Getty Images via Penn Capital-Star Old Main building in the main campus of Penn State University, State College.

Around 112 scientific grants in Pennsylvania from the National Institutes of Health have been impacted by cuts or freezes instituted by the Trump administration, according to a group of researchers and scientists who have been tracking the terminations.

An estimated 82 are currently affected, with another 30 having possibly been possibly reinstated. Losses are believed to total nearly $40 million. Yet researchers say the impact could extend beyond academia, with scientific grant funding often creating jobs and resulting in boons to local economies.

In August, a U.S. Supreme Court order allowed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to terminate $783 million in grants funding initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aiming to give political appointees even more power to terminate federal grants, including those at the NIH.

The project Grant Witness has found more than 5,100 NIH grants across the country that have been impacted since the administration first began terminating funding en masse in February, resulting in roughly $5.3 billion in losses. The cuts have sometimes left scientists with no way to continue ongoing research or clinical trials.

It says it believes more than 1,300 frozen or terminated grants have been possibly reinstated.

Noam Ross, one of the founders of Grant Witness, which is led by scientists and researchers, began tracking grant terminations around March after he and others who had been doing the same work independently banded together.

“We recognized there was going to need to be an understanding of what was being terminated,” Ross said. “Everything just accelerated from there in terms of the government just became much more large scale and more brazen with its terminations. Things moved from NIH to the [National Science Foundation, or NSF] and more agencies than we’ve been able to cover.”

Ross estimates the group has captured roughly 80% of all NIH grants terminated since the Trump administration cracked down on scientific spending. Data was compiled by scraping government websites, collecting and verifying social media and news reports, and gathering stories from impacted researchers.

The stories and data can sometimes be hard to parse. Ross said tracking has to occur on multiple fronts. That’s because many grants have been frozen and then unfrozen, different federal datasets tracking grant spending have misaligned and it can sometimes take more than a month to see when a grant is reinstated because of a lag in reporting.

“Everyone on the team thinks the American scientific system is a huge, underlying component of what we would say makes this country great, American Prosperity,” Ross said. “The system that we have certainly has its flaws, but it’s done really well for the past almost hundred years. It’s, from our perspective, hugely damaging, discriminatory and probably illegal what the administration is doing to undercut it.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which contains the NIH, did not respond to a request for comment. But officials have said the goal is to align scientific spending with the priorities of the Trump administration.

The NIH calls itself “the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.”

Impacted grants in Pennsylvania have covered a wide swath of subjects at 16 universities and research institutions, with many, but not all, focused on individual social groups or advancing equity in health care.

Grant projects include studies ranging from topics such as brain development in children with autism, veterans’ access to organ transplants, racial disparities in kidney failure mortality, uptake in HIV prevention and treatment among transgender women, and efforts to encourage various minority groups to enter scientific fields.

The most affected universities in Pennsylvania were the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of Pittsburgh with 34 and 33, respectively. Four at the University of Pennsylvania and six at the University of Pittsburgh are listed as “possibly reinstated.”

All but eight of the 112 impacted grants in the commonwealth contained words reportedly flagged by the Trump administration to weed out projects that may be linked to DEI initiatives. They include “bias,” “trans,” “race” and “diverse,” words that sometimes have different meanings in scientific and colloquial contexts. “Trans,” for example, is used as a prefix in chemistry to indicate certain arrangements of atoms in molecules.

Yet even grants that did focus on subjects related to gender or diversity can be important, Ross said. Disparities still exist in health outcomes between people of different ethnicities and social groups. And those differences, he noted, contribute to America’s lagging health indicators and life expectancy when compared to other developed countries.

“That’s the big health science challenge in America these days,” Ross said. “The richest, most well-off communities do as well as any other rich country, but our average health outcomes are much worse because we haven’t figured out how to deliver health care to other communities.”

Cuts may mean fewer people train as scientists

Allie Sinclair, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Medicine, worked on NIH-funded projects as a PhD student, and was supported by a fellowship from theNational Science Foundation.

Like the NIH, the NSF has slashed funding for grant projects under the Trump administration, and that’s also had an effect on schools, research institutions, and their ability to support students in medical science fields.

“This past spring, we saw that universities all over the country were cutting down on the number of PhD students that they were admitting,” Sinclair said. “That’s because PhD students don’t pay tuition out of pocket. Rather, they’re actually paid a stipend to live because they’re really crucial workers in our scientific economy. They’re doing the day-to-day work of science.”

Much of that work is covered by the NIH, but right now, that funding is volatile.

Undergraduate students working on federally-funded projects can get an early chance to do hands-on scientific research. For some, it’s their first exposure to the field. For others, it’s a way to help pay their way through school.

“If those opportunities are cut, we’re going to see fewer people who are getting into this pipeline in the first place, and fewer people who have the chance to train as a scientist,” Sinclair said.

While she wasn’t personally affected by recent grant-funding cuts, Sinclair joined a group of researchers on a project to measure their economic impact. And some of them had their work effectively terminated.

Their research, which led to the creation of a website called Science Impacts, discovered counties across Pennsylvania and the rest of the country may lose millions of dollars in future revenue, all due to the loss of NIH grants and the accompanying jobs and local spending.

It’s based in part on a 2025 study that found NIH grant funding can have a roughly 250% return on investment when it comes to dollars driven into local economies. Mapping jobs lost to scientific grant cuts across the country, and using census data to approximate where researchers may live and spend money, allowed her team to estimate what local economies may lose. They also considered a proposed 40% cut to the NIH’s budget in 2026 to help estimate potential future losses.

“When a university like Penn or Temple or Drexel in the Philadelphia area is impacted by these cuts, the effects will be felt in the surrounding region, not only for people who are right at that institution,” Sinclair told the Capital-Star.

But the impacts won’t just be felt by students and communities around research institutions. Terminated grants, Sinclair said, often represent projects that are already underway.

In most cases, the work was already in progress and then they were abruptly frozen or ended by the government so the funds are no longer being disbursed,” she said. “Those research projects are disrupted. That can halt clinical trials and things like that.”

Moreover, cuts to scientific grant funding, like the Trump administration’s recent proposal to slash the NIH budget by about 40%, also represents a loss of future research that can lead to all sorts of scientific and medical advancements.

Between 2010 and 2019, over 99% of all drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were created, at least in part, with NIH funding.

“That’s a demonstration that, despite the fact that big pharma and the private sector want to be generating new discoveries, they still really crucially depend on some aspect of federal support for discovering new cures,” Sinclair said. “This sort of broad spectrum investment from the government in health research really leads to tangible benefits for Americans.”

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