A STAT analysis of National Institutes of Health spending shows that in the 2026 fiscal year, which ended Wednesday, the agency continued reducing grant awards involving health disparities, race, and ethnicity but made little progress toward other Trump administration priorities, including disbursing funds more evenly across the country and expanding support for early-career scientists.
While the agency, like last year, spent its entire external grants budget of roughly $34 billion after a slow start, the manner in which it did so is sowing deep uncertainty among researchers. In a survey and interviews, they said delays in the grant review process are slowing down the pace of their work, and making it difficult for them to propose and conduct the sort of innovative, impactful science that the NIH exists to support.
Overall, the agency funded around 58,000 projects, a slight drop from the 61,000 awarded during the 2025 fiscal year and well below the roughly 63,700 grants awarded annually in the years before the second Trump administration. Though this number may increase somewhat in the coming weeks because of reporting lags in the NIH grants database, the smaller number of grants potentially resulted from the White House’s push to fully fund more multiyear grants in advance, which meant that there was less funding on hand to issue new awards.Â
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