---
title: "Counting the Money That Never Came: $177 Billion in Federal Grants Disrupted"
description: "A Harvard epidemiologist’s spreadsheet grew into a national ledger, as NPR charts how NIH funding was reshaped"
author: "Walter Pine"
published: 2026-09-25T13:59:08.909Z
modified: 2026-09-26T17:26:29Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/counting-the-money-that-never-came-177-billion-in-federal-gr-c40a1a
language: en
tags: ["trump", "nih", "budget", "funding", "regulation", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Counting the Money That Never Came: $177 Billion in Federal Grants Disrupted

*A Harvard epidemiologist’s spreadsheet grew into a national ledger, as NPR charts how NIH funding was reshaped*

By Walter Pine · September 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/counting-the-money-that-never-came-177-billion-in-federal-gr-c40a1a

## In brief

- The Lost Funds project estimates $177B in federal grants disrupted across all 50 states and DC since Trump returned
- Massachusetts: $6B disrupted and $2.45B restored, hitting nonprofits, local governments and universities
- NIH obligated funds roughly 44 days behind its 2021–2024 pace in fiscal 2025, per NPR
- Grants renewed 90+ days late ran four to six times the prior rate; minority health research funding fell 29%
- Delaney counts 27 lawsuits over withheld funds, with 26 states among the filers

Early last year, as his own federal research funding came under threat, the Harvard epidemiologist Scott Delaney helped build a spreadsheet. Its purpose was narrow: record terminated science grants. That spreadsheet became Grant Witness, a database now used by journalists, universities, congressional staffers and lawyers, and this month it grew a sibling. Partnering with States United Democracy Center, a democracy watchdog, Delaney’s group launched Lost Funds, which estimates that $177 billion in federal grants has been canceled, frozen, delayed or otherwise disrupted across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., since President Trump returned to office.

Massachusetts alone accounts for $6 billion in disrupted funding, the tracker finds, of which an estimated $2.45 billion has been restored. The money — from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation — was destined for 76 nonprofits, 70 local governments, 40 colleges and universities and 164 other recipients, across health and biomedical research, education, disaster relief, environmental programs, transportation and food assistance. “If you only look at NIH, or NSF, or disaster relief, you see one piece at a time,” Delaney told The Boston Globe. “Lost Funds lets you see those disruptions across government.”

## The numbers behind the numbers

Separately, NPR charted how the machinery has changed inside NIH itself. The agency holds a $47.5 billion budget, more than 80 percent of which goes out the door as grants. The administration proposed cutting that budget by 41 percent — about $19.6 billion — for 2026, and restructuring 27 institutes into eight, eliminating four outright. Congress did neither, preserving the institutes and a budget on par with previous years. The topline, in other words, looks intact. “NIH is committed to responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and to advancing rigorous, high-impact science,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in an August email.

Between appropriation and a working grant sits a quieter step: obligation, the committing of funds to specific projects, normally at a fairly consistent rate through the year. Here NPR found the drag. In fiscal year 2025 the NIH ran roughly 44 days behind its average 2021-to-2024 pace of obligating money; through early July 2026 it ran 42 days behind. Heather Pierce, who tracks obligations for the Association of American Medical Colleges, pointed out that three-quarters of the way through the fiscal year the agency had obligated roughly half its budget, with billions of dollars still on the table.

Jennifer Troyer, who directed extramural operations at the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute until resigning at the end of 2025, described an added layer of review she calls a “black hole.” Peer-reviewed grants step through statuses as staff prepare them for funding, and one, called Status 19, was a thing she “did not know existed until things started getting stuck,” she said, because grants “would blip through for, like, a few minutes.” Awards she had signed went out and came back stopped — flagged by HHS, by the Office of Management and Budget or by the White House “as not acceptable.” At first, she said, the Department of Government Efficiency did the flagging; “and then they went away, but the other systems had been put in place to do the same function.” Staffing thinned in parallel: her institute went from 11 grants-management specialists and two assistants to three specialists. “We did not have the person-time to put awards out the door.”

## Ninety days late

The delays reached grants already awarded. Many NIH grants run multiple years and are paid out annually — continuity that funds lab work, employees and medical care in clinical trials — and before this administration, renewals traditionally arrived a week early to avoid funding gaps. In the past two years, grants have been renewed 90 or more days late at a rate four to six times that of the previous four years: 3.9 percent in fiscal 2025 and 2.7 percent in fiscal 2026, against 0.7 percent across 2021 through 2024. Institutions can offer bridge funding, repayable when the grant renews, but the bridge spans 90 days. “It’s really bad if it goes past 90 days,” said Ryan Gutenkunst, head of molecular and cellular biology at the University of Arizona, whose own renewal arrived two and a half months late; before it did, he said, “I was starting to plan who I would cut if I needed to.” The delays crossed party lines: renewals in Democratic districts swung from 3.4 days early to 8.4 days late, in Republican districts from 3.8 days early to 8.0 days late.

## Winners and losers

The redirection has a shape. Funding for racial- and ethnic-minority health research fell by more than a billion dollars from 2024 to 2025, a 29 percent drop, while machine learning and AI gained $468 million and networking and information technology $368 million — two of the five largest increases, NPR reports. The shifts track stated priorities: Mr. Trump’s executive orders directed agencies to end “radical” and “wasteful” diversity, equity and inclusion research, and the NIH’s August 2025 unified funding strategy named AI research a priority. According to Nature, a new system flagged grants carrying disfavored terms including “climate change,” “DEI,” “gender” and “vaccine hesitancy”; Troyer said about half the awards going out the door had to be “renegotiated” — new language in the title, specific aims, abstract and “anything that was going to appear in public.” Mariana Stern, a professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, renamed her research center: “We have to call it the CaRE2 Health Center now,” she said, the word “equity” removed. For Scarlett Lin Gomez of UC San Francisco, whose Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry saw its National Cancer Institute funding cut from $5.4 million in 2024 to $4.4 million in 2025 and then $3.7 million in 2026, the shift meant departures: about seven of roughly 50 lab employees let go last year, five or six more expected this year. “We received a cut that was completely unprecedented,” she said.

## What the ledger shows

Delaney’s own figures explain why an intact topline can mislead. Nationally, the NIH is down 15,000 grants even as dollars approach last year’s levels — a decline he attributes in large part to the agency’s move toward multiyear funding, committing several years at once to fewer awards. “So you can look at the topline dollars and say funding has recovered. But if thousands fewer projects are being supported, that means fewer scientists doing research, fewer opportunities for scientists, less productivity, and less progress for American breakthroughs,” he told the Globe. An NIH spokesperson said in a statement that the agency is on track to spend the full amount appropriated by Congress and “has been working diligently to ensure that the only research receiving NIH funding is scientifically rigorous.”

Reports last week of a possible executive order adding a layer of political review to NIH grants — an order the White House never confirmed — read to Delaney as part of a broader effort by OMB director Russell Vought to centralize control and take decision-making power from individual agencies. The university-wide freezes may have ceased, he said, but grants are still terminated or scrutinized for alignment with administration priorities. Lost Funds, meanwhile, is tallying the legal response: 27 lawsuits so far, one filed last week in Northern California, with Massachusetts among the 26 states that have sued. Many of the administration’s actions, Delaney said, “toe the line of unlawful.” And fatigue is its own problem: “We’re past the point of provocative headlines,” he said; the big announcements have faded from the news cycle while states and municipalities are still losing money they expected to have.

The spreadsheet he started with still tracks grants — terminated, frozen, reinstated, delayed. Lost Funds tracks the money that never arrived at all. And inside the NIH, the process now has a status code that awards, in a different administration, used to blip through in a few minutes.

## Sources

- [$177B in federal grants disrupted since Trump took office](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/09/25/metro/nih-grant-witness-lost-federal-funds/) — bostonglobe.com
- [Six charts show how NIH research funding has been reshaped under Trump](https://npr.org/2026/09/24/nx-s1-5931971/trump-nih-science-funding-disruptions-charts) — npr.org