Nature’s guide to what’s next was the subject of a number of lawsuits
Nature reveals the NIH and the White House are “Capricious” in terminating research grants as a response to the Trump administration’s decision to end COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to entire scientific fields, finds a Nature analysis of the unprecedented cuts.
Here, Nature unravels the legal claims and sets out what is likely to happen next. Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, told Nature that the department does not comment on pending litigation. The NIH and White House did not respond to questions from the public.
Nature’s analysis shows that, looking at just the projects terminated so far, 17% are related to COVID-19, and 29% to HIV/AIDS (see ‘Terminated grant tally’) — although this represents less than 4% of all the grants awarded to each of those topics that the agency funded in 2024. One reason for the focus of these cuts is that the Trump administration has said that the COVID-19 pandemic is over and people in the United States have moved on from it. The US government stopped acknowledging the fact that a person’s gender can differ at birth after Trump signed an executive order in his first day in office.
These actions deny “a small but real percentage of the population answers to critically important questions about their health”, Tilghman says. “You cannot eliminate a segment of the population by executive order, but you can harm them greatly.”
Trump’s team has targeted research grants at Columbia, cancelling $400 million to the university because, the administration has said, it failed to protect Jewish students from harassment during campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is a 1946 statute that regulates how federal administrative bodies establish regulations. The complaints argue that the NIH’s actions have been “arbitrary and capricious” rather than following normal procedures.
The NIH and HHS have also been named as defendants alongside the US Department of Justice and other bodies in a suit regarding the cancellation of grants and funding at Columbia University in New York City.
At the same time, researchers are finding it is taking longer for new NIH grant applications to be processed. The complaint filed on April 4th by 16 US states says that only half of the historical average has been achieved so far in the current fiscal year.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reportedly terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to whole scientific fields. The analysis by Nature said that 17% of the terminated research projects were related to COVID-19 and 29% to HIV/AIDS. Scientists have accused NIH and the White House of “arbitrary and capricious” actions.