Over 700 and $1.7 billion in previously undisclosed grant terminations published by NIH
beSpacific 2025-05-29
Grant Watch: “726 additional additional terminated grants were reported by NIH this week, amounting to over $1.70 billion in total grant value, with $780 million remaining unspent. This brings the total number of terminations in our NIH database to over 1500 and $7.5 billion in total value. Thanks to scientists self-reporting these terminations, we know these are not all recent terminations. 58 of the 726 were previously reported by scientists to Grant Watch, with dates as early as 2025-03-21. The list of publicly reported terminations is likely still far from complete. Grant Watch has reports of over 40 additional terminations reported by researchers that still do not appear in any official public site or list, also reported as far back as early March. Nor does the current list include many grants to Harvard University terminated last week. This suggests that even with this new batch, NIH and HHS’s public reporting is not up to date, and the full scope of terminated grants is unreported and will grow. Approximately 500 terminations were added to NIH’s RePORTER database on Sunday May 18, then more were also published to the HHS TAGGS website today. As has been the case previously, the two sources have significant discrepancies, with approximately 300 terminated grants only published in one of the two sources. In the past three weeks, HHS had stopped posting new terminations to the TAGGS list, actually removing some. Terminations in the RePORTER database are not searchable and not included in the site’s programmatic API. Grant Watch tracks this designation by regular scraping of the RePORTER website. These new terminations also do not appear to have been part of releases on doge.gov. DOGE’s website claims that 1,951 grants have been cancelled across all of HHS, totaling $47 billion in value, but provides no details or reference numbers beyond the recipient institution, which is also missing in many cases. Nonetheless, more grants to Harvard, UC San Francisco, and other institutions appear in the new RePORTER terminations than are listed by DOGE. Institutions – The newly identified terminations affect 243 institutions across 48 states. While Harvard Medical School accounts for the highest number of grant cancellations in this batch, the new RePORTER data do not seem to reflect the huge wave of terminations that occurred last week.”