Funding cuts hurting researchers, clinicians

Federal cuts have impacted research grants and funding at many universities. As a result, some researchers and scientists are increasingly dealing with the effects by moving abroad for other positions, with many fleeing to Canada.

Three Yale University professors took that short hop north. In a video piece for The New York Times last spring, Timothy Snyder, D.Phil, Marci Shore, Ph.D., and Jason Stanley, Ph.D., spoke about their fears of the U.S. shifting into authoritarianism.

Snyder said, “I’m leaving for the University of Toronto because I want to do my work without the fear that I will be punished for my words.”

Additional researchers addressed funding cuts.

In an article for “The Hill” in November 2025 featured were Michael Liu, M.D., M.Phil, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Nathaniel Tran, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health policy at the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Public Health on the topic.

Liu said some National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants were gutted more than others, including one at the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. Tran is a researcher for a federally funded project regarding the health of older LGBTQ adults.

“It was high-quality science asking important questions, and it happened to include LGBTQ people,” Tran said.

Brittany Charlton, Sc.D., who holds associate professor positions with the Harvard School of Public Health Epidemiology department and the HMS Population Medicine department, had a similar experience to Tran’s.

In May, Harvard’s magazine “The Crimson” reported how Charlton’s R61 grant was terminated. It gave her the opportunity to research how discriminatory laws impacted the mental health of LGBTQ teens.

The project’s terms included phrases like “gender affirming care,” “minority-serving institution,” “lesbian, gay, and bisexual,” as well as “discrimination.”

Without the grant, she said, “I got nothing. Harvard’s not stepping in. Harvard Medical School is not stepping in. The School of Public Health is not stepping in.”

Behavioral Health practitioners are not spared from cuts.

According to the American Psychological Association, cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the Veterans Administration, have obliterated $12 billion in funding for mental health care, addiction treatment, and disease tracking.

The organization further said threats to Medicare, Medicaid, and student loan repayment programs risked public access to care and the stability of mental health workforce.

So, how do all these cuts affect clinicians and their practices?

For one, halting a research project may mean decreasing access to new treatments. Annie Harper, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist at Yale University who studies poverty, finances, and mental illness.

In an email, she talked about the relationship between clinicians and researchers.

“Ideally, as researchers, we study problems in depth that clinicians and their patients might be aware of but don’t have time or research skills to explore further,” she said. “We then share our findings with them so that together we can consider how to address those problems. Obviously, if we don’t have funding to do the research, that cycle of improvement can’t happen.”

She also commented on how funding cuts have personally affected her, referring to two halted projects because of grant terminations.

One was an EPA funded project in New Haven on carbon emissions from induction stoves and the other was on a diversity supplement for an ongoing NIH RO1 study. That explored how to help people better handle their finances who have been in prison and have mental illness so they can reenter society successfully.

A third project, which focused on the types of shelters that would best support homeless people plus avoid mental health problems, had its funding terminated and then refunded six months later.

Harper said there has been some support through philanthropy, but there was a caveat.

“The critical difference between private and public dollars,” she said, “is that public funding (NIH, EPA etc.) is by definition driven by a democratic and accountable process versus private funding through which private parties can impose their preferences to meet their specific interests…”

Harper clarified, “not that this is the norm—and private funders I’ve worked with have been exemplary, but it’s always a possibility.”