After the mass terminations of science and health grants at NSF and NIH in 2025, and then CDC and SAMHSA in early 2026, terminations of science grants have been quiet, even as the number of new grants has slowed to a trickle.
This appears to be changing at the National Science Foundation. Earlier this month, we detected the first outright termination of a NSF grant since last year. In addition, NSF is starting to use new mechanisms to disrupt research programs. As reported by Berkeleyside and Nature, 18 NSF grants to researchers at UC Berkeley were “suspended” in April, based on claims of insufficient disclosure of foreign funding. Researchers claim to be baffled as they have received no foreign funding. You can view these 18 grants now in our database. They span a wide range of topics, grant types, and directorates.
The May termination appears to target the kind of diversity topics the administration has been trying to suppress. The April Berkeley suspensions do not. Rather, they appear to use a new strategy to target UC Berkeley or the University of California, whose faculty has successfully fought back terminations in court, broadly and opportunistically. Two of the 18 suspended grants, in fact, were terminated in 2025, then restored by court order in Thakur v. Trump.
We need your help to continue to track these grant disruptions. “Suspensions” of the type experienced by UC Berkeley researchers do not appear in our data sources. Even if the suspensions are indefinite, they are not “final actions” and thus are not reported in public grant records. Other such disruptions may be occurring quietly in institutions across the country as the government tries new strategies to evade legal restrictions and oversight. NSF has not updated its public list of terminated grants since June 2025. If you are a researcher that has been affected by a new grant disruption, or know of one, please report it via our form, email, or Signal. Your reports help us track the administration’s actions and advocate for affected researchers and the public being denied the benefits of their science.
