Inside a quiet room at Harvard, computational biologist Sean Eddy walks past empty workstations that once thrummed with researchers analyzing genomic data. A year after the Trump administration terminated his federal grant, the monitors are gone, the group table is vacant and most of his team has dispersed. The software his group built — now ubiquitous tools for comparing DNA and protein sequences, identifying genes and predicting function — remains widely used in papers across fields from cancer to neurodevelopment. But the laboratory that produced it is a shadow of its former self.
Eddy says the abrupt loss of funding set his lab back years. Where he had envisioned another decade of work, he now faces an uncertain future and has helped colleagues find positions elsewhere. Harvard’s hiring freeze makes it unlikely a younger scientist will step into the space anytime soon.
He received an especially jarring letter in 2025 from the National Institutes of Health telling him his work was “of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer” and that his grant was being terminated. Eddy calls the blow irrecoverable at his career stage and estimates the setback amounts to roughly a decade of lost progress.
Eddy’s experience is one example among thousands of researchers nationwide who are still dealing with the fallout from cuts, freezes and suspensions imposed in 2025. Although Congress moved this spring to restore much of the money through appropriations, scientists and university advocates say the cash is not flowing the way it used to and the agency’s opacity is harming research momentum.
A long-standing norm at NIH was predictability: clear deadlines, regular funding cycles and well-understood expectations that helped labs plan experiments, hire staff and sustain multi-year projects. Jeremy Berg, a former senior NIH official who has tracked recent changes, says that trust has eroded. He argues NIH has shifted toward awarding fewer grants with larger dollar amounts spread over longer periods — an accounting change that leaves many investigators without support even if the overall budget looks intact on paper.
Berg’s analysis found that at one point earlier this year NIH had issued roughly 2,300 new grants, about half the number awarded at the same point the previous year. “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of science that isn’t going to get done,” he says.
Advocacy groups and university leaders have flagged similar problems. The Association of American Universities reported that NIH issued about 66 percent fewer awards in the first months of 2026 than it did the prior year. Universities say approved funds are slow to reach investigators, hampering hiring and experiments.
Former program officer Elizabeth Ginexi, who left NIH amid the turmoil, has been tracking a separate symptom of the breakdown: agency “forecasts,” the notices that indicate areas NIH plans to support. She found many forecasts lingering past their promised posting dates — a pattern she says creates the appearance of opportunities that never materialize. Of 336 forecasts still listed as open, she counted 205 that were already past their assumed publication dates with no full announcement.
These procedural shifts have real scientific consequences. At the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, biomedical engineer Rachael Sirianni watches grant timelines on the NIH website and fears her proposal will not be reviewed in time to receive funds this year. Her project, testing a drug combination for pediatric brain tumors that are often impossible to remove surgically, had shown promising early results and depended on continued funding to move toward clinical utility. Repeated deadline changes, she says, have made it “basically zero” chance the grant will be funded in 2026.
Sirianni laid off a researcher and left benches cluttered with reagents and pipettes she can’t clear. For her, the delays are more than administrative — they are a loss of momentum for families whose children face few other treatment options. “Every month, every week — that matters to them,” she says.
Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon acknowledged the slowdown but attributed the delays to factors such as the recent government shutdown and actions by congressional Democrats, writing that timelines have since “returned to typical funding patterns.” Scientists and advocates remain skeptical, arguing that the changes represent a new approach to withholding and reallocating federal research support rather than a temporary disruption.
Researchers worry the effects will be long-lasting. Fewer new grants mean fewer early-career investigators launching labs and fewer midcareer teams maintaining programs. Instrumental software and datasets risk losing support and upkeep. The result is paused projects, lost jobs and stalled therapeutic development despite years of prior investment.
For scientists like Eddy and Sirianni, the disruption is personal and professional: emptied labs, interrupted careers and a sense that public investments in research are failing to deliver because the federal machinery that funds them is no longer operating reliably. They and others in the research community are calling for greater transparency, restored grantmaking rhythms and policies that ensure approved funds actually reach scientists on timelines that sustain ongoing work.