Trump administration ends funding for some healthcare research work in Wisconsin
The Trump administration pulled the plug on $94 million in funding for 150 grants that supported health research and scientist training, including Wisconsin projects, according to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.
The Department of Health and Human Services ended a slate of grants at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, including work to help doctors catch lung cancer earlier, keep new moms and their kids safe during childbirth and use telehealth to improve healthcare access in rural communities, Baldwin noted. Canceling funding in the middle of multi-year projects wastes years of prior work and millions of taxpayer dollars, her office said.
“It’s sowing chaos and taking away chances to improve Americans’ health and well-being,” Baldwin said.
Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokeswoman, said that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality must “determine whether continuation funding is in the best interest of the federal government.”
“To be clear, these grants were not terminated,” she said. “They were not awarded continued funding. The Trump administration remains committed to the responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”
Baldwin supplied a list of affected grants, which included three at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: a study to improve families’ access to hospitalized kids’ medical notes, a look at how COVID-19 affected antibiotic prescribing and an evaluation of a faith-based intervention designed to help Black people with depression.
Dr. Michelle Kelly, a UW pediatrics professor and pediatric hospitalist at American Family Children’s Hospital, received a five-year, roughly $2 million grant to study how providing access to electronic medical records to families could improve care for kids.
The research builds off of a pilot study that found 1 in 5 families found a medical error when given access to records through a tablet. About half of those errors could result in a change of care if identified early, Kelly said.
Kelly received a fifth of the funding in September 2024, which she used to prepare for a randomized control trial at her hospital, Seattle Children’s and Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
They started recruiting in spring 2025, but Kelly didn’t hear anything when the grant was supposed to be renewed and did not receive information when she followed up with the agency.
When HHS asked her to speak on an April panel about the work, she told them she had to stop the clinical trial due to the lack of funding but agreed to participate as the grant had not yet been terminated. She received her notice of non-renewal earlier this month.
Kelly has been talking with the Seattle and the Los Angeles sites to pull together “shoestring pilot-level funding to try to start recruitment.”
“We scrambled to try to recruit as fast as possible at our site, so we have all of that data,” she said. “But the problem is we can’t tell the results of the trial without a certain number. Unless we can get those other sites some scrounged money, we’ll just have to essentially throw those data away.”
Kelly said hospitals won’t implement something they don’t know will benefit patients.
“We’ll probably never know whether that happens unless some similar trial happens in the future,” she said. “We don’t know whether we’ll have this in our toolbox as a way to make care safer for children in the hospital setting.”
Kelly added that “research can’t function in this way.”
“It doesn’t make sense to reward a grant and then stop it in the middle,” she said. “For people to put all this effort and lose all these data based on a project that was brought up by patients and families of things that they want and need, it’s just very disappointing.”
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