# Alzheimer’s research centers face Trump-imposed $65m funding delay across the US

**Contributor:** Jessica Glenza

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Major Alzheimer’s disease research centers across the country face a $65m funding gap amid a Trump administration-imposed delay, with at least one struggling to retain highly trained staff.

Although  a government-wide funding freeze is illegal, the administration has managed to delay research funding by  scientific meetings and failing to publish forthcoming meetings in the Federal Register, both which are legally required.

As the Trump administration seeks to reshape government and cut costs in line with its priorities, scientific institutions, and in particular the $48bn-budgeted National Institutes of  (NIH), have come under attack.

Funding delays have affected nearly every research field, from pediatric cancer to dementia, as part of a multi-pronged strategy of draconian cuts. Government cost-cutting measures come ahead of an expected push to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which .

For Alzheimer’s research, the stakes are high. The degenerative condition affects 6.7 million Americans with diagnoses expected to double by 2060. Although it most often affects older adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention () does  part of aging.

At least $65m slated for 14 of the nation’s 35 Alzheimer’s disease research centers is now in limbo. Funding for all 14 centers is expected to run out on 30 April.

The critical funding gap comes as senators consider Trump’s nominee to head the NIH, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a conservative darling who rose to prominence criticizing Covid-19 lockdown measures. Bhattacharya said during his confirmation hearing that he would ensure researchers “have the resources they need”, but repeatedly deflected comments on the administration’s funding freeze and .

Ann D Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry and an Alzheimer’s disease researcher who has about $3m in delayed funding, is working to “stop the bleeding” and retain her staff – spending hours scouring spreadsheets and seeking temporary funding.

“Our clinicians and our staff are really highly trained, highly skilled people, and to lose them would be devastating,” said Cohen, who spoke in her personal capacity. She is based at the University of Pittsburgh’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “You don’t just pull those kinds of skill sets out of anyone in the general population.”



The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center houses an Alzheimer’s disease research center. Photograph: WoodsnorthPhotography/Alamy

Pittsburgh’s center alone houses clinical trials, a bank of 1,769 brains, 965 positron emission tomography (PET) scans, 5,000 blood samples, and longitudinal data on 6,000-plus patients – altogether accounting for decades of research at an institution that has been funded continuously since 1984.

“Make no mistake: Donald Trump and Elon Musk are slashing research for Alzheimer’s disease to give tax breaks to big corporations,” said Tammy Baldwin, a Democratic sentaor from Wisconsin. Baldwin  the cuts this week.

“This investment gives patients and their loved ones hope that they can fight this disease, and stopping their funding wastes precious time we cannot get back,” she said.

Cohen has reduced her lab’s budget to one-quarter of normal operating expenses. She is being tided over by “generous donors” and the help of her institution. Many researchers such as Cohen are now effectively doing damage control, Berg said, as they seek to retain talent.

“It’s all very distressing and damaging for no reason,” said Berg. “These are multimillion-dollar, years-long grants that coordinate the Alzheimer’s clinical trials … They’ve got staff, etc, and now they’re going to have a gap in funding.”

With widespread disruptions in research, outcry led the administration to  and publishing in the Federal Register, both legally required to for federal grants. But a secondary layer of peer review called advisory councils remains delayed, gumming up grant renewals, with more chaos on the horizon.

Alzheimer’s research is also threatened by an executive order targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Such language could be a threat to Alzheimer’s research because the field has sought to diversify study participation in recent years. White, wealthy and female patients are overrepresented in clinical trials, which makes trial results less generalizable to the “real world”, in Cohen’s words.

Grant-making officers have canceled  across the agency, and NIH employees expect that hundreds more could be canceled, .

Trump touted this work as ending “the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government”, in his . In practical terms, it has amounted to an ideological review.

Cohen’s lab has a 59% indirect cost rate. Part of that cost is related to the maintenance of freezers with tissue samples – and not just the electricity to run them. Their contents are so precious that at all times a member of staff wears a pager that alerts in the event of a malfunction.

“We also expect the administration to try to use existing authority, existing terms and conditions in regulations and rate agreements, to open them up for renegotiation,” said Graham. In practice, that could mean arguing that researchers spent money inappropriately to reopen negotiations.

The administration moved to further solidify its ability to impose changes by rescinding a little-known transparency policy called the “”. In force since 1971, the waiver requires the Department of Health and Human Services to publish policy changes in the Federal Register.

The change has private industry, researchers and institutions bracing for a more secretive department – even as health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s promised “radical transparency” in his .

Ironically, Cohen’s research would appear to comport with at least one administration priority: Kennedy’s  in anything “that advances human health and can’t be patented by pharma”.

“I’m interested in what lived experience does to brain ageing,” said Cohen. “That’s not something shareholders in a private company are going to be interested in because they can’t monetize that.

“Without NIH, who takes risk on that kind of observational work, we lose out on a whole sector of research that doesn’t involve pharmaceuticals that could be sold.”

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