They Cut $2.7 Billion from Medical Research. You're About to Pay for It.

3,200 terminated grants. 74,000 stranded trial participants. NIH funding at a 25-year low. A wound care doctor explains who actually gets the invoice.

By Eric Lullove, DPM, CWSP, MAPWCA, FFPM RCPS(Glasg)

Chief executive and medical officer, West Boca Center for Wound Healing, Coconut Creek, Florida | Contributing medical editor, Blue Amp Media

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I want you to picture someone. Let’s call her Margaret. She’s 67. She’s a retired schoolteacher from central Florida—the kind of woman who packed lunches every morning for thirty years without complaint and never once called in sick. She found a lump. She found it in the shower on a Tuesday morning in November, and now she’s sitting in my colleague’s office, terrified, being told that the clinical trial she qualified for—the one that might have given her a real fighting chance against a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer—has been shut down.

Not because the science didn’t work. Not because the drug failed. Because the funding was pulled. Because someone in Washington decided the National Institutes of Health needed to be trimmed like fat off a spreadsheet.

Margaret isn’t a hypothetical. She is every patient I’ve ever known. She is your mother. She might be you.

And I think it’s time we had a real conversation about what that actually costs—not in policy language or budget jargon, but in real, human terms. In dollars and years and the quiet devastation of diseases that didn’t have to get this bad.

We are not cutting “government waste.” We are cutting the pipeline between a scientist’s breakthrough and your survival. Those are not the same thing.

Let’s Start with the Numbers

I’ll be upfront: numbers alone don’t move people. But context does. So let me give you both.

In the first three months of 2025 alone, the Trump administration effectively cut $2.7 billion in NIH funding, terminating more than 3,200 research grants compared to the same period the year before. [1] That’s not a proposal on a whiteboard. That already happened. Those dollars are gone. And the consequences are only now beginning to surface.

And then there’s what’s proposed for next year. The FY2026 White House budget called for a 40% cut—an $18 billion reduction—that would push NIH to the lowest inflation-adjusted funding level in 25 years. [3] Congress pushed back hard on the full cut, but the damage already done in 2025 is real and not reversible with a press release.

Sit with that phrase: the lowest level in 25 years. While the diseases we’re fighting—the cancers, the dementias, the diabetic complications that fill my wound care clinic every day—have only gotten more complex, more expensive, and more prevalent. The math here is not complicated. The consequences are not distant. They are already arriving.

A Wound Care Doctor’s Honest Assessment

I’ve spent more than twenty years standing over wounds—wounds that should never have gotten this bad, that represent years of undertreated disease, financial stress, and delayed care. And there’s something I tell my residents, something that sounds almost too simple, but that I’ve never once seen disproved in clinical practice: the most expensive patient is the one who didn’t get help six months ago.

That’s what NIH cuts do at a systemic level. They are the policy equivalent of ignoring an infection until it becomes sepsis. You close your eyes, call it “efficiency,” rename the agencies—and for a while, nothing looks visibly different. The labs are still lit. The researchers still show up. The patients in the trials still get their infusions.

And then, one by one, the lights go out.

Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins—the man who helped lead the Human Genome Project, who served under three presidents—put it plainly: “When you’re talking about medical research, when you’re talking about people’s lives, when you’re talking about clinical trials for Alzheimer’s or cancer that may take three or four years, you can’t just go in and decide, ‘I’m going to shut those down and maybe I’ll try something else.’ Those are people’s lives at risk.” [4]

He also made the return-on-investment case that should appeal to anyone who balks at the cost of science: every dollar the NIH invested in 2024 returned $2.56 in economic activity within the year. [5] Over the past decade, NIH funding has driven more than $822 billion in new economic activity and supported 3.7 million jobs. [5]

So when someone tells you cutting NIH saves money—with the most respectful version of physician directness I can muster—they are wrong. It doesn’t save money. It defers it. It transfers it. It multiplies it. And it drops it on you.

In wound care, we say: “Dead tissue doesn’t heal.” You cannot revive a research program with a press release after you’ve let it bleed out. And you cannot undo the science that never happened.

The Hidden Tax on Your Family

Here’s what this means to you personally—not as a citizen, but as someone who has a body, a family, and a future medical bill you haven’t gotten yet.

Let me walk you through one disease—Alzheimer’s—because it illustrates what happens when research stalls and care costs compound.

Alzheimer’s and related dementias are projected to cost the U.S. health care system $409 billion in 2026 alone. That’s direct health and long-term care—not counting the $446 billion in unpaid family caregiving hours provided by nearly 13 million Americans who quit jobs, defer their own health care, and exhaust their savings to keep a loved one alive and dignified. [7] By 2050, total care costs are projected to reach nearly $1 trillion per year. [7]

The National Institute on Aging—where Alzheimer’s and dementia research lives—is facing a proposed 45.5% cut in grant funding and a 24.5% reduction in research center support. [3]

We were getting closer to something real. Disease-modifying therapies. Earlier detection. Drugs that might actually slow the disease—not just manage the symptoms. And now those labs are dark, those researchers are updating their résumés, and the cost of care will keep climbing while the pipeline of solutions runs dry.

The same math plays out in cancer. In diabetes. In heart disease—a disease where, because of NIH-funded research over decades, deaths have dropped by roughly 75%. [4] That progress didn’t happen automatically. It happened because a generation of scientists, funded year after year by the NIH, showed up and did the work. Gut the funding, and the next generation of progress doesn’t happen. It’s that direct.

Who Pays When the Research Stops?

You do. Your family does. That’s the honest answer, and I think you deserve to hear it plainly.

When a disease that could have been caught in stage I is caught in stage IV instead, the cost difference isn’t marginal. For breast cancer, early-stage treatment costs roughly $60,000 to $100,000. Late-stage metastatic treatment can exceed $300,000 per patient—before accounting for home health care, lost income, and the family members who have to leave work to become full-time caregivers.

When we defund research, we don’t save money. We finance a catastrophe on an installment plan—with the payments pushed far enough into the future that the people who made this decision won’t be in office when the bill comes due. But you will be. Your kids will be.

This is also a workforce story that doesn’t get told enough. Every canceled NIH grant isn’t just a failed experiment. It’s a researcher who spent eight years in training—who chose this path because they believed that figuring out why cells go wrong matters more than a bigger paycheck—now applying for jobs in Europe or leaving science entirely. You can’t pause a scientific career and pick it up three years later. That institutional knowledge, those research networks, those methodologies honed over decades—they scatter. They don’t come back on demand.

This isn’t fiscal responsibility. This is fiscal cowardice dressed up as reform. And the invoice is already being written—in your name.

Clinical Trials Aren’t Light Switches

I want to come back to those 74,000 people in interrupted trials, because I don’t think that number lands the way it should.

Seventy-four thousand people. That’s not a statistic. That’s a stadium full of people who volunteered—who signed consent forms and showed up for appointments and, in some cases, let researchers implant devices or give them experimental drugs—because they believed the research mattered. They trusted the system.

Dr. Vishal Patel of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who led the JAMA Internal Medicine study, put it clearly: “If you pause an experiment, especially when it comes to experiments involving drugs and patients where you need a consistent dose over time and consistent measurements, it’s possible that you just screwed up the entire research.” [8]

Some of those patients lost access to their medication. Some were left with unmonitored implants. Some participated in trials whose results will now never be published. And the researchers at the Rhode Island Public Health Institute? “I panicked,” said Dr. Amy Nunn, a professor at Brown University School of Public Health. “I was worried we might lose everything.” [8]

The knowledge that those 383 trials would have generated—about what works and what doesn’t, about how to improve population health, about how to catch disease earlier and treat it better—that knowledge is gone. As Dr. Nunn said: “The knowledge that we would have had about how we can enhance population health through those clinical trials will be lost.” [8]

That’s the part that keeps me up at night. Not just the people in those trials today, but the ones in twenty years who won’t have a treatment—because the research that should have produced it was shut down in 2025.

What You Can Actually Do

A practical plan—because outrage without direction doesn’t heal anything.

I don’t write pieces like this to leave you sitting in helpless anger. That’s not medicine. That’s not useful. So let me give you something concrete—real steps, real tools, real ways to push back in your own life and community. Some of these take five minutes. Some take more. All of them matter.

1. Know What’s at Stake in Your State

NIH funding doesn’t just live in Bethesda, Maryland. It flows to universities, research hospitals, and medical centers in every congressional district in the country. The United for Medical Research tool at unitedformedicalresearch.org lets you look up exactly how much NIH funding your state receives and how many jobs it supports. When you call your congressman, this number is the most powerful sentence you can say: “NIH funding supports X jobs and $X million in our district—and you’re voting to cut it.”

2. Call—Not Email—Your Representatives

Emails get logged and ignored. Phone calls get counted and reported. Call both of your U.S. senators and your House member. Find their numbers at congress.gov/members/find-your-member. Keep it simple: “I’m a constituent. I’m calling because I’m concerned about cuts to NIH research. I want my representative to oppose any reduction in NIH funding in the FY2026 and FY2027 budgets.” Congressional offices track these calls by issue. Volume moves votes.

3. Support the Organizations Fighting This Every Day

Several organizations are doing the legal and legislative heavy lifting right now. The American Association for Cancer Research (aacr.org) is actively rallying researchers and patients. Research!America (researchamerica.org) tracks legislation and issues action alerts. The Alzheimer’s Association (alz.org) has an advocacy center specifically for this fight. Even a $25 annual membership or a single constituent letter makes these organizations stronger when they lobby on your behalf.

4. Talk to Your Doctor—and Ask Them to Speak Up Too

Physicians carry enormous credibility with legislators, and most of us have professional associations that lobby on our behalf. But our professional associations need to hear from patients too. If your doctor has mentioned cuts to research funding, ask them if their specialty society is advocating against it. If you’re a patient who has benefited from a clinical trial, that story is more powerful than any policy document. The American Medical Association (ama-assn.org) has policy portals where patient voices can be formally submitted.

5. Share This Story—Especially with People Who Don’t Think It Affects Them

The most effective thing you can do right now, today, in the next five minutes, is forward this article to someone who votes but doesn’t follow health policy. The people who think NIH funding is an abstraction for scientists—not something that touches their families—are the most important audience for this conversation. Write one sentence: “This is about your family’s future medical bills and treatments that won’t exist. Worth five minutes.” That’s the whole ask.

6. If You’re a Researcher, Don’t Go Quietly

If you work in biomedical research and your grant has been disrupted or threatened, document everything and connect with the American Association of University Professors (aaup.org) and the Association of American Universities (aau.edu). Both are tracking the legal landscape and supporting researchers navigating terminations. You have rights. Use them. And if you’re considering leaving the country for a research position, I understand—but the field will be worse for losing you, and so will the patients who depend on what you’re building.

One More Thing

I’m a wound care physician. I walk into a clinic every day and look at what happens to a body when something that should have been addressed early was left to worsen. The wound gets bigger. The infection goes deeper. What was once a conversation becomes a surgery. What was once a surgery becomes an amputation.

I have watched people lose limbs to the compounding consequences of neglected care. And I am watching this country do the exact same thing to its own medical research infrastructure—and calling it responsible governance.

It isn’t. It is reckless. It is a slow amputation performed without anesthesia on the organ that keeps this nation medically alive.

But here’s what I know from twenty-plus years of doing this: wounds, even serious ones, can heal. Not always perfectly. Not without scar tissue. But they can heal—when they’re treated with urgency, skill, and the right resources.

The research infrastructure of this country is not beyond saving. But the window is not infinite. The scientists we lose today don’t come back. The trials that ended in 2025 don’t restart in 2027. The cures that weren’t developed won’t appear on their own.

This is the moment for urgency. Not panic—urgency. There is a difference. Panic is paralyzing. Urgency moves people from their chairs to their phones, from their phones to their representatives, and from their representatives to something that might actually change.

Make some noise. Margaret is depending on it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and are based on publicly available federal budget data, peer-reviewed literature, and congressional testimony current as of May 2026. This article is intended for general educational purposes and does not constitute medical or legal advice.

Cliff’s Note

What you just read isn’t an op-ed—it’s a warning shot from a doctor who spends his days looking at what happens when problems get ignored, and who took the time to write it out with footnotes while the rest of the political press was busy doing horse-race garbage. Blue Amp Media exists to make room for pieces like this, and we do it without a billionaire backer and without a corporate parent quietly steering us away from the predator class that’s looting this country in plain sight. We have you. That’s the entire business model. If this hit you the way it hit me, become a paid subscriber—or buy us a coffee over on our Ko-Fi page. That’s how we keep publishing doctors like Dr. Lullove, how we keep the YouTube channel sharp, and how progressive media finally starts hitting back at the weight class the right has been operating at for thirty years. Margaret gets a fighting chance because you decided she deserved one. Now go make some noise.

— Cliff

References

1. Baldwin, T. (2025, April). Senate Appropriations Subcommittee Hearing: NIH Budget. Senator Baldwin pressed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya on a 31% cut to cancer research and 3,288 fewer disease studies in Q1 2025 vs. Q1 2024. senate.gov

2. Patel, V. R., et al. (2025, November 17). Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health. JAMA Internal Medicine. Study found 383 of 11,008 NIH-funded clinical trials disrupted, affecting more than 74,000 participants. jamanetwork.com

3. Brookings Institution. (2025, June 27). The 2026 Health and Health Care Budget. Analysis of proposed NIH cuts, including 40% overall reduction, 38.6% NCI grant cut, 45.5% NIA grant funding reduction. brookings.edu

4. CBS News / 60 Minutes. (2025, April 27). Scientists Fear Trump Administration Cuts to NIH Could Impact the Health of Americans for Generations. Transcript of Dr. Francis Collins interview, including quotes on heart disease mortality, clinical trial risks, and NIH’s role in drug development. cbsnews.com

5. United for Medical Research / Fierce Biotech. (2026, March 13). Despite Delays, NIH Grants Generated a 250% Return on $36.6B Investment in 2025. NIH grants returned $2.57 per $1 invested in 2025; more than $822 billion in economic activity generated over the past decade. fiercebiotech.com

6. Galkina Cleary, E., et al. (2023, April 28). Comparison of Research Spending on New Drug Approvals by the NIH vs. the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2010–2019. JAMA Health Forum. NIH funding contributed to 354 of 356 (99.4%) FDA-approved drugs from 2010 to 2019, totaling $187 billion in public investment. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

7. Alzheimer’s Association. (2026). Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures 2026. Annual report documenting $409 billion in projected 2026 dementia care costs, nearly $1 trillion projected by 2050, and $446 billion in unpaid caregiving. alz.org

8. Powers Health / HealthDay / The Washington Post. (2025, November 18). NIH Grant Terminations Leave Thousands Without Access to Care, Study Finds. Includes direct quotes from Dr. Vishal Patel (Brigham and Women’s Hospital / Harvard) and Dr. Amy Nunn (Brown University School of Public Health). powershealth.org

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