Grants terminations requested by the administration of US President Donald Trump last year disproportionately affected researchers from under-represented groups, a survey suggests.Credit: Loic Venance/AFP via Getty
The abrupt termination last year of thousands of research grants by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, didn’t affect all groups of scientists equitably. A survey suggests1 that it disproportionately hit researchers from groups that have been historically under-represented in the biomedical sciences, including women, people of colour and investigators from sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+).
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Although some of these cancelled grants were later restored, researchers fear that the cuts — many of which targeted studies on health equity and gender-related issues — will change the demographics of who is doing science in the United States. That, in turn, could widen existing knowledge gaps about populations that are already underserved by the US health-care system, researchers say.
Many scientists who research a specific community tend to come from that community themselves, says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who studies scientific labour markets. “Who’s based in the sciences gets to influence what questions are being asked, so when diverse investigators and scientists are pushed out, then those questions are also pushed out,” adds Arjee Restar, a social and legal epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut.
The NIH did not comment on the survey or scientists’ concerns about the findings. A spokesperson responded to Nature with a statement about the agency’s grant-review system, saying that the “NIH supports a fair and objective review process that evaluates proposals based on scientific merit, methodological rigor, and potential contribution to the field”.
Research defunded
Officials in the administration of US President Donald Trump began terminating already-funded grants at the NIH in February 2025, cancelling more than 2,000 grants by the end the year. The administration targeted research topics that it deemed wasteful or politicized, including misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups — which it has called discriminatory and unscientific. Some of the grants were later restored because of negotiations with universities and lawsuits.
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Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a social epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues wanted to understand who these cuts affected, so they sent a survey to the corresponding authors, or investigators, of approximately 2,000 terminated grants. The results of their analysis are published today in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas1.
About 940 researchers responded to the survey. Of the people who had lost grants that were focused on health-equity topics, nearly half of them identified as Black, Indigenous or as a person of colour (BIPOC). (In 2024, the NIH awarded 7% of its grants to Hispanic and Latino researchers and 4% to Black researchers, suggesting that BIPOC individuals were disproportionately affected by the terminations.)
Among grants terminated because they were funding gender-related studies, 60% of the investigators identified as LGBTQ+, including more than 15% who were transgender or nonbinary. And LGBTQ+ researchers had more than ten-fold higher odds of losing a grant for a gender-related study than did their counterparts who did not identify as LGBTQ+.
According to NIH data from 2024, 42% of grants were awarded to women. However, 56% of survey respondents self-identified as women, pointing to female scientists being disproportionately affected by the terminations.
