More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen, roughly 25,000 staff gone from federal science agencies, and a proposed 35% cut — $32 billion — to non-defence R&D: those are the headline figures in a graphic-led assessment Nature published on 20 January 2026, one year into Donald Trump's second term.

The numbers matter directly for lab planning. For R&D managers at US universities and institutes, they quantify an award base that has shrunk in both breadth and depth, and they separate what the administration has already done from what Congress may yet refuse to fund.

Terminated grants, and how many came back

The disruption began in February 2025, when officials started terminating already-funded grants at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — an unprecedented step — and later at the National Science Foundation (NSF). By year-end, 5,844 NIH grants and 1,996 NSF grants had been cancelled or suspended.

The cancellations were not evenly distributed. The administration disproportionately targeted topics it disfavours — research on misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and studies involving people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups, which it has labelled discriminatory and unscientific.

Geographically, New York took the heaviest hit, with nearly 1,500 cancelled or frozen awards, the majority at Columbia University. More than 800 of the terminated or frozen grants related to infectious diseases. Some of the largest affected awards fund clinical trials, cancer centres and infrastructure on multi-year timescales.

Courts have ordered thousands of grants reinstated, and some universities have settled with the government to unfreeze funding. But Nature reports it is unclear how many scientists have actually received those funds. Roughly 2,600 grants remain neither reinstated nor unfrozen, representing $1.4 billion in unspent funding.

One methodological caveat from the source data: the count includes grant supplements, so fewer than 0.5% of grants appear two or three times in the tally.

Fewer new awards at both agencies

Beyond terminations, the pipeline of new awards narrowed. NSF issued 25% fewer new grants in 2025 than its ten-year average; NIH issued 24% fewer.

The mechanisms differed. At NSF, reduced volume reflected funding uncertainty and a shift toward multi-year awards, in which a project's full budget is committed at once rather than annually. NIH, after early-year delays and reduced staff, raced to obligate funds before the fiscal year closed — partly by awarding multi-year funding to a smaller number of applications than usual. The net effect: sharply fewer scientists holding federal support.

The talent pipeline

New international-student enrolment at US universities fell 17% from 2024 to 2025, according to preliminary Institute of International Education data based on a subset of universities — the lowest level in a decade except for the pandemic year of 2020–21. Nature notes the 2025–26 figure was extrapolated from the institute's autumn snapshot, which surveyed fewer schools than in other years.

The decline is uneven. About 60% of institutions reported decreases while 40% reported stable or rising numbers; of the declining group, 96% cited visa-application concerns, which have intensified under the current administration.

Agency staffing

Federal science agencies lost about 20% of their staff in 2025 relative to the previous year, following modest increases in prior years. The EPA and NASA — both targets of the administration's attacks on climate science — were hit hardest, and the FDA lost more than 20% of its staff.

Most departures were voluntary, through an incentive programme for federal workers to resign, rather than the early-2025 mass layoffs. Many who left were at early career stages. Remaining NIH and NSF staff report struggling to keep up with workload that includes reviewing and approving grants — a constraint that feeds directly back into award timelines for applicants.

Proposed cuts versus what Congress will pay for

The administration's proposed budget for fiscal 2026 requested a 35% cut to non-defence R&D — $32 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that reduction would be unprecedented in the past half-century and would return spending to 1991 levels.

The proposal includes an $18 billion, roughly 40% cut to NIH — the world's largest biomedical funder — plus 57% at NSF and 47% at NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

Congress has so far rejected the steepest numbers. Even with both chambers controlled by Trump's Republican Party, spending bills moving through the House and Senate would give NIH a slight increase, and likely final agreements hold cuts to 3.4% at NSF and 1.1% at NASA's science directorate. Negotiations on the remaining agencies, including NIH's final level, were still open as of publication, and actual figures will probably land between the administration's request and current levels — largely protecting total US R&D spending for this fiscal year.

For portfolio planning, the practical read is a two-track reality: the grant base and review capacity have already contracted sharply, while headline appropriations for core agencies appear likely to survive Congress largely intact. Policy experts quoted by Nature expect lawmakers to finalize the 2026 budget in the coming weeks.