Harvard computational biologist Sean Eddy stands in a deserted laboratory once filled with more than a dozen researchers. The computers are gone and the group table where colleagues once gathered to compare genomic data is silent. More than a year ago, federal funding for his work was terminated under the Trump administration; today he is one of the last people left.
“Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it’s supposed to be,” Eddy says. “This was a very vibrant lab.” He describes the funding loss as “a 10-year hit to a lab.” At 60, he had expected to keep building the team over the next decade. Now he says the setback is probably unrecoverable for his career stage.
Eddy’s group created widely used software for comparing DNA and protein sequences, identifying genes and predicting function — tools scientists liken to lab staples such as microscopes. Researchers across many fields, from cancer biology to studies of neurodevelopmental disorders, rely on those programs. The software grew from years of work in Eddy’s lab and underpins countless papers and experiments worldwide.
When Eddy received an NIH letter in 2025 saying his project had “been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer” and was being terminated, he had more than a dozen staff members. Over the past year he has had to let nearly all of them go and has helped them search for other jobs. He had hoped a younger computational biologist could step into the space, but a hiring freeze at Harvard makes that unlikely.
Eddy’s experience is one of many examples researchers point to when describing how federal science funding was disrupted in 2025 under the Trump administration. Although some funding was restored in early 2026 through the appropriations process, many scientists say the money is not flowing the way it used to and that agency behavior has changed in ways that make planning and conducting research difficult.
Jeremy Berg, a former senior NIH official who now tracks the agency’s actions, says trust in NIH’s predictability has eroded. In prior years, NIH maintained clear deadlines, funding forecasts and timelines that helped scientists plan. “In the past you had a pretty good sense of how NIH was gonna behave,” he says. “Now that level of trust is pretty much gone.”
On paper, the NIH budget in 2026 may look intact, Berg says, but the agency shifted its approach to award fewer grants with larger budgets over longer terms. That accounting change means many fewer investigators receive funding. Berg’s analysis found that earlier this year NIH issued roughly 2,300 new grants — about half as many as at the same point the previous year. “There’s a lot of pain and a lot of science that isn’t gonna get done,” he warns.
Advocacy groups have raised similar concerns. The Association of American Universities reported NIH awarded 66 percent fewer grants in the first months of 2026 than in the prior year. Groups and scientists also say NIH has become less transparent about when funding opportunities will be announced and awarded.
Elizabeth Ginexi, who worked for 22 years as an NIH program officer and left when cuts began, has been tracking another signal of the problem: funding “forecasts” posted on the NIH website. Forecasts typically indicate areas the agency plans to fund and guide researchers preparing applications. Ginexi found that of 336 forecasts still listed as open, 205 had passed their promised posting dates with no full announcement ever published. She says leaving forecasts unfulfilled creates the illusion of opportunities that never materialize.
At the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, biomedical engineer Rachael Sirianni is watching deadlines and grant reviews slide. She moved her family from Texas in 2022 to build a lab studying pediatric brain metastases and had been counting on an NIH grant to continue testing a promising drug combination. “The chances of that grant being funded in 2026 are basically zero,” she says. Repeatedly shifted deadlines have kept the application from being reviewed in time for funding.
Sirianni had to lay off a researcher and still can’t bring herself to clear the bench full of pipettes and reagents. For families of children with these aggressive tumors, every delay matters. “This is a loss of investment. It’s a loss of momentum for the families that have children that are affected by these tumors,” she says.
A Health and Human Services spokesperson acknowledged a slowdown in funding and attributed delays to a government shutdown and congressional Democrats. He said timelines have “returned to typical funding patterns.” Scientists who lost staff, halted experiments or saw programs terminated argue that for their projects and the patients who rely on progress, the interruptions are already doing lasting damage.
Researchers and former agency staff say the combination of grant terminations, fewer awards, unfulfilled forecasts and opaque timelines has altered the research ecosystem. They warn that the effects extend beyond individual labs: training opportunities for early-career scientists have been reduced, institutional hiring is frozen, and entire lines of inquiry risk being abandoned.
For Eddy, Sirianni and many others, the consequences are personal and practical: trained teams dismantled, projects stalled and momentum lost. Even when money is restored on paper, the time and people required to rebuild scientific programs are not easily replaced. “Even as just a citizen of the country, this frustrates me,” Sirianni says. “Every month, every week — that matters to them.”