This essay is part of a First Opinion series on the future of the National Institutes of Health and American science.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has implemented a series of policy changes with significant, direct impacts on the funding, practice, and governance of science and medical research. The administration froze or terminated billions of dollars of federally funded science and medical research projects already underway and tried to slash negotiated research infrastructure commitments worth billions more, first within Health and Human Services and then more broadly. These changes were met with silence by many, but not by all.
Increasingly, individual researchers, grassroots organizations, coalitions of higher educational institutions, and professional organizations have adopted an action-oriented approach, particularly communicating the economic impacts of HHS policy changes and crowdsourcing data that informs lawsuits intended to reverse grant terminations. This litigation has been successful, in part. But many grants, projects, and programs have been lost, delayed, or abandoned or are now in limbo given ongoing uncertainty in science budgets.
Precisely so, it is difficult to separate out what has been changed, how much has been lost, and how much continues to survive in a transformed (and increasingly uncertain) research landscape.
The challenge in discerning intent from impact motivated me to dive deeper this past year and forms the basis for ongoing collaborative work to map the local, economic impact of science policy changes. The Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMaP) has helped clarify how much we stand to lose if we abandon support for evidence-based research and discovery.
The realized impacts of the past year offer us a way to look ahead. Unfortunately, early warning indicators suggest further degradation of America’s capacity to remain a global leader in science and medical research.
One of the earliest policy changes last year illustrates the scope of impacts, challenge of separating intent from impact, and governance approach. On Friday, Feb. 7, and without community input, NIH issued a “Supplemental Guidance” announcement, reducing research infrastructure support costs on existing and new awards from negotiated rates to a flat rate of 15%, effective Monday, Feb. 10. This change was both drastic and dramatic. It was also explicitly included in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as a means to “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.” This decision was a bellwether, too, showing how the White House intended to try to conform America’s world-leading system science and biomedical research to its priorities.
In practice, institutions negotiate their “indirect cost” (IDC) rates with the federal government. These IDCs support essential research infrastructure required for safety checks, compliance, facilities, and administration associated with science and medical research. The nationwide average, effective IDC rate for NIH awarded grants is approximately 42%, a rate that has remained steady for nearly 40 years.
Leveraging publicly reported data on NIH awards, my colleagues and I at SCIMaP estimated that the NIH-initiated policy change to research infrastructure support would lead to a reduction of over $6 billion in federally awarded funds to recipient institutions. Leveraging analysis from United for Medical Research, we further estimated that the proposed IDC policy would lead to more than a $16 billion reduction in economic activity and a projected loss of approximately 70,000 jobs in communities throughout the U.S.
The attempted reduction of research infrastructure costs for medical research is an example of a large-scale impact that has been tempered, in part, by successful litigation. At present, officially negotiated IDC rates have not changed, but the intent has had ripple effects. How can universities, research institutes, and hospitals manage budgets, hire staff, and build capacity for R&D if there is a near-term risk of losing a significant fraction of the support it takes to do research? Rather than diminishing, the threat to the viability and stability of American science and medical research has expanded in complexity and scope.
Next, framed as an effort to “restore gold-standard science,” the administration began to terminate science and medical research projects deemed incompatible with White House priorities. According to Grant Witness (an independently crowdsourced database of grant terminations), the administration has frozen or terminated more than 5,000 NIH grants, of which more than 3,000 have been reinstated. Although billions of dollars of research projects have been restored, nearly $2 billion in medical research remains impacted. The topic areas span the spectrum of NIH’s portfolio. These terminations also undermine the ability of early-career researchers to build research programs, exemplified by the termination of the MOSAIC scholars program at NIH, which supports researchers from underrepresented backgrounds in the transition from postdoc to faculty positions.
The damages extend beyond the immediate year. Science cannot be turned on and off and on again; it requires continuity for experiments, personnel, and, in some cases, clinical trial participants — more than 74,000 of whom have been impacted by post-award terminations.
Even in normal circumstances, science and medical researchers face an uphill battle to secure funding. In 2024, only 1 in 5 grant applications for the prestigious NIH Research Project “R01” award were successful. Despite the competition, securing an R01 had meant multiple years of security to fund the people, materials, and equipment required to advance both foundational understanding and translational work required to help discover the next drug, device, therapeutic, or cure.
The NIH system is imperfect, requires reform (by those who know the difference between a scalpel and an axe) — and has also yielded enormous successes. NIH-funded research contributed to more than 99% of FDA-approved drugs between 2010 and 2019.
The roots of medical research success run deep. For example, the development and global distribution of billions of lifesaving mRNA vaccines was made possible by NIH support, decades in the making.
This administration sees the long game differently. In early August, HHS canceled federal contracts worth more than $500 million intended to develop and improve mRNA vaccines. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that mRNA vaccines proved ineffectual against upper respiratory infections, whereas NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya claimed that mRNA vaccine technology did not earn the American public’s trust. The cancellation of mRNA vaccine research reflects an emerging threat of the past year: the disruption of both the social and legal contract to advance American leadership in science.
Transformative science requires investment, creativity, and stability. The Trump administration has approached contracts as starting points for ad hoc changes, rather than as rock-solid commitments from the federal government. These choices run counter to long-standing formula for success and popular opinion. Recent surveys show that nearly 90% of Americans want the same or more science and medical research support next year compared to this year.
Instead, decisions to slash research infrastructure support, freeze and terminate grants, and eliminate research initiatives (from mRNA vaccines, to HIV, and beyond) reflect a model of governance that strips the power of decision-making on what gets funded away from domain experts and into the hands of political appointees. The impacts have been widespread but could have been worse — and may yet be.
On Nov. 18, NIH released an announcement changing the terms and conditions of all future awards. Moving forward, grant contracts will include explicit language asserting that projects can be terminated if the award “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” New directives suggest that administration priorities and the recipient institute’s location will shape award decisions outside of conventional prioritization mechanisms by expert review panels. Meanwhile, the NIH is searching for new directors for 13 of its 27 institutes and centers, in an accelerated process that has yet to seek input from committees of distinguished internal and external researchers.
The Trump administration’s approach to science and medical research has been a radical departure from bipartisan consensus. The White House proposed FY 2026 budget includes an approximately 40% reduction in NIH support to an inflation-adjusted level billions of dollars lower than at any point in the past 25 years. The Senate and House have proposed top-line budgets that are more consistent with previous budgets and may yet determine the scale of FY26 allocations.
But characterizing the threat to America’s science and medical research landscape requires moving beyond top-line budget numbers and toward true radical transparency: what is funded, at what levels, in what areas, and by whom. The work of Grant Witness and SCIMaP reflect complementary efforts to catalog the scope of grant terminations and the economic impact of policy changes, respectively. There is far more to do.
Measuring and communicating emerging threats to science and medical research is now more essential than ever. How are new policies stimulating or inhibiting grant submissions? How are topic areas and portfolios shifting? Who is left out and why? How much research can move ahead and where, whether measured in terms of grants awarded and/or total research support? And critically: To what extent are funding decisions guided by expert reviews or curated to “align” decisions with political priorities?
Alone, each indicator tells a partial story. Together, as we approach 2026, measuring and communicating these early warning indicators (and their local impacts) will be essential to help the public understand whether evidence or ideology now governs science and medical research in America.
Joshua S. Weitz is professor of biology and Clark leadership chair in data analytics at the University of Maryland, College Park; an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology; and the co-founder of the Science and Community Impacts Mapping Project (SCIMaP).
