Now that the Supreme Court officially ruled last week the Trump administration can cut $783 million in research grants as part of its defunding of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that started in February, universities and hospitals across the country are left scrambling to remain stable.
Healthcare and academic research rely heavily on NIH funding. Fierce Healthcare reported NIH funding drives the economy, bringing in $2.56 for every dollar of spent funding and supporting 400,000+ jobs across the country.
The UMass Chan Medical School laid off or furloughed 209 employees and cut its incoming fall 2025 graduate class by 86% (70 students to 10) due to cuts, according to court documents related to the case.
The American College of Obstetricians also stopped accepting federal funding due to the administration’s anti-DEI push, which it said conflicted with its efforts to reduce maternal health issues.
Still, the White House is set on limiting money across federal agencies, proposing $27 billion in NIH funding—that’s $18 billion less than before—in the Trump administration’s discretionary budget proposal.
Industry and philanthropic dollars can create a lifeline for some research. For instance, Robert Wright, chair of the department of environmental medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai, suggested private sector funding as an option for environmental health-related research, and the head of AI and engineering at Northwestern Medicine’s cardiovascular institute, Adrienne Kline, received $1.4 million in industry funding from Big Tech to create new AI tools. Kline called these industry partnerships a “godsend.”
Despite this, Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy and regulatory counsel at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), said there’s “no replacement” for federal government funding.
“It is hard to overstate how important NIH funding is to scientific progress,” she told us.
Money matters. Philanthropic organization the Gates Foundation announced on Aug. 4 it would provide $2.5 billion through 2030 to support R&D in women’s health, specifically to address five areas: obstetric care and maternal immunization, maternal health and nutrition, gynecological and menstrual health, contraceptive innovation, and sexually transmitted infections.
Researchers at universities, hospitals, and biotech companies including health tech company Philips Innovation Center, biotech company Vedanta Biosciences, and Massachusetts General Hospital, all based in Massachusetts, will receive funds from the Gates Foundation, Rasa Izadnegahdar, director of maternal, newborn, child nutrition, and health at the nonprofit, told Healthcare Brew.
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“Some of the challenges around women’s health have been longstanding. It’s been underfunded for a long time,” Izadnegahdar said, noting this as one of the reasons the foundation wanted to pursue women’s health.
And that lack of research is “only exacerbated by the recent cuts in NIH,” he said.
“Our hope is that we create some enthusiasm and optimism in the space,” Izadnegahdar added, and “that others will join in as well.”
Other private contributions have also been made this year, like an $8.6 million donation from the local estate of community leader Donald Coldren to Pennsylvania-based health system WellSpan Health, where the late Coldren and his wife were once patients.
Not enough. Philanthropic donations bring in an estimated $30 billion a year to health and science research, whereas NIH doled out $47.4 billion in 2024.
“It is a very complicated, very hard time in biomedical research,” she said.
Not only did researchers lose their funding but it’s been hard to get money released from grants that had already been awarded, and the application process for new projects has slowed down, she said. The National Cancer Institute, for example, anticipates it will only be able to fund 4% of grant applicants after October, down from 9%, according to Stat.
“Our nation decided decades ago to create this relationship between academic institutions and the federal government that had a vision for advancing scientific progress,” Pierce said.
Further, she said other funding sources, like philanthropic or industry sources typically have a specific mission or a commercial end—such as the Gates Foundation’s recent efforts to fund research in specific areas of women’s health—whereas the NIH has been dedicated to improving scientific progress and health advancement broadly.
In other words, the NIH is that girl.
“There is no replacement for the federal government in terms of the breadth, the scope, the volume of research that it can and has and should fund,” Pierce said.