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The US slashed research for cancer, Alzheimer’s, mental health — and nearly everything else

Revealed in one chart.

Think about the disease that worries you most — the one that runs in your family. Or maybe someone you love is living with it. Whether that’s cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or depression, odds are the US government has been funding the research to treat it.

That research is a big reason we have drugs that made fatal blood cancers survivable, treatments that turned HIV from a death sentence into something people live full lives with, and a vaccine that all but prevents cervical cancer.

But last year, the US funded dramatically fewer grants to do medical research that can lead to breakthroughs like those. New data released by the NIH this week shows how the damage from those cuts broke down.

The numbers are striking across the board.

New grants for Alzheimer’s and aging research were cut in half — from 369 in 2024 to 177, all while the US population is rapidly aging. Mental health research grants fell by 47 percent. And new grants for cancer research fell by 23 percent — even as cancer rates are rising sharply among Gen X and millennial Americans. Across all areas, the NIH went from funding roughly 5,000 new research grants in 2024 to just 3,900 in 2025.

“This is the worst year I’ve ever seen, probably going back to the 1980s,” said Jeremy Berg, who led the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of NIH’s largest institutes, from 2003 to 2011.

The NIH’s funding system was already under strain — too many researchers were chasing too few research dollars. That has always meant that the most ambitious and most unconventional ideas struggle to get funded.

But the Trump administration’s policy decisions have made that problem dramatically worse in just a single year.

The NIH funds research through federal grants. Scientists across the country submit their........

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