Trump Administration Canceled 181 National Cancer Institute Grants in 2025

The Trump administration canceled 181 grants from the National Cancer Institute in roughly the first half of 2025, Npr reported. The grants totaled more than $317 million, and many studied cancer disparities. An American Association for Cancer Research survey of 122 researchers found that federal policy changes affected 93 percent of respondents.

Seventy-eight percent said they had been unable to apply for funding, and 59 percent reported that ongoing projects were disrupted. Fifty-nine percent of those who lost funding said it came from the National Institutes of Health. Thousands of grants across the NIH were terminated in 2025, according to Grant Witness.

An executive order issued in January 2025 directed agencies to end what it called radical and wasteful DEI research. Many canceled grants were later restored after court cases, though the Department of Health and Human Services reported additional terminations afterward.

Scarlett Lin Gomez, who leads the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry at the University of California, San Francisco, said the registry had received NCI funding for 53 years.

She described the cut she received as completely unprecedented in that history and said she had to let go about seven full-time employees in 2025 while expecting to release five or six more in 2026. Mariana Stern, professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, said some researchers reframed projects or reworded proposals to retain funding after the executive order.

She noted that programs previously aimed at students from racial and ethnic minorities could no longer target those groups exclusively.

The AACR report documented narrower gaps in some outcomes. The Black-white cancer death rate difference fell from roughly 34 percent higher in the 1990s to 9 percent higher in 2026. Rural Americans remain 18 percent more likely to die from cancer overall and 36 percent more likely to die from lung cancer.