By Bianca Licitra
A new report published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine used public data to quantify the impact of National Institutes of Health funding cuts on patients participating in hundreds of the agency’s clinical trials. According to the report, recent cuts to NIH grants affected more than 74,000 participants in these trials, many of which test new treatments or drugs. The report underscores the toll of NIH funding cuts on both patients and researchers.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term, the administration has issued a series of executive orders and policies targeting government-funded research. Many of the actions have sought to reduce federal spending on research that the administration says pertains to diversity, equity, and inclusion; environmental justice; and transgender identity. The administration has also cut funds designated for foreign aid and has used the threat of funding cuts to promote what it says is greater efficiency and accountability in how taxpayer dollars are spent on research. As challenges to the cuts move through the courts, federal agencies and their grantees have been thrown into chaos. The impact continues to reverberate months later.
Vishal Patel, the report’s lead author and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, spoke to The Washington Post about his findings. (The teaching hospital is affiliated with Harvard Medical School.) “One argument is that a large motivation for canceling and reducing a lot of the research budget was to reduce the amount of unnecessary research or low-quality research,” Patel said, “But clinical trials are the pinnacle of scientific research.”
The report indicated that approximately 1 in 30 NIH trials were affected by funding disruptions between February and August 2025, for a total of 383 trials. The cuts disproportionately affected trials involving the study of “infectious diseases, prevention, and behavioral interventions,” the JAMA report noted. For example, the cuts affected 118 cancer trials, 97 trials studying infectious diseases, 18 trials studying cardiovascular diseases, and 48 trials studying reproductive health, among others.
Patel and his co-authors also found that a greater percentage of NIH trials conducted in locations outside the United States experienced funding disruptions, compared to those conducted within the country. This corresponds with other administration actions targeting international researchers.
Many trials require “sustained financial support to ensure operations and participant safety,” the report stated, which means “unanticipated funding disruptions raise concerns about avoidable waste, data quality, and compromised ethical obligations to participants.” Funding delays can have serious negative effects on the studies. “If you pause an experiment, especially when it comes to experiments involving drugs and patients where you need a consistent dose over time and consistent measurements, it’s possible that you just screwed up the entire research,” Patel told The Washington Post.
Disrupted trials also hurt patients. As Patel told Politico, the patients in the trials “were exposed to the potential harms of treatment — whether that’s in the form of drugs or devices or other interventions — but they didn’t receive any benefit, which is what the entire purpose of the clinical trial is.”
Predictable and robust funding for the NIH is essential to ongoing medical innovation for the American people. The NIH has supported the foundational and clinical research behind nearly every advancement in treating chronic and infectious diseases in the last century. The agency also trains the nation’s scientific and biomedical workforce and drives national and regional economic growth. Investment in the NIH will continue to enhance human health, improve lives, and ensure American leadership in biomedical innovation.
Bianca Licitra is editorial and communications assistant at AAU.