But last year, the US funded dramatically fewer grants to do medical research that can lead to breakthroughs like those. New data<\/a> released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from those cuts broke down.<\/p>\n The numbers are striking across the board.<\/p>\n New grants for Alzheimer\u2019s and aging research were cut in half \u2014 from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging<\/a>. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent \u2014 even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans<\/a>. Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the worst year I\u2019ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,\u201d said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH\u2019s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.<\/p>\n The NIH\u2019s funding system was already under strain \u2014 too many researchers were chasing too few research dollars. That has always meant that the most ambitious and most unconventional ideas struggle to get funded.<\/p>\n But the Trump administration\u2019s policy decisions have made that problem dramatically worse in just a single year.<\/p>\n The NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their proposals, a panel of outside experts scores and ranks them, and then each NIH institute \u2014 each focused on a different area of medicine \u2014 funds as many top-scoring proposals as its budget allows. In a normal year, about 5,000 new grants get funded.<\/p>\n Last year, one policy change did more to shrink that number than almost anything else.<\/p>\n In July 2025<\/a>, the White House Office of Management and Budget required NIH to start paying the full cost of approved grants upfront \u2014 all at once, instead of paying year by year, as it has for a very long time. In principle, funding grants upfront makes them less vulnerable to future budget cuts.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s the problem: When NIH funds a research project, it\u2019s typically a commitment that stretches three to five years. That means in any given year, about 80 percent of the agency\u2019s budget is already spoken for \u2014 paying for grants it promised in previous years. Only the remaining 20 percent of the budget is available to fund new research.<\/p>\n When the agency has to pay the full cost of every multiyear grant up front, that means each new grant costs several times more than it used to. Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH\u2019s grant-making for nearly a decade before leaving the agency in early 2025, put it simply: \u201cInstead of funding five grants, you now only fund one, and that means four other grants that would\u2019ve been funded don\u2019t get funded.\u201d<\/p>\n Berg, the former NIH institute director, estimates this single change wiped out roughly 1,000 new grants.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t the only factor. The Trump administration also terminated thousands of existing grants<\/a> over the past year \u2014 something Lauer said he had seen happen only twice in his entire 18-year tenure at the agency. The leftover money from those terminations went to the US Treasury, not back to NIH. Berg estimates that roughly $500 million left the system this way.<\/p>\n On top of that, about 12 percent<\/a> more grant applications were submitted in 2025 than in 2024, all competing for the shrinking pool of funds.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has been open about wanting a smaller NIH; it proposed<\/a> cutting the agency\u2019s budget for 2026 by 40 percent, though Congress has not enacted that cut. At the same time, the White House has pushed policy changes it says are aimed at restoring accountability<\/a> at NIH \u2014 but the effect of those changes has been to shrink the agency.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s pretty easy to start to wonder if there is some connection between those two things,\u201d Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior NIH official, told STAT News<\/a>.<\/p>\n The NIH did not respond to specific questions about the institute-level declines, or what happened to the money from terminated grants.<\/p>\n But isn\u2019t the best research still getting funded?<\/p>\n With fewer grants to go around, you might think the system is just getting more selective \u2014 funding just the best ideas and cutting the rest. But that\u2019s actually not how it works.<\/p>\n Philippe Aghion, the economist who shared last year\u2019s Nobel Prize, found<\/a> that past a certain point, more competition actually stifles innovation rather than spurs it. When NIH can only fund the top 5 or 6 percent of proposals, what survives is good but conservative science \u2014 established labs extending well-established research.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main thing you\u2019re giving up there is new ideas,\u201d Berg said.<\/p>\n Researchers in the UK recently discovered that people vaccinated against shingles had a roughly 20 percent lower risk of developing dementia<\/a> seven years later. That finding came from a natural experiment in Wales, where people born before a certain date weren\u2019t eligible for the vaccine and those born after were \u2014 and the group that got the vaccine had lower rates of dementia.<\/p>\n Understanding why a shingles vaccine works against dementia, and whether it could lead to new ways to prevent dementia, is the kind of exploratory research that would now struggle to get funded.<\/p>\n Katalin Karik\u00f3, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine for the mRNA work behind the Covid vaccines, had her grants repeatedly<\/a> rejected<\/a> long before the Trump cuts. The window for unconventional ideas was already narrow. Now it\u2019s narrowing even further.<\/p>\n And much of the damage could prove permanent. When funding dries up, researchers leave \u2014 for other countries, for the private sector, for careers outside science altogether. \u201cResearchers who leave the field or the country to work elsewhere are unlikely to return,\u201d said Joshua Weitz, a University of Maryland professor who tracks<\/a> science funding.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/nVIuH-the-us-slashed-medical-research-grants-in-nearly-every-field-2.png\"\/)
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