How many kills does DOGE have? How many scientific breakthroughs have been stifled by President Trump's administration?

Some trackers worth tracking.

Getty Images / Anton Petrus

Project 2025 in the White House has a strategy. The strategy is to overwhelm us with bad news so we can’t possibly keep up. The strategy is to bombard us with so much destruction that we become numb and nothing shocks anyone. The goal is that we’ll lose track of everything, give up, and stop fighting. Yesterday’s impeachable offense barely makes the news today.

It’s working at times, though not always. (You’re here, aren’t you?)

But the Trump administration’s “break as much as possible” approach has worked enough of the time that our public health and medical resources have been tragically gutted. Keeping up is exhausting, but we have to try.

Two common questions…

When discussing the first few months of the Trump administration, people often ask me questions that can be boiled down into two categories:

1. How many deaths have been caused by the sudden draconian cuts in foreign aid and humanitarian assistance?

2. How many research grants have been terminated; what were they; and what effect will the abandoned investments have?

One way that I keep up is checking in on some high-quality resources that are actively tracking these metrics.

Clean kills.

Can we quantify the impact of the Trump administration’s decision to destroy our highly successful foreign aid and humanitarian programs? While exact figures would be difficult to pin down, reasonable estimates are possible and credible. Make no mistake: these sudden terminations of support—our pathetic retreat from global leadership—are clean kills. Innocent people are dying preventable deaths. And to be clear, these deaths are occurring for no other reason than that President Trump and his enablers feel like it.

Impact Counter is one resource doing the work of tabulating our body count. As of Sunday, May 11 (Mothers Day in the United States), the tracker estimates that President Trump and his administration have caused 83,388 adult deaths, and 174,001 child deaths due to their sudden cuts in foreign assistance so far. Within the site, you can also get updated numbers for specific high-impact projects driving these totals:

• PEPFAR (the HIV/AIDS program developed and implemented by George W. Bush) that has saved millions of lives.

• Tuberculosis projects.

• Malaria projects.

• Medicaid cuts (if Congress carries out the Trump administration proposal).

Canceled science.

It’s a lot harder to know how many deaths all of the canceled research will cause because the very nature of biomedical research is uncertainty. But the sheer magnitude of the cuts is worth noting, both for their magnitude and breadth. All told, the cuts paint a picture of a nation that is retreating from its perch as the global leader in biomedical science, be it cancer, infectious disease, mental health, or basic science. (For what reason, I still can’t fathom. Scientific and biomedical innovation are massive parts of what made America great in the first place.)

I’ve seen a number of resources tracking grant terminations. The one I find most useful is Grant Watch:

“Grant Watch is a project to track the termination of grants of scientific research agencies under the Trump administration in 2025. We currently are tracking terminations of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).”

Here are the links:

• Terminated NIH grants (another website, run by HHS, seems to actually lag behind Grants Watch).

• Terminated NSF grants.

The information included is detailed. Among others, you can search by:

• Program office (e.g., National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases).

• Grant type (more on this below).

• Project title.

• Institution recipient.

• Termination date.

• Amount of money the grant was supposed to provide.

• How much money remained to be disbursed when the grant was canceled.

• The member of Congress representing the district of the recipient (and their phone number).

Also, if you are a grant recipient who has just learned of a termination (ugh), you can submit your information here to help the organizers. We need eyes on this.

In addition to Grant Watch, here are some government websites that have information on NIH grants and federal spending overall:

• NIH Reporter is an NIH.gov website that can be searched for information on all of its grants, if you are interested checking up on other projects.

• USAspending is “the official open data source of federal spending information,
  including information about federal awards such as contracts, grants, and loans.”

Here’s what you need to do: Read these resources. Loudly share what you’re seeing. Call your Representative or Senator. Bookmark these websites. Repeat!

We have to keep the applying pressure. We have to let our leaders know we care about science and that we want the United States to retain its leadership.

Some analytics.

Perusing these updated resources can feel like drinking from the firehose. Fortunately, some recent analyses capture the mayhem. Unfortunately, those analyses indeed capture a lot of mayhem.

Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper (by my great friend, mentor, and Inside Medicine resource, Dr. Harlan Krumholz and colleagues) that provides a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the DOGE-driven chainsawing at the NIH.

All told, Harlan and his team identified 694 terminated NIH grants, amounting to $1.8 billion in immediately revoked support, as of April 25, 2025. The top targets were projects funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (which would likely include work on equity and disparities research, which this administration does not care about), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—which used to be run by Dr. Anthony Fauci. That doesn’t seem coincidental. Meanwhile, Columbia University was the biggest target, while Stanford (where the new NIH Director was previously employed) did not make the top 10 list of institutions most affected by the cuts (despite being the 10th largest recipient of NIH funding in 2024). Things that make you go, ‘Hmmm.’

20% of the terminated grants were early career grants, meaning that the next generation of scientists are being prevented from reaching their potential. But R01 grants—which are larger grants supporting established scientists—were the biggest target. That means that respected scientists and the staff that carry much of that work out are already (or will soon be) without funding. Livelihoods are being destroyed, along with the knowledge that the work would have created.

Let’s not sugarcoat things. The administration’s actions are absolutely despicable. Even acknowledging that the administration has the right to choose what research it supports, the humane way to carry that out would be to make it clear that future funding would have to adhere to certain priorities. To pull funding midstream is cruel and wasteful, because it is leaving scientists unemployed and a lot of work unfinished (that is, the government funded the science, but not long enough to get returns on those investments. That’s the literal opposite of effective return on investment). It’s no wonder Europe and China are trying to catch the windfall by recruiting our best and brightest.

The American Association of Medical Colleges published another important analysis last week. The AAMC’s data is a little more current than the JAMA paper, and found that by May 5, 2025, there had been 777 terminated NIH grants, totaling $1.9 billion in unfulfilled funding obligations. The AAMC’s analysis highlighted that 113 clinical trials have been terminated. This is particularly wasteful because shutting a trial off midway basically forfeits the entire effort, meaning that patients who volunteered to participate put themselves into these studies with the hopes that scientists would learn something that would improve their lives, and those of others. Well eff that, the administration decided.

According to the AAMC, “Of these terminated grants, 51 (56%) investigated topics related to HIV or AIDS, 36 (40%) focused on mental or behavioral health, 16 (18%) focused on cancer, and 15 (16%) focused on COVID-19. Fifty-five grants (60%) funding active clinical trials mentioned LGBTQ+ populations, 52 (57%) mentioned racial or ethnic subpopulations, 32 (35%) mentioned women, and 20 (22%) mentioned low-income populations.”

I will say it again: If the administration thinks it can improve science, or that it has the mandate to change the priorities in government-funded science, it could achieve this by changing decisions on forthcoming grant proposals. Shuttering funded science midstream sends a nihilistic, anti-science, and, frankly, cruel message. The way the Trump administration is pursuing this agenda tells us a lot about what it wants—which looks much more like destruction of our scientific community than it does reform.

If you have information about any of the unfolding stories we are following, please email me or find me on Signal at InsideMedicine.88.

Thanks for reading, sharing, speaking out, and supporting Inside Medicine. Please ask your questions in the comments.

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