Women and early-career researchers hit hardest by NIH grant cancellations

Shortly after the second Donald J. Trump administration took office, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) canceled or paused thousands of previously awarded grants. Those cancellations did not affect everyone equally, according to an analysis published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.: Women lost greater proportions of their funding than did men, while men lost more money as a whole. Early-career researchers also lost hundreds of millions in grants designed to help them launch into biomedical research. “While headlines quickly reported the scale of the cuts, we realized there was very little information about who was actually being affected,” lead investigator Diego Fregolent, a computer scientist at the University of North Dakota who has studied gender differences in science funding, writes in an email to C&EN. Fregolent and his colleagues analyzed grants canceled between February and August 2025 listed in Grant Witness, a database of terminated federal grants maintained by a group of data scientists. The researchers searched for those grants in the NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools: Expenditures and Results (RePORTER) module to fill in details such as funding amount, type of grant, institution, and principal investigator names. They then used computer programs to infer an awardee’s gender based on their name, and they directly confirmed gender identities when possible. Their data is publicly available.. During the study period, the NIH terminated 2,291 active grants comprising $2.45 billion; the agency froze another 1,534 grants. At the 10 institutions with the most terminations, men