Last year’s funding cuts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) disproportionately impacted women and early-career researchers, according to a new analysis, raising questions about what the future of the scientific workforce will look like.
All in all, the NIH terminated 2,291 active grants and froze funding for a further 1,534 projects between February and August 2025, according to the analysis published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For terminated projects that were still ongoing with money to spend, 57.9% were led by women compared to 48.2% led by men.
Most of the 2,291 terminated grants had been awarded to fully tenured professors. But 630 of them were given to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and pre-tenure assistant professors, all pivotal stages that can make or break a researcher’s career. These early-career cuts also hit women especially hard—60% of affected graduate student projects were led by women, as were 48% of the postdoctoral projects and 60% of the assistant professor projects.
Though the results are not surprising, “documenting the damage from current policy is critical,” Jenna Norton, Ph.D., a program director at the NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, told Fierce. Norton is a co-signer of the Bethesda Declaration, an open letter from hundreds of current and former NIH staffers calling on the Trump administration to reverse its drastic changes to the agency.
“These harms were predictable,” Norton said. “In fact, they were predicted by many staff inside NIH, but our warnings were ignored.”
Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, told Fierce that the research agency “allocated its full budget” in 2025, “providing funding to scientists at all stages of their careers who are performing high-impact science.”
“Any other suggestion is false,” she said.
Early-career and female scientists are more likely to rely on grants that are smaller, less frequent and focused on training, Diego Fregolent Mendes de Oliveira, Ph.D., a computational scientist at the University of North Dakota and leader of the analysis, told Fierce Biotech.
“That structure inherently makes them more vulnerable to sudden disruptions,” Oliveira said. “What was unexpected was how clearly this vulnerability showed up across institutions, grant types and career stages in a single, large-scale event.”
Oliveira and his collaborators have not themselves been affected by the NIH funding cuts, he said, but “have seen the impacts quite directly through our professional networks.” That includes terminated grants but also shifting priorities away from research areas the administration perceives to be related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
The NIH has historically prioritized supporting early-career researchers, Oliveira noted, and current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., has listed “training future biomedical scientists” as a key priority for the agency he oversees.
While Oliveira pointed out the new analysis can’t speak to intent, “the effects of instability can run counter to long-standing goals of supporting the next generation of scientists.”
For Norton, the findings call “into question Bhattacharya’s frequently claimed commitment to the next generation of scientists.”
“Dr. Bhattacharya has been very vocal on his commitment to strengthening the agency’s culture and expanding opportunities for early-career scientists,” HHS' Hilliard said, pointing to the NIH's effort to boost funding to certain states, many led by Republicans, and streamline grant-making procedures.
Asked by Fierce if the NIH thinks it is important to support women researchers, Hilliard replied “of course we do.”
“Any other assumptions are completely baseless,” she said. “NIH supports a fair and objective review process that evaluates proposals based on scientific merit.”
With the demographics of the NIH cuts documented, Oliveira’s attention is now turning to tracking the long-term effects, he told Fierce. That includes whether affected scientists end up publishing less or securing fewer grants down the line as well as the impacts on broader trends like workforce retention, team formation and knowledge production.
“Ultimately, our goal is to understand not just who was affected, but how disruptions of this kind reshape the trajectory of the scientific enterprise over time,” he said.
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit. Quisque faucibus ex sapien vitae pellentesque sem placerat. In id cursus mi pretium tellus duis convallis. Tempus leo eu aenean sed diam urna tempor. Pulvinar vivamus fringilla lacus nec metus bibendum egestas. Iaculis massa nisl malesuada lacinia integer nunc posuere. Ut hendrerit semper vel class aptent taciti sociosqu. Ad litora torquent per conubia nostra inceptos himenaeos.
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