President Donald Trump’s administration terminated a $5 million grant to the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center amid the White House’s sweeping efforts to punish Columbia University for its approach to protests against the war in Gaza.
The terminated grant, which has not been previously reported, appears to be one of the more than 400 National Institutes of Health grants pulled at Columbia University over its handling of alleged antisemitism on campus.
Neither the White House nor Columbia University has said which grants were terminated, but NOTUS identified that grant and hundreds of others not previously reported by analyzing data published by the Department of Government Efficiency and the NIH.
Several of the grants that were cut supported research, including the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center’s work toward “early detection, prevention and intervention.” Others supported research on HIV, maternal health, cardiovascular disease and drug abuse prevention, along with other programs spread across research centers tied to Columbia University.
The grants affected not only specific research programs but also funding for students’ education. Multiple terminated grants, totaling over a million dollars collectively, supported the training of students in the fields of neuroscience research and autoimmune rheumatic diseases.
The exact dollar figure for each of those grants is listed on the DOGE website’s “savings” page without a name attached.
The cuts are part of the White House’s wider effort to go after Columbia University. Earlier this month, HHS, the Department of Education and other agencies said they would cancel a collective $400 million worth of federal grants at the campus “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” The agencies are members of the administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.
A few days later, the NIH, the largest sponsor of biomedical research globally, said it canceled upward of 400 grants worth over a quarter-billion dollars at Columbia University. The same day, DOGE updated its savings page to include nearly 400 new grants listed as “terminated” by the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH’s parent agency.
Although the page does not list what each award is for, NOTUS matched the dollar amounts of nearly every HHS grant added that day to corresponding grants previously doled out by the NIH to Columbia University. (Some grants had a listed value of $0, making them impossible to identify.)
The Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is part of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, was granted $5,302,111 in August 2024. The budget end date was listed as June 30, but it was updated in recent days to be March 12. It was around that time that DOGE listed a $5,302,111 federal grant issued and terminated by HHS on its savings page.
Columbia’s Irving Medical Center said the campus was still in the process of “reviewing notices and cannot confirm how many grant cancellations have been received from federal agencies since March 7.”
The campus remains “dedicated to our mission to advance lifesaving research and pledge to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding,” a spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.
“From pioneering cancer treatments to innovative heart disease interventions and cutting-edge gene and cell therapies, research conducted by Columbia faculty has helped countless people live healthier, longer, and more productive lives,” the spokesperson said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the NIH nor the National Cancer Institute responded to requests for comment.
“Anti-Semitism – like racism – is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a statement announcing HHS’s review of grants at Columbia University.
The Trump administration demanded that Columbia University implement a series of changes to its policies by the end of the day Wednesday. Without those changes, the administration said it would not begin “formal negotiations” with Columbia University to receive continued federal funding.
The demands, outlined in a March 13 letter from the General Services Administration, HHS and Education Department officials, included the “expulsion or multi-year suspension” of those who participated in encampments on campus, the reforming of “undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices” and a ban on face mask use with exceptions for “religious and health reasons.”
While the White House looks to make an example out of Columbia, dozens of other universities could soon see federal funding pulled.
The same day NIH canceled hundreds of grants to Columbia University, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights put 59 other universities on notice. Those included Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, four University of California campuses and others being investigated for potential Title VI violations “relating to antisemitic harassment and discrimination.”
“U.S. colleges and universities benefit from enormous public investments funded by U.S. taxpayers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote. “That support is a privilege and it is contingent on scrupulous adherence to federal antidiscrimination laws.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. He can be reached on Signal at MarkAlfred.14 or at MarkAlfred@NOTUS.org.