Cancer Disparity Researchers Say NIH Grant Cuts Have Hit 93% of Them, Per New AACR Survey

The Numbers

Rural Americans are 18% more likely to die from cancer overall than their urban counterparts. Black women are 35% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. Those figures come from a recent report by the American Association for Cancer Research, or AACR, the professional group that tracks cancer research trends nationwide.

The same AACR report surveyed 122 researchers, professors, scientists and students who study why those gaps exist and how to close them. The result: 93% said federal policy changes have affected their work.

Seventy-eight percent said they've been unable to apply for funding they would otherwise have pursued. Fifty-nine percent said ongoing research projects were disrupted. And 59% said the funding they lost specifically came from the National Institutes of Health.

What Got Cut

Mariana Stern, professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and chair of the AACR report committee, said the disruption went beyond paperwork delays. "Many medical trials were stopped in the middle, meaning those patients suddenly didn't receive the treatments they were getting, because the funding stopped," Stern said, according to NPR.

Data published in JAMA Oncology in November found that in roughly the first half of 2025, the Trump administration canceled 181 grants from the National Cancer Institute, a division of NIH. Those grants totaled more than $317 million. Many of them funded disparities research specifically.

Across the entire NIH, thousands of grants were terminated in 2025, according to Grant Witness, a non-profit that tracks grant terminations and funding changes at federal science agencies.

Why It Happened

The cuts trace to a January 2025 executive order from the Trump administration calling to end "radical" and "wasteful" DEI research. That's the administration's stated rationale, and an incoming administration has the authority to redirect research priorities.

The problem, according to Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, is the method and scale. Pierce described the cuts as a mass termination "for simply not moving forward priorities of a new administration," and said that under prior administrations, "termination was reserved as a very extreme remedy." She called the scale of this round unprecedented.

Redirecting future grant priorities is normal when administrations change. Cancelling active, already-awarded grants mid-trial, including studies on why Black women die from breast cancer at higher rates or why rural cancer patients face worse outcomes, is different. If a drug trial gets pulled halfway through, patients who were receiving treatment lose access to it.

The Legal Pushback

Many of the canceled NIH grants were restored after court challenges, according to the AACR report and NPR's reporting. Several court cases fought the terminations.

But the fight didn't end there. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, reported additional terminations since those court cases. Fewer new grants have gone out this year from both the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities compared to the same point in prior years. Pierce also described a "continued slowdown this year" in grant making and renewals.

What's Actually Disputed

The research community's complaint isn't that priorities shifted. It's that grants already awarded got cancelled without the kind of due process typically applied. Whether that reflects a legitimate housecleaning of ideologically driven projects or an overcorrection that swept up legitimate biomedical research along with it is something reasonable people can disagree on. Courts have been actively sorting through the issue case by case rather than in one sweeping ruling.

Scarlett Lin Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF who leads the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, said her registry received a cut she called "completely unprecedented" in the 53 years it has been funded through the NCI. She said she had to let go of about seven full-time employees last year and expects to let go five or six more this year.

Mortality gaps by race and geography are real, backed by data AACR compiles, and they didn't disappear because funding for the research studying them did. The open question is whether the administration's stated goal of cutting "wasteful" DEI spending can be pursued without halting active clinical trials mid-course, and whether new grant volume at NCI and the disparities institute will recover to prior levels.