Who Lost Their NIH Grants? Women and Early-Career Scientists Bore the Heaviest Burden.

Minoli Perera had spent roughly $250,000 of her $500,000 first-year NIH funding when the termination letter arrived. Her lab at Northwestern University was studying how African ancestry affects medication responses — pharmacogenomics research with direct implications for health disparities in Black communities. NIH's stated reason for cutting the grant: the work "promoted diversity rather than science." Perera, a scientist whose research sits at the intersection of genetics and clinical medicine, was left questioning whether her work has a place in the current funding environment at all.

Her story is not an outlier. It is the pattern.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in March 2026 has, for the first time, quantified who actually lost funding when NIH terminated 2,291 active research grants in early 2025 — withdrawing $2.45 billion and abruptly ending thousands of research projects. The findings confirm what many in the scientific community suspected but could not prove: the terminations fell hardest on women and early-career researchers, deepening exactly the structural inequities that decades of federal science policy had been designed to correct.

The Numbers Tell a Clear Story

The PNAS analysis found that women lost an average of 57.9 percent of their grant funding, compared to 48.2 percent for men. That gap — nearly ten percentage points — is not explained by random variation or proportional representation. It reflects the structural position of women in the scientific funding hierarchy.

Among doctoral students and assistant professors, the disparity was even starker: 60 percent of terminated grants in those career stages were led by women. The pattern reversed at higher ranks — men dominated among postdoctoral fellows, associate professors, and full professors with cancelled grants — but the concentration of terminations at the earliest career stages, where women are disproportionately represented among grant holders, produced a net effect that fell harder on female scientists.

Diego F. M. Oliveira of the University of North Dakota, one of the study's authors, explained the mechanism: "Funding shocks do not affect all researchers equally. Women and early-career researchers were more likely to hold smaller grants and to be in earlier stages of those projects when funding was cut." Because they held smaller grants, each termination represented a larger share of their total research capacity. Because they were earlier in their project timelines, more of the investment was prospective — meaning the cancellation destroyed not just current work but the entire downstream trajectory of data collection, analysis, and publication that the grant was designed to support.

Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who studies research funding equity, was direct in her assessment: "This confirms what I have been hearing in the community. Young and female investigators disproportionately lost NIH funding. It is disappointing to see that many of these grants were training grants that will have the impact of derailing scientific careers just as they are getting started."

The Training Grant Problem

The mention of training grants is critical. NIH's K-series career development awards and F-series fellowship grants are specifically designed to support researchers at the most vulnerable points in their careers — the transition from graduate student to postdoc, from postdoc to independent investigator, from assistant professor to established researcher. These grants don't just fund research; they fund the researcher's development. Terminating a training grant doesn't delay a project. It can end a career.

Almost $400 million in funding to students and early-career researchers was cut. For a doctoral student whose dissertation research depended on an F31 fellowship, termination means the research cannot be completed and the degree timeline extends — potentially indefinitely. For an assistant professor who built a tenure case around a K-award-funded research program, losing that grant removes both the funding and the preliminary data needed to compete for an R01, the standard independent research grant that tenure committees expect.

The career pipeline in academic science is already fragile. The "leaky pipeline" — the gradual attrition of women and underrepresented minorities at each successive career stage — has been documented for decades. NIH training grants were one of the primary tools the federal government used to shore up that pipeline, particularly at the critical early-career transitions where attrition is highest. Terminating those grants doesn't just affect the individuals who held them. It sends a signal to every graduate student and postdoc considering an academic career: the federal government may not be a reliable partner in your professional development.

$1.4 Billion in Wasted Investment

The financial waste argument against the terminations is at least as compelling as the equity argument. Biochemist Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, has calculated that the terminated grants had already spent $1.4 billion of the $2.8 billion NIH had promised to their investigators at the time of cancellation. That money — spent on equipment, reagent supplies, personnel salaries, patient recruitment, and data collection — cannot be recovered. The experiments were designed as multi-year projects. Stopping them midstream doesn't save the money already spent; it simply ensures that the investment yields no return.

Berg's assessment was blunt: if the grants had value in the first place, "what they're doing is throwing away the money that's already been invested."

The STAT News survey of nearly 1,000 NIH-funded researchers produced specific examples of this waste in action. A Baltimore-based HIV researcher had collected data from approximately 500 study participants when his grant was terminated. That data — representing hundreds of hours of patient interaction, informed consent processes, blood draws, and clinical assessments — now sits unanalyzed because the lab no longer has funding to process it. The researcher noted the irony: the administration claims to be reducing waste, but abandoning partially completed research is the definition of waste.

An Ohio-based endometriosis researcher saw her funding eliminated just as she was launching her laboratory. Her employment contract expires within days of losing NIH support, meaning the university invested in her hiring, lab setup, and institutional infrastructure for a research program that will now produce nothing.

These are not edge cases. They are the predictable consequence of terminating grants mid-cycle rather than allowing them to complete their funded period and then declining to renew. The distinction matters enormously: non-renewal is a normal part of the scientific funding process, and researchers plan for it. Mid-cycle termination is an emergency that the grant system was never designed to absorb.

The Broken Trust Between Scientists and Government

STAT's survey revealed something harder to quantify but potentially more damaging than the financial losses: a collapse of trust between researchers and the federal funding apparatus.

Scientists build careers around the assumption that federal grant commitments will be honored. A five-year R01 grant is not just money — it is a commitment that allows a researcher to hire postdocs, recruit patients, purchase equipment, and design experiments with a known funding horizon. When NIH terminates grants years before their scheduled end, it doesn't just break a financial agreement. It breaks the foundational social contract that makes long-term scientific research possible.

The STAT survey found researchers describing broken bonds of trust not only between scientists and the federal government but between scientists and the communities they serve. The Baltimore HIV researcher, for instance, had built relationships with study participants who trusted that their data would be used to advance treatment. Abandoning that data abandons those patients.

For early-career researchers — the ones the PNAS study shows were disproportionately affected — the trust rupture is particularly consequential. These are scientists making career-defining decisions about whether to pursue academic research, industry positions, or careers outside the United States entirely. (Our earlier analysis of the scientific brain drain documented the accelerating outflow of talent.) Every terminated early-career grant makes the calculation tilt further away from American academic science.

What This Means for Grant Applicants

The PNAS findings carry specific implications for anyone currently applying for or holding NIH funding.

Diversify your funding portfolio. The era of building a career on a single federal funding source is over. Researchers should actively pursue foundation grants, industry partnerships, state-level funding, and international collaborations alongside NIH applications. University bridge funding programs can provide short-term stability, but they are not a long-term solution.

Strengthen compliance and documentation. Grants that were terminated on content grounds — like Perera's pharmacogenomics research — suggest that applicants need to be more deliberate about framing their work in terms that align with current agency priorities. This is not about changing the science; it is about ensuring that the scientific rationale is articulated clearly enough that it cannot be easily mischaracterized.

Build coalitions. The PNAS study was possible because researchers shared data about their experiences. The advocacy that follows will depend on continued willingness to document and publicize the impacts of grant terminations. Professional societies, university research offices, and congressional delegations need specific, quantified evidence of harm — not just anecdotes — to push back effectively.

Plan for mid-cycle risk. Until the legal and political landscape stabilizes, every NIH grant holder should maintain a contingency plan for sudden funding loss. That means keeping equipment and data documentation current, maintaining relationships with alternative funders, and ensuring that partially completed research can be described compellingly in applications to other agencies or foundations.

The grant funding landscape is more volatile than at any point in recent memory. For researchers navigating this uncertainty — whether applying for their first NIH grant or managing a portfolio of active awards — tools like Granted can help identify alternative funding opportunities, track deadlines across agencies, and build the diversified strategy that this moment demands.