‘Great news but a weird twist.' After the NIH moved to restore hundreds of grants, researchers remain in limbo.

Boston Globe

3 days ago

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In New England, 63 of those grants, worth $126 million, are set to be restored, according to a Globe analysis based on the
The grants were restored as the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Public Health Association and 16 state attorneys general arguing that the NIH improperly ended funding tied to topics like gender identity, health disparities, vaccine hesitancy, and DEI efforts. The judge in the case ruled in June that the terminations were 'illegal and void' and ordered the government to immediately make the funds available. The Trump administration has appealed the decision.
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The grants are a fraction of the more than $3.1 billion in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services that the Trump administration has canceled across New England.
At a status hearing on the case Monday, attorneys representing the public health association said that more than 50 of its roughly 300 affected research grants across the country have not been reinstated, and that the NIH has not provided a timeline for when all grants will be restored. Researchers face other obstacles as well.
At Harvard, virtually all federal funding remains frozen as part of the administration's broader assault on the university. Others face reduced staffing, due to layoffs,
and shortened deadlines to complete their research. And funding at the federal level remains subject to sudden reversals, as shown Tuesday night when the White House
In a statement Thursday, the NIH told the Globe it 'has been working to reinstate grants to comply with the court's order.'
Scott Delaney, a Harvard scientist and co-creator of Grant Watch, said many researchers remain wary despite the win because of further appeals and reviews.
'Every indication is that NIH will continue to cut research on trans health and on DEI. They still remain hostile to broad bodies of research, and they continue to ask researchers to rewrite their grants to avoid certain topics,' said Delaney, who lost his own NIH funding and received a
But many are pressing ahead despite the obstacles and hoping for the best.
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Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, learned this month that her funding would be restored. She said that despite feeling vindicated by US District Court Judge William G. Young's ruling, she cannot access the funds due to the federal freeze on funds to Harvard.
Since 2019, Krieger and her team have been working to measure the impact of six types of discrimination — including racism, sexism, and ageism — on health. The researchers enrolled 699 patients who completed two study questionnaires online and at three Boston community health centers — including Fenway Health, Mattapan Community Health Center, and Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center in Dorchester — to test how discrimination contributes to psychological distress and sleep disorders.
'We can resume the work because we had completed all data collection and we were in the phase of data analysis and manuscript preparation,' Krieger said. 'Whether or not the funding ever truly gets reinstated for my grant — and I would like that it is — it's important, given the complexities, to make sure these things go from a court order to reality.'
At Tufts, the school lost and then suddenly regained a pipeline for young talent, though several young scientists lost out in the process. The university hosts one of just 22 NIH-sponsored programs in the country that trains a diverse group of postdoctoral scholars in both research and teaching. The program, called the Institutional Research Career and Academic Development Award, or IRACDA, focuses on underrepresented groups.
'We were ramping up for another five years after earning highly competitive funding last fall,' said Mitch McVey, program director and professor of biology at Tufts. 'Then the new administration came in, and everything changed.'
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When the NIH terminated funding, four incoming applicants had their offers rescinded just one day after receiving them.
Marissa Maroni, 28, celebrated the news with her husband and prepared to move back to her home state.
'It felt like the right next step, personally and professionally,' said Maroni, who is finishing her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. 'But just a day later, I got an email saying the program was canceled. It was incredibly disheartening.'
The loss also affects Bunker Hill Community College, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Suffolk University, where IRACDA scholars like Maroni were slated to teach next year.
McVey said Tufts might extend the offers again to the four applicants but, 'We're trying to balance the risk involved here, which would be that if the government wins the appeal, the funding will likely be terminated again. We don't want to put the scholars in a position where their job security is always in jeopardy, so we're trying to figure out how to best navigate this situation. It's not easy.'
At Yale, nine NIH grants that were terminated are in the process of reinstatement. Four of those belong to John Pachankis, a Yale School of Public Health professor who has spent the past 20 years investigating why people in the LGBTQ+ community are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and suicide.
The sudden March terminations not only disrupted years of research but also halted the rollout of promising mental health interventions.
One of Pachankis's halted trials aimed to train front-line mental health providers working at 90 LGBTQ+ community centers across 35 states in cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat depression, anxiety, and substance use.
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'Right before the funding termination, we learned that our trained mental health providers had started delivering our cognitive-behavioral therapy to over 4,000 LGBT people in just four months,' he said. The funding cut prevented them from studying the longer-term impact of the therapy and ways to sustain it in local communities.
Restarting the work has been slow and resource-intensive, he said. It requires updating ethics approvals, reconvening data safety review boards, updating clinical trials registries, drafting now-overdue progress reports, and restarting trials enrollment while no longer having sufficient staff to do this work.
'The research infrastructure took years to build, was collapsed in a day, and will take months if not longer to rebuild,' Pachankis said. 'My confidence in future federal funding for this research remains shaken, but my team's commitment to asking and answering important scientific questions isn't going away.'
Meanwhile, at Brown, Moitra is figuring out how to move forward with his research.
Between 2022 and early 2024, he and his team recruited 240 LGBTQ+ participants, offering two counseling sessions to study the mental health impacts from the pandemic. After funding was pulled, Moitra said, they lost 40 participants' worth of data that had timed out after those participants received just one counseling session.
Now that the grant has been reinstated, Moitra's team is left racing against the clock as the deadline for the funding to be used remains Aug. 31.
The researchers are applying for a no-cost extension to allow them to complete the work without requesting additional funds.
'After five-plus months of uncertainty, we were moving on,' Moitra said. 'It's hard to scramble it all back together.'
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Sarah Rahal can be reached at