The National Institutes of Health (NIH) wields a $47.5 billion budget. More than 80% of its funds go out the door as grants to answer pressing biomedical questions. Over the decades, those grants have helped decipher the human genome, eliminate the polio virus in the U.S. and turn AIDS from a death sentence to a survivable illness.
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But experts say this kind of fundamental science is coming up against an administration that has delayed funding and rerouted billions of dollars in research, resulting in chaos for researchers and patients alike. Trump officials say the administration's practices serve to further the agency's goals.
"NIH is committed to responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and to advancing rigorous, high-impact science that improves health outcomes for the American people," Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, wrote in an August email.
More political oversight may be coming to how those funds get dispersed, according to recent reports. For now, court cases have restored funding, and Congress has preserved it in successive budget bills. But for the scientists who have had to scrap time-sensitive experiments or have seen their labs shuttered, those top-line numbers do not tell the full story.
Here are six graphics that highlight some of the less visible impacts of changes in research funding at the NIH.
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The Trump administration proposed cutting the NIH budget by 41%, or by about $19.6 billion, for 2026. It also asked to restructure 27 institutes to eight — eliminating four outright — in its request. Congress did neither; in fact, it maintained both the existing institutes and a budget that was on par with previous years' appropriations.
But experts say that though the total amount of funding suggests that little has changed, it masks a deeper disruption in the way that money moves.
The numbers behind the numbers
Once money is appropriated by Congress, it then has to be obligated by the NIH — committing the funds to specific projects via grants. Those grants are generally doled out at a fairly consistent rate throughout the year. But since President Trump's inauguration in 2025, that process has slowed to a crawl. In fiscal year 2025, the NIH ran roughly 44 days behind the average pace of 2021 to 2024; through early July 2026, it ran 42 days behind.
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Heather Pierce tracks NIH obligations for the Association of American Medical Colleges. She pointed out that as of July — three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year — the NIH had obligated roughly half its budget, with billions of dollars still left on the table.
Jennifer Troyer, a former director of extramural operations for the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute, oversaw billions of dollars in grants awarded over her tenure until she resigned at the end of 2025. She ticked through some of the reasons for these delays.
Grants are peer-reviewed and prepared by the NIH staff to get funded, stepping through different "statuses" in the process, says Troyer — but now, they are undergoing another level of review that she calls a "black hole."
"There's a status called Status 19 I didn't, even as the director, I did not know existed until things started getting stuck," says Troyer, "because it was something that [grants] would blip through for, like, a few minutes." Awards she had signed would go out and come back stopped, she says, flagged by the Department of Health and Human Services, by the Office of Management and Budget or by the White House "as not acceptable."
At first, she says, it was the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) doing the flagging; "and then they went away, but the other systems had been put in place to do the same function."
She says the staff members who used to process awards have also gone. Her institute went from 11 grants-management specialists (plus two assistants) down to just three specialists. Efforts to cut staff and freeze new hires exacerbated staff shortages and, in turn, further delayed funding. "We did not have the person-time to put awards out the door," she says.
With funding, timing is everything
The delays also affected grants that had already been awarded. That's because many long-term NIH grants are often awarded for multiple years and paid out annually. They not only fund lab work but also pay for employees and medical care in clinical trials. Scientists rely on that continuity to keep projects stable — which is why, prior to this administration, those renewals traditionally came in a week early, to avoid any funding gaps.
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But in the past two years, grants have regularly been renewed 90 or more days late at a rate four to six times more often than in the previous four years (3.9% in the 2025 fiscal year and 2.7% in the 2026 fiscal year, compared with 0.7% in fiscal years 2021 through 2024).
Ryan Gutenkunst is a professor and the head of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Arizona. When his grant renewal got delayed, he says, "I was starting to plan who I would cut if I needed to." Fortunately, he says, his university provided bridge funding and the grant was renewed two and a half months afterward.
Not everyone experiencing these delays has been so lucky. Gutenkunst explained that researchers can sometimes get bridge funding from their institutions to keep research projects afloat, because those funds can be paid back when the grant finally renews. But that bridge funding has a 90-day window. "It's really bad if it goes past 90 days," he says — adding that these extended delays have in some cases led to lost research, loss in employment and institutions' increased hesitancy to provide bridge funding.
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The delays could be measured in roughly a third of U.S. congressional districts, and they cut across party lines: Renewals in Democratic districts went from arriving 3.4 days early to 8.4 days late; in Republican districts, they went from 3.8 days early to 8.0 days late. These widespread delays have been systemic, affecting U.S. biomedical research broadly regardless of location.
Funding winners and losers
Some disruptions — grant terminations and changes in the types of research being funded — have resulted in more than a billion dollars less for racial- and ethnic-minority health research in 2025 than in 2024 — a 29% drop. Instead, projects studying artificial intelligence, among other categories, received more funding; machine learning and AI gained $468 million, and networking and information technology $368 million — two of the five largest increases. These shifts track the administration's stated priorities; Trump's executive orders have directed agencies to end "radical" and "wasteful" diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) research, and the August 2025 NIH unified funding strategy named AI research as a priority.
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Troyer says the change in research funding happened, in part, due to the top-down control, including a new system that flagged grants with disfavored words. According to a story published by Nature, the disfavored terms include "climate change," "DEI," "gender" and "vaccine hesitancy." About half the awards going out the door, she says, had to be "renegotiated" — with the institution, the lead researcher and the program director agreeing on new language in the title, the specific aims, the abstract and "anything that was going to appear in public."
Researchers describe the same experience from their end. Mariana Stern, a professor of preventive medicine and urology at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, had to reframe her grants, her research and even her research center, which was once called the CaRE2 Health Equity Center. "We have to call it the CaRE2 Health Center now," she says — omitting the word "equity."
But for some, the shift in funding meant a loss of funds and staff. Scarlett Lin Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, leads the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, which receives funding from the National Cancer Institute. That funding was cut from $5.4 million in 2024 to $4.4 million in 2025 and then $3.7 million in 2026. "We received a cut that was completely unprecedented," Gomez says. "We've not had a cut of this magnitude at all — by far." Of her roughly 50 lab employees, she had to let go about seven last year and expects she'll have to let go five or six more this year.
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Those effects also showed up in significant delays to many training grants that fund students and trainees. Some worry these and other disruptions could discourage the next generation of scientists.
"More and more students are very hesitant to go into academia because of what's happening — because they see how stressful it is for us, their mentors," Stern says. "More and more are choosing industry, because it's easier, the pay is better and they don't have to struggle with funding the way we do." Gomez sees it as worsening a preexisting problem. "We're definitely seeing an academic brain drain, and this current environment is certainly going to further hasten that."
Trump officials did not comment directly on NPR's findings, instead pointing to the merits of the administration's current strategy.
"The Unified Funding Strategy ensures that the NIH embraces transparency, scientific rigor, and unbiased, evidence-driven research," Hilliard, the Health and Human Services spokeswoman, wrote in the August email. "Under the Strategy, NIH Institute and Center Directors make final funding decisions after considering multiple factors, consistent with longstanding federal grantmaking practices."
Not everyone is critical of the NIH changes. Ian Banks, who directs science and development at the Foundation for American Innovation and has advised the White House on science policy, argues that the NIH was overdue for disruption. "I think it was clear to just about every observer, left, right, and center, that the NIH of recent decades is a very unhealthy institution and has really desperately needed substantial reform." Banks isn't for cutting funding, as he says it's well established that funding science is merited. But he does say it's time to examine whether there is a better way to allocate the funds.
Over 44% of principal investigators' time is spent on non-research activities such as filling out paperwork, per a 2018 survey, and Banks thinks it could be over 50% today. He says this is a problem that contributes to the rising time and costs for new biomedical innovations — a troubling trend named Eroom's law.
"Is a lottery a better way of allocating specific funding than the current peer review process?" asks Banks, who says he is open to any ideas that might help improve science funding. "For at least funding reforms," he says, "we don't really know what works."
The same sentiment lands with scientists too. After all, most would like to do more science and have it be easier.
"That's a legitimate debate to have," Gutenkunst, of the University of Arizona, says. "But it should be an open debate. It shouldn't be a hidden list of words that is dictating things. It should be a real discussion between the administration, the scientists and the public."
That's part of why he and other experts say they're worried about a new rule proposed by the White House's Office of Management and Budget — one that, if implemented, would give political appointees the final say on federal grantmaking. Scientists say this will likely place further restrictions on research funding and increase executive control. Its effects, if passed, remain to be seen.
Note: The information in these graphs is a snapshot of the National Institutes of Health data that was pulled from NIH ExPORTER by NPR and by Grant Witness in July 2026. That data is frequently updated retroactively on the NIH's site and is subject to change.
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