NIH funding Cut - How This Impacts You

Written By: Damiya Ringgold

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has just received drastic funding cuts due to an Executive Order from President Donald J. Trump. NIH funds medical and biomedical research that allows advancements to be made for reducing disease outbreaks, furthering medicine, and improving global health. This budget cut is projected to cause the progress made by scientific research in medicine to be halted, as institutions and many researchers attempt to figure out the next steps. This drastic reduction of funding for the NIH is effective immediately, and the question of what will be done with the money that was previously distributed is still largely unanswered. 

The NIH provides grants to more than 2,500 institutions worldwide, including universities, hospitals, and independent research centers. The funding cut impacts everyone to varying extents, with some impacts being direct and immediate, and others being indirect and gradual. Despite the pace at which the impact will be had, this event has the capability of impacting millions of people. Continue reading to learn how and what you should do about it.

Biomedical Research at Large

The first tier of impact is at the university level, indirect costs for research done under universities were set to be from a range of 65% to 70% of the direct cost given to researchers from the NIH. This allocation was decreased to 15% for all universities. To put what this means into context, indirect cost allows for graduate school tuition to be covered by universities rather than researchers, offsets the cost of materials needed for labs, and various staffing jobs from lab safety and sanitation workers to lab managers. “The change would likely leave research institutions needing to find billions of dollars from other sources to support laboratories, students, and staff”, Malakoff wrote in the Science Insider article detailing the executive orders’ impact on medical research. Researchers, especially in the field of biomedicine, are critical to providing innovation and accessibility to knowledge in the field of medicine.

Public Health & Healthcare accessibility

The fact is that most US citizens are not researchers or aspiring doctorate students, which is why the second level of impact is important to understand. Medical research is done not only to understand new diseases but to ensure that current medicine can continuously evolve. A primary example includes the ongoing research being done by scientists to expand the effectiveness of HPV vaccines against strains like HPV 35, which is primarily found in African American women. “The investigators found that African American women have more HPV 35 infections and HPV 35-associated cervical precancers than other races/ethnicities…In addition, genomic analysis revealed that the HPV 35 A2 sublineage was associated with precancer/cancer in African American women and invasive cervical cancer in Africa” (Pinheiro 2020). To further place the importance of research into perspective, research is the reason why we can have a “post-pandemic life” and has offset the number of casualties. The NIH is contributing largely to the research necessary for pharmaceutical companies to make vaccines and to streamline information about them. This funding cut interferes with and is presumed to halt potentially life-saving research. 

Additionally, NIH funding supports thousands of jobs in research, biotech, and healthcare industries. Budget cuts will lead to job losses in these areas. What that means for the average citizen is that they will likely face an elevated cost in healthcare, difficulty accessing proper treatment, especially for more complex medical matters, and a potential increased risk of vulnerable populations of people facing mortality from treatable diseases. As well as vulnerability to global outbreaks of infectious disease due to the lack of medical research. Although the greater impacts will not be seen immediately, it is important to understand how this executive order can impact you and your family if not overturned. The funding cut on NIH acts as an attack on research that supports marginalized communities and cancer research. “Of these terminated grants, 51 (56%) investigated topics related to HIV or AIDS, 36 (40%) focused on mental or behavioral health, 16 (18%) focused on cancer, and 15 (16%) focused on COVID-19 (Figure 2). Fifty-five grants (60%) funding active clinical trials mentioned LGBTQ+ populations, 52 (57%) mentioned racial or ethnic subpopulations, 32 (35%) mentioned women, and 20 (22%) mentioned low-income populations”(AAMC 2025). The cuts vary by state, with two of the primary states that received the largest budget cuts being California and New York. These states are large contributors to producing cancer research. The table below is from the article on the NIH funding cut by the Association of American Medical Colleges, it shows how much money is being cut from individual states.

Herrin, Andrew. “Convened Coalition Recommends Increased Funding for NIH.” AAMC, 11 Apr. 2025, www.aamc.org/advocacy-policy/washington-highlights/aamc-convened-coalition-recommends-increased-funding-nih. 

What Can Be Done

Now is a pivotal time to communicate with your state's legislature. Email them requesting that they take the actions necessary to restore NIH funding and subsidize biomedical research. This can be done through email or a phone call. To maximize impact, make an event out of it with your community members, where you describe why this funding cut concerns them. Then, urge them to contact all of their members of Congress. The more individuals who voice concern about this executive order, the more likely it is to gain traction and spark necessary dialogue.  In addressing possible dissenting opinions, it is important to understand that the mindset of “healthcare is already expensive,” or that “proper medical care is already inaccessible” in the United States, does not hold potency in apprehending the impact of this decision. Regardless of your current understanding and experience with healthcare, this order is projected to progressively worsen the state of healthcare and medical education in this country.  Accessibility in healthcare education has a direct effect on public health, which is why utilizing all our viable options for combating this order is quintessential. Public health is a human right, so we should do all we can to protect it.

Sources

Pinheiro, Maisa, et al. "Association of HPV35 with cervical carcinogenesis among women of African ancestry: evidence of viral‐host interaction with implications for disease intervention." International journal of cancer 147.10 (2020): 2677-2686.