The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services terminated around 60 federal grants supporting HIV and HIV prevention-related research over the past five weeks, cutting tens of millions in funding for programs spread across nearly two dozen universities and a handful of other institutions.
Much of the research focused on population groups most impacted by HIV. Roughly half of the programs centered on Black or Latino populations, who have made up the vast majority of recent HIV infections per estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Others focused on transgender people, a frequent target of this White House. At least one grant focused on preventing HIV in infants and children.
The Trump administration has steadily increased the pace of terminations over the past five weeks, cutting a new batch of grants every few days. Some days saw a single-digit number of cuts, others over a hundred. Most of the cuts were only disclosed in the past few days after the National Institutes of Health updated a running list of canceled grants that notes the dates of their terminations.
The NIH list was compiled and disclosed to comply with “the Presidential Memo ‘Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending,’” the agency told NOTUS. The memo instructs agencies to disclose grants and contracts terminated by the federal government.
“The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest,” the memo reads. “The American people have a right to see how the Federal Government has wasted their hard-earned wages.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. NIH passed along the list of grants and did not respond to follow-up questions about its contents. An HHS official told NOTUS that the department does not comment on details of its internal deliberations on grants.
Many of the grants had been awarded to Columbia University, which also saw multi-million dollar cuts to Alzheimer’s disease and cancer research as the White House sought to impose sweeping changes to campus policies over its handling of encampments and pro-Palestine demonstrations.
The largest savings from any single grant came from research at Columbia that studied PrEP use among those impacted by the opioid crisis. PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, is intended for people at risk of HIV, reduces the risk by 99% and was the subject of much of the research affected by the recent terminations.
Those cuts hit 21 other universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, Florida State and three University of California campuses. Several nonprofit organizations also saw recisions of funding, among them RAND and Public Health Foundation Enterprises.
HIV-related training programs at Northwestern, Columbia and the University of Miami’s Center for HIV and Research in Mental Health were also cut.
Another affected campus, the University of Pennsylvania, is in the White House’s crosshairs over unrelated policies. A week after the NIH pulled funding related to HIV research at the university, the administration paused $175 million in federal funding over policies relating to transgender athletes, according to the White House’s rapid response X account. A university spokesperson told NOTUS it had not “received any official notification or any details” regarding grant terminations.
Penn “has always followed NCAA and conference policies regarding student participation on athletic teams and is in full compliance with the recent changes to the NCAA rules” under Trump, a university spokesperson told NOTUS in a statement.
Penn was the only university of the 22 affected who responded to NOTUS’ request for comment.
Many of the NIH cuts were listed as yielding little or no savings. One UC Irvine grant supported research into HIV stigmas. Its cancellation saved the federal government 94 cents, NIH data shows.
HHS also axed funding for the annual International Workshop on HIV Pediatrics, “the only meeting entirely devoted to research in prevention and treatment of HIV infection in infants, children, and adolescents.” The cut saved $13,509, according to the NIH list.
HHS Secretary Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has in recent years voiced skepticism of the overwhelming scientific consensus and evidence that HIV causes AIDS. “There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS,” he told New York Magazine in 2023.
A week later, Kennedy said at a health roundtable that “Anybody who reads ‘The River’ will come away pretty much convinced that HIV also came from a vaccine program, there’s plenty of evidence on that as well.”
The terminations represent only some millions of the $28 billion the federal government spends on combatting HIV annually, although the steady stream of cuts shows little sign of stopping. HHS estimates roughly 1.2 million people Americans live with HIV, and around 13% of them are unaware of it.
These cuts arrive as the NIH lays off contract workers and fires employees tasked with preventing lab leaks — all after its parent agency encouraged staff to resign.
The administration was also weighing large-scale cuts to HIV prevention efforts at the CDC’s HIV Prevention Division and PrEP initiative, the Wall Street Journal first reported last week.
“HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking a careful look at all divisions to see where there is overlap that could be streamlined to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure the federal government,” the HHS official told NOTUS. “This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard.”
“No final decision on streamlining CDC’s HIV Prevention Division has been made,” the official added. HHS work on the issue would continue elsewhere in the agency if the decision were made, the official said.
The prospect sparked an immediate backlash from health organizations and lawmakers.
“Suggested cuts to HIV funding are disgraceful and wasteful,” GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a post. “These cuts will result in more cases of HIV, and end up costing taxpayers billions more in new health care costs.”
Dozens of lawmakers wrote to President Donald Trump last week urging him to keep the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention intact.
“Prevention provides a large return on investment for the federal government — adjusted for inflation, a lifetime of medical costs for a person with HIV can be over $500,000,” the lawmakers wrote. “We urge your administration to reconsider any plans to eliminate or reduce federal HIV programming.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.