Mother Jones illustration; Getty(2)
As disease researchers around the country received letters last year that their grants had been cancelled, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya declared his agency was merely clearing out the clutter. Those terminated grants do “not actually have anything to do with promoting the health of the American people,” he told Science.
Experts weren’t buying that explanation at the time, and now they have the data to rebut it. A new report from the Senate health committee details deep cuts into research on some of the leading causes of death in the United States.
Over the last 12 months, the NIH has slashed hundreds of grants for research related to Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These conditions also happen to be among the favorite talking points of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. In his 2025 inauguration speech, Donald Trump vowed to “end the chronic disease epidemic,” a promise repeated by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., who has zeroed in on nutrition and environment as key factors.
Given RFK Jr.’s focus on “diet-related chronic disease”—a phrase he repeated as he unveiled his new food pyramid—one might expect he’d be a fan of Lisa Goldman Rosas, a Stanford epidemiologist who, last spring, received one of those emails saying her funding no longer aligned with the administration priorities and was therefore terminated. Rosas, who studies how diet affects human health, estimates that at least 1 million US deaths could be prevented each year if every American ate a healthy diet. But how to accomplish that is where she and the administration diverge.
That’s because Rosas focuses on Hispanic families, who are more than twice as likely as the average US family to experience food insecurity—a major risk factor for several chronic conditions. “There’s really strong evidence that programs that promote healthy eating and active living need to be tailored to people’s cultural backgrounds. It’s not a one size fits all,” she told me.
This evidence-based observation was how her work got entangled in Trump’s anti-DEI trap, even though “it’s really just implementing patient-centered care,” Rosas says.
Lots of studies have been cancelled for perceived connections to DEI, even the most tangential. “Anyone doing community outreach could have their research cut regardless of subject,” says an NIH employee who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. Such cuts affect everyone, the employee adds, by limiting our broader understanding of human health and disease: “If you’ve been to the doctor, you’ve been impacted by NIH research.”
Rosas’ work was cited in the Senate report alongside other major investigations into chronic disease the administration has defunded. Those include a 35-year study of Alzheimer’s risk, a cancer vaccine development program, and an NIH scientist’s work that another expert called, “the most important study in nutrition that’s been done since vitamins.”
In the wake of her grant cancellation, Rosas had to stop recruiting patients and scrape together what remained to keep paying her team. The lapse also disrupted her relationships with farms that supplied food for her study. “It’s a waste of money to cut funding partway through a study,” the NIH employee told me. And for patients midway through a course of treatment during a clinical trial, it poses serious safety issues.
Many of the hundreds of clinical trials cancelled last year involved chronic disease interventions, a separate analysis found, and about a third of them pertained to cancer treatment and prevention. The journal Nature reported that some of the highest dollar-value grant terminations were for cancer centers, which can provide cutting-edge treatments often not available at smaller hospitals.
Rosas eventually got her funding back by working with the program officer who’d been managing the grant at NIH. But due to staffing cuts and a hiring freeze, “every program officer is doing the work of multiple people,” the NIH employee told me. Researchers looking for help with getting their grants back may be reaching out to empty offices or waiting a long time for the overburdened employees who remain to get back to them. By the time Rosas’ grant was reinstated, she says, “a lot of the damage was unfortunately done.”
Another 2,000 NIH grants were restored by a federal judge’s order, but more than $700 million in grant money remains in limbo. Bhattacharya doesn’t seem inclined to dish those funds back out. In the past, grants for ongoing work were renewed periodically, and it was typically far easier to extend existing grants than secure new ones. Going forward, Bhattacharya has declared, “we won’t renew them.”
This move will compound the effects of reduced support for new grants. New funding for research on the above-mentioned diseases declined 16 percent overall in 2025 per the Senate report, with Alzheimer’s studies hit the hardest. That’s notable, because the number of people afflicted is expected to grow drastically as the the population ages over the next few decades.
The administration’s drastic cuts have not gone unnoticed. In the budget bill Congress passed last week, lawmakers rejected the president’s proposed budget, which would have cut spending on biomedical research in half. The NIH got $47 billion for the upcoming year—a slight increase over 2025.
Still, the NIH staffer I spoke with doesn’t foresee an end to the administration’s meddling. “It’s no longer about what’s being cut but what’s being politicized and restricted now,” the employee explains. “We got this full budget through, but how is that money going to be spent?”
Maybe not on improving the lives of the people with chronic conditions. “Those of us who focus on nutrition and chronic disease are hearing from this administration many messages that are aligned with what we’re doing,” Rosas told me. Yet its actions are “really confusing, not just for us, but for the people we serve.”
