Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget
Alert: The Trump administration is quietly slashing new NIH grant awards, and it's not via the budget
NIH’s sudden move to multiyear grant funding is forcing shocking cuts in the number of grants funded. This is an effective budget cut. It's bad, folks.
The world's largest biomedical funder is the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the past, the usual way to assess how well NIH is supporting science has been to look at the NIH budget number: how much money Congress has appropriated for the agency.
Under Trump, however, that assessment is no longer the only thing that matters. In recent months, the Trump administration has created a new policy for the NIH — a policy change without Congressional consent — that will produce devastating cuts to US science, with no change in budget required. And there is little public information about how it will work.That new policy is the 'multi-year funding' policy. In short, the Trump administration has required many research grants to be fully funded up-front, with funds from this fiscal year. In the past, these grants were typically funded year-by-year, spreading out the cost of, say, a five year grant over five years of NIH appropriations. Now such multi-year grants must be funded with funds from this year — fiscal year 2025 (FY25).
The new policy means that the number of grants that can be funded this year will drop dramatically. And that will decimate US biomedical science labs across the country, and set back medical research and cures for disease by years. Many more labs will be facing the equivalent of bankruptcy as a result of this policy.
The multi-year funding policy has been in discussion internally at NIH for months. It may have started with a good-faith effort by NIH civil servants trying to get money out the door to spend the budget, but it now appears to have been weaponized by the Trump administration, by requiring a large number of grants to be funded this way. The effects of this policy have now come out to the public clearly: on July 24th, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) published its funding strategy for the rest of this fiscal year.
Last year's percentage of funded grants was nearly 10%. Now, the NCI payline has gone down to 4%. That means out of 100 grant submissions, only four will receive funding. No scientist, no matter how good a writer and no matter how good their ideas and data, can reliably write a grant that will beat out 96% of other submitted grants.
If you are a Principal Investigator with a well-scored grant, just waiting for council review, and you think you are sure to receive an award, you should think again.
The previous 10% payline was crushing; it meant only 1 out of every 10 grants submitted was chosen competitively for funding. The new 4% payline, by comparison, is a nuclear bomb dropped on cancer funding. As one university scientist said, "A payline under 5% means it's not worth my time to apply. My lab will close down, and I'll stop doing research." And the problem is not just at NCI: other institutes are similarly planning to fund many fewer grants this year.
What can be done? One first step is to call your Congress members. Much more impactful would be to reach out to your local community and activate them. Contact your local press — TV, radio, and local news — and tell them that this policy and other Trump administration policies are killing medical research and need to be changed soon. Reach out to local existing groups, like patient groups and local organizing groups (you can find one list here) and offer to speak to them about this destruction of medical research.
The end of the fiscal year, Sept 30, is the final deadline, and work by grant staff needs to be done weeks before that to issue grants. We don't have much time.
The key metric to watch now is how many grants will be funded by NIH in fiscal year 2025. The number of funded grants dictates the number of labs that receive money, the number of fellows and students that can be paid to do work, and the number of projects to cure cancer and other diseases that can proceed.
While the agency has not yet published information on the impact of this policy on each NIH institute, we are seeing signs that the percentage of awarded applications will generally drop by a factor of 2 to 4. The policy change reputedly requires 50% of new awards to be made using multi-year funding, and for four years of each grant to be funded in advance. But the exact amount of reduction will vary across NIH institutes based on the duration and type of grants awarded by each institute.
Here's what we know: NCI's payline has gone down to 4%. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) payline is projected to drop from 12% to somewhere between 5-8%, according to internal estimates. Again based on internal data, the number of project grants funded by two other large institutes, the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) will fall by a factor of 3 or 4 compared to last year. That means paylines in those institutes would go from 15% to 4-5%.
Given the effects of this policy on science, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump and his budget chief Russell Vought required this new policy in order to maximally harm scientists — to reduce funding and thus turn the screws on scientists and universities at a time when they are feeling budget pressure inflicted by other administration policies.
Vought has bizarrely blamed NIH researchers for the pandemic when justifying significant NIH cuts, while comparing his political review process of NIH to the process that resulted in the shuttering of the Department of Education.
The purpose of the multi-year funding policy may be even more nefarious than just cutting medical research now. Under normal grant funding conditions, a big portion of the NIH budget each year is committed to previous year grants, which makes it hard for political interference to change the research funded by NIH funding quickly. But if many grants are converted to up-front funding, the Trump administration will have more freedom to rapidly repurpose large chunks of the NIH budget in future years. — for example, funneling money to bad-faith anti-vax studies, or worse.
Sources inside NIH say that this rigid and sweeping multi-year funding policy did not come from NIH, but instead from political appointees at HHS or the White House. NIH employees are not in favor of this requirement. It was dictated from above.
What about rescissions?
In the spring, close watchers of NIH were paying attention to a different kind of irregular budget cut: cutting the NIH budget by rescission. It may still be that some rescissions will be sent down by Vought to cut the NIH budget. But it appears that the multi-year funding strategy was first discussed inside NIH around the time this article was published about NIH rescissions, and when public attention focused on Jeremy Berg's documentation of slowed grant awards.
In other words, it seems like the first Trump plan this year was to cut the budget by interfering with NIH internal operation to reduce the number of grants that could be awarded — and then use rescission to formalize a budget cut. But NIH staff proved to be resourceful and resilient, and did everything they could to get grants reviewed and approved for funding. So it seems the Trump administration then pivoted to a different plan to cut science.
Instead of reducing the number of funded grants via blocking peer review panels and other means to stop awards, the Trump people imposed this new multi-year funding policy to make every awarded grant cost the government much more. That means that no matter how much good work peer reviewers and NIH civil servants might do, a big reduction in the number of awarded grants would be inevitable.
Another factor that might explain why the Trump administration seeks to effect cuts in via multi-year funding is that Congress would vote against any NIH budget cut. While any prediction is inherently uncertain, it seems from here that Republicans would have difficulty getting a majority vote in each house to cut the NIH budget, since many are already urging Trump to spend appropriated NIH funds. (To use rescission Republicans need a majority vote to lock in cuts. The normal budget or appropriations process requires a 60-vote threshold in the Senate and would be even harder for them to meet.)
This new multi-year funding plan doesn't need Congressional votes: it effectively cuts the number of NIH-funded projects with zero signoff from Congress.
Funding grants for multiple years could have potential upsides, but not this way, not now
In some scenarios, a gradual introduction of multi-year funding could stabilize or enhance US science. It is the rapid implementation of this policy as the Sept 30th deadline approaches that creates severe damage.
If there was an orderly transition over many years, it might make sense to pay some grants up front. Some basic or fundamental research projects, which are awarded in part based on the past reputation of the laboratory and investigators, might be paid out at the beginning of the project period. That would reduce compliance paperwork for the scientists, and accountability would be a natural consequence via future competitions for grants: peer review for later grants would take into account that the prior grant didn't produce good work.
But for many grants, year-by-year review is useful for oversight, and to allow NIH to assist awardees. When grants are awarded one year at a time, program officers — skilled scientists responsible for managing research portfolios with specific medical or scientific themes — evaluate progress, require budgetary accountability, and work with grantees before each year releasing the next installment of funds. Multi-year funding disrupts this important aspect of scientific oversight and accountability.
Whatever the potential upsides might be, the sudden nature of the policy's application means it is a terrible idea now. We are arriving at the last few months of an already challenging and financially complex fiscal year. Research laboratories across the country are struggling with instability introduced by new federal policies. Many grants have been terminated, some institutions have had their funding completely frozen, and grants that would have been awarded are stuck behind administrative bottlenecks.
Given these unprecedented attacks on science, scientists and institutions are faced with impossible decisions. Staff layoffs are widespread, investigators are fleeing to other countries, and research projects are being shuttered. Scientific work is not something that can be stopped and started on a whim: the required specialized expertise, reagents, cells, and animal models require predictability over several years to allow planning.
If you are a PI with a well-scored grant, just waiting for council review, and you think you are sure to receive an award, you should think again. Paylines have changed just in the past few weeks due to this Trump multi-year funding policy. Even strong grants that you would have expected to be funded based on last year's paylines may not be awarded.
If you are a lab head, this affects you; if you are a student, this threatens your future
The NIH grant system was already hyper-competitive before Trump. This policy will make it brutal. Without immediate resistance from the research community, this policy will go forward with devastating consequences for US science.
What can you do?
Contact your Congressional representatives. It is best to show up in person. Explain and tell them to oppose this forward funding mandate. Share this article if it helps! Tell them to protect NIH funding.
For researchers: Make noise within your institution. Ask your research office what they’re doing to push back. Talk to your program officers. Demand transparency.
Tell your local press that Trump is destroying US medical research, and find local activist groups to reach out to.
There are many engaged citizens across the country affected by cancer, or Alzheimer's, that want more information from scientists to help them advocate to their elected officials and to the press. Offer to talk to them, and help them do that.
This policy will devastate the next generation of scientists, the discoveries they would have made, and the breakthrough cures they would have enabled. This is one piece of an ongoing destruction of American science, which will cede our dominance on the world stage, create economic losses in every state of the union, and withhold progress on cures. Americans will suffer and die as a result. Scientists and everyone affected by science should speak up.
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