Top of mind for many scientists over the past several months has been the looming threat of research grants being terminated by the federal government. 

Before the Trump administration, grant cancellations were a rarity — often reserved for cases of outright fraud or data manipulation. But, just months into the current administration, some 2,100 National Institutes of Health grants, totaling around $9.5 billion, have been terminated. For some time, there was no record of the devastation on the scientific community.

Two scientists — Scott Delaney and Noam Ross — took it upon themselves to document the extent of NIH grant terminations. By combining government information with crowdsourced submissions, the pair have gathered what appears to be the most detailed, public accounting of projects halted by the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. 

“The community of affected scientists is really what drove this. That’s really what created it. We wouldn’t have been successful if folks weren’t willing to step forward,” Delaney said. Most researchers are uncomfortable openly discussing political issues, he added. “Yet they did, because they shared their information with us. They let us post it publicly online for everybody to see, and many of them even stepped forward and started taking more prominent roles in advocacy, talking to lawmakers, to interest groups, to journalists.” 

The Grant Watch database Delaney helped set up has been used to better understand the implications of grant terminations as well as in litigation challenging the NIH actions — a role he felt ready to take on having trained as both an epidemiologist and a lawyer.

Now, Delaney himself has been swept up in the wave of grant cancellations because of the administration’s targeting of funding for Harvard University. He is a research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and all the grants supporting his research, which examines the ways that climate change can exacerbate Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, were terminated this month. 

STAT spoke to Delaney last week about the impetus for Grant Watch, and the escalating battle between the Trump administration and Harvard. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hearing you say that you study climate change-related health disparities feels like a lot of buzzwords that this current administration doesn’t prioritize. 

When I say it’s health disparities and it’s climate change, that’s jargon. What I’m really talking about is making sure that everybody has an equal opportunity to be well. So that’s the health disparities piece. Some groups don’t have an equal opportunity, and we can use more jargon, like socially marginalized, this, that, and the other. But the bottom line is not everybody has the same equal opportunity to be healthy because of the communities that they live in or based on where they live, based on laws. 

I don’t think what I do, when I speak plainly, is controversial. I hope this isn’t naive, but I don’t think that trying to help folks with Alzheimer’s be healthier, have better days, should engender controversy. One thing that we can do to ensure that we communicate what motivates us every day better is to stop using these weaponized words that weren’t controversial but are now and just have a more kind of simplified conversation about why I get out of bed every day, why I sit down and analyze data every day, and why I write every day,

When did you have the idea for Grant Watch?

At the very beginning of March, there were news stories that I had read that said the federal government was terminating a large number of NIH grants. As I read these stories, my first question was, “Which grants?” You want to know that, especially because I don’t necessarily trust everything the government says. 

I looked, and there wasn’t much information. There were only a couple of folks that had been willing to go on their record and share their story. So there were only, you know, a few examples of grants that I could find. My first thought was, “This is surely illegal,” but it’s going to be really hard to file a lawsuit if we don’t have a record of what’s happened. We need details. Litigation, especially at the trial court, is fact-intensive. 

I put my lawyer hat back on, and I thought if there was a way that anybody was going to bring a lawsuit, or if there was a way that anybody was going to sort of organize any other kind of advocacy … we needed a common factual record, and that’s why I started it. 

You mentioned litigation — what do you view as your goal in the next couple of months? 

Right now, our core goal continues to be to curate a record. It’s really important to document and establish what happened in the first place. I think that’s especially important because the government has taken steps that obscure that record. 

Through the beginning of April, not so much anymore, the government was putting forth information about which grants it terminated. They stopped doing that. But for five or six weeks, they did do that. The only thing that they’ve done since then is updated the document … by removing grants that had been reinstated. So if there’s a lawsuit, and there’s an injunction in a particular lawsuit, and there’s a court order that says “reinstate this grant,” then what the government does is they comply, they reinstate the grant, but they remove it from any federal database and from any other record any indication that it was terminated in the first place. 

So unless you have our Airtable, there is no record that that grant was ever terminated in the first place, at least not in the public domain. 

Last week, I assume, this became very personal for you, watching mass terminations at Harvard. Can you walk me through what last week was like for you?

Last week was surreal for a couple of reasons. Because I’ve been tracking these grants, I have a front-row seat to everything that the NIH has been doing to science generally. That includes grant terminations. That also includes these grant freezes. So they’ve said in a couple of instances, we’re freezing all the grants to specific universities. What they mean by that is that they stopped paying their bills. They stopped paying out money on grants. So if a scientist spent some money, either on salary or for supplies or for whatever it was, then they would submit that, basically an invoice to the government, usually on a monthly basis, and then the government would pay them. When they freeze payments, they stop those payments. 

The federal government had already frozen payments on all NIH grants, as well as many other types of grants, to Harvard back in April. And the reason that that matters is that the terminations from last week, on some very practical level, didn’t have a huge impact. Things were already frozen. It was always going to take a court order or a negotiated settlement, which probably wasn’t going to come to undo the freeze. It’s still going to take a court order or a negotiated settlement to undo the terminations. 

All the grants were terminated, but the request from Harvard [to scientists] is to continue doing the research as if the grants were not terminated. That’s important, because if you stop doing that research, and then later the court orders the government to start paying its bills again, then you can’t collect, right? You can’t collect money for work you didn’t do. So it’s a very long way of underscoring that the practical impact of the terminations was limited, and yet they had a huge impact for a couple of reasons. 

The terminations felt like a much bigger deal, and a freeze always felt temporary, whereas the terminations felt in some sense final. Even though I know on some cognitive, intellectual level that there wasn’t a huge impact, it shook me. I told my colleagues, I was like, I know this doesn’t change much, and yet I’m gutted. I just had to take some, take some time away, get outside. On my colleagues, it had a really, really, really profound impact, and was extremely demoralizing. 

But the other thing that it did was it sharpened people’s response. During a freeze, it feels a little temporary. We’re still kind of moving along as if things are going to be unfrozen, maybe we’ll reach a settlement. It didn’t have that finality. As a consequence, I don’t think people were ready to stand up and fight, not like they are now.

These grants are the manifestations of a life’s worth of work. You terminate that and now everybody’s ready to fight. It takes a minute, right? It takes getting knocked down. You get the wind knocked out of you. But then when you get up, you’re ready to go, frankly, in a way that people weren’t before.