Massachusetts research labs recovered most of the federal funding that the Trump administration slashed early last year but still ended 2025 with slightly less than they received in 2024, according to a new analysis.
Scientists here faced a shortfall of $500 million in July after the National Institutes of Health abruptly terminated millions of dollars in awards nationwide, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council said. In making the cuts, the NIH targeted areas it said weren’t in line with the administration’s priorities, including research related to COVID, vaccine hesitancy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, and other topics.
But after the NIH settled a number of high-profile lawsuits brought by researchers and multiple states, scientists in Massachusetts ended the year with $3.41 billion in funding. That represented a 1.4 percent decline, or just $48 million less than in 2024, a far smaller reduction than many in the state’s scientific ecosystem had feared.
“NIH funding rebounded beginning in September, following successful court challenges and policy changes, though its future remains uncertain, especially in research hubs like Massachusetts,” said a new report by MassBio, a trade group for the state’s biotechnology industry.
The report released Thursday reflected NIH data through Jan. 2 this year. It showed a bigger drop last year than Massachusetts scientists actually received because the federal agency updated 2025 numbers this week, which MassBio analyzed and provided to the Globe.
Massachusetts remained by far the biggest recipient of NIH funding per capita, with the state receiving $478 for each resident. California, widely considered Massachusetts’ biggest rival as a life sciences hub in the United States, received less than a third of that in funding per capita, according to the report.
And although NIH grants to Massachusetts fell by roughly $48 million last year, the state actually had a slightly bigger slice of the pie than it did in 2024 because overall funding by the institutes shrank in 2025, from $37.3 billion to $36.9 billion. Scientists at hospitals, colleges, and biotech startups in Massachusetts received 9.4 percent of all NIH funding in 2025, compared with 9.3 percent in 2024, according to the MassBio report.
In recent weeks, Massachusetts scientists have said they were relieved to get much of their funding restored, but are hardly celebrating.
Marc Weisskopf, a professor of environmental health and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the NIH in May terminated about $200,000 remaining in a three-year grant totaling roughly $1 million for his research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Weisskopf has been studying why military veterans have double the risk of developing ALS as nonveterans.
Although his funding was restored in September, Weisskopf said that during the interim he lost access to two key employees of the Veterans Administration. They were helping him with his project analyzing electronic medical records for 14,000 veterans with ALS who have been treated at VA hospitals for various maladies from 2000 to 2023. The veterans served as far back as the Vietnam War era.
“When you shut off this work for a period of time, you can’t just flick a switch and start off where you were,” Weisskopf said. “If you lose people, you’ve got to get new people.”
Weisskopf is also worried about the Trump administration shutting off the funding spigot again. He has cause to be concerned.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, said during a visit to Massachusetts on Dec. 5 that he wants to provide more research funding to the heartlands — which many fear could lead to fewer dollars here and hurt one of the state’s biggest economic drivers.
“I want Iowa, Nebraska scientists, scientists at every institution, to be able to compete on the same level playing fields with the brilliant scientists here in Massachusetts,” Bhattacharya said in an interview with the Globe.
Under Bhattacharya, the NIH has said it will prioritize “geographic balance” in funding decisions, and Bhattacharya has said he wants the nation’s research infrastructure to extend to places that better reflect the country’s health problems, such as Alabama.
He denied that he wanted to move research grant funding away from states like Massachusetts.
“I don’t see a future with Massachusetts not having support,” he said. “But I would love to see that kind of success spread all across the country.”
Still, Benjamin Bradford, the head of external affairs for MassBio and chief author of the report, said scientists are right to be wary given their experience last year.
“There’s still uncertainty about how the NIH will disburse dollars moving forward,” he said. “Uncertainty makes it very hard for institutions to appropriately plan for hiring and using valuable grant dollars to advance critical early-stage science.”
Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jonathan.saltzman@globe.com.
