Over 700 and $1.7 billion in previously undisclosed grant terminations published by NIH

news
Author

Noam Ross

Published

May 20, 2025

726 additional additional terminated grants were reported by NIH this week, amounting to over $1.70 billion in total grant value, with $780 million remaining unspent. This brings the total number of terminations in our NIH database to over 1500 and $7.5 billion in total value.

Thanks to scientists self-reporting these terminations, we know these are not all recent terminations. 58 of the 726 were previously reported by scientists to Grant Watch, with dates as early as 2025-03-21.

The list of publicly reported terminations is likely still far from complete. Grant Watch has reports of over 40 additional terminations reported by researchers that still do not appear in any official public site or list, also reported as far back as early March. Nor does the current list include many grants to Harvard University terminated last week. This suggests that even with this new batch, NIH and HHS’s public reporting is not up to date, and the full scope of terminated grants is unreported and will grow.

Approximately 500 terminations were added to NIH’s RePORTER database on Sunday May 18, then more were also published to the HHS TAGGS website today. As has been the case previously, the two sources have significant discrepancies, with approximately 300 terminated grants only published in one of the two sources. In the past three weeks, HHS had stopped posting new terminations to the TAGGS list, actually removing some.

Terminations in the RePORTER database are not searchable and not included in the site’s programmatic API. Grant Watch tracks this designation by regular scraping of the RePORTER website.

These new terminations also do not appear to have been part of releases on doge.gov. DOGE’s website claims that 1,951 grants have been cancelled across all of HHS, totaling $47 billion in value, but provides no details or reference numbers beyond the recipient institution, which is also missing in many cases. Nonetheless, more grants to Harvard, UC San Francisco, and other institutions appear in the new RePORTER terminations than are listed by DOGE.

Institutions

The newly identified terminations affect 243 institutions across 48 states. While Harvard Medical School accounts for the highest number of grant cancellations in this batch, the new RePORTER data do not seem to reflect the huge wave of terminations that occurred last week.

Top 10 institutions of new grant terminations
Institution Terminated Grants Grants Value
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL 19 $42,314,991
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO 17 $94,524,021
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO DENVER 14 $24,247,811
DUKE UNIVERSITY 13 $28,434,968
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS 13 $20,174,996
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 13 $60,527,311
UNIV OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL 12 $25,753,932
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR 12 $27,326,433
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 12 $39,915,358
YALE UNIVERSITY 12 $17,846,082

Topics

Most terminations were of R01 research projects, which make up most of NIH grants, followed by a variety of education and training activities. The largest number of terminations were under the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, but the greatest amount of grant funding terminated was from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Top 10 activity codes of the new grant terminations
Activity Code Activity Terminated Grants Grants Value
R01 Research Project 322 $789,570,438
R25 Education Projects 79 $152,339,664
F31 Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award 75 $5,089,764
T34 Undergraduate NRSA Institutional Research Training Grants 58 $45,889,490
T32 Institutional National Research Service Award 38 $43,152,674
R21 Exploratory/Developmental Grants 25 $10,370,997
U01 Research Project–Cooperative Agreements 23 $114,494,294
K99 Career Transition Award 16 $2,700,546
R00 Research Transition Award 10 $5,519,629
DP2 NIH Director’s New Innovator Awards 9 $15,040,138
Top 10 NIH institutes of new grant terminations
Institute Abbr. Institute Name Terminated Grants Grants Value
NIGMS National Institute of General Medical Sciences 134 $189,738,732
NIAID National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases 113 $353,069,476
NIDDK National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases 113 $138,140,064
NIMH National Institute of Mental Health 89 $400,221,333
NIMHD National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities 67 $158,797,845
NIDA National Institute on Drug Abuse 47 $128,396,607
NIA National Institute on Aging 31 $72,760,293
NIBIB National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering 27 $23,179,399
NHGRI National Human Genome Research Institute 21 $41,005,076
NCI National Cancer Institute 18 $73,286,545

Examining programs1 under which these grants are funded paints a clearer picture of the topics targeted for terminations. The largest group of terminations, by number and value, were research supplements to promote diversity, a program that was not only ended but deleted off the NIH website. (You can find it on the Internet Archive.) 191 such supplements with a value of $770 million were terminated. Many other terminated projects were funded under programs for science education, training, early-career support, and other programs focused on diversity and studying health disparities.

Top 10 funding programs of new grant terminations
Funding Opportunity Numbers Program Title Terminated Grants Grants Value
PA-23-189, PA-21-071, PA-20-222 Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research 191 $768,214,323
PA-20-185, PA-19-056, PA-20-184, PA-20-183 Research Project Grant 109 $290,364,678
PA-21-049, PA-20-251, PA-23-271, PA-21-052 Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award 76 $5,232,698
PAR-19-218, PAR-21-146 Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement 58 $45,889,490
PAR-24-031, PAR-19-037, PAR-21-025 Initiative for Maximizing Student Development 38 $43,152,674
PAR-22-220, PAR-20-066 Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program 29 $97,054,509
PAR-21-271, PAR-21-272, PAR-19-343 Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers 22 $5,529,685
PAR-22-241 NIAID Research Opportunities for New and “At-Risk” Investigators to Promote Workforce Diversity 21 $21,601,155
PAR-21-313 Small Grants for New Investigators to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research 18 $7,200,840
PAR-23-114, PAR-20-223 Enhancing Science, Technology, EnginEering, and Math Educational Diversity 12 $6,550,142

Nonetheless, the actual topics of research and study of these terminated projects covered a wide range of basic and applied biomedical topics. A word cloud of the most frequent words in project titles and abstracts shows the scientific range of these projects.

World cloud of the most common words in the project titles of terminated grants, with size proportional to word frequency.

Footnotes

  1. We now report funding program titles in the database under the field foa_title.↩︎