NIH 2,291 grants ($2.45B) and NSF 1,752 grants ($1.4B) terminated Feb-Aug 2025

Between February and August 2025, the National Institutes of Health terminated 2,291 active grants, withdrawing $2.45 billion in committed funding and disrupting 383 clinical trials with more than 74,000 enrolled participants. The National Science Foundation terminated 1,752 grants totaling roughly $1.4 billion in the same window, with the STEM Education Directorate alone losing 839 grants worth $888 million (S-0031).

Proposed FY2026 reductions extend the pattern: NSF approximately −56% from the FY2025 enacted level of $9.06 billion, NOAA approximately −24%, ARPA-E approximately −57% (S-0031, S-0034).

Every long-term dataset funded under those grants entered C-0019's mechanism. The data infrastructure they paid for — server contracts, repository hosting, data-curation staffing — lapsed with the funding. The cumulative consequence has not yet been measured because the events are recent; the structural prediction from C-0019 is that a substantial fraction of the affected datasets will enter the failure modes of §3.1 and §3.4 within five years of termination.

This is the largest documented funder-driven preservation event in U.S. research history, and the architectural prediction is that its data-loss consequences will compound across the next decade unless the affected institutions deploy preservation independent of the originating grants.