NIH canceled $1.81 billion in research grants. Most of the money was already spent.
Summary
A JAMA analysis of NIH's own award data found 694 grants terminated between February and April 2025, worth $1.81 billion — and $1.27 billion of that had already gone out the door. A federal judge called the terminations “void and illegal”; the Supreme Court let them stand anyway, the same month NIH cut 1,200 of its own staff.
Where the canceled money had already gone
A research letter published in JAMA in May 2025 pulled 's own award-termination and funding data — the Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System and RePORTER — and reconstructed exactly what got canceled between February 28 and April 8, 2025: 694 grants, across 24 of 's 26 institutes and centers, worth $1.81 billion in cumulative funding. Only 30% of that, $544,024,077, was still sitting unexpended at the recipient institution when the termination notice arrived. The rest — roughly $1.27 billion — had already been spent on salaries, supplies, and patient enrollment before pulled the plug.
View data as table
| Total terminated (694 grants) | $1.81B | Feb 28–Apr 8, 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Already spent before termination | ~$1.27B | 70% — derived by subtraction |
| Unexpended, clawed back | $544,024,077 | 30% — reported directly |
The cuts didn't land evenly. The National Institute of Mental Health lost the most grants outright, 128. But the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities took the deepest proportional hit: 77 grants terminated, worth $224 million — 29.6% of everything the institute had active, the highest share of any institute or center, per the same JAMA analysis.
A federal judge already ruled on this. On June 16, 2025, U.S. District Judge William Young found that 's terminations of grants touching topics like racial health disparities and transgender health were arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act — "void and illegal," in his words — and ordered roughly 800 grants restored. He said from the bench he'd "never seen government racial discrimination like this" in 40 years on and around the federal bench. It didn't stick. On August 21, 2025, the Supreme Court stayed that restoration order in a 5–4 ruling, letting withhold roughly $800 million in grants while it sent researchers to litigate individually in the Court of Federal Claims instead. The underlying case reached the First Circuit Court of Appeals for oral argument on January 6, 2026, and remains undecided.
The same month, shrank its own staff
The terminations weren't the only cut moving through in spring 2025. On March 27, 2025, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a department-wide restructuring, and on April 1 it took effect: 's own fact sheet put the department-wide cut at 82,000 full-time employees down to 62,000, with 's share set at approximately 1,200 positions, achieved by centralizing procurement, human resources, and communications functions that had been run separately across 's 27 institutes and centers.
View data as table
| FDA | 3,500 | HHS restructuring fact sheet, Apr. 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| CDC | 2,400 | HHS restructuring fact sheet, Apr. 2025 |
| NIH | 1,200 | HHS restructuring fact sheet, Apr. 2025 |
| CMS | 300 | HHS restructuring fact sheet, Apr. 2025 |
's 1,200-person cut was the smallest of the four major agencies in absolute terms — lost roughly 3,500 (not touching drug, device, or food reviewers, says), roughly 2,400 before folding in about 1,000 incoming staff from the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. But it landed on an agency that was simultaneously being asked to process a wave of grant terminations, reinstatements ordered by a district court, a Supreme Court stay of that order, and — per 's own account — a lawsuit from laid-off former employees alleging the RIF relied on "error-ridden" personnel data.
The takeaway
- Terminating a grant doesn't recover the money already spent. Of $1.81 billion in canceled grants, roughly $1.27 billion — 70% — had already gone out the door. The termination stopped the research; it didn't return the funds to the Treasury.
- A court called it illegal. The cuts happened anyway. Judge Young voided the terminations as arbitrary and capricious in June 2025. The Supreme Court stayed that ruling two months later, and as of the First Circuit's January 2026 oral argument, roughly $800 million in withheld grants remains in legal limbo.
- The agency doing the canceling was shrinking too. cut 1,200 of its own staff the same spring it was managing a $1.81 billion wave of grant terminations, a district court order, and a Supreme Court reversal — all at once.
Grant-termination figures cover a fixed six-week window (Feb 28–Apr 8, 2025) captured by the JAMA analysis, not the full run of terminations before or after that window; later terminations under other DOGE-driven initiatives are not included here. Workforce figures are 's own announced targets as of April 2025, not verified year-end headcounts.
Sources
- Ferguson et al., "Characterization of Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health," JAMA, published online May 8, 2025 — the source for the 694 terminated grants, $1.81 billion total, $544,024,077 unexpended, and the NIMHD institute-level breakdown. jamanetwork.com
- National Institutes of Health, "Budget" — official figure that ~82% of 's budget funds extramural research grants. nih.gov
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, "Fact Sheet: ' Transformation to Make America Healthy Again" (April 2025) — the department-wide 82,000-to-62,000 target and the agency-level breakdown ( −1,200, −3,500, −2,400, −300). hhs.gov
- STAT News, "Hundreds of grant terminations are 'void and illegal,' federal judge rules" (June 16, 2025) — reporting on Judge William Young's ruling and his remarks from the bench. statnews.com
- Health Affairs Forefront, "Unpacking The Supreme Court's Decision Over Funding" — details of the August 21, 2025 stay in v. American Public Health Association, including the ~$800 million figure and the Court of Federal Claims redirection. healthaffairs.org
- Federal News Network, " relied on 'error-ridden' data to cut 10,000 jobs, former staff allege in lawsuit" (June 2025) — reporting on the RIF-methodology lawsuit referenced in the workforce section. federalnewsnetwork.com
Comments
Always open. Logged-in readers can annotate paragraphs in place.
The National Institutes of Health hands out nearly 82 percent of its budget as grants to outside researchers — almost 50,000 awards a year, to more than 300,000 people at over 2,500 universities, hospitals, and labs. Starting in late February 2025, the agency began canceling a large slice of that portfolio outright. Cancelation doesn't undo spending that already happened. It just stops the project and, for money not yet drawn, takes it back.