Since January, the Trump administration has taken a red pen to research grants across the healthcare industry, with one analysis from Stat finding that NIH grant awards have decreased by $2.3 billion since the start of the year.
Now, couple that with other targeted areas, like climate change. While experts told us it’s still too early to say how these research and staff reductions might impact patients or the healthcare industry overall, they said there could be long-term impacts to environmental health research cuts.
“On the one hand, perhaps health systems are going to see tariffs nudging them toward exploring reusable and reprocessable products. And on the other hand, it might inhibit innovation,” Emmie Mediate, chief program officer at health sustainability nonprofit Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), told us.
Uncertainty abounds
The research world tends to move slowly, Mediate said, meaning the full impact of staffing and research cuts likely won’t be known for quite some time.
For instance, Mediate pointed to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps people from low-income households keep heat and air conditioning on during peak use months. Every staffer in the department was laid off on April 1.
“One of the reasons it’s hard to assess the impact is, in a devastating way, we’re going to have to wait until the summer when we have extreme heat days that we see around the country to really be able to quantify what those impacts are on folks’ health,” she said.
As parameters for grants have changed since January, Robert Wright, chair of the department of environmental medicine at New York-based Mount Sinai and a pediatrician, told us it’s all about adapting. This includes looking to the private sector for grant funding and focusing research applications on specific phenomena that can lead to health issues, such as weather events and causes of climate change like air pollution or heat waves.
Further, Mediate said she feels optimistic health systems are making the right moves to independently address climate change regardless of changes happening on a federal level. In HCWH’s data program that tracks health systems’ environmental efforts, the group received 492 submissions this year, up from 476 in 2024 and 413 in 2023. And almost half of those applicants said climate change was identified as a “business risk requiring regular reporting,” a 38% increase from applicants who said the same last year, she said.
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“Folks are really incorporating this into their risk planning, into their strategic planning, and understanding that if you’re not thinking about environmental sustainability…you’re kind of behind the curve in terms of what it means to be doing good business,” she said.
Waiting game
Climate change’s role in healthcare can be seen in how extreme weather like wildfires, flooding, and heat waves have correlated to increases in illnesses like asthma, cardiovascular disease, and stroke. In 2022, 44.2 million people in the US had been diagnosed with asthma, according to data from the American Lung Association, a 48% increase from 1999.
Wright has worked on various initiatives that study how environmental factors impact health, in particular among children. One area he’s been studying is how environmental chemicals might lead to childhood obesity, a topic Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been outspoken about.
“I think there are clear signs that children’s environmental health actually might be of higher priority than it has been in the past to NIH,” Wright said.
But since diseases linked to environmental factors take a long time to incubate in a patient, he added that it might not be possible “to see perceptible increases for a while.”
Wright said he also anticipates wait times for grants (which are already backlogged) will extend from about 1.5 years to up to 2.5 years.
“That’s a pretty significant increase in what was already a fairly slow process,” he said. “It’s not just the slashing of the funding. It’s going to be increased inefficiencies that go forward. It’s going to delay the onset of grants and research that is actually going to have a pretty significant impact.”