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STAT+: NIH grants plummeted $2.3 billion in Trump’s first months, as federal-academia partnership crumbles
The NIH has scaled back its awards of new grants by at least $2.3 billion since the beginning of the year, a STAT analysis shows.
The National Institutes of Health has scaled back its awards of new grants by at least $2.3 billion since the beginning of the year, with the biggest shortfalls hitting the study of infectious diseases, heart and lung ailments, and basic research into fundamental biological systems, a new STAT analysis has found.
This roughly 28% contraction in funding comes on top of threats to freeze billions of dollars of NIH funding to specific universities as well as abrupt terminations to hundreds of research projects on Covid-19, HIV/AIDS, health disparities, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas targeted by President Trump’s political agenda.
While Trump and his Republican allies have begun to use the threat of withholding NIH funding to force private universities like Columbia and Harvard to change what they say are “woke,” left-wing, and antisemitic policies, STAT’s analysis shows that the institutions hardest hit by the slowdown to new NIH awards include public universities, medical schools, and a nonprofit cancer research center. The Boston area and New York City — home to Harvard and Columbia — have experienced large declines in new grants, but so have Seattle and San Diego, where the public University of Washington and University of California, San Diego, are located.
