Recently, Toni Antonucci, a senior researcher at the University of Michigan, received a $13 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). For decades, she and her colleagues had been running the National Study of American Life, studying the social determinants of health in preventing and treating Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias in Black and white Americans.

The proposal had received high priority scores from a panel of experts when it was first reviewed in the summer of 2024, and it was funded in February 2025. But less than two months later, all grant money to run the project was abruptly cut.

“Money was rescinded, as they say, at the highest level,” says Antonucci. “The administration no longer considers this an important priority.”

Antonucci’s experience is not unique. Researchers around the country are seeing funds for vital studies snatched away by the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the NIH and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which are the principal funding sources for psychological and medical research. As explained in the journal Science, the administration has severely slashed NIH’s and NSF’s budgets, defunded hundreds of research projects, and closed a majority of major research institutes.

Already, the fallout has been overwhelming. As an article in Nature reports, “The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has terminated nearly 800 research projects at a breakneck pace, wiping out significant chunks of funding to entire scientific fields.”

We at Greater Good rely heavily on the work of social scientists in everything we do, including our articles, books, podcasts, and programs. Research findings provide the evidence for the tips for well-being we offer free to the general public. Losing research like Antonucci’s and others’ means hampering our efforts to effectively help create a happier, healthier, more compassionate society for all.

As current research projects end and future research projects are stopped before they’ve started, it’s not just researchers or specific populations of people who suffer. All of us are losing out, because so many insights into health and well-being are tied to that research.

Taking aim at human diversity

According to a report in Nature and the NSF website, most research projects have lost funding because they reference diversity, equity, or inclusion efforts in some way. Researchers trying to uncover the effects of gender, ethnicity, or race on health and well-being, or those helping train scientists from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds, are now out of luck.

Like many others, Antonucci is trying to appeal the decision and save decades of research. She argues that her research is not just important for certain groups, but will reveal vulnerabilities to dementia that have relevance for everyone.

“What I do is designed to help people cope with their stresses, live a better life, increase their life satisfaction, and reduce their depressive symptomology. We’re trying to make life better for everybody,” she says.

Judy Moskowitz, vice chair for scientific and faculty development in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, is in a similar boat. She studies how positive psychological interventions help people cope with life stress, such as caregiving for ill family members or living with a chronic illness.

After years of research, she’s been able to show how her multicomponent intervention—which includes skills such as noticing and savoring positive events, gratitude, mindfulness, Self-compassion, and positive reappraisal, among others—increases resilience to stress in several contexts. She has even tested the intervention in the general public via a popular “resilience challenge” through NPR.

Yet in the first wave of grant terminations, her department lost 21 grants, throwing everything into chaos.

Faculty and staff in her department, which relies on NIH for the majority of its funding, are scrambling to find alternative ways to fund the work. Moskowitz is particularly concerned for her community partners who are especially vulnerable to these drastic cuts in federal funding.

“I’m very aware that these grants might be terminated any day,” she says.

Losing these grants won’t affect just her and her team, though it certainly is doing that. It also cuts short the promise of this intervention for helping thousands of people manage their stress down the line.

“Our program is based on 20 years of foundational work funded by NIH,” she says. “The drastic disruption of funding is detrimental not just to my own science but to programs across the behavioral and social science spectrum.”

Funding cuts hurt local economies

The fallout of these losses has been much more widespread than most people realize, affecting both “blue states” and “red states.” For example, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which houses a world-class biomedical research facility, has lost funding—in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth. Given that the university is the second-largest employer in the state, Alabamans are bound to see unemployment rates rise, which will hurt the state’s overall economy. The rest of us will lose out on the innovations that may have come out of their research.

According to Richard Sloan of Columbia University, a behavioral medicine researcher and NIH grant proposal reviewer, gutting research makes no sense at all—not only from a health care standpoint, but an economic one. For example, he says, when a project funded by the NIH succeeds, pharmaceutical companies may use that research to develop and market new drugs, which benefit those who are suffering and make a profit. Without that basic research being funded, people and businesses will suffer.

“The NIH is the world’s foremost biomedical research institute. For every dollar that’s spent by the NIH on research, there’s a return on investment from two to two and a half times to one,” he says. “It’s short-sighted and idiotic to defund that.”

He has watched from the sidelines as colleagues wait for expected funding to arrive only to be told it’s been rescinded. He has colleagues who have lost multiple grants at once, closing down vital research. From Sloan’s vantage point, what’s happening is a lose-lose situation that may take years to recover from.

“What the administration proposes to do with health and human services just makes no sense, even from their own personal interest,” he says. “What on earth is the justification for stopping research studies on cancer or Alzheimer’s?”

Lost research hurts all of us

To find out how the researchers we depend on are being affected by these cuts, Greater Good ran a quick poll. Of those we heard from, about 35% had lost funding, with another 24% expecting to lose funding in the coming year, based on their research goals. Many have had to stop their research projects midway or revise their research goals; some feel their future employment is at risk. Almost all are mystified, angry, or depressed about what’s happening.

Phil Cowan, a researcher at UC Berkeley and an advisor to Greater Good, has worked for decades to study how improving couples’ communication skills helps stabilize marriages, as well as how involving fathers in child-rearing leads to positive outcomes for children. His and Carolyn Cowan’s research has culminated in a 16-week intervention that helps individuals within couples improve their Mental health and stress management, while learning how to work through disagreements with partners in a collaborative manner.

Already, the intervention has proven successful at helping partners stay together and improving the outcomes for children in California and England. Now, it’s being tested in Oklahoma with lower- and middle-income couples. But the application to NSF for additional funding to continue the study has not yet come through, even though the project had been green-lit in 2015 and 2020. Cowan was told initially that he’d have an answer by last February, but that never happened.

“About two weeks ago, we got a notice saying the funding will appear on April 25th, a very specific date,” he says. “And here it is, April 29th, and there’s still no news, and nobody knows anything.”

This means the project is currently in limbo, apparently for political reasons, which makes little sense to Cowan. Studies that help couples and families stay together have been widely supported since the Bush administration, especially among Republicans, he says. If the project doesn’t receive funding, it will have to close down in September, hurting all of the people involved but especially the couples being served.

“This project sees about 200 families a year, and over the course of the project, it’s more like a thousand families,” says Cowan. “Oklahoma families that have been benefiting from this are really going to miss out, because there just aren’t other services like this in Oklahoma City right now.”

Obliterating a generation of researchers

I spoke with another prominent university researcher, whom I’ll call “Cindy” to protect her anonymity. Many researchers requested name changes or wouldn’t go on the record for fear of retaliation, which itself speaks volumes about the current atmosphere in science. Cindy is devastated by what funding losses will mean for her projects, which focus on women’s health. Though her own study had not been defunded as of our interview, a post-doctoral student in her department had her study grant abruptly cancelled.
 
This is a huge loss to the student, for sure. But it’s also a loss to the department, the university, and the public at large, says Cindy. To even get to the point of being an independent researcher receiving your own grant usually takes at least five to six years of specialized training after college—meaning all of that investment may be for naught. If her post-doc decides to leave the field entirely, along with others who’ve lost funding, it may have severe consequences.
 
“Defunding junior investigators will obliterate a whole generation of researchers, creating a gap we may never recover from,” says Cindy.
 
As Cindy notes, it takes years to complete studies, including the initial development, peer review of grants, optimization of the research design, data collection, analysis, and, finally, publication. Losing a grant at any point in this process is devastating.
 
“If the termination of funding comes during any one of those stages, except publication, the research project is dead in the water and discoveries will not be made, even if it took 10 years and many millions of dollars to put together,” she says.
 
And, of course, defunding research means none of us will gain the insights that the research would have provided. Ongoing, longitudinal cohort studies, which follow people over decades, sometimes from birth, have taught us so much about the factors that create health, longevity, and resilience. We don’t need fewer of those studies, says Cindy—we need more.
 
“Research on women’s health, Mental health, and interventions is already very understudied,” she says. “If we lose these life-course studies, we could end an invaluable resource and never gain the insights from studying critical life periods, like puberty, menopause, retirement, disease, and mortality.”

We need research to understand ourselves

Another researcher I’ll call “Jim” studies discrimination and how to counter it. He expects changing funding priorities to put a chill on research like his that’s focused on specific populations, like people of color or gender-diverse groups. Already, his post-doctoral graduate students, who receive funding not just for research but to support their education, are reconsidering their future careers.

“I expect to see less interest in the work that I do around discrimination and stigma because people are going to feel like it’s not something they could get jobs with down the road,” he says.

All of these changes in funding priorities could mean losing important granular information that we need at Greater Good. As we’ve reported many times through the years, psychological interventions are not universally applicable, and it’s important to understand how and why.

For example, research has found that expressing gratitude is not as effective at increasing happiness in some populations as in others. Research studies tell us how discrimination affects the health and well-being of young Black Americans, as well as other ethnic or racial groups, and what can be done about it. Research reveals how an unfair division of shared labor in marital relationships affects both men and women’s happiness. And research is what helps us understand the unique health care issues women face and how they can better manage stress in childbirth or get more sleep, just to name a few examples.

Many researchers I interviewed mentioned people they knew who were thinking of quitting the field or already had. Others I wanted to interview wouldn’t go on the record for fear of losing an appeal to their funding cuts or for making themselves or their institution more visible. Jim told me he took his name off of a major paper he’d been working on for years for that very reason.

“I wouldn’t want my name to get on some website or some list of ‘troublemakers’ that need to be gone after,” he says.

Where to go from here

While Antonucci understands people’s fears, she felt safe to share her own experience because of her long tenure and being close to retirement. She still worries about the loss to medical science and about how privileging some lines of research over others will affect the integrity of science going forward.

“We scientists believe in collecting data, whether it supports our hypotheses or not. But this administration seems to be saying to only collect the data that will support what they want it to support,” says Antonucci. “That’s not science.”

No one I spoke with had solutions for how to manage the “brain drain” happening before our eyes. It remains to be seen how bad the damage will be and whether or not some of the grant cancellations will be reversed.

In the meantime, it’s important for all of us to pay attention to what’s happening and do whatever we can to protest the loss of this vital resource. As Sloan noted, Harvard has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, which other universities are watching closely. If Harvard prevails, perhaps others will follow suit. 

Whatever happens at the legal level, we, as a society, deserve to have the research that will help us live healthier, happier lives—no matter our ethnicity, race, or gender; no matter our wealth; and no matter our political identity. If we all recognize what this basic research means to us all, it could be a first step toward building a movement to fight back.