These are the health research grants nixed by the Trump administration

“On a human level, this is a shock, with real personal fallout,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiovascular medicine specialist at Yale School of Medicine and among the four authors of the study, which was published in the medical journal JAMA. “Over the long term, the message being sent is one of retreat from full-throated support for science and scientists.”

While President Trump has used federal funding as a cudgel in an attempt to force elite universities like Harvard and Columbia to change what his administration says are left-wing and antisemitic policies, the new analysis highlights the broad swath of research institutions affected. They include some 210 medical schools, cancer centers, hospital systems, historically Black colleges, and public and private universities from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas.

“The big takeaway is that institutions of all stripes have been affected by these cuts in some way,” said Michael Liu, a Harvard Medical School student and coauthor of the study.

The Trump administration’s assault on biomedical research began in February with a flurry of executive orders targeting research related to diversity and transgender identity, which the administration called “woke ideology.” Yet it quickly expanded to include federally funded studies covering an array of topics, from the COVID-19 pandemic to teen mental health and HIV prevention.

But the breadth of those cuts and their impact on medical research have been unclear. That’s because the White House has not provided a comprehensive accounting of the grant terminations. Individual researchers have scrambled to fill the information void by cobbling together data on scrapped grants from a hodgepodge of sources — including government spreadsheets, cancellation notices to researchers, social media, and interviews. Complicating such efforts is that new grant terminations have piled up each week, while some canceled grants have been reinstated.

Yet without a full accounting of the cuts, policy makers and research institutions have struggled to respond. The lack of transparency may also have fueled the perception that the cuts were focused primarily on diversity or transgender topics when in fact they are far broader, said Scott Delaney, a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who developed a website for tracking grant terminations and was not involved in the new study.

“It’s absolutely vital for people to know exactly how these [grant terminations] will play out in the real world and exactly what is being cut,” Delaney said. “Generally speaking, when we think of DEI or transgender research, we don’t think of research into cancer or HIV prevention.”

Frustrated by the lack of reliable data, Liu, Krumholz, and their colleagues in late March undertook their own analysis.

They found spreadsheets of all terminated grants at the the US Department of Health and Human Services on a government website known as TAGGS, Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System. They then developed a statistical code to categorize the grants by awarding institutes and centers. Finally, they linked the data with the NIH RePorter, an online repository of NIH grant information, to tally up the number of grants and the total funding terminated.

What they found was staggering.

All told, 694 NIH grants were terminated across 24 of the 26 institutes and centers at the NIH that administer grants. Those affected include the renowned National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Aging, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The biggest cuts were at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which terminated $505 million in grants. Yet in percentage terms, the cuts were deepest at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which slashed nearly 30 percent of all grants between late February and April 8, the researchers found.

The largest number of terminated grants were at the National Institute of Mental Health, where 128 grants were canceled.

Because the study focuses solely on NIH grant cancelations, and not new grants, it still does not encompass the full scope of the cuts unfolding at federal health agencies. In addition to the grant cancellations, the NIH has scaled back its awards of new grants by at least $2.3 billion since the beginning of the year — a 28 percent contraction in its funding, according to a recent analysis by STAT, the Globe’s sister publication. The new study also does not include grants that have been frozen en masse at major universities. Last month, the Trump administration moved to freeze more than 2.2 billion in grants and contracts to Harvard University after the school refused to give the government more control over academic decisions.

While most of the canceled grants affected existing research projects, about 20 percent of the grant terminations were for training, fellowship, or early career development programs — which are vital for young people entering biomedical research, the authors said. The study found that 139 of 694 of the terminated grants were training grants, which support early-career researchers and are sometimes used to promote diversity in the sciences.

“It was really jarring to see that one in five of these grants were for early career researchers,” said Kushal Kadakia, a Harvard Medical School student and study coauthor. “Because no matter what your philosophy is on science or on what scientific priorities should be, I think everyone has a common priority of making sure the US is the world’s leader in health care research, and that doesn’t happen if you cut off the pipeline.”

Chris Serres can be reached at chris.serres@globe.com. Follow him @ChrisSerres.