In most years, Talya Shragai can devote a few concentrated weeks to securing federal funding that supports a full year of research for Stanford’s Disease Ecology in a Changing World (DECO) program. But as recent federal decisions have snatched funding away from climate and health research, she has spent this year as DECO’s Research and Program Manager chasing nearly a dozen smaller grants, piecing together enough support to keep the program’s infectious disease work moving forward. “It splits your attention,” Shragai says. With funding coming from so many different sources, “it’s hard to make sure that your direction fits up with what [each grant is] looking for without feeling like you’re moving into a million places.”
This scramble for funds to keep research projects afloat comes at a time when scientists are trying to understand the growing threat of climate change, and its effects on when, where, and how infectious diseases are emerging. Researchers warn that the funding disruptions to essential climate and health studies will leave the world ill-prepared to face new disease threats and ultimately undermine the future of global and planetary health.
This spring’s hantavirus cases are the latest signal that infectious disease research is more important than ever. While hantavirus has stirred global panic, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, infectious disease ecologists know that spillover events, when diseases transfer from animals to humans, are likely to become more frequent as climate change shifts ecosystems and human exposure patterns. But just as these new cases are increasing the need for infectious disease research, federal support for climate and health related research is more uncertain than ever. Recent National Institutes of Health funding cuts have canceled an unprecedented number of research grants, with infectious disease clinical trials impacted the most.
“I was looking into applying for an NIH grant, but they changed the requirements to be able to do global work,” Shragai says. “The funding reality now is the infrastructure is no longer set up to support these global, climate change-driven infectious disease outbreaks.”
The timing is particularly difficult. Many of the studies affected are the same ones designed to detect early signals of emerging disease before they become larger public health crises. This science of infectious disease prediction, and consequently prevention, has been building across decades of field surveillance and modeling. But translating those findings into prevention requires long-term monitoring systems that are expensive to maintain and difficult to restart once interrupted. “A gap like this can really derail a whole area of research,” Shragai adds.
In the short term, gaps in funding can mean the loss of years of data and partnership connections, and the long-term effects are even more concerning. “When you prevent funding of research from happening at all,” explains Dr. Rashmi Joglekar, Associate Director of Science & Policy at the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PRHE), “you’re losing potentially decades of other scientists relying on those findings, doing more research, publishing follow up studies and integrating that into health protective policies.”
Instead, recent policies from the current U.S. government administration have canceled or frozen billions of dollars in climate science funding, and ordered The National Institutes of Health (NIH) to shut down their funding for studies on climate and health, leaving universities and public health institutions scrambling to preserve long-term studies. Furthermore, a recent proposal by the Office of Management and Budget seeks to restrict federal research funding even further by centralizing authority over federal grantmaking to political appointees instead of peer-review agencies.
“These provisions would basically allow immediate termination of an ongoing grant,” says Joglekar. “They make it very hard to get new grants if your proposals don’t align with ‘national interests.’” With the current administration’s stance on climate change, environmental studies are directly threatened.
Unfortunately, even without these proposed changes in effect, researchers are already well aware of the risk of losing funding. In January 2025, Carter Brandon, senior fellow at the World Resources Institute (WRI) and former Global Lead Economist for the Environment/Natural Resources and Climate Change Departments at the World Bank, was working on the economics of climate change impacts in Africa when his funding got cut. “I lost a $10 million grant in the first week of Trump 2,” he reveals.
Increasingly out of options, more researchers are turning towards private organizations and philanthropic institutions to patch this missing support. The Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation have all expanded investments in climate and health initiatives in recent years, including a recent study by Brandon and colleagues at WRI that highlights how investing just $1 to prepare for climate-caused health risks can return up to $68 in health benefits in developing countries.
While philanthropy and private funds can support projects like Brandon’s, and have even helped launch pilot programs and fund targeted interventions that might otherwise struggle to secure federal backing, a large funding gap remains. Well-known research institutions like Harvard, Rutgers University, and the Manhattan Institute, are seeing devastating effects of lost funding. Multi-year field studies are being paused or restructured, hiring decisions delayed, and grant proposals rewritten with shorter timelines and narrower scopes.
Even the well-endowed Stanford University has been feeling the effects of the federal changes. “There is simply no substitute for federal research funding for science,” said Stanford Provost Jenny Martinez in her annual budget presentation last June, underscoring how deeply academic research depends on federal stability even at well-resourced institutions. That system of support, administrators say, underpins much of the country’s scientific output, particularly in fields like epidemiology and environmental health that require sustained data collection over many years, which has health implications far beyond the country’s borders.
“The moral argument is devastating,” Brandon states. “Because we’ve cut what, in fact, are small amounts of money in the U.S. budget, we are leading directly or indirectly to the deaths of – over time in Africa, across AIDS and other diseases – millions of people.”
The uncertainty of funding for infectious disease research doesn’t just undermine the work itself, but jeopardizes the future of human health. After a year spent scrambling to secure the resources to continue DECO’s work, Shragai worries the consequences will extend far beyond this funding cycle. “We’re going to be seeing the repercussions of this for many years into the future.”
