The number of grants the National Institutes of Health made from January through the end of the fiscal year in September fell 11.6% compared with the same period last year, according to a STAT analysis of almost 750,000 grants from the past 10 years in the NIH RePORTER database. Against the average for the same months in the previous nine years, the decline was 8.2%. The dollar total distributed stayed close to recent levels, but the money is now spread across fewer projects.

That single shift captures the practical damage to lab planning in 2025: principal investigators who would normally count on a renewal cycle face fewer slots, and department chairs must model scenarios in which a program line simply disappears.

The numbers did not fall evenly by accident. The drop cut across the agency's $37 billion extramural portfolio and was driven largely by a switch to paying for many multiyear grants entirely up front, which left money for fewer projects overall. Vaccine research and health disparities work — both targets of the administration's ire — took hits. But so did new studies in cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and HIV/AIDS, areas that generally enjoy bipartisan support, according to STAT's analysis of grants approved by scientific review panels in those disease areas.

High-risk, high-reward grants, designed to fund scientists taking big swings on creative ideas, also contracted. In the first nine months of 2024, NIH funded 406 such awards; in 2025, that fell to 364. The decline is notable because NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who studied the agency's ability to fund novel ideas before taking the job, told his Senate confirmation hearing his "plan is to ensure that the NIH invests in cutting-edge research in every field to make big advances rather than just small, incremental progress over years and sometimes decades."

After the story published, NIH responded to STAT's questions. "The assertion that there is less high-risk, high-reward science taking place is incorrect. Innovative, groundbreaking research — driven by bold ideas and rigorous inquiry — is actively pursued across all 27 NIH institutes and centers," the agency said. NIH also attributed some cuts in HIV/AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer's research to those projects' inclusion of "DEI criteria that NIH determined limited the reach of research benefits."

The turbulence has not gone unchallenged. Courts have stepped in to restore billions of dollars in terminated grant funding to universities; one federal judge, William Young, ruled NIH research cuts illegal in June. The Government Accountability Office found the cuts violated the Impoundment Control Act. NIH, despite layoffs and those legal hurdles, managed to spend its entire $47 billion budget for the fiscal year. And Congress, in a rare rebuke to the president, has so far refused steep cuts to the NIH budget for 2026 — a Senate committee replaced the administration's proposed reductions with a $400 million increase — and rejected a White House plan to consolidate the agency's 27 institutes.

Even so, the cumulative effect on the academic pipeline is measurable. On campuses that were never directly targeted as alleged hotbeds of "woke" thinking or antisemitism and did not lose hundreds of millions in grants overnight, institutions have frozen hiring, laid off staff, and scaled back graduate training. Enrollments in Ph.D. programs in the life and biomedical sciences flatlined in fall 2025 after years of steady growth, according to initial data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Early-career grant awards to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers fell this year to their lowest point since 2016, STAT's analysis of NIH data shows. NIH said it "continues to track challenges that early-career investigators face and to implement programs that address barriers to advancement."

The deeper cost may be trust. "That's the most devastating part of all this," one NIH official told STAT. "Why would anyone trust the NIH ever again?"

Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton — one of the universities the administration targeted — argued the damage to science is collateral to the real aim. "That social compact is being systematically undermined at the moment by a group of ideologues whose real target is not science; its real target is what they perceive to be the power and the arrogance of elite institutions, starting with the great research universities of this country," she said. "The intention was to punish elite universities, it was not to destroy the scientific capacity of the United States, but that's what they're doing. It's one thing to destroy something. It is quite another to destroy it and have nothing to replace it with. I think that's the moment we're in."

The officials charged with leading the administration's science policy see it differently. They frame the moment as an opportunity to push long-sought reforms to the infrastructure governing how federal dollars reach universities and their scientists. Outside the administration, some scientific leaders allow that the unprecedented shake-up could dissolve the inertia that has long blocked change at federal science agencies.

STAT interviewed more than two dozen biomedical researchers, science policy experts, historians of science, and current and former federal health officials, including four former NIH directors, to map the inflection point. Most spoke openly; some requested anonymity. They disagreed on how badly the government-academia partnership has eroded and what recovery or reimagining should look like. They agreed on one point: there is no returning to the pre-2025 arrangement.

"Whatever comes next is never going to be what it used to be," said Larry Tabak, who served as NIH's principal deputy director from 2010 until he was pushed into early retirement in February. "The genie is out of the bottle."

For R&D managers, the planning implication is direct: budget for volatility, diversify funding sources, and treat multiyear federal commitments as conditional rather than guaranteed as the 2026 appropriations fight plays out.