How Researchers Could Get Their Canceled NIH Grants Back

Despite the National Institutes of Health rebuking many of the grants it terminated last month as “antithetical to the scientific inquiry,” experts say members of the academic community may have both administrative and legal recourse to attempt to restore some or all of their research funding.

The NIH—which sent about $26 billion to more than 500 institutions or research centers affiliated with colleges and universities in 2024—mostly targeted projects related to vaccines and the health of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community, citing a federal regulation that allows agencies to terminate grants “if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

“While this provision exists and is broad on its face, there are some guardrails for grantees and steps that can be taken along the way to make sure these were done legally,” Amanda Fuchs Miller, a policy consultant, lawyer and former deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs at the U.S. Department of Education, said at a webinar last week hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “And if termination does remain,” grantees “are allowed to recover as much as possible.”

Some of those tools—which have already been used to challenge other executive attempts to halt or cancel federal funding—include parsing the particulars of individual grant agreements and pursuing agency-specific appeals processes. Per the NIH, grant recipients who received termination notices have 30 days to ask the agency’s director for a review of the decision.

But it’s not clear how long it may take the NIH to hear such a high volume of potential appeals and decide if any grants should be reinstated, especially as its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, initiated the firings of some 10,000 employees Tuesday.

“The delay in actually hearing back on the appeals request is a place of concern,” said Krystal Toups, director of contracts and grants administration for COGR, an association of affiliated medical centers, independent research institutes and research universities.

And since a new federal budget could pass in September that might include more clear guidelines about federal funding priorities, if researchers want some consideration for continuation of their grants, Toups said they should get their cases in front of the appeals committee “sooner rather than later.”

Jeremy Berg, who served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences from 2003 to 2011, said that although appeals have to come from the institutions, grantees “would be insane” not to “push their institutions to appeal everything.” But before this year, Berg said, grant terminations were relatively rare and only reserved for extreme circumstances, so he’s not sure how seriously the Trump-run NIH will review any appeals.

“This is completely unprecedented,” he said. “I have no idea if they intend to treat them as good-faith appeals or deny them all as a matter of course, just as they seem to be breaking the law around everything else.”

Litigation Likely

Beyond administrative appeals, Berg said the NIH’s justification that it can terminate a grant because it no longer “effectuates agency priorities” will “almost certainly” be litigated.

“When a grant is awarded to a university, there are terms and conditions that go with the grant. It’s basically a legal contract,” he said. “The question of whether the rationale they’re giving is actually legal is very much an open question. I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that the great majority of the terminations that have been done are in fact legal.”

No lawsuit has been filed over the NIH’s grant terminations yet. But if institutions and their advocates do sue, they could argue that the grant terminations violated statutory requirements, constitutional amendments or the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits agencies from enacting “arbitrary” or “capricious” orders, among other possible legal challenges.

The APA argument already swayed a federal judge in Maryland last month to reinstate dozens of teacher-preparation grants the Education Department canceled because it said the programs, which included diversity, equity and inclusion–related content, were “inappropriate and unnecessary.”

A federal judge in Massachusetts has also enjoined the NIH’s recent guidance to cap the amount of money it sends to institutions to cover indirect research costs after a cavalry of Democratic attorneys general, institutions and trade associations argued in a lawsuit that the plan is “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the APA.

Samuel Bagenstos, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and general counsel for the HHS from June 2022 to December 2024, said in an email that from the termination notices he’s seen, “many folks who have lost their grants would at a minimum have strong arbitrary-and-capricious claims,” in addition to claims that the termination “violates the law creating the grant program, or violates the grant terms.”

Beyond litigating potential APA violations, Ted Waters, managing partner at Feldesman Leifer LLP, who specializes in federal grant programs, said the NIH’s grant termination letters rely on language that doesn’t yet apply to grants administered by the HHS.

During the last days of Trump’s first administration in 2020, the Office of Management and Budget amended the federal uniform guidance to include a provision that said a federal grant could be terminated if it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

Although there were some attempts to strike that language during the Biden administration, those efforts failed. However, when OMB updated the regulations in 2024, it said agencies must “clearly and unambiguously specify all termination provisions in the terms and conditions” of a federal award.

Each individual granting agency then had to adopt the uniform guidance and make any agency-specific changes. But Waters said HHS “never got around” to updating its grant provisions with OMB’s language from 2020 or the 2024 amendments. One day before the deadline, on Sept. 30, HHS posted in the Federal Register that it would wait until October 2025 to adopt the “no longer effectuates the program goals” language it’s now using to justify grant terminations.

“That’s the height of arbitrary and capricious,” Waters said, “citing a regulation that doesn’t apply to these particular NIH awards.”

Although it’s not clear whether a lawsuit may be filed against the NIH over the grant terminations, Waters expects a challenge to come from trade associations rather than individual grantees—like many of the other lawsuits filed against the Trump administration.

“It’s generally better if you have a collection of institutions getting one of the national associations to file suit,” he said, noting that individual plaintiffs often have their integrity questioned on issues unrelated to the lawsuit. Instead, when associations file lawsuits, it helps keep the focus on the “the bigger picture” of if the action is lawful.