Democrats Highlight Canceled Grants as Court Blocks NIH Cuts

Last month, researchers seeking to reinstate hundreds of terminated grants notched a win when a federal judge ruled that the National Institutes of Health’s terminations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion were illegal and ordered the agency to resume funding for the plaintiffs. The court orders specified close to a thousand grants and non-renewals to be reinstated.

Some of those grants were featured at a “science fair of canceled grants” hosted by Congressional Democrats this week, including a grant issued to Harvard postdoc Kelsey Tyssowski. The grant, one of NIH’s Pathway to Independence Awards, was meant to cover her salary and research costs as an “outstanding” postdoctoral researcher and eventually support her transition into a faculty position. However, even after the court ruling flagged her grant for reinstatement, Tyssowski said she has “no idea” whether she will eventually receive the remaining four years of funding from the five-year award.

Other researchers at the event said they were similarly unsure whether their canceled grants from the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies would be reinstated, though 16 states and various research and education groups are currently challenging the NSF terminations.

Some presenters had their individual grants or entire grant programs canceled because the Trump administration deemed them related to topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion or misinformation research. Other grants were part of a blanket termination of federal funding to Harvard University in May.

Tyssowski described the period since President Donald Trump’s executive order banning DEI as a “roller coaster.” NIH terminated the Pathway to Independence program within the brain research initiative early this year, and Tyssowski’s award ended in March before the second year of funding, with no notice or explanation from the agency. Tyssowski said she believes her award was canceled from both the overarching program’s termination and the separate blanket cancellation of federal grants to Harvard. The impact of the Harvard cancellations on the reinstatement of her grant is unclear.

“Every person I personally know who is not a white man that has a [Pathway to Independence] career transition award had their award terminated,” Tyssowski said.

The judge in the NIH lawsuits, William Young, said the terminations represent “racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. I would be blind not to call it out.” In Young’s opinion, released last week, he further states that acting on DEI bans when there is no operative definition of DEI is arbitrary and capricious.

Other researchers at the Democrats’ event noted that court cases are unlikely to result in the reinstatement of their funding because they work for public institutions in states that have not joined the lawsuits, many of which have Republican attorneys general. Principal investigator Overtoun Jenda said getting his NSF grant reinstated in court would require lawsuits from national organizations challenging all DEI-related grant terminations, since he works at Auburn University in Alabama, a state that has not joined the recent lawsuit on NSF’s terminations.

Currently, Jenda and his collaborators are aiming to get state funding for their project, which works to support disabled students studying STEM in higher education. The project spans 37 institutions in 19 states, some of which have laws against DEI, “especially in the South,” Jenda said.

“We survived because we’re getting our money from the federal government, and that also now has been taken away,” Jenda added.

Even though some of the states hosting their project might consider DEI a “bad word,” Jenda said, he argued that those states also generally support K-12 STEM engagement and special education efforts, of which he considers his project to be an extension. “What’s wrong with helping a student with a disability do well in physics?” he added. “How can we work with them to say, ‘Yes, you provide all these scholarships to the students or financial aid to students to come to our universities, but there’s no mentoring for them when they get to the university’?”

Tyssowski said there are few funding sources available to a late-stage postdoc such as herself. She plans to focus on finding a faculty position, a more difficult task now that she no longer has three years of funding from NIH and amid potentially limited hiring at universities.

“The thing I’m most concerned about is that I’m not going to be able to get a job because there will be no jobs. Or there’ll be a very small number of jobs, but every single person in my career stage is going to apply to them. So I think there’s probably a lot of people forced out of academia,” Tyssowski said.

House Science Democrats invited members of the press, science communication creators, and the public to Tuesday’s fair to learn about “the things we’ll never know.” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) said in his opening remarks, “The hard part about the politics of cutting science is that it’s hard to tell people what they’re missing out on. It’s hard to tell people, ‘Hey, this cancer would have been cured, but for this cut,’ right? Because we don’t see that in action. … It demonstrates not just the work that’s happening now, but the work that could have been done in the future, the entire industries that could have been created because of some of this work.”