease incurring charges on this subcontract.”

De Vries was disappointed, though not surprised—his team knew this might happen under the new Trump administration. His projects focused on immune responses and a new antiviral treatment for respiratory viruses like Covid-19. Animals had responded well in pre-clinical trials, and he was about to explore the next steps for applications in humans. But the news, which he received in March, left him with a cascade of questions: What would happen to the doctoral student he had just hired for his project, a top candidate plucked from a pool of some 300 aspiring scientists? How would his team comply with local Dutch law, which, unlike the US, forbids terminating a contract without cause or notice? And what did the future hold for his projects, two of which contained promising data for treating Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses in humans?

It was all up in the air, leaving de Vries, who works at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam and whose research has appeared in top-tier publications scrambling for last-minute funding from the Dutch government or the European Union.

Of the 20 members in his group, he will soon run out of money to pay the salaries for four. As of June, he

estimated that his team has enough to keep going for about six months in its current form if it draws money from other funding sources.

But that still leaves funding uncertain in the long-term: “So, yeah, that’s a little bit of an emergency solution,” he said.

Cuts to science funding in the US have devastated American institutions, hitting cancer research and other vital fields, but they also affect a raft of international collaborations and scientists based abroad. In Canada, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere, projects receiving funds from the National Institutes of Health have been terminated or stalled due to recent budget cuts.

Researchers in Europe and the US have long collaborated to tackle tough scientific questions. Certain fields, like rare diseases, particularly benefit from international collaboration because it widens the pool of patients available to study. European leaders have said that they will step into the gap created by Trump’s NIH cuts to make Europe a magnet for science—and they have launched a special initiative to attract US scientists. But some researchers doubt that Europe alone can truly fill the void.

In many European countries, scientist salaries are modest and research funding has lagged behind inflation in recent years. In a May press release, a French scientists’ union described current pay as “scandalously low” and said research funding in France and Europe as a whole lags behind the US, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Europe and its member states would need to increase research funding by up to 150 billion euros (roughly USD $173 billion) per year to properly support science, said Boris Gralak, general secretary of the French union, in an interview with Undark.

The shifts are not just about money, but the pattern of how international research unfolds, said Stefan Pfister, a pediatric cancer specialist in Germany who has also received NIH funds. The result, he said, is “this kind of capping and compromising well-established collaborations.”

Funding beyond US borders

For decades, international researchers have received a small slice of the National Institutes of Health budget. In 2024, out of an overall budget of $48 billion, the NIH dispensed $69 million to 125 projects across the European continent and $262 million in funding worldwide, according to the NIH award database.

The US and Europe “have collaborated in science for, you know, centuries at this point,” said Cole Donovan, associate director of science and technology ecosystem development at the Federation of American Scientists, noting that the relationship was formalized in 1997 in an agreement highlighting the two regions’ common interests.

And it has overall been beneficial, said Donovan, who worked in the State Department for a decade to help facilitate such collaborations. In some cases, European nations simply have capabilities that do not exist in the US, like the Czech Republic and Romania, he said, which have some of the most sophisticated laser facilities in the world.

“If you’re a researcher and you want to use those facilities,” he added, “you have to have a relationship with people in those countries.”

Certain fields, like rare diseases, particularly benefit from international collaboration because it widens the pool of patients available to study.

The shared nature of research is driven by personal connections and scientific interest, Donovan said: “The relationship in science and technology is organic.”

But with the recent cuts to NIH funding, the fate of those research projects—particularly on the health effects of climate change, transgender health, and Covid-19—has been thrown into question. On May 1, the NIH said it would not reissue foreign subawards, which fund researchers outside the US who work with American collaborators—or agree to US researchers asking to add a foreign colleague to a project. The funding structure lacked transparency and could harm national security, the NIH stated, though it noted that it would not “retroactively revise ongoing awards to remove foreign subawards at this time.” (The NIH would continue to support direct foreign awards, according to the statement.)

The cuts have hit European researchers like de Vries, whose institution, Erasmus MC, was a sub-awardee on three Columbia University grants to support his work. Two projects on Covid-19 transmission and treatment have ended abruptly, while another, on a potential treatment for measles, has been frozen, awaiting review at the end of May, though by late June he still had no news and said he assumed it would not be renewed. “We’re trying to scrape together some money to do some two or three last experiments, so we at least can publish the work and that it’s in literature and anyone else can pick it up,” he said. “But yeah, the work has stopped.”

His Ph.D. students must now shift the focus of their theses; for some, that means pivoting after nearly three years of study.

De Vries’ team has applied for funds from the Dutch government, as well as sought industry funding, for a new project evaluating a vaccine for RSV—something he wouldn’t have done otherwise, he said, since industry funding can limit research questions. “Companies might not be interested in in-depth immunological questions, or a side-by-side comparison of their vaccine with the direct competition,” he wrote in an email.

International scientists who have received direct awards have so far been unaffected, but say they are still nervous about potential further cuts. Pfister, for example, is now leading a five-year project to develop treatments for childhood tumors; with the majority of funding coming from NIH and Cancer Research U.K., a British-based cancer charity, “not knowing what the solution will look like next year,” he said, “generates uncertainties.”

The jointly funded $25 million project—which scientists from nine institutions across five countries including the US are collaborating on—explores treatments for seven childhood cancers and offers a rare opportunity to make progress in tackling tumors in children, Pfister added, as treatments have lagged in the field due to the small market and the high costs of development. Tumors in children differ from those in adults and, until recently, were harder to target, said Pfister. But new discoveries have allowed researchers to target cancer more specifically in children, and global cooperation is central to that progress.

The US groups, which specialize in drug chemistry, develop lead compounds for potential drugs. Pfister’s team then carries out experiments on toxicity and effectiveness. The researchers hope to bring at least one treatment, into early-phase clinical trials.

Funding from NIH is confirmed for this financial year. Beyond that, the researchers are staying hopeful, Pfister said.

“It’s such an important opportunity for all of us to work together,” said Pfister, “that we don’t want to think about worst-case scenarios.”

Pfister told Undark that his team in Heidelberg, Germany, has assembled the world´s biggest store of pediatric cancer models; no similar stock currently exists in the US The work of the researchers is complementary, he stressed: “If significant parts would drop out, you cannot run the project anymore.”

Rare diseases benefit from international projects, he added. In these fields, “We don’t have the patient numbers, we don’t have the critical mass,” in one country alone, he said. In his field, researchers conduct early clinical trials in patients on both sides of the Atlantic. “That’s just not because we are crazy, but just because this the only way to physically conduct them.”

The US has spearheaded much drug development, he noted. “Obviously the US has been the powerhouse for biomedical research for the last 50 years, so it’s not surprising that some of the best people and the best groups are sitting there,” he said. A smaller US presence in the field would reduce the critical mass of people and resources available, which would be a disaster for patients, he said. “Any dreams of this all moving to Europe are illusions in my mind.”

While Europe has said it will step in to fill the gap, the amounts discussed were not enough, Gralak said. The amount of money available in Europe “is a very different order of magnitude,” Pfister said. It also won’t help their colleagues in the US, who European researchers need to thrive in order to maintain necessary collaborations, he said. “In the US, we are talking about dozens of billions of dollars less in research, and this cannot be compensated by any means, by the EU or any other funder.” Meanwhile, the French scientists’ union said the country has failed to meet funding promises made as long ago as 2010.

And although Europe receives a sliver of NIH funds, these cuts could have a real impact on public health. De Vries said that his measles treatment was at such an early stage that its potential benefits remained unproven, but if effective it could have been the only treatment of its kind at a time when cases are rising.

And he said the stalling of both his work and other research on Covid-19 leaves the world less prepared for a future pandemic. The antiviral drug he has developed had positive results in ferrets but needs further refinement to work in humans. If the drugs were available for people, “that would be great,” he said. “Then we could actually work on interrupting a pandemic early.”

New opportunities for Europe

The shift in US direction offers an opportunity for the EU, said Mike Galsworthy, a British scientist who campaigned to unite British and EU science in the wake of Brexit. The US will no longer be the default for ambitious researchers from across the world, he said: “It’s not just US scientists going to Canada and Europe. There’s also going to be the huge brain diversion.” he said. “If you are not a native English speaker and not White, you might be extra nervous about going to the States for work there right now,” he added.

And in recent weeks, European governments have courted fleeing scientists. In April, France launched a platform called Choose France for Science, which allows institutions to request funding for international researchers, and highlights an interest in health, climate science, and artificial intelligence, among other research areas Weeks later, the European Union announced a new program called Choose Europe for Science, aiming to make Europe a “magnet for researchers.” It includes a 500 million Euro (roughly USD $578 million) funding package for 2025-2027, new seven-year “super grants,” to attract the best researchers, and top-up funds that would help scientists from outside Europe settle into their new institution of choice.

The initial funding comes from money already allocated to Horizon Europe—the EU’s central research and innovation funding program. But some researchers are skeptical. The French union leader, Gralak, who is also a researcher in mathematical physics, described the programs as PR initiatives. He criticized European leaders for taking advantage of the problems in US science to attract talent to Europe, and said leaders should support science in Europe through proper and sufficient investment. The programs are “derisory and unrealistic,” he said.

“It’s not just US scientists going to Canada and Europe. There’s also going to be the huge brain diversion.”

Others agreed that Europe’s investment in science is inadequate. Bringing scientists to Europe would be “great for science and the talent, but that also means that will come from a line where there’s normally funding for European researchers,” said de Vries, the researcher from Rotterdam. As Mathilde Richard, a colleague of de Vries who works on viruses and has five active NIH grants, told Undark: “Why did I start to apply to NIH funds? And still, the most straightforward answer is that there isn’t enough in Europe.”

In the Netherlands, a rightwing government has said it will cut science funding by a billion euros over the next five years. And while the flagship program Horizon Europe encourages large-scale projects spanning multiple countries, scientists spend years putting together the major cross-country collaborations the system requires. Meanwhile, European Research Council grants are “extremely competitive and limited,” de Vries said.

Richard’s NIH grants pay for 65 percent of her salary and for 80 percent of her team, and she believes she’s the most dependent on US funds of anyone in her department at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. She applied because the NIH funding seemed more sustainable than local money, she said. In Europe, too often funding is short-term and has a time-consuming administrative burden, she said, which hinders researchers from developing long-term plans. “We have to battle so much to just do our work and find funds to just do our basic work,” she said. “I think we need to advocate for a better and more sustainable way of funding research.”

Scientists, too, are worried about what US cuts mean for global science, beyond the short-term. Paltry science funding could discourage a generation of talented people from entering the field, Pfister suggested: “In the end, the resources are not only monetary, but also the brain resources are reduced.”

Let’s not talk about it

A few months ago, Pfister attended a summit in Boston for Cancer Grand Challenges, a research initiative co-funded by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and Cancer Research U.K. Nobody from the NIH came because they had no funding to travel. “So we are all sitting in Boston, and they are sitting like 200 miles away,” he said.

More concerning was the fact that those present seemed afraid to discuss why the NIH staff were absent, he said. “It was us Europeans to basically, kind of break the ice to, you know, at least talk about it.”

Pfister said that some European researchers are now hesitant about embarking on US collaborations, even if there is funding available. And some German scientists are taking steps to ensure that they are protected if a similar budget crackdown occurred in Germany, he said—devising independent review processes, separating research policy from funding, and developing funding models less dependent on government-only sources, he said. “I think the most scary part is that you know, this all happened in three months.”

Despite the worry and uncertainty, de Vries offered a hopeful view of the future. “We will not be defeated by NIH cuts,” he said. “I feel confident that Europe will organize itself.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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NIH scientists publish “Bethesda Declaration” rebuking Trump admin

Bethesda Declaration, Great Barrington Declaration, health, NIH, Policy / Kelly Newman / June 9, 2025

Backlash to the idea was quick, with the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus immediately calling it “unethical.”

“Allowing a dangerous virus that we don’t fully understand to run free is simply unethical. It’s not an option,” Tedros said in a news briefing at the time.

“A risk”

In the letter on Monday, NIH researchers speak directly to Bhattacharya, writing, “We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration.” They titled the letter “The Bethesda Declaration,” named after the NIH’s location in Maryland.

“Standing up in this way is a risk, but I am much more worried about the risks of not speaking up,” Jenna Norton, a program officer at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, said in a statement. “If we don’t speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe. If we don’t speak up, we allow our government to curtail free speech, a fundamental American value.”

The organization leading the NIH dissent, Stand Up For Science, published a second letter on Monday in support of the Bethesda Declaration. The support letter is signed by over a dozen Nobel laureates and former NIH directors Jeremy Berg and Joshua Gordon.

Tomorrow, Bhattacharya will testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal for the NIH, which proposes a cut of about 40 percent to the agency’s $48 billion budget.

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Federal agencies continue terminating all funding to Harvard

DoD, doe, Harvard, NIH, NSF, research funding, Science / 9u50fv / May 14, 2025

On Tuesday, the federal government’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it had terminated research grants to Harvard totalling $450 million, spread out across eight federal agencies. The move comes on the heels of $2.2 billion in earlier cuts and an announcement that the university will be prevented from receiving any future grants. The ongoing campaign appears to be heading toward a point where no researchers at Harvard will receive federal funding.

The announcement reiterates accusations that are familiar from earlier federal funding terminations. It references antisemitic incidents during earlier protests about Israel’s actions in Gaza and the fact that the Harvard Law Review has taken steps to diversify the authors it publishes, which the government considers illegal discrimination. Notably, the letter does not mention any more recent events, nor Harvard’s efforts to address antisemitism on campus, saying:

Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.

It’s generally difficult to understand the big picture of these cuts and the reasons for them from this announcement. Instead, it has to be pieced together from the multitude of letters that individual agencies have sent Harvard.

Multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, also sent letters announcing the grant terminations on Tuesday. These sometimes contain more specific accusations, such as the Department of Energy letter, which specifically terms Harvard’s efforts to address past problems as insufficient. “Harvard has refused to take immediate, definitive and appropriate remedial action,” the letter said.

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Trump’s NIH ignored court order, cut research grants anyway

doge, health, NIH, syndication, Trump, whistleblower / DJ Henderson / May 8, 2025

Officials testified that DOGE was directly involved in hundreds of grant terminations.

For more than two months, the Trump administration has been subject to a federal court order stopping it from cutting funding related to gender identity and the provision of gender-affirming care in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

Lawyers for the federal government have repeatedly claimed in court filings that the administration has been complying with the order.

But new whistleblower records submitted in a lawsuit led by the Washington state attorney general appear to contradict the claim.

Nearly two weeks after the court’s preliminary injunction was issued, the National Institutes of Health’s then-acting head, Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, drafted a memo that details how the agency, in response to Trump’s executive orders, cut funding for research grants that “promote or inculcate gender ideology.” An internal spreadsheet of terminated NIH grants also references “gender ideology” and lists the number associated with Trump’s executive order as the reason for the termination of more than a half dozen research grants.

The Washington attorney general’s allegation that the Trump administration violated a court order comes as the country lurches toward a constitutional crisis amid accusations that the executive branch has defied or ignored court orders in several other cases. In the most high-profile case so far, the administration has yet to comply with a federal judge’s order, upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court, requiring it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March.

The records filed in the NIH-related lawsuit last week also reveal for the first time the enormous scope of the administration’s changes to the agency, which has been subject to massive layoffs and research cuts to align it with the president’s political priorities.

Other documents filed in the case raise questions concerning a key claim the administration has made about how it is restructuring federal agencies—that the Department of Government Efficiency has limited authority, acting mostly as an advisory body that consults on what to cut. However, in depositions filed in the case last week, two NIH officials testified that DOGE itself gave directions in hundreds of grant terminations.

The lawsuit offers an unprecedented view into the termination of more than 600 grants at the NIH over the past two months. Many of the canceled grants appear to have focused on subjects that the administration claims are unscientific or that the agency should no longer focus on under new priorities, such as gender identity, vaccine hesitancy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Grants related to research in China have also been cut, and climate change projects are under scrutiny.

Andrew G. Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency, told ProPublica in an email that the grant terminations directly followed the president’s executive orders and that the NIH’s actions were based on policy and scientific priorities, not political interference.

“The cuts are essential to refocus NIH on key public health priorities, like the chronic disease epidemic,” he said. Nixon also told ProPublica that its questions related to the lawsuit “solely fit a partisan narrative”; he did not respond to specific questions about the preliminary injunction, the administration’s compliance with the order or the involvement of DOGE in the grant termination process. The White House did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Mike Faulk, the deputy communications director for the Washington state attorney general’s office, told ProPublica in an email that the administration “appears to have used DOGE in this instance to keep career NIH officials in the dark about what was happening and why.”

“While claiming to be transparent, DOGE has actively hidden its activities and its true motivations,” he said. “Our office will use every tool we have to uncover the truth about why these grants were terminated.”

Since Trump took office in January, the administration has provided limited insight into why it chose to terminate scientific and medical grants.

That decision-making process has been largely opaque, until now.

Washington fights to overturn grant termination

In February, Washington state—joined by Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, and three physicians—sued the administration after it threatened to enforce its executive orders by withholding federal research grants from institutions that provided gender-affirming services or promoted “gender ideology.” Within weeks, a federal judge issued an injunction limiting the administration from fully enforcing the orders in the four states that are party to the suit.

The same day as the injunction, however, the NIH terminated a research grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital to develop and study an online education tool designed to reduce the risk of violence, mental health disorders and sexually transmitted infections among transgender youth, according to records filed in the court case. The NIH stated that it was the agency’s policy not to “prioritize” such studies on gender identity.

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” the notice stated, without citing any scientific evidence for its claims. The NIH sent another notice reiterating the termination four days later.

The Washington attorney general’s office requested the termination be withdrawn, citing the injunction. But the administration refused, claiming that it was in compliance as the termination was based on NIH’s own authority and grant policy and was not enforcing any executive order.

The Washington attorney general asked the judge to hold the administration in contempt for violating the injunction. While the request was denied, the court granted an expedited discovery process to better assess whether the administration had breached the injunction. That process would have required the administration to quickly turn over internal documents relating to the termination. In response, the administration reinstated the grant for Seattle Children’s Hospital and declared the discovery process moot, or no longer relevant. However, US District Judge Lauren J. King, who was appointed by former President Joseph Biden, permitted it to continue.

Whistleblower documents reveal sweeping changes at NIH

In recent months, whistleblowers have made the plaintiffs in the lawsuit aware of internal records that more closely connect the grant terminations to the administration’s executive orders.

In an internal spreadsheet of dozens of grants marked for cancellation at an NIH institute, the stated reason for termination for several was “gender ideology (EA 14168),” including the grant to Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The rationale appears to reference Executive Order 14168, which banned using federal funds to “promote gender ideology,” again seeming to conflict with the administration’s stance that the termination was not based on the executive orders. The termination dates of the grants, according to the spreadsheet, were after the injunction went into effect.

Another internal document, which provides extraordinary insight into the administration’s efforts to reshape the NIH, also states the executive order was the impetus for grant terminations.

In the March 11 memo from Memoli, the NIH cataloged all actions that the agency had taken thus far to align with the president’s executive orders. In a section detailing the steps taken to implement the “gender ideology” executive order, one of the 44 actions listed was the termination of active grants.

“NIH is currently reviewing all active grants and supplements to determine if they promote gender ideology and will take action as appropriate,” the memo stated, noting that the process was in progress.

While the administration has said in court filings that it is following the judge’s injunction order, the Washington state attorney general’s office told ProPublica that it disagreed.

“Their claim to have complied with the preliminary injunction is almost laughable,” said Faulk, the office’s deputy communications director. “The Trump administration is playing games with no apparent respect for the rule of law.”

Depositions reveal DOGE links

In depositions conducted last month as part of the lawsuit, the testimony of two NIH officials also raised questions about why the research grants were terminated and how DOGE was involved.

Liza Bundesen, who was the deputy director of the agency’s extramural research office, testified that she first learned of the grant terminations on February 28 from a DOGE team member, Rachel Riley. Bundesen said she was invited into a Microsoft Teams video call, where Riley introduced herself as being part of DOGE and working with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Riley, a former consultant for McKinsey & Co., joined HHS on January 27, according to court filings in a separate lawsuit, and has reportedly served as the DOGE point person at the NIH.

The executive order detailing DOGE’s responsibilities describes the cost-cutting team as advisers that consult agency heads on the termination of contracts and grants. No language in the orders gives the DOGE team members the authority to direct the cancellation of grants or contracts. However, the depositions portray Riley as giving directions on how to conduct the terminations.

“She informed me that a number of grants will need to be terminated,” Bundesen testified, adding that she was told that they needed to be terminated by the end of the day. “I did not ask what, you know, what grants because I just literally was a little bit confused and caught off guard.”

Bundesen said she then received an email from Memoli, the NIH acting director, with a spreadsheet listing the grants that needed to be canceled and a template letter for notifying researchers of the terminations.

“The template had boilerplate language that could then be modified for the different circumstances, the different buckets of grants that were to be terminated,” she said. “The categories were DEI, research in China and transgender or gender ideology.”

Bundesen forwarded the email with the spreadsheet to Michelle Bulls, who directs the agency’s Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration. Bundesen resigned from the NIH a week later, on March 7, citing “untenable” working conditions.

“I was given directives to implement with very short turnaround times, often close of business or maybe within the next hour,” she testified. “I was not offered the opportunity to provide feedback or really ask for clarification.”

Bulls confirmed in her own deposition that the termination list and letter template originally came from Riley. When Bulls started receiving the lists, she said she did what she was told. “I just followed the directive,” she said. “The language in the letters were provided so I didn’t question.”

Bulls said she didn’t write any of the letters herself and just signed her name to them. She also said she was not aware whether anyone had assessed the grants’ scientific merit or whether they met agency criteria. The grant terminations related to gender identity did not stem from an independent agency policy, she testified, appearing to contradict the administration’s assertion that they were based on the agency’s own authority and grant policy.

As of April 3, Bulls said she had received more than five lists of grants that needed to be terminated, amounting to “somewhere between five hundred and a thousand” grants.

Most grant recipients endure a rigorous vetting process, which can involve multiple stages of peer review before approval, and before this year, Bulls testified that grant terminations at the NIH have historically been rare. There are generally two main types of terminations, she said, for noncompliance or based on mutual agreement. Bulls said that she has been “generally involved in noncompliance discussions” and since she became the director of the office in 2012, there had been fewer than five such terminations.

In addition to the termination letters, Bulls said she relied on the template language provided by Riley to draft guidance to inform the 27 centers and institutes at the NIH what the agency’s new priorities were to help them scrutinize their own research portfolios.

Following the depositions, the Washington state attorney general’s office said that the federal government has refused to respond to its discovery requests. It has filed a motion to compel the government to respond, which is pending.

Riley, Bundesen, Bulls, and Memoli did not reply to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

While the administration did not answer ProPublica’s questions about DOGE and its involvement in the grant terminations, last week in its budget blueprint, it generally justified its proposed cuts at the NIH with claims that the agency had “wasteful spending,” conducted “risky research” and promoted “dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

“NIH has grown too big and unfocused,” the White House claimed in its fiscal plan, adding that the agency’s research should “align with the President’s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism.”

Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH from 2003 to 2011, told ProPublica that the administration’s assessment of the institution was “not fair and not based on any substantial analysis or evidence,” and the proposed cuts “would be absolutely devastating to NIH and to biomedical research in the United States.”

“It is profoundly distressing to see this great institution being reduced to a lawless, politicized organization without much focus on its actual mission,” he said.

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Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board

budget, budget proposal, doe, interior, NIH, NOAA, NSF, Science, science funding, trump administration / Mike M. / May 3, 2025

Budget document derides research and science-based policy as “woke,” “scams.”

On Friday, the US Office of Management and Budget sent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, an outline of what to expect from the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal. As expected, the budget includes widespread cuts, affecting nearly every branch of the federal government.

In keeping with the administration’s attacks on research agencies and the places research gets done, research funding will be taking an enormous hit, with the National Institutes of Health taking a 40 percent cut and the National Science Foundation losing 55 percent of its 2025 budget. But the budget goes well beyond those highlighted items, with nearly every place science gets done or funded targeted for cuts.

Perhaps even more shocking is the language used to justify the cuts, which reads more like a partisan rant than a serious budget document.

Health cuts

Having a secretary of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in germ theory is not likely to do good things for US health programs, and the proposed budget will only make matters worse. Kennedy’s planned MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) program would be launched with half a billion in funds, but nearly everything else would take a cut.

The CDC would lose about $3.6 billion from its current budget of $9.6 billion, primarily due to the shuttering of a number of divisions within it: the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Environmental Health, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Global Health Center and its division of Public Health Preparedness and Response. The duties of those offices are, according to the budget document, “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary.”

Another big hit to HHS comes from the termination of a $4 billion program that helps low-income families cover energy costs. The OMB suggests that these costs will get lower due to expanded energy production and, anyway, the states should be paying for it. Shifting financial burdens to states is a general theme of the document, an approach that will ultimately hit the poorest states hardest, even though these had very high percentages of Trump voters.

The document also says that “This Administration is committed to combatting the scourge of deadly drugs that have ravaged American communities,” while cutting a billion dollars from substance abuse programs within HHS.

But the headline cuts come from the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of scientific funding in the world. NIH would see its current $48 billion budget chopped by $18 billion and its 27 individual institutes consolidated down to just five. This would result in vast cutbacks to US biomedical research, which is currently acknowledged to be world-leading. Combined with planned cuts to grant overheads, it will cause most research institutions to shrink, and some less well-funded universities may be forced to close facilities.

The justification for the cuts is little more than a partisan rant: “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The text then implies that the broken trust is primarily the product of failing to promote the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab, even though there’s no scientific evidence to indicate that it had.

Climate research hit

The National Science Foundation funds much of the US’s fundamental science research, like physics and astronomy. Earlier reporting that it would see a 56 percent cut to its budget was confirmed. “The Budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” Funding would be maintained for AI and quantum computing. All funding for encouraging minority participation in the sciences will also be terminated. The budget was released on the same day that the NSF announced it was joining other science agencies in standardizing on paying 15 percent of its grants’ value for maintaining facilities and providing services to researchers, a cut that would further the financial damage to research institutions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see $1.3 billion of its $6.6 billion budget cut, with the primary target being its climate change work. In fact, the budget for NOAA’s weather satellites will be cut to prevent them from including instruments that would make “unnecessary climate measurements.” Apparently, the Administration doesn’t want anyone to be exposed to data that might challenge its narrative that climate change is a scam.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology would lose $350 million for similar reasons. “NIST has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda,” the document suggests, before going on to say that the Institute’s Circular Economy Program, which promotes the efficient reuse of industrial materials, “pushes environmental alarmism.”

The Department of Energy is seeing a $1.1 billion hit to its science budget, “eliminating funding for Green New Scam interests and climate change-related activities.” The DOE will also take hits to policy programs focused on climate change, including $15 billion in cuts to renewable energy and carbon capture spending. Separately, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will also take a $2.6 billion hit. Over at the Department of the Interior, the US Geological Survey would see its renewable energy programs terminated, as well.

Some of the DOE’s other cuts, however, don’t even make sense given the administration’s priorities. The newly renamed Office of Fossil Energy—something that Trump favors—will still take a $270 million hit, and nuclear energy programs will see $400 million in cuts.

This sort of lack of self-awareness shows up several times in the document. In one striking case, an interior program funding water infrastructure improvements is taking a cut that “reduces funding for programs that have nothing to do with building and maintaining water infrastructure, such as habitat restoration.” Apparently, the OMB is unaware that functioning habitats can help provide ecosystem services that can reduce the need for water infrastructure.

Similarly, over at the EPA, they’re boosting programs for clean drinking water by $36 million, while at the same time cutting loans to states for clean water projects by $2.5 billion. “The States should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects,” the OMB declares. Research at the EPA also takes a hit: “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.”

An attack on scientific infrastructure

US science couldn’t flourish without an educational system that funnels talented individuals into graduate programs. So, naturally, funding for those is being targeted as well. This is partially a function of the administration’s intention to eliminate the Department of Education, but there also seems to be a specific focus on programs that target low-income individuals.

For example, the GEAR UP program describes itself as “designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.” The OMB document describes it as “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access.” It goes on to claim that this is “not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”

Similarly, the SEOG program funding is “awarded to an undergraduate student who demonstrates exceptional financial need.” In the OMB’s view, colleges and universities “have used [it] to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” Another cut is claimed to eliminate “Equity Assistance Centers that have indoctrinated children.” And “The Budget proposes to end Federal taxpayer dollars being weaponized to indoctrinate new teachers.”

In addition, the federal work-study program, which subsidizes on-campus jobs for needy students, is also getting a billion-dollar cut. Again, the document says that the states can pay for it.

(The education portion also specifically cuts the funding of Howard University, which is both distinct as a federally supported Black university and also notable as being where Kamala Harris got her first degree.)

The end of US leadership

This budget is a recipe for ending the US’s leadership in science. It would do generational damage by forcing labs to shut down, with a corresponding loss of highly trained individuals and one-of-a-kind research materials. At the same time, it will throttle the educational pipeline that could eventually replace those losses. Given that the US is one of the major sources of research funding in the world, if approved, the budget will have global consequences.

To the people within the OMB who prepared the document, these are not losses. The document makes it very clear that they view many instances of scientific thought and evidence-based policy as little more than forms of ideological indoctrination, presumably because the evidence sometimes contradicts what they’d prefer to believe.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board Read More »

RFK Jr.‘s bloodbath at HHS: Blowback grows as losses become clearer

CDC, CMS, fda, health, HHS, NIH, robert f kennedy jr, trump administration / DJ Henderson / April 3, 2025

Last week, Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Trump administration would hack off nearly a quarter of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees critical agencies including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The downsizing includes pushing out about 10,000 full-time employees through early retirements, deferred resignations, and other efforts. Another 10,000 will be laid off in a brutal restructuring, bringing the total HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000.

“This will be a painful period,” Kennedy said in a video announcement last week. Early yesterday morning, the pain began.

It begins

At the FDA—which will lose 3,500 employees, about 19 percent of staff—some employees learned they were being laid off from security guards after their badges no longer worked when they showed up to their offices, according to Stat. At CMS—which will lose 300 employees, about 4 percent—laid-off employees were instructed to file any discrimination complaints they may have with Anita Pinder, identified as the director of CMS’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights. However, Pinder died last year, The Washington Post noted.

At the NIH—which is set to lose 1,200 employees, about 6 percent—new director Jay Bhattacharya sent an email to staff saying he would implement new policies “humanely,” while calling the layoffs a “significant reduction.” Five NIH institute directors and at least two other senior leaders have been ousted, in addition to hundreds of lower-level employees. Bhattacharya wrote that the remaining staff will have to find new ways to carry out “key NIH administrative functions, including communications, legislative affairs, procurement, and human resources.”

At CDC—which will lose 2,400 employees, about 18 percent—the cuts slashed employees working in chronic disease prevention, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, tuberculosis, global health, environmental health, occupational safety and health, maternal and child health, birth defects, violence prevention, health equity, communications, and science policy.

Some leaders and workers at the CDC and NIH were reportedly reassigned or offered transfers to work at the Indian Health Services (IHS), an HHS division that provides medical and health services to Native American tribes. The transfers, which could require employees to move to a remote branch, are seen as another way to force workers out.

RFK Jr.‘s bloodbath at HHS: Blowback grows as losses become clearer Read More »