NIH funding – Harvard computational biologist Sean Eddy says an NIH termination letter told him his work had been deemed to have “absolutely no value to the US taxpayer,” leaving his lab nearly silent and setting his work back by about a decade. Other researchers warn that
The lab used to be loud.
In Harvard professor Sean Eddy’s workspace. more than a year ago. screens glowed with data work and researchers crowded around a group table—coffee in hand. leaning in to troubleshoot genomic questions from different species. Then his federal funding was terminated under the Trump administration. Now the computers are gone and the room is quiet. with vacant work stations lined up where people used to sit. Eddy, now among the last researchers still there, walks past empty desks and points out what’s missing.
“Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it’s supposed to be,” he says. “This was a very vibrant lab.”
Eddy. a computational biologist. has spent his career pursuing one question: “the origin of life. ” and where it all came from. His team spent years building software that scientists around the world use to compare DNA and protein sequences. identify genes. and predict what they do. Eddy says his work underpins countless studies. including research related to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders. and he describes its role as so common it’s comparable to instruments like microscopes or pipettes.
“It’s very affirming for me to pick up sort of semi-random papers in the literature in fields that I care about and see them using our software over and over again,” he says.
The loss isn’t only institutional—it’s personal and physical. When Eddy designed the lab more than a decade ago. he worked with an architect. and the room carries that history. Pictures of animals are pinned and stenciled on the wall—his daughter. who was 12 at the time. stenciled them for him. Among the images is a reference to “a bacterial virus called T4. ” a topic Eddy says he did his thesis on.
In 2025, Eddy received a letter from the National Institutes of Health. He recalls that the agency told him his work had been “determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated.”
That termination followed a broader shake-up to research funding. Eddy is one of thousands of researchers across the U.S. still grappling with the damage inflicted on science in 2025 under the Trump administration—despite a restoration of funding earlier this year.
Before the termination, Eddy had more than a dozen people working for him. Over the last year, he says he has had to let almost all of them go. He worked closely with his team to help them find jobs elsewhere.
He has also stopped believing the grant will come back.
“I haven’t talked to my program officer in years now,” he says. “My guess is that he’s under instructions not to talk to me. So we’re just sort of left guessing what the status of the grant is.”
Eddy estimates the funding loss set him and his lab back by a decade. At 60, he says he had planned to keep working through the next decade with his team, and now he doubts recovery is realistic for someone at his career stage.
“For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable,” he says.
Walking through the empty lab, Eddy says he’d like to see it taken over by a younger computational biologist—someone who could pick up where he left off. But with Harvard now on a hiring freeze, he doesn’t see that happening soon.
Even where money does exist on paper, researchers describe a different reality.
Harvard professor Eddy’s experience is mirrored by a larger warning from people who have watched NIH closely since before the cuts began. Champions of science had celebrated a rare bipartisan victory in the early months of 2026. after the Trump administration tried to cut. freeze or suspend billions of dollars in the previous year. A handful of Republicans. prompted by their constituents. joined Democratic colleagues in efforts to quietly restore significant portions of that funding through the appropriations process.
Now. advocates are warning that money isn’t reaching scientists at the rate it should. and that a lack of transparency at the agency is compromising research reliability. Jeremy Berg. a former high-ranking official at NIH who has become a watchdog for the organization. says his personal trust in the agency has frayed.
“In the past you had a pretty good sense of how NIH was gonna behave,” Berg says. “Now that level of trust is pretty much gone.”
Berg says NIH used to operate with clear deadlines. funding forecasts. and predictable expectations from researchers—an environment he credits with helping biomedical research progress through developments such as mapping the human genome. major advances in cancer care. and new therapies for HIV and AIDS. He recalls a Republican senator once describing NIH as “the crown jewel in biomedical research. ” and “the crown jewel in the federal government.”.
When the cuts hit, Berg began tracking what changed over the last year. He says that even in 2026, where the budget may appear intact on paper, NIH has switched strategy toward fewer grants with more money over more years. In his account, the shift translates into fewer scientists receiving funding.
Berg says his analysis showed 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 says.
Advocacy groups also point to transparency problems. They say money approved by Congress this year has been slow to reach researchers. and that analysis from the Association of American Universities found NIH issued 66 percent fewer grant awards in the first few months of 2026 than it did the previous year.
Elizabeth Ginexi, who spent 22 years at NIH as a program officer working on substance use prevention, says the agency’s forecasts became part of her evidence. She left after the Trump administration began cuts, fearing she would be cut anyway, and says she has been looking for a job for over a year.
Ginexi focused on “forecasts,” areas of research the agency says it intends to fund. She says these forecasts normally help guide scientists applying for research money. But she began tracking them after noticing they weren’t being filled as quickly as before.
“There are tons and tons of them — starting from last year — that are still sitting as forecasts and were never published,” Ginexi says.
She reports that of 336 NIH funding forecasts still listed as open, 205 were already past their promised posting date with no full announcement published. In her view, the forecasts can create the illusion of opportunities even when full funding plans fail to materialize.
For researchers submitting proposals, the impact is sometimes more direct—and more personal.
Cancer researcher Rachael Sirianni scrolls through the NIH website, monitoring the grants her team has submitted that are waiting for agency review. She calls one application’s prospects grim.
“The chances of that grant being funded in 2026 are basically zero,” she says.
Sirianni had been counting on the grant to continue evaluating a combination of medications to treat children with cancer that has metastasized to the brain. She describes the pairing as a “one-two punch” and says early results offered real promise—enough, she thought, to secure additional funding.
But she says she hasn’t been able to move the work through NIH’s normal review process.
The stakes, she argues, are different for pediatric brain cancer. Many families, she says, have no other options for dealing with a condition that is “basically impossible to remove or mitigate.”
“It’s thin and it’s across the soft tissues of the brain and spinal cord,” she explains. “There isn’t really a consistent neurosurgical solution to that cancer complication.”
Sirianni is a biomedical engineer. She says that earlier in her career, while working at a research institute, she met a family who had lost a child to a type of cancer she describes as “considered unsurvivable.” She says that experience became especially impactful after she became a parent.
“Being exposed to that family’s pain, especially when I had become a parent myself,” she says, “was pretty personally transformative.”
In 2022, she moved her young family from Texas to Worcester, Massachusetts—a city of a little over 200,000—about an hour outside Boston—to build a lab at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and run pediatric cancer studies.
For the specific grant. Sirianni says she and a colleague spent several years working on the proposal. carefully tracking compliance requirements and watching deadlines. But she says that in the last year, those deadlines have been repeatedly moved. She describes the result as a breakdown large enough to prevent her grant from even being reviewed in time for funding.
In her lab, the consequences show up on a bench. She points to equipment still left out—reagent bottles and pipettes—because the person who worked at the bench had to be laid off.
“I can’t bring myself to clear his bench,” Sirianni says. “It makes me sad.”
When she speaks about the agency delays, she connects them directly to what happens to therapeutic development. She says restarting stalled work is too late to undo the damage.
“That means that the therapeutic development work that taxpayers previously invested in is now hitting a brick wall,” Sirianni says.
“Even as just a citizen of the country, this frustrates me,” she adds. “It’s a loss of investment. It’s a loss of momentum for the families that have children that are affected by these tumors. Every month, every week — that matters to them.”
The response from the federal government places the delays in a different frame. A spokesperson from Health and Human Services. Andrew Nixon. acknowledged the slowdown and attributed the delays to the government shutdown and congressional Democrats. In an email, Nixon wrote: “Timelines have returned to typical funding patterns.”.
Sirianni and Eddy say that, for them, timing has already passed. What’s underway now doesn’t simply wait for better schedules—it waits for the work to survive the gaps. Eddy estimates his termination has pushed his lab back by a decade. and he describes his team’s future as uncertain in a hiring freeze environment. Sirianni says the changes have meant grant reviews that can’t catch up. leaving promising therapeutic work blocked while families still face tumors that can’t be reliably cleared with consistent neurosurgery.
In both accounts, the story isn’t only about the loss of funding. It is about the moment when research momentum turns into silence—and what that silence can cost.
NIH funding Sean Eddy computational biology genomic sequencing software Rachael Sirianni pediatric brain cancer grant delays transparency biomedical research Harvard hiring freeze