How Will the Budget Cuts Affect You if You’re Chronic?
U.S. government health funding has been slashed by billions—with more cuts hanging in the balance. People with chronic diseases, from arthritis to MS, will feel it across the nation.
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Chronic disease has been in the news a lot lately, with public discourse about how best to help the six out of 10 American adults, or roughly 130 million people, who live with at least one long-term health issue. Illnesses include everything from autoimmune disease and metabolic syndrome to cognitive decline, infectious complications, cancer, and blood disorders—plus hundreds of other maladies that can affect longevity, quality of life, and household income.
To develop new treatments and possibly cures for the chronic community, research institutions and health organizations dive deep into the trenches of scientific discovery. When progress is made—as seen with recent breakthroughs in gene-editing for sickle cell disease, for example, and immunotherapies for cancer—people gain access to new therapies that improve symptoms and extend their lives.
Such advancements require brain power. Years of training. Lab space and specialty equipment. Not to mention, funding. Progress is never free.
Yet, according to the Minority Staff Report, released on May 13, the Trump administration has “terminated at least $13.5 billion in health funding … and arbitrarily fired thousands of workers who ran America’s scientific infrastructure.”
Additional cuts are now being battled in our legal system, says Steven Taylor, the president and chief executive officer of the Arthritis Foundation, who is based in Atlanta, GA. If federal courts allow for a 15% cap on indirect costs for universities—the goal of a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy, with similar rules imposed by the Department of Energy (DoE), Department of Defense (DoD), and the National Science Foundation (NSF)—universities, which have served as the incubators for some of the most important chronic disease discoveries of the last century, will lose billions of dollars in essential operating funds, crippling research across all health condition categories.
“The 15% cap will drastically change grant-making for the healthcare community,” Taylor notes. “Administrative cost helps cover shared services that are so important to the research program. We’re going to be going backwards in the research of many diseases. It won't be good for anyone in America.”
Both the NIH and Health and Human Services (HHS) filed appeals to the proposed cap after a federal judge filed a permanent injunction blocking it. Yet, the cap is just one of several tactics to slash health research. The proposed government budget for fiscal year 2026, which passed in the House and is under negotiation in the Senate, cuts the NIH—27 distinct institutes and agencies that comprise the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world—by an additional 37%, according to the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. The same budget instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has primary control over Medicaid and other health programs, to cut a minimum of $880 billion in spending, per the American Hospital Association.
The effects are already being felt by scientists who study chronic disease. “The funding cuts are decimating the future of biomedical research,” says Mary K. Crow, M.D., the co-director of the Mary Kirkland Center for Lupus Research and the director of the Autoimmunity and Inflammation Program at Hospital for Special Surgery’s Research Institute in New York City.
The long-term impacts across all disease categories are likely to be even more devastating, says Michael Kornberg, M.D., the associate director of the neurology residency program at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. He points to the effects of young researchers losing essential funding opportunities, foreign collaboration coming to a halt, and government agencies losing the ability to coordinate nationwide research initiatives. “Any big downturn in research funding is going to have an impact that extends beyond that funding coming back,” Dr. Kornberg adds. “It’s a lot easier to downsize research infrastructure than to scale it back up.”
So, what do these budget cuts mean if you, or someone you love, has dementia, kidney disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), multiple sclerosis (MS), long COVID, or some other serious disorder? HealthCentral asked experts and insiders working for U.S. military health initiatives, government agencies, independent health foundations, universities, and more for their views on how these cuts are reshaping America’s ability to respond to chronic disease.
Multiple Sclerosis Research Is in Jeopardy
As the government takes a chainsaw approach to cost-cutting, federally funded research programs for chronic illnesses that have been celebrated across political parties for decades have been defunded.
One such example is the shuttering of the Multiple Sclerosis Research Program(MSRP), a research initiative that was launched in 2009 by Congress and the DoDto address the higher incidence of MS among military members. The program, which has awarded more than $153 million in research grants, with $20 million awarded annually since 2020, has a clear disease focus and includes a mechanism for funding “high-risk, high-reward” research projects, Dr. Kornberg explains. “To get funding from the MSRP, you have to prove a clear and direct relevance to MS—things that are going to help people living with MS, anywhere from immediately to within 10 years or so,” he says. “It’s a clinical and translational focus that is so important to MS research.”
The MSRP includes a grant award pathway specifically for pilot projects that have a “strong biological rationale, but don’t have a lot of preliminary data,” Dr. Kornberg adds. “It’s a way for this program to generate outside-the-box thinking for MS, which is so critical.”
An example of this approach is the use of MSRP funding by Dr. Kornberg and his team to conduct research to better understand the biology of the progressive phase of MS and myelin repair—two of the biggest unmet needs for people with MS. The researchers were able to identify a number of drug candidates that promoted myelin repair in animal models. After nearly 10 years of study, the team had planned to launch a clinical study with humans—but is now without funding to finish the project.
This is just one case, Dr. Kornberg warns, of how the cuts will affect the millions of Americans with MS, including the 70,000 veterans living with this chronic autoimmune disease that targets the central nervous system.
Jon Englund, an Army National Guard veteran from Meade County, SD, was diagnosed with MS in 2006 and was medically discharged at age 25, three years after serving a tour in Iraq. He recently traveled to D.C. to advocate for the MSRP to be refunded.
“I don’t know anybody that is for abuse, waste, and fraud using taxpayer money,” Englund says. “But the MSRP is for the Department of Defense employees and their families. When the funding is allocated to research veteran issues, it should be a priority. It’s a matter of our nation’s security.” Englund says if a treatment were ever discovered, he would re-enlist immediately. “I loved my job as a soldier.”
Arthritis Cuts Also Impact Veterans
Arthritis affects nearly 60 million Americans and numbers continue to climb, with more than one in three veterans now living with arthritis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC also projects that the current estimate of 60 million Americans with arthritis will rise to 78 million by 2040.
The economic impacts of the disease are massive. Annually, 172 million workdays are lost to arthritis and other rheumatic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, says Taylor. And arthritis is the second-most common reason for medical discharge among U.S. service members, notes Anna Hyde, the vice president of advocacy and access at the Arthritis Foundation, who is based in Washington, D.C. Which is why federal funding has increasingly prioritized arthritis research, with significant new funding pathways formed in just the last few years.
Those research efforts are in jeopardy, says Hyde, who points to a $10 million arthritis research program that ran under the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) and was defunded by the DoD earlier this year. Specifically designed for military service members, the program was only in its second year.
Additionally, the CDC fired the entire staff for the Healthy Aging Division and the Arthritis Program, as part of downsizing that has included more than 2,400 firings, Taylor shares. These cuts, he believes, will be felt strongest in rural communities across the country. “The CDC works to reach out to people who don’t have access to physical exercise and gym memberships, and there is evidence that exercise both reduces the risk for arthritis and improves arthritis,” Taylor explains.
Taylor believes this is just the beginning of fallout to the chronic arthritis community, considering the looming 37% budget cut to the NIH budget and a proposed $3.6 billion cut to the CDC. The current administration is also proposing to cut 80,000 jobs in the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), which provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans and is a major funder of arthritis research.
“The research community can’t sustain that big of a hit to the NIH budget, let alone the HHS, FDA, VA, and CDC,” Taylor says. “We will go backwards. We will stall projects that are on the cusp of breakthroughs in arthritis and other diseases. That’s surely not making America healthy by any means.”
Dr. Crow from HSS adds that it’s impossible for private institutions or pharmaceutical companies to fill the gap of lost NIH research funding—and the far-ranging impacts will likely go beyond lost scientific progress, or individuals not having their arthritis needs met, to negatively affecting the American biomedical industry, she believes.
“The NIH funds much more basic studies into the mechanisms of how biology works that are fundamental to how we understand disease, and then how we identify therapeutic targets,” Dr. Crow explains. “The biotech companies then take that information and build off of it. Without that critical information, I don’t know what’s going to happen to biotech or pharma.”
Kidney Disease Research Grants Evaporate
Research shows that race is one of the most determining factors in the U.S. for the risk of developing chronic kidney disease (CKD). Black people in this country are four times more likely to develop end-stage kidney disease (ESKD), while Hispanic people and Native Americans are two times more likely, and Asian people 1.4 times more likely than white people to have this chronic, often life-threatening condition.
In the past three months, hundreds of research programs, studies, and clinical trials that contained the word “diversity,” or other words that indicated the studying of health inequities, were abruptly terminated in the administration’s quest to end all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives. The move has severely undercut CKD research.
One big nationwide CKD program that was abruptly cut in May is the now defunct Eliminating Racism and Structural Inequities in Kidney Disease (ERASE-KD) effort, an NIH-funded consortium of more than 70 researchers, administrators, and community partners from 13 participating U.S. universities and health institutions. The consortium was ready to launch five clinical trials across the country starting in January 2025 to investigate and address racial disparities in CKD.
A senior researcher in ERASE-KD, who works at one of the participating universities, and who spoke to HealthCentral on the condition of anonymity, shared an inside look at the consortium’s attempt to save the program, including its ongoing work from more than $8 million dollars already spent since ERASE-KD’s inception in 2023.
Earlier this year, the researcher says, project scientists at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) worked with ERASE-KD researchers to “realign [the program] with the administration’s values” by “focusing less on the structural racism component, and more on CKD outcomes,” which were already designated as the primary outcomes of all five trials.
“Unfortunately, we were never given that chance” before the axe fell, the researcher says. On May 1, with no official notice, the grant award disappeared from the NIH’s online grant management system, eRA Commons. All five clinical trials had already been through a rigorous scientific review process, including Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, a critical step to conducting trials involving humans.
Such cuts are a blow to all 34 million Americans with CKD, this researcher believes. “The request for applications from NIH was focused on minority populations,” they explain. “But all five trials would have had clear implications for other people with kidney disease.” Another potential CKD gain lost? A planned shared database across all five trials that would have made for a “rich resource” for future investigation.
Dana Crawford, Ph.D., a genetic epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, OH, lost a grant with an estimated $332,000 in funds remaining because her research analyzed a genetic variation in kidney disease that is most commonly found in African American and Hispanic people with West African ancestry, she says. Her project aimed to study if genetic risk in this group increased after exposure to certain heavy metals to more broadly understand how environmental factors may play a role in CKD.
On April 15 of this year, Crawford received a letter from the NIH. It read: “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to DEI. Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
Crawford says this statement couldn’t be further from the truth.
“You really need to study everybody, and in all environmental contexts, to understand what is going on in terms of susceptibility to disease and the underlying biological mechanisms, so that we can develop therapies that work for everybody,” Crawford says. “When we say diversity, that’s what we really mean, to ensure that we’re doing research on a wide variety of people.”
Long COVID Research Is Being Dismantled
After declaring the COVID pandemic as officially “over,” the current administration terminated billions of dollars in COVID research and dismantled infrastructureaimed to bolster research into long COVID (LC), a condition affecting more than 20 million Americans, and in some cases leading to long-lasting disability.
Among those cuts: $11.4 billion in CDC funding meant for state and local health departments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and international recipients to increase COVID testing and vaccinations, LC research, and bolster the response to other public health threats, as reported by NBC News and confirmed by the HHS.
On May 19, a federal judge imposed a preliminary injunction on the HHS, blocking the rescinding of those funds. Should the cuts go through, health agencies across the country will lose a key source of funding for LC research, including studies, statewide surveys, and outreach programs to inform health care workers about the chronic condition, per a report.
Raising awareness among health care providers is critical for long COVID, says Beth Stelson, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, who personally contracted long COVID in the early days of the pandemic. The condition has more than 200 symptoms, can affect multiple organs, and is often misdiagnosed as depression, anxiety, or other mental health conditions.
Stelson fears that the Americans who deal with LC are now at risk of being left behind after five years of remarkable progress. “We went from, ‘What are the symptoms?’ and ‘Am I reinfected?’ to having rehabilitative services, a deeper understanding of a myriad of different organ systems that can be affected, and how to manage these symptoms,” she notes. “We really fought to become visible. These cuts are trying to make us invisible again.”
Stelson has been a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative for Long COVID since 2020. Especially concerning to her is the shutting down of the Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, an HHS-run body set up to coordinate the nationwide effort to research and understand chronic COVID. “Usually we have a very siloed approach in the government,” Dr. Stelson says. “This was a way to bring together the research that we need for our communities and the services that patients and caregivers need. It was a new model that was going to be more efficient—and it was cut in the name of efficiency.”
The current administration has also directed the HHS to terminate the Federal Advisory Committee on Long COVID, a group of researchers, patient advocates, and physicians to advise the executive branch on addressing LC.
In a demonstration of the power of patient advocacy, LC scientists have been able to claw back some of their research dollars. After the NIH terminated a $1.7 billion program, Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER), the single largest federal funding for long COVID research, the Trump administration reversed itself, at least in part, after intense pushback from the LC community and researchers.
“As a patient community, we have more skills than we did five years ago,” Stelson says. “We have more advocacy partners than we did. We have stronger research partnerships than we did. We might not have the funding, but we are a larger community. I think we’re quite savvy, to be perfectly honest.”
As Dementia Cases Rise, Funding Disappears
A recent report from the Alzheimer’s Association found that incidents of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) increased by 300,000 cases between 2024 and 2025, with 7.2 million Americans over the age of 65 now living with this debilitating neuroinflammatory disorder that robs people of memory, reasoning skills, and eventually, their lives.
But funding for dementia research has plummeted in 2025. In March, the NIH halted $65 million in funding for 14 of the 35 Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers (ADRC) across the nation, which are “dedicated to developing and testing new ways to detect, diagnose, treat, and prevent dementia and to improving care for people with these diseases and their families,” per Alzheimers.gov.
HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement that “the pause was a necessary step in response to compliance issues related to grant proposals that included language pertaining to DEI, as well as concerns regarding antisemitism.”
The impacts will be felt not just by institutions, but by the dementia community, says one Alzheimer’s researcher, who recently lost millions of dollars for a study that aimed to better understand why Black Americans are at least 1.5 to two times more likely than white Americans to develop Alzheimer’s and related dementias, and who spoke to HealthCentral on the condition of anonymity. “The basis for canceling it was that it’s a DEI project,” they say of their project. “But it wasn’t DEI. It doesn’t advocate for anything, or say anything, like white participants were having better outcomes because they are white. It’s simply a fact that there are race differences in dementia. And when we study disparities, the whole population benefits.”
On top of DEI-related cuts to dementia-focused and other disease research, the current administration has targeted programs at universities, including Columbia and Harvard, resulting in the termination of hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Columbia, for example, has lost $250 million in NIH federal funding for more than 400 grants.
One such newly eliminated study out of Columbia had been awarded $51 million for a five-year project to research the connection between dementia and pre-diabetesand type 2 diabetes, comprising high-risk groups for cognitive impairment and a large fraction of the U.S. population, according to the research proposal.
Experts also warn of the long-term impacts for young researchers across the nation as funding opportunities dry up. Historically, minority and disadvantaged graduates have been able to apply for research supplements to promote diversity through funds that are added to existing grants to “increase the participation of scientists from underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” or to “help promising researchers return to a scientific career,” per the NIH website on Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research (which has recently been removed).
At Case Western University, Crawford was supporting a post-baccalaureate fellow doing research on genetic variants in Alzheimer’s in the Amish community. In early May, that fellow received word that the remaining $111,000 in funding had been cut. According to Grant-Watch.US, 191 similar research supplements to promote diversity have been terminated, totaling over $768 million in funding.
“We’re going to be missing a whole class of scientists because there are no training programs right now,” Crawford says. “It is a horrible self-inflicted wound on the scientific American enterprise. And most important, it is going to affect a lot of people—those with Alzheimer’s and other conditions.”
Chronic Disease Funding Is in Peril
As America grapples with an array of public health issues—including obesity, with more than two in five U.S. adults deemed obese, a condition that raises the risk of serious heart issues, diabetes, and other chronic conditions, per the CDC—deep cuts to fund the science that can deliver treatments and solutions for chronic disease will likely worsen the existing problem, says Crawford.
“It would make more sense if we understood … that there was a vision of what is supposed to be at the other end,” she adds. “But there isn’t. It’s just the complete destruction of the research enterprise in the United States.”
“We’re losing our research future,” confirms Stelson, especially in light of a recent government mandate, currently in legal limbo, revoking Harvard’s right to enroll foreign students, which would force roughly 6,800 of the world’s brightest minds to transfer, with new international students barred from studying at Harvard going forward, should the courts allow the order to stand. (Even if it’s struck down, a scientific “brain drain” to the U.S. is already being documented.)
“The damage has been done,” she adds. “And it's going to take a really long time for us to rebuild.”