Not long ago, Patty Kissinger, an epidemiologist at Tulane University, was one of many scientists to lose federal funding. On March 18, she was crushed to learn that the National Institutes of Health was killing her grant — a program to treat sexually transmitted infections in Black youth — on the grounds that it was about “DEI.”
Then, in an email that arrived on April Fool’s Day, an NIH employee informed her of a change in plans: Her grant was getting restored. Kissinger was sure she was being pranked. But she was not. The agency gave no explanation, she said, leaving her both delighted and bewildered.
“I’ve been asked by so many people, ‘What is the magic sauce? How did you get that grant back?’” Kissinger said. “And I’m like, ‘I have no idea.’”
As President Trump’s administration cancels billions of dollars of scientific-research funding, Kissinger feels like she won the lottery. But she isn’t the only one. A small number of canceled NIH grants have quietly been restored, according to a Chronicle review of government data collected by independent researchers — often for reasons not disclosed to the recipients or the public. Temporary court orders have allowed some scientists to get back to studying transgender health and COVID-19, while other funding has been reinstated without any appeals filed and without any apparent prompting from a judge.
Distressed researchers may find hope in individual reversals. But the anecdotes also illustrate the haphazard way in which the administration is managing the nation’s immense research portfolio and undermining scientists’ faith in its stability. Those who have unexpectedly landed on their feet say they don’t know what to tell colleagues. “I’m having a little bit of survivor guilt,” Kissinger confessed.
The NIH has canceled nearly 800 grants since February, according to Grant Watch, a database created by Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, and Noam Ross, the executive director of rOpen Sci. The grants were about LGBTQ+ health, vaccines, climate change, diversity, and other subjects that the White House has called ideologically slanted. Many were issued to Columbia University, one of several prestigious universities under threat of losing federal dollars. Another agency, the National Science Foundation, has axed more than 520 grants about artificial intelligence, misinformation, climate change, and scientist training, according to Grant Watch. Long-incubating projects have been unceremoniously ended, careers derailed, university budgets squeezed.
I’m having a little bit of survivor guilt.
Over the last month, however, Delaney, Ross, and Anthony Barente, a Grant Watch volunteer, started identifying signs of reversals in data scraped from the websites of the NIH and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. Barente cautioned that they “only make up a small proportion of the money stolen from American scientists.”
Even so, Delaney said that the reversals, particularly those achieved through court challenges, should motivate other scientists and universities. “You can’t win if you don’t fight,” he said.
The NIH did not return a request for comment.
In executive orders issued right after taking office, Trump directed federal agencies to withhold funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care to people under age 19 and that promote what he called “gender-ideology extremism.” Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, and Colorado sued, and a preliminary injunction on March 5 prohibited the government from upholding Trump’s executive orders in the four plaintiff states. That injunction was responsible for the restoration of gender-related research funding, a spokesperson for Washington’s attorney general confirmed.
But the connection wasn’t necessarily communicated to scientists.
“Unfortunately, I have no idea how the termination was rescinded,” Kendra Hutchens, an instructor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, wrote in an email. “It was a complete surprise and, after reaching out multiple times to the NIH for guidance, I still have not received a response.” Hutchens lost, then regained, a grant to develop a study evaluating how transgender people and others with nonbinary gender identities are affected by state policies on gender-affirming care, according to the NIH’s website.
Christine Rael, an assistant professor at the same campus, had NIH grants to develop HIV- and syphilis-treatment programs for transgender women in South Africa canceled and then reinstated. “We didn’t appeal our terminations (for a variety of reasons) and were shocked to find they had been reinstated,” she said by email. “Nobody at our institution is sure of what happened, or if this is permanent.”
Kathy Green, a spokesperson for Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, confirmed that federal agencies have re-evaluated grants in accordance with the preliminary injunction. While she declined to comment on individual reinstatements, she wrote that “NIH funding determinations are generally based on scientific merit, peer review, and compliance with applicable laws and policies.”
A grant about HIV prevention in transgender women, awarded to the University of Washington, was also turned back on. Don Operario, one of the project’s leaders and a professor of behavioral, social, and health-education sciences at Emory University, said the team did not know exactly how the restoration had happened, but it was “highly probable” that Washington’s lawsuit was to thank. “We are happy that the project was reinstated,” he wrote in an email, but “this poses a grim outcome for research grants that are based in states that do not pursue legal actions through the judicial system.”
Separately, 23 states and the District of Columbia are suing HHS for terminating $11 billion in public-health funding — including COVID-19-related research funding. The agency argued that the funding was no longer necessary because the pandemic has ended, while the states argued that the terminations didn’t follow required legal procedures.
On April 5, a court-ordered temporary restraining order barred the agency from ending that funding in the plaintiff states. Grants have since been restored at institutions that include the Johns Hopkins University and Oregon Health & Science University, according to scientists there.
“There is this legitimate fear that the Trump administration will just ignore the courts,” said Barente, a data scientist in Boston who is volunteering with Grant Watch. “But these reinstatements show us that legal action still has the power to hold the federal government accountable to its obligations.”
Other scientists, meanwhile, have clawed back grants under circumstances seemingly untied to litigation.
Leaders of the Women’s Health Initiative, a groundbreaking, federally funded project, relayed the news in April that HHS would end contracts with all four of the project’s regional centers, which have followed tens of thousands of participants since the 1990s. But four days later, following an outpouring of public support, NPR reported that the funding would be restored.
An agency spokesperson told the news outlet that the NIH, which funds the project, had “initially exceeded its internal targets for contract reductions” — federal health agencies are under orders to cut spending — but “we are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts.” As of April 25, Women’s Health Initiative leaders said they had not received confirmation from the NIH.
Within three weeks in March, the University of Utah lost — then snatched back — a $38-million grant for the Utah Clinical and Translational Science Institute, a regional hub of researchers turning lab discoveries into clinical care. A university press release did not state a rationale from the NIH, but the project’s leaders thanked their funders as well as “University of Utah leadership, the University of Utah Board of Trustees, our legislative delegation, and the Utah community.”
Julie Kiefer, a university spokesperson, declined to provide further details. “What we can say is that we were able to convey the importance of Utah CTSI in conducting and supporting research that broadly impacts populations across rural and frontier communities of the Mountain West,” she wrote in an email.
Also in March, a University of California at Davis neurologist’s $36-million dementia grant was defunded for allegedly perpetuating a “DEI agenda.” The day after he filed an appeal and CalMatters reported on his loss, the NIH restored it without giving a reason, according to the news outlet. Charles DeCarli, the UC Davis professor, did not return requests for comment. A spokesperson for the UC system told The Chronicle that the NIH had restored COVID-related grants for a total of four UC scientists as of mid-April.
Kissinger, the Tulane epidemiologist, still feels like she’s living a “miracle.” The study funded by her grant, which was awarded in September, intends to screen and treat sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia in young Black people, who have it at significantly higher rates than non-Black youth. The NIH’s initial rationale for ending it — that her “DEI” project was harmful and unscientific — was inaccurate and upsetting, Kissinger said. “Epidemiologists focus in on the population at risk,” she said. “So if I’m looking at melanoma, I would study white people. If I’m looking at prostate cancer, I would study men. If I’m studying STIs, it happens to be persons of color.”
Before the restoration came through, she’d penned a lengthy appeal that she hadn’t submitted yet, she said. She was also writing op-eds and planning to meet with her senators’ offices, but hadn’t followed through on either of those efforts yet, either. In the interim, she said, she had to fire her field coordinator and several graduate assistants, move others onto another grant, and void agreements with contractors. And she’d already bought diagnostic tests, boxes for shipping them, a refrigerator to store samples, and other supplies.
“Fortunately, now we can use most of them,” Kissinger said. “So the taxpayer dollars would not be wasted.” She’s also hired back everyone except for the field coordinator (who found another job), started reinstating contracts, and begun retraining her staff to head into the field. They’ll likely end up four or five months behind schedule. Better late than never.
“In a sea of unhappiness, I’m delighted to be able to serve our people,” Kissinger said. But “there’s always in the back of your mind: ‘Are they going to take it away again?’”
