A nationwide STAT survey of federally funded researchers reveals that, a year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, many academic scientists are reeling. Rather than waning, the impacts of the administration’s seismic changes to science funding are intensifying, causing researchers to drastically scale back the ambition of their work and driving some to shut down their labs entirely.
The survey of nearly 1,000 researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s leading funder of biomedical research, paints a concerning portrait of the state of American science. More than a quarter of respondents have laid off lab members, and more than 2 out of every 5 have canceled planned research. Two-thirds have counseled students to consider careers outside the ivory tower.
Strikingly, despite courts reversing some grant terminations and Congress thwarting plans to slash the NIH budget, just 35% of respondents whose grants were cut or delayed said their government funding had been fully restored by the end of 2025.
Labs aren’t just shrinking. In some cases, they’re on track to shut down permanently, with early-career researchers among the hardest hit. A staggering 81% of junior tenure-track scientists said they are very or somewhat concerned that disruptions to their research productivity could threaten their chances of earning tenure.
In follow-up interviews, survey respondents told STAT that interrupted funding and changes in federal priorities caused patients to drop out of a diabetes prevention trial in Puerto Rico, forced an Ohio researcher on the cusp of losing her position to close her lab, and led one scientist to take a 95% pay cut in a last-ditch bid to avoid laying off staff.
STAT interviewed 30 respondents, not all of whom have been severely impacted. But many said they were enraged and disillusioned that the federal government, historically science’s largest and most reliable partner, had blindsided researchers with an array of funding cuts and delays. Several warned that the full scope of last year’s policy changes — measured in discoveries that aren’t made, at least not in the United States — won’t be visible for years. As they spoke, a couple of researchers wept.
“This is like the Titanic hitting the iceberg,” said Steve Shoptaw, who runs the Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, which has shrunk by 40% due to funding cuts. “People are still eating at the table, music’s still playing, and yet the ship is sinking.”
In response to a detailed summary of STAT’s findings, the NIH said in an email that it remains committed to promoting research that improves health by supporting the best and brightest scientists. The agency, which is lagging far behind in the number of grant awards and dollars doled out this fiscal year compared with prior years, though it has committed to fully spending its 2026 budget, also blamed former President Joe Biden for creating conditions that required drastic change to fix.
“The Biden administration prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people. This NIH is directing taxpayer dollars toward research practices that deliver results, with a focus on combating the chronic disease epidemic,” the agency said. “A major reset was overdue.”
But Jason Owen-Smith, executive director of the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, a consortium of dozens of universities, believes that the survey findings suggest deep-seated anxiety and chaos sown by federal policies are undermining rather than bolstering the agency’s objectives.
“This is the equivalent of working in a company that feels like it’s on the verge of bankruptcy,” he said. “These are not the conditions where people are going to be able to focus really well on the kind of high-risk, high-reward science that many of the federal agencies, NIH included, say that they want.”
All is not well
From a distance, it may seem that the nation’s research enterprise made it through 2025 largely unscathed. After all, despite a slow start, NIH spent most of its budget by the end of the last fiscal year. A Trump administration plan to slash support for research overhead has been blocked in the courts. Congress increased the NIH’s 2026 budget and rejected a proposed reorganization of the agency. A federal judge ordered the restoration of thousands of terminated grants, and the administration reached an agreement to reconsider certain frozen and denied grant submissions.
But in labs like Mariya Sweetwyne’s, all is not well.
Sweetwyne, at least for now, is an assistant professor at the University of Washington, where since 2021 she has run a lab that studies kidney aging and chronic disease. Last spring, the NIH rescinded a grant program through which she’d applied for funding after President Trump put an end to initiatives connected to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The impact was immediate. As she scrambled to submit her grant through another channel, Sweetwyne burned through her institutional startup funds. To avoid laying off staff, she looked for other savings, including reducing the size of her mouse colony by half; she now has around 200 fewer animals than she did a year ago.
It wasn’t enough to save her three-person team. Sweetwyne still let go of a laboratory technician, and another left on their own. She’s had to return to the bench to help the one remaining staffer with experiments. Sweetwyne expects she’ll have to shut down the lab by the end of this year. And as a non-tenure-track researcher with 95% of her salary coming from grants, Sweetwyne said she’s at risk of losing her position at UW altogether.
While she tries not to bring her worries home, her 6-year-old daughter has noticed. Each morning, she hands Sweetwyne a pair of coins and asks, “Is this going to be enough?” Sweetwyne always says yes, and, at the end of each day, hides the pennies and quarters around her house for the child to find again so that she doesn’t run out of change.
If new funding doesn’t come in soon, she has no idea what she’ll do next.
“I’m not sure who I am without this job,” Sweetwyne said. “I’m just really trying to honor the work I’ve done and try to get that out and hope that that will be enough.”
Thirty-two percent of respondents, like Sweetwyne, applied for a grant through a program that was subsequently canceled. Award terminations, delays, and freezes affected 15%, 45%, and a third of researchers, respectively. Sixteen percent of respondents reported taking a salary cut due to funding disruptions, and 27% said they took on additional duties to make up for lost salary.
These national rates were slightly lower than a similar Boston Globe poll in December found for NIH-funded researchers at Massachusetts universities, potentially due to the administration’s targeting of Harvard’s research funding.
STAT partnered with the MassINC Polling Group to conduct its survey of 989 researchers from 45 states, plus Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. It was emailed to about 41,000 NIH-funded scientists between Jan. 28 and Feb. 18, relying on a public database of grant recipients in 2022; respondents were then screened to ensure they had active grants in 2025. The results were weighted based on each researcher’s total NIH funding and their region of the country, and the margin of error for questions asked of the full sample is 3.3 percentage points.
Those studying health disparities were especially likely to be in the NIH’s crosshairs. Director Jay Bhattacharya, who himself once did research on racial health disparities, has said the NIH remains committed to studying the health of minority populations. Still, the survey found that 68% of disparities researchers shifted their work to topics aligned with federal priorities, compared to 41% of all respondents. Similarly, 26% of these researchers had grants terminated, 11 percentage points higher than the overall rate, with the agency telling health equity researchers that their work was “antithetical to scientific inquiry.”
Some of these grant terminations were declared “void and illegal” by a federal judge last June. But while researchers celebrated that ruling, it only applied to grants named specifically in a pair of lawsuits filed by the American Public Health Association and 16 states. Among respondents whose funding had been cut or delayed, 54% reported that only some or none of their lost funding had been restored by the end of 2025. A third of those whose funding hadn’t been fully restored lost around $100,000 to $500,000 due to NIH policy changes, and 36% reported a drop of less than $100,000.
Researchers spent much of last year trying to plug funding gaps, with around 3 out of every 4 scientists saying they’d applied for non-NIH funding. But even before Trump’s return to the White House, academia faced a longstanding problem: too many people competing for too few dollars. That is especially true now. Only 1% of researchers who’d applied for additional funding said they’d gotten all of what they’d applied for, while 20% got some of what they asked for, 24% did not receive any of what they requested, and 29% were waiting to hear back.
About half of those applying for additional funding sought support from their own institutions. But many universities have tightened their belts, especially places that currently receive a large share of grant dollars and are worried about the NIH’s plans to achieve “geographic balance” with future funding. Respondents at institutions that ranked among the top 25 in NIH funding were more likely than researchers elsewhere to report that their universities had laid off staff, reduced travel and conference budgets, and added new processes for approving spending and hiring decisions.
Support from private foundations, which don’t have the resources to match the NIH’s $48.7 billion annual budget, has also been hard to come by. Unlike the federal government, private funders generally provide little or no money for the facility and administrative expenses associated with science, such as the cost of keeping the lights on in a lab or the salaries of administrators who help prepare grants.
Dana Crawford is a case in point. The Case Western Reserve University geneticist had received a two-year NIH award for using data from All of Us, a massive research program launched by the agency to advance precision medicine, to study how genetics and a person’s environment shape their risk of disease. Her planned study focused on African American and Hispanic people, who are more likely to carry variants in the APOL1 gene associated with kidney disease, but any findings had the potential to apply to other populations that have these mutations, too.
She lost more than $400,000 when the NIH terminated the award. Last December, she got $10,000 from a foundation to keep the work limping along. The new grant includes less than 10% support for overhead — a fraction of the 57% overhead rate in federal awards to Case Western.
‘Full panic mode’
Research projects often involve many partners spread across myriad institutions and thousands of miles, relationships that take years to build and rely on trust. Once lost, that trust is not easily regained.
Josiemer Mattei learned that lesson firsthand last year in Puerto Rico, while running a diabetes prevention trial that provided participants with healthy, culturally tailored foods, such as pineapples, beans, and leafy greens grown by local farmers. It’s the kind of work that aligns with the goals of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has railed against ultra-processed foods and promised to “end the chronic disease epidemic.” But in May, Mattei, a Harvard researcher, had her funding cut as the administration terminated more than $2.8 billion in grants across the university.
What followed, she said, was “full panic mode.” Bridge funding from the university allowed her to resume operations after a few weeks, but just barely. Tubes of blood and saliva filled freezers to bursting, with analyses delayed indefinitely until more funding came in. Mattei lost half her team to layoffs and voluntary departures. And participants started calling in to say that, if Harvard was under fire from the administration, they worried that they, too, would get in trouble by staying in the trial. It wasn’t long before three of them stopped coming in for follow-up. More than three dozen participants have also dropped out of a larger observational study Mattei is running to identify factors that could help explain Puerto Rico’s high rate of chronic disease.
Mattei is one of the 47% of respondents who had to pause experiments or studies in response to funding changes, and the 61% who adjusted project timelines or milestones. While her funding was fully restored last year, the damage has already been done. The clinical research site she was working with in Puerto Rico decided to stop partnering with her team — and to stop working with academics at all going forward — in part because of the funding disruption. She says she can’t blame them given that invoices from the clinic had piled up unpaid for months.
Mattei ultimately managed to find another site for the study, but she said keeping the trial going has felt a lot like stopping an open-heart surgery and trying to resume without losing the patient. “I still have PTSD,” said Mattei, who at one point during a video call held her face in her hands while describing the past year. “I was massively depressed with the whole thing.”
Science’s next generation is struggling
Bhattacharya repeatedly lists supporting early-career scientists as one of his priorities as NIH director. The health economist often cites his own past research, which found that scientists are most likely to try out new ideas right after they earn their Ph.D. But STAT’s survey shows that those most deeply impacted by federal policy changes have been junior researchers, who typically have fewer active grants than established scientists. Twenty-nine percent of researchers in tenure-track roles said they’d applied for jobs at other institutions due to the NIH funding changes, nearly twice the rate of 15% among tenured faculty.
Follow-up interviews made clear that many of these young investigators are burnt out, and are deeply worried about their futures. Among junior researchers in tenure-track positions, 62% were very concerned recent policy changes could derail their chances of securing tenure.
Sarah Ewald is one of them. The University of Virginia immunologist, who studies how parasites subvert the body’s defenses, had all her major grants expire last year, and renewal of one of the awards was delayed six months in part due to an NIH freeze on communications shortly after Trump took office. When Ewald finally got an award notice, it was just in the nick of time — six days before she was up for tenure review, where funding plays a make-or-break role.
The nerve-wracking experience has transformed how she runs her lab. Ewald, like 58% of survey respondents, is now slower to hire new lab members. As current students leave the group, there’s often no one around to continue the team’s most innovative projects, including cutting-edge techniques to visualize interactions between immune cells and parasites.
“It looks like we’re making it through this funding blip, but we have lost a lot of the knowledge in the lab because we haven’t been able to use the normal [funding] projections to hire people,” she said. “It stymies innovation. It means that we’re not bringing in as many perspectives and fresh ideas.”
Even a one-month delay in the eventual renewal of a grant can push scientists out of academia, and out of the U.S., according to previous research. There are signs that this is already playing out in response to the administration’s litany of funding delays, terminations, and shifting priorities. Thirteen percent of respondents said they lost researchers to institutions in other countries, and 7% said that postdocs or other staff had rejected job offers.
Even before Trump’s second term, academia was facing an unprecedented exodus of life science researchers that respondents warned will only accelerate now. In addition to the two-thirds of researchers recommending trainees consider nonacademic paths, 53% of respondents are advising students to consider positions outside the U.S.
Meanwhile, changes to immigration policy, including travel bans and visa processing delays, have made it more difficult for foreign scientists to enter the U.S. Fourteen percent of respondents said immigration policy forced students and postdocs to turn down offers to work in their labs.
Many universities cut back on graduate enrollment last fall, believing that they’d be better able to support smaller incoming classes. But while 70% of respondents said their institutions had admitted fewer students or rescinded offers, some students have still struggled to find labs willing to take them as cost-conscious faculty adapt to an NIH shift to fully funding many multi-year grants up front, leading to fewer new awards overall. The survey found that 22% of respondents’ labs had rescinded offers to students, staff, or postdoctoral researchers, and 11% had reduced lab members’ salaries.
It’s a situation that is causing trainees to question whether they can carve out careers in the competitive world of academic research. It’s hard to know what to tell them, said Case Western’s Crawford.
“I’m feeling angry, resentful,” she said. “You’re trying to put up a good front for your trainees and be hopeful, but we are in bad times.”
Anil Oza contributed reporting.
STAT’s coverage of the federal government’s impact on the biomedical workforce is supported by a grant from the Dana Foundation and the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.