Federal funding cuts continue to rattle Chicago’s scientific community
Fact checked by Jim Lacy
Michelle Birkett, PhD, a Northwestern University psychologist, wanted to find out how infectious diseases spread through under-resourced communities.
Her vision was grand: She’d need to interview thousands of people across multiple cities to get a true picture of their realities.
It’s not easy work; this type of research takes mountains of coordination, trust-building, analysis, and distillation. But Birkett’s results could have a big impact, helping to inform policy decisions that directly affect marginalized people.
In search of support, Birkett submitted a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in October 2023. The following July, she heard back: The NIH believed in and would support her project with a nearly $4 million grant. Birkett remembers feeling elated and relieved to receive funding.
“It was my dream project,” she says.
By March of 2025, she was set up to gather information from 2,700 study participants across five cities. Finally, she could start.
Or could she?
One day, three weeks before data collection was slated to start, Birkett received an email from Michelle G. Bulls, director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration at NIH, informing her that her grant had been terminated. After more than a year of planning, preparation, and a formal notice of award sent to Northwestern, the project’s funding suddenly disappeared.
“Terminations don’t happen unless you’re doing something explicitly wrong, so this was really uncalled for,” Birkett says. “It was really hard.”
NIH grants have long funded landmark discoveries, from identifying ticks as the source of Lyme disease to advancing treatments for sickle cell disease. Federal funding also supports research on Covid-19, cancer, and mental health — work that requires sustained investment.
The grants also generate economic returns. In 2024, Illinois institutions received $1.23 billion in NIH funding, according to United for Medical Research, a coalition of institutions pushing for more federal research funding. That investment supported more than 15,500 jobs statewide.
A tidal wave of disinvestment
Birkett was the first at Northwestern to receive a grant termination letter, but soon dozens of researchers across Chicago-area institutions received similar notices. The Trump administration determined that a range of health research — from medical science to public health — no longer aligned with federal priorities.
Researchers nationwide halted projects, laid off staff, and scrambled to reassess plans when the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), began revoking or delaying funding in January 2025. Projects focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility faced particular scrutiny.
While funding priorities often shift between administrations, many affected proposals had already completed peer review and received approval. Suspending or rescinding multiyear awards already in progress was unprecedented. Nationally, the cuts totaled at least $643 million.
Anna Culbertson, a former NIH employee, points to the agency’s reach. “The NIH is the largest biomedical research funder in the world,” she says. “It also funds small businesses and helps getproducts from the benchtop to the bedside.”
After losing her job, Culbertson founded the nonprofit 27 UNIHTED to support laid-off NIH employees and raise awareness of the funding cuts. “The whole system is broken because of the heavy influence of politicization into science through censorship, multiyear funding, and misinformation,” she says.
Timothy Koh, PhD, a kinesiologist and nutritionist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studies diabetic foot ulcers, says he has noticed that grant funding has declined sharply. “From heart disease to diabetes to cancer, the number of grants has been substantially reduced,” he says.
Economic toll
Joanna Buscemi, PhD, associate dean for clinical education and health initiatives at DePaul University, compares grant recipients to small businesses. “They hire project managers and all the staff. They provide funding to incentivize the participants,” she says. “[NIH funding] is a big source of jobs in the state of Illinois, and a lot of those jobs are disappearing when you cancel these grants.”
Buscemi co-authored a position statement for the Society of Behavioral Medicine, published in Translational Behavioral Medicine, outlining the health and economic consequences of the cuts. “If the experts don’t grab the mic, then somebody else will,” she says.
The Illinois Economic Policy Institute estimates that by the end of Trump’s second term, funding reductions could shrink the state’s economy by $10 billion and eliminate 86,000 jobs.
As 2025 progressed, researchers informed graduate students and postdoctoral fellows that funding had evaporated. Some, like Koh, joined advocacy efforts such as Stand Up for Science. Others, including Gregory Phillips II, PhD, an epidemiologist at Northwestern who studies health disparities, sought foundation support after losing federal grants. Competition intensified as more scientists pursued limited money.
Phillips and Birkett joined lawsuits to reinstate their funding. In both cases, the judge ordered the funding restored, but not before Phillips reduced his team from 20 staff members to four.
“When the stuff you spent 15 to 20 years doing is no longer fundable, how do you pivot in a way that makes sense?” he says. “We’re all struggling with that.”
In January, Congress approved $27.9 billion for NIH in fiscal year 2026, a $415 million increase from the prior year, despite earlier proposals to slash funding. CDC received $9.2 billion, the same as the previous year.
Still, uncertainty persists. Abby Tighe, a former CDC employee who founded the National Public Health Coalition and Fired But Fighting — groups that identify CDC funding cuts — is worried about where the money will go. “We’re concerned that the staffing language in [the federal appropriations] bill is just going to lead to this administration hiring bodies just to put into these spots,” she says. “They’re not going to hire experts.”
Seeking stability
Linda Forst, MD, an environmental and occupational health sciences researcher at UIC, directs one of the CDC’s 12 Centers for Agricultural Safety and Health. After learning that her research on migrant workers would be paused, she later received notice that her funding would proceed.
If her federal support disappears, she says, “it curtails a huge training program that serves employers and workers across the U.S.”
Many Chicago researchers remain wary.
“I’ve been writing NIH grants for 25 years, and this is the most chaotic and worst situation that we’ve come under,” Koh says. “I don’t think the universities really have the resources to deal with the chaos that it causes.”
Birkett is preparing to relaunch her study this spring. If anything, she feels the work is even more important now because fewer people are doing it. But the funding chaos has forced her to think beyond data collection.
“Despite wanting to push forward the study as we originally intended, we’re also thinking about how to keep everyone’s positions and jobs, thinking about grant writing, thinking about how we fund ourselves. How do I give people stability?”
She remains concerned about the future. “If scientists are saying that these are important things to study, and you’re going through peer review successfully, and numerous individuals are agreeing this is important, that should be what the standard is — not some administration saying that certain populations or certain keywords are no longer appropriate to study,” she says. “That’s just completely against science.”
In February, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind $600 million in CDC funding from Illinois, California, Colorado, and Minnesota — all Democrat-led states. The grants support state and local public health departments and nonprofit organizations, funding disease response, staffing, and data modernization.
Among the proposed cuts: $7.2 million from the American Medical Association in Illinois and $5.2 million from Lurie Children’s Hospital for HIV prevention.
