More than 700 grants awarded to Northwestern researchers by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation have been terminated or frozen since January, leaving more than $1.06 billion in awards unpaid, according to data from Grant Witness, a project that tracks grant cessations from the two agencies.
Grant Witness aggregates its data from researcher reports, news reports and government open data.
The billion-dollars’ worth of grant cessations is alongside the $790 million figure the White House confirmed to The Daily in April. The New York Times, which first published that statistic, reported that it was largely a result of frozen contracts with and grants from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Defense and Agriculture. It’s unclear whether the two figures overlap.
Funds frozen include $77 million supporting the Lurie Cancer Center, a cancer-focused hospital in Chicago affiliated with the Feinberg School of Medicine. It is the largest still-frozen grant in Grant Witness’ database. Three of the 12 affected NU grants with more than $10 million in unpaid awards — a total unpaid award of $51 million — funded studies focused on HIV/AIDS.
The NIH grant terminations and freezings span dozens of scientific fields. Grants in medicine were impacted most significantly, with 250 grants, or 36% of all grants, affected by federal actions.
The reasons for termination are unclear. Grant Witness indicates which of 197 federally flagged words reported by The Times in March are included in an affected grant’s description. However, a direct correlation has not been confirmed. Only 60 affected grants, or 9% of all grants, contain no flagged words.
Of the flagged terms, the term “trans” appears most frequently in the grants identified by Grant Witness, appearing 426 times in any part of the grant description, including as part of another word, but only six times in “transgender.”
Nine days after the federal funding freeze was first reported, on Apr. 17, a wave of freezes hit NU researchers, impacting at least 686 NIH grants. Freezes on that day account for $1.05 billion of the $1.06 billion that has not been paid from the original award.
On May 22, another wave of terminations hit NSF grants at NU. For the University’s largest grant, $3.3 million out of the awarded $4.5 million was unpaid at the point of grant termination; the grant was intended to support STEM programs at the majority-minority 5th Ward’s Foster School, set to open in August 2026.
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Bluesky: @ryaninevanston.bsky.social
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