The pace of medical advances for older adults is slowing, according to experts who say research is being throttled by government budget cuts, federal worker layoffs and frozen or canceled grants.
“These cuts to research are going to have a significant negative and enduring impact on the health and well-being of all Americans and, perhaps disproportionately, upon older individuals,” says James Appleby, CEO of the Gerontological Society of America. The society surveyed members who are experts in aging research and found 71% saying their work has been harmed.
Medical research for a wide variety of maladies plaguing older people — from Alzheimer's to pneumonia, diabetes to strokes — is being affected.
From just $107.88 $24.99 for Kiplinger Personal Finance
Become a smarter, better informed investor. Subscribe from just $107.88 $24.99, plus get up to 4 Special Issues
Sign up for Kiplinger’s Free Newsletters
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice on investing, taxes, retirement, personal finance and more - straight to your e-mail.
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice - straight to your e-mail.
“Researchers are reducing federally-funded work on several topics relevant to older adults,” says William Dow, a professor of public health and management at the University of California, Berkeley, and chair of the Government and Public Affairs Committee of the Population Association of America, a nonprofit that promotes demographic research. “This is from a combination of grant recissions on certain topics, informal guidance from program officers and a general chilling effect, which has caused researchers to pivot their focus.”
Grants frozen or canceled
The National Institute on Aging, the government agency that focuses on health research regarding older people, initially slashed or froze nearly 500 grants since January, according to Grant Witness, a website that tracks cuts in scientific research grants under the Trump administration. Of those 500, about 300 were reinstated or unfrozen, but 200 remained listed in mid-October as being terminated or still frozen.
Among the terminated grants was one that aimed to “provide insight into the molecular underpinnings of age-related cognitive decline” and another that proposed to look at health outcomes for participants in private Medicare plans.
In addition, many health conditions, such as pneumonia and stroke, disproportionately affect older people. Grants to research these conditions are typically funded by the National Institutes of Health, the government’s primary medical research agency, which includes the National Institute on Aging and 26 other institutes and centers, such as the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases; and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
The New York Times has reported that NIH has frozen or canceled nearly 2,500 research grants nationwide. Among the frozen grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders was one where researchers aimed to study people of different age groups and identify specific risk factors of developing dementia to help identify people who could benefit from early intervention.
The Trump administration has given several reasons for derailing research, ranging from assertions of waste and fraud to a failure to align with the administration’s priorities. In August, the Supreme Court allowed the NIH to stop paying approximately $783 million in research grants for projects it said failed to align with the administration.
Staff cuts
The administration has also laid off 1,300 employees at the National Institutes of Health. It’s unclear how many National Institute of Aging employees have been affected, but in March, the Alliance for Aging Research and numerous other organizations wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressing alarm at the cuts there, as well as at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS).
“Already, the NIA has lost at least 115 new employees, or 17% of its total workforce,” the letter said. “Despite the lack of transparency, we understand another 60 to 70 employees were dismissed at NINDS. Layoffs and [reductions-in-force] include several of the most prominent and distinguished program directors and experts in aging research" — most of whom were thought to be recent hires or promotions.
Moving forward, President Trump’s proposed budget would cut the National Institute on Aging budget to $2.7 billion in 2026 from $4.4 billion previously. That’s part of an overall 40% cut at NIH to $26 billion from $45 billion. However, members of Congress of both parties continue to support funding research.
Nonmedical research cut
The cuts have gone beyond medical research and the NIH. Among the other casualties was the Retirement and Disability Research Consortium, which involved six research centers that helped the Social Security Administration assess the impact of its policies on beneficiaries. The consortium “helped the agency improve program efficiency, reduce improper payments and ensure that critical benefits and services reach our communities,” according to a prior statement from Social Security.
In terminating the consortium, Social Security cited Trump’s “priorities to end wasteful initiatives and contracts,” partly because the research “included a focus on research addressing [diversity, equity and inclusion] in Social Security, retirement and disability policy.”
“The immediate consequence would be that these programs will not be as good of a match to the needs of the beneficiary population,” says Dmitriy Stolyarov, director of the Michigan Retirement and Disability Research Center, which was part of the consortium.
The administration has also terminated a study funded by the Environmental Protection Agency aimed at helping mitigate wildfire smoke risk in Nevada. While the study description does not mention age, other research has found that older people are particularly vulnerable to harm from inhaling wildfire smoke.
Administration priorities and leverage
Cuts have directly targeted research examining health disparities among racial and other groups, which the administration has characterized as violating its policies against diversity, equity and inclusion.
Among the research project cuts cited by the Population Association of America’s Dow are: “vaccine hesitancy, learning from the COVID-19 pandemic response, health impacts of climate change, health and healthcare access related to gender identity, racial discrimination effects on health and healthcare access, immigrant health, effect of immigration policy changes on the health care workforce, etc.”
Other significant cuts and funding freezes have been unrelated to the substance of the research, but rather used as leverage against universities accused of harboring antisemitism, promoting diversity, equity and inclusion or otherwise failing to align with administration policies.
In some instances, researchers found temporary, alternative funding in hopes that grants could be restored.
“The practical effect (of the cuts) on older people is that this will cause delays in our discoveries of new risk factors and new treatments for the diseases that affect us as we grow older,“ says Daniel Belsky, epidemiology professor at Columbia University. “So, over the long term, this will make the lives of older people worse than they would have been had we not had this disruption.” Columbia saw $400 million in grants frozen before it settled with the administration in July.
Some grants have been restarted by court orders or, as was the case at Columbia, by settlements with the administration. In other cases, projects remain in limbo or have been killed outright.
“NIH now looks on track to spend their full budget this fiscal year, including the NIA,” Dow says. “But they are awarding fewer grants overall this fiscal year by using the current budget to fund grants over several years. That will, of course, adversely affect the amount of science that will get done from this year's spending.”
Corruption alleged
Defending cuts, Health Secretary Kennedy told a Senate committee there was “a lot of corruption” at NIH. He added that the U.S. has “the sickest people in the world. The NIH, with the best science, is supposed to be protecting. We should be the healthiest people in the world. We're switching the trajectory so that we're going to really focus narrowly on chronic disease, ending the chronic disease epidemic, and then we're going to make sure that the science cannot be corrupted.” Kennedy also said he plans to use artificial intelligence to make the work less expensive and more efficient.
Appleby, of the Gerontological Society, says as a scientist, he looks at the data, and he hasn’t seen evidence of corruption. “I'm always concerned when I hear that we're going to be better at science by cutting investments in science,” he adds. “That doesn't ring true for me as a believable statement.”
'Not political'
Nationwide, researchers are disoriented from being thrust into politics after having historically found broad bipartisan support. Diabetes, heart disease and cancer, they note, don’t discriminate between Democrats and Republicans.
“Alzheimer's is not a political event,” says Lee Lindquist, chief of Northwestern University’s Division of Geriatrics. “It's something that has always received generous funding from the government because it is a big issue. But what we're finding now, more than ever, is that there are more blockades making it harder and harder for research to be started.”
Lindquist’s research, which seeks to help older adults stay in their homes as they age, derailed in March when the NIH froze $800 million in grants to Northwestern amid unrelated allegations of student antisemitism.
Lindquist says the university’s board of trustees has provided short-term funding to keep the research afloat for now.
“It's just frustrating from my end,” Lindquist says, “because you try to do good work for seniors and it's just being cut off at the knees.”
She says it’s extremely difficult to apply for grants because of staffing cuts at the NIH. The agency used to issue regular notices of grants being available. Now, researchers are told to search a website. “If you go on that website … it's almost like finding a needle in a haystack,” Lindquist says.
And when researchers do apply for grants, the process has slowed, she says; applications are processed through an additional review by political appointees to determine if they align with administration priorities.
Alzheimer’s disease probes curbed
Progress in Alzheimer’s research at a collaborative of 14 research centers nationwide screeched to a halt in March as the administration froze some funding and stopped processing grants. As researchers found stop-gap funding, their work limped along for months, says Ann Cohen, co-director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. The funding for the collaboration was restored on July 31, but funding for individual research projects remained in question.
Cohen says researchers don’t know why the funding was disrupted. “Fourteen of the top Alzheimer's disease research centers in the country were essentially handcuffed for six months and not able to collect data and do research,” Cohen says. “There's a long-lasting impact on the field. Everything is moving so much more slowly and that really is hard to see happen. It really is kind of gutting.”
Cohen has the unmitigated support of at least one research subject, Ted Popovich, 80, whose mother participated until she died of Alzheimer’s. Popovich enrolled when asked and has been monitored for 14 years. A retired engineer and businessman, Popovich is an avid supporter of science and is determined to save the Alzheimer’s study. In fact, he thinks it should receive more funding; he’s encouraged other people to participate because he thinks it’s vital that we find answers as our population ages.
“Let me put it this way,” he says. “It won't stop. I'm adamant about it because I'll raise my voice to get a whole bunch of other people to go to our congressman's office. Even go to Washington and make a fuss.”
Stroke research affected
S. Thomas Carmichael, chairman of the Neurology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, says, UCLA lost federal grant funding in July over allegations relating to pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year and admissions policies for undergraduates. The administration also demanded $1.3 billion in fines to restore $548 million in grants.
“The grant suspensions affected a lot of diseases that relate to aging,” Carmichael says. “We had to stop cold.”
The suspension disrupted clinical trials for new drugs to treat strokes and Alzheimer’s and also research into Parkinson’s disease, vascular dementia and other conditions, Carmichael says.
The university sued, and a federal judge ordered that the grants be restored. So ultimately, the disruption was relatively brief — July 31 to Oct. 1. “We can overcome this delay,” Carmichael says. “Had this gone on longer… we would have had layoffs of highly trained personnel, and they would not have been replaceable.”
Diabetes research project caught in university dispute
A 29-year landmark national diabetes research study, credited with helping significantly decrease the number of new cases of type 2 diabetes in the U.S., came to a sudden halt in March as it became collateral damage in a clash between President Trump and Columbia University that had nothing to do with the study.
Alleging the school had mishandled allegations of antisemitism, the administration froze federal grants going to Columbia.
“We got swept up into it,” says David Nathan, director of the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study. “Of the $400 million that were stopped at Columbia, we were the largest part. We represented about $90 million.”
Not only was the study unrelated to the antisemitism allegations, but with 26 sites around the country, very little of the grant money was actually for research at Columbia, which had been designated to manage the grant funds for the national project. “It was rather odd because in fact, although the money flowed through Columbia, the vast majority, like 95% of the dollars, made a U-turn” and was distributed to centers, laboratories and imaging centers around the country, says Nathan, who is based at Harvard University. “Columbia had frankly a small financial stake. However, when Columbia got zapped, we got zapped along with them.”
The study — which had followed the medical lives of what had started out as 3,200 Americans and still involved about 1,800 people — came to a screeching halt. Researchers had to call the participants whose average ages were in the 70s to tell them not to come for their appointments.
The study began in 1996, when the country was in the midst of what was considered a diabetes epidemic with a rate of diabetes growing at about 5% a year. The study began looking at people with high blood sugar who were not yet diabetic, but considered prediabetic. Their blood sugar made them highly susceptible to the disease, getting it at a rate of about 11% a year.
Researchers found that lifestyle intervention (losing 7% of weight) reduced the development of diabetes by 58% and using the inexpensive diabetes drug metformin reduced it by 31%. The findings helped develop a national model that, once adopted, Nathan says, caused the national diabetes rate to drop, leveling off in 2016 when it reached 1.4 million new cases a year, down from a high of 2 million new cases annually.
The study continued, tracking how long the effects lasted, as well as the effects of the interventions on cardiovascular disease and cancer. As required, researchers renewed their grant applications every five years, continuing to get approvals. Three years ago, researchers began looking at dementia, with funding shifting to the National Institute on Aging.
After the study was halted in March, Nathan says the researchers turned to the Congressional Diabetes Caucus. In May, one of its leaders, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., confronted Health Secretary Kennedy, who professed to be unaware of the halting of the study and promised to look into it. But nothing happened.
Then, at the end of July, Columbia settled with the Trump administration and the study funding was restored.
“They didn't kill the study,” says Nathan. “They just injured it. We're now kind of in rehab and yes, we're going to have to change some of our strategies.”
Deterring future researchers
The disruptions follow a slew of medical breakthroughs in recent years. “The world has been rapidly accelerating, I would say, in the past five years or so,” says Esther Oh, who is on the board of directors for the American Geriatrics Society and teaches at Johns Hopkins University. Oh, who specializes in Alzheimer’s, describes a recent clinic: “I was telling my patients, ‘Had you come to see me maybe two to three years ago, I would have been prescribing your medication that was FDA-approved in the 1990s. And here we are discussing new options that you have.’”
But now fewer younger researchers are entering the field as the result of cuts to training grants, as well as overall uncertainty.
UC Berkeley’s Dow says there’s anxiety in the research field that is “leading to cuts in the research pipeline of young people. And so we're seeing early career researchers leave the field. We're seeing graduate programs cut back on the number of new people that are accepted into the field. And all of this is going to have long-term damage.”
What happens next and how deep and permanent the cuts will be depends on battles being waged in Congress and at colleges and universities.
Says Oh: “If we don't fund the future scientists of America, that day when we might actually have a cure for Alzheimer's disease may be delayed.”
Note: This item first appeared in Kiplinger Retirement Report, our popular monthly periodical that covers key concerns of affluent older Americans who are retired or preparing for retirement. Subscribe for retirement advice that’s right on the money.
Read More
-
Should You Renew Your CD?With rate cuts impacting earnings, we examine if now is a wise time to renew CDs.
-
7 Ways to Plan Now to Save on Medicare IRMAA Surcharges LaterUnderstand the critical two-year lookback period and why aggressive planning before you enroll in Medicare is the most effective way to minimize IRMAA.
-
Law Reversal Looming? Trump Eyes 2026 Gambling Winnings Tax ChangeTax Deductions It's no secret that the IRS is coming after your gambling winnings in 2026. But how long will that last?
-
Ask the Editor, December 12: IRAs, 401(k)s and RMDsAsk the Editor In this week's Ask the Editor Q&A, Joy Taylor answers questions on IRAs, 401(k)s and required minimum distributions
-
3 Ways to Stretch the 2026 Social Security COLA For Your BudgetThree steps retirees can take to stretch the Social Security COLA to fit their budgets.
-
Pickleball Injuries are Getting Out of Hand for Some AdultsAs more older adults take up pickleball, injuries are on the rise. Here's how you can lower your risk and still have a ball.
-
Are You Prepared to Live Longer? MIT AgeLab Answers QuestionsA new measure of longevity readiness indicates that for many Americans, the answer is no — and suggests what is needed to get on track.
-
Ask the Editor, November 28: Roth Conversions and Tax PlanningAsk the Editor In this week's Ask the Editor Q&A, Joy Taylor answers questions on how to convert a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA.
-
4 Strategies for Older Adults to Cut Property TaxesBefore you settle your next property tax bill, make sure you're taking full advantage of these tax breaks for older homeowners across the US.
-
A Guide to Starting a Successful Business After 50Age can be an advantage for older entrepreneurs looking to extend their careers or supplement their income in retirement.
-
10 Things You Should Know About Buying a Car Today, Even if You've Bought BeforeIf buying a car is on your to-do list, and it's been a while since you went shopping for a new one, this guide will help avoid any nasty shocks in the showroom.
