The 8 federal funders listed here obligated $36.08B in grants to US colleges and universities in federal fiscal year 2025. NIH alone was $24.23B, 67% of it.
Grants are only part of the picture. In fiscal year 2024 US universities reported spending $64.64B of federal money on R&D, 55% of their $117.55B total. By agency that was HHS (mostly NIH) $35.50B, the Department of Defense $10.17B, NSF $7.17B, the Department of Energy $2.94B, NASA $2.37B and USDA $1.98B. These are expenditures reported by the universities to NSF, so they include the DoD and NASA money that the grant data below undercounts.
Source: NSF HERD Survey FY2024, Tables 10 and 11 (NSF 26-304).
| Funder | Grants to higher education | Top recipient |
|---|---|---|
| National Institutes of Health (NIH) | $24.23B | Johns Hopkins University |
| National Science Foundation (NSF) | $6.70B | University of Texas at Austin |
| Department of Energy (DOE) | $1.87B | Colorado State University |
| US Department of Agriculture (USDA) | $1.54B | Texas A&m Agrilife Research |
| Department of Commerce (NIST, NOAA) | $931.4M | University of Colorado |
| Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) | $427.5M | Columbia University in the City of New York |
| Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) | $369.5M | Texas Southern University |
| National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) | $17.1M | Center for Independent Documentary, Inc. |
The Department of Defense and NASA are not listed yet: their grants to universities are undercounted when filtered by recipient type, so we will add them once we can count them correctly. Department of Education grants are left out because most are student aid, not research.