At least 60% of the federal health research grants terminated in Colorado earlier this year are officially back on, though some scientists say the delay has thrown off their ability to test out their ideas and train new researchers.
The National Institutes of Health canceled 53 grants to Colorado institutions earlier this year, representing more than $2 million in lost funding, according to the volunteer tracking group Grant Witness.
The Trump administration prioritized ending funding for projects related to diversity, equity and inclusion, with an emphasis on research about health disparities affecting people of color and LGBTQ people.
Of the grants terminated in Colorado, only two are still definitively over: one at Denver Health to study vaccine hesitancy and one at the University of Denver examining how same-sex couples’ health changes when they get married.
The Denver Post confirmed 31 grants have been reinstated, though in a handful of cases, researchers said they hadn’t yet received the money, or couldn’t move forward because their partners’ funding was still on hold.
Three grant-funded programs had already reached the end of their awards, and in 17 cases, neither the university nor the researchers involved would confirm whether their grants were back on.
Grant recipients who spoke to The Post said they couldn’t comment on their employers’ behalf, and emphasized that others’ experiences with termination and reinstatement may be different.
Colorado had a high percentage of its grants reinstated because it sued the NIH alongside 15 other states, said Scott Delaney, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health and co-founder of Grant Witness.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the NIH to start paying the grants again to public universities in those states. The University of Denver is a private school, and therefore doesn’t fall under the order.
Even if a grant is reinstated on paper, that doesn’t mean the federal government is sending the payments as scheduled, Delaney said. The NIH has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to stop funding grants while the lawsuit in Massachusetts plays out, meaning that researchers could find themselves out of money again in the near future.
“The federal government can kind of cripple a grant in a number of ways,” he said.
‘We still can’t restart’
Dr. Lisa Abuogi, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, recently got word that her grant to study ways of serving pregnant and postpartum women dealing with both HIV and common mental health conditions was reinstated.
But Kenya Medical Research Institute, the institution she’s partnering with, still hasn’t received its NIH grant, she said.
“In effect, we still can’t restart the work,” she said.
People with HIV who are also dealing with untreated anxiety or depression are less likely to keep up with the treatment regimen that protects their own health and prevents them from passing the virus to their unborn children or uninfected partners.
The study was testing whether people who aren’t mental health clinicians could effectively help the women with less-severe needs, Abuogi said. That question is important, both in low-resource countries like Kenya and in the U.S., which is looking for more cost-effective alternatives to referring everyone to psychiatrists, she said.
Researchers won’t receive additional time to complete their projects, meaning some will have to speed up the pace.
Dr. Heather Littleton, director of research operations at the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience at CU Colorado Springs, is testing whether a group program for LGBTQ teens and their parents can help prevent dating violence.
She said the news that her grant was gone came when she was about a quarter of the way through recruiting 80 families to participate. She and her staff offered the curriculum to those who’d already signed up, then shut down their work.
“When we lost the funding, we assumed the funding was gone; we’re never going to get it back,” she said. “Now we’re scrambling again.”
Littleton was able to rehire the staff she’d had to lay off, and now they’re trying to find families with kids between 15 and 18 who identify as gender or sexual minorities as quickly as possible. They need at least 40 families by October to have a good chance of figuring out whether the group curriculum is successful. Generally, programs aimed at heterosexual teens don’t improve outcomes for those who are LGBTQ, she said.
“We’re trying the best we can to support this work and keep it going,” she said.
‘Doesn’t matter how good my science is’
The terminations targeted projects focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as “diversity supplements,” which pay for labs already working on NIH grants to train additional researchers from underrepresented groups.
Beth Tamburini, an associate professor on the Anschutz campus, said her lab temporarily lost funding for a student working on her Ph.D., who was studying how proteins in the liver behave. The lab was able to shift some funding around to avoid firing her, but if the funding hadn’t returned, the student would have had to shift her focus to a slightly different project, she said.
The student had to complete an extensive process to show her project deserved funding, Tamburini said. She qualified to apply because she was the first in her family to complete high school or college, and people whose parents have less education are underrepresented in science.
“That’s what these (grants) are meant for, to help scientists take under their wing people who haven’t had the same opportunities,” she said.
Dominique Ramirez, a doctoral student at CU Boulder who researches how proteins work together in cell division — and how the process can go awry in cancerous cells — said the lab where he works had to ration chemicals for experiments and cut back on DNA sequencing to keep paying his salary after the grant funding him disappeared.
If a judge hadn’t restored the funding, the lab would have had to abandon plans to bring on another student researcher, he said.
“It only serves to weaken the U.S.’s ability to do strong, impactful work,” he said.
Charlie Moffatt, a graduate student on the Anschutz campus studying how the genetic material that directs the body to make proteins moves around within cells, said their diversity grant also temporarily landed on the chopping block.
Moffatt, who is nonbinary and has a disability, said the experience has changed their plans for training. They have dual citizenship in the U.S. and Canada because their father is Canadian, and they are considering applying for research positions there because of the more stable political environment.
“It doesn’t matter how good my science is, because I fall under this (diversity supplement) group,” they said. “I’m having to look at really different options.”
Even so, Moffatt said they were relatively lucky because the lab where they work found funds to avoid letting them go. Other young researchers had to move on from science if their labs didn’t have another funding source, and they couldn’t go without a paycheck for months, they said.
“It’s really upsetting to see so many people lose their opportunity to make the world better,” they said.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get health news sent straight to your inbox.