Ohio agencies, universities lose millions in health research funding: What’s at stake?

COLUMBUS, Ohio – LGBTQ youth suicide reduction, improving the state’s outdated infectious disease reporting database and development of tuberculosis vaccines are among the hundreds of millions of dollars in health and medical research funding for Ohio that the federal government has axed in recent months.

Scientists, doctors and people who support them are worried. They say the cuts – expected to be in the billions nationwide by the time the administration of President Donald Trump is done – will result in job losses for those who work in research or public health. Grant terminations will constrict the economy, since companies depend on government-funded research to make medicines, vaccines and devices. And an entire generation of young scientists could be lost as new research opportunities dry up.

“We need these federal grants in order to continue this work,” said Sara Kilpatrick, Ohio executive director of American Association of University Professors. “You’ve heard from professors, doctors, other researchers that people will die as a result of this research not going through.”

RELATED STORY: At least $321.8M in federal medical research grants terminated in Ohio under Trump

Since Trump took office, about $321.8 million in health and medical funding has been cut in Ohio alone. Some of the projects were for LGBTQ research that Republicans have opposed.

The feds terminated $815,881 from Ohio State University researchers who were to evaluate the success of suicide reduction efforts in LGBTQ youth. Another project at Case Western Reserve University looked at the health and biology of gender-affirming vaginoplasties, from which $116,154.10 was terminated.

But what bewilders Dr. Stephen Carpenter, an infectious disease physician and faculty member at Case and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, is why his research on the immune response to a certain type of tuberculosis has been frozen for 90 days. He also hasn’t heard back from federal officials since January on a separate tuberculosis grant needed to fund his lab.

“Tuberculosis research, I can’t imagine why they would want to specifically target that,” he said.

Case’s immune response research will help with the development of a more effective vaccine for what’s known as mycobacterium tuberculosis, Carpenter said. The team at Case is collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard, which is leading the study and received the $60 million, seven-year grant. Case officials expect to get $6 million to $7 million total from the work, which began in 2019.

“That money with the contact being frozen is not available for our institution in Cleveland,” he said. “It just puts jobs at risk.”

The last he heard from the National Institutes of Health on the separate project that directly funds his lab, officials were working with the U.S. Department of State for approvals, which are necessary because the project uses specimens from volunteers in Uganda through a 35-year collaboration Case has had with the country. The collaboration with a university there is essential because Uganda has a larger population with TB and HIV than can be found in the U.S., he said.

His lab is busy and needs the grant money.

“I have three graduate students, I have a post-doctoral fellow, I have two technicians,” Carpenter said. “I have some other funding sources right now, and institutional funds, which will end this year. As long as my grant can be funded sometime this year, I think we’ll be okay. But if not, it becomes a very difficult situation.”

The Trump administration is attempting to trim government bloat, through cuts across dozens of agencies. But the results could be damaging to the economy.

United for Medical Research, a group made up of universities and organizations such as the American Cancer Society, released a report in March showing every $1 in NIH research created $2.56 in new economic activity.

“It makes no sense to pinch pennies on something that’s really high-yield like medical research and runs really lean,” Carpenter said. “In research labs, we do everything ourselves. In a company you may have multiple people for one job you might have in academic research.”

In 2023, the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of NIH, requested applications for projects that would examine genomes of diverse populations, since most genomic research has been based on populations of European origins, said Dana Crawford, a professor in the Case School of Medicine and associate director for Community and Population Research and Outreach at the Cleveland Institute for Computational Biology.

Crawford applied for a two-year grant – considered relatively short for scientific research – to look at a gene called APOL1 after exposure to lead and cadmium. The gene is associated with changes that can cause kidney disease.

People of African descent disproportionately get kidney disease. Crawford has been studying the gene in Black Americans of West African dissent, she said.

She said she received an email April 15 that in part said:

“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to DEI. Research programs based primarily on artificial and not scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance the length in life or reduce illness. Worse are so-called diversity, equity and inclusion, ‘DEI,’ studies often used to support unlawful discrimination on the bases of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”

But NIH had itself called for the study of non-whites under the prior administration. And when applying for federal funding, if a scientist is not going to include women and minorities in the medical research, they must offer a valid scientific explanation as to why, she said.

The grant was for $437,443. The grant works as a funding reimbursement. She and Case officials have submitted expenses for just $52,756.50 in reimbursements thus far. Crawford could lose up to $384,686.50 if she doesn’t spend it by the end of July. The project originally was supposed to end on Aug. 31, 2026.

Crawford expects she will have to return much of the money.

“Typically, it takes us a while to do the research, so no way I want to finish the project by the end of July 2025,” she said.

A post-doctorate fellow will not be allowed to work on the project past July. Crawford said she has colleagues in her department who have enough funding to provide work for the fellow, who otherwise would have been let go.

At Case, professors are expected to get a level of outside funding that will cover 70% of their salaries, she said. Not every department’s faculty can achieve this, but it can be doable for scientists using federal research grants.

“Faculty are very worried that we’re going to get to a point where there’s not enough money coming in to support all faculty, even if you’re tenured,” she said.

Crawford was notified of another federal cut for a program she co-directed at Case, called the Post Baccalaureate Research Education Program, or PREP. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences offered college graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds or from undergraduate schools without extensive research a one-year, paid internship if they were interested in pursuing a doctoral degree to become a scientist. The idea was that the year of research would make them more competitive in their graduate school applications.

The administration cut the program, she said, deeming it to be DEI.

Case has participated in the national program for 18 years. The school was up for a five-year, $2.7 million renewal that would have paid for 30 students, or six a year, she said.

Crawford said the program was successful in producing scientists. Case recipients went on to get PhDs, and joint MD/PhD degrees at universities across the country.

“We are losing a generation of scientists,” she said. “…There will be an age-group missing from scientists 20 years from now because of this disruption in funding. There’s zero investment in some of these future scientists right now. They will go on to do other things because there’s just no support for them.”

Carpenter, the tuberculosis researcher, has the same concern about future scientists. He is worried that young would-be researchers are exploring other careers as they read about funding disappearing.

“If the same thing (funding cuts) keeps going year after year you end up losing – not to sound cliché – but you end up losing like a generation of people that would have gone into research,” he said.

The U.S. system for funding scientific research has been the envy of others around the globe, Crawford said, and no other country or private foundation can make up the loss.

“In terms of research loss, I can’t quantify,” she said. “What would have been the innovation? Science builds upon other science. Right now we’re stagnant in producing that science that future science will need to propel us forward in innovative ways that we can’t even think of right now.”