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NIH shake-up to grant decision-making draws concerns of political meddling

Policy drops “paylines” based on peer-review scores and requires geography and other factors to guide approvals

by Jocelyn Kaiser

In a potentially dramatic change to how it chooses what science to fund, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is ending a long-running practice at many of its institutes of establishing, and making public, a threshold peer-review score needed for a grant application’s approval. Instead of many NIH investigator grant decisions being determined by such cutoffs, known as paylines, all 27 institutes and centers must now consider factors such as an institute’s priorities, the applicant’s career stage and existing funding, and even their geographic location.

The policy is drawing concern from some researchers, even though about half of NIH institutes, mostly smaller ones, already don’t use these paylines. The critics fear the new policy will further make agency grant decisions subject to political considerations, including the whims of appointees of President Donald Trump’s administration, rather the peer review of scientific subject matter experts.

“My colleagues are asking who would agree to volunteer their time on an NIH study section if their ranking of grants will not be what drives awarding,” Carol Greider, a Nobel Prize winner and molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, tells ScienceInsider. “The main issue really is who is making the decisions after peer review and how will there be transparency in that process?”

Other scientists, however, were nonplussed. “This is not new. At all,” wrote a U.S. academic scientist known by the pseudonym DrugMonkey on their blog. “I, for one, endorse the general idea that grant selection should absolutely not be a direct reflection of the percentiles arising from the scores” from peer reviewers. But whether the current policy implementation is an improvement will depend, the researcher adds, on “the expertise of those making the decisions.”

NIH announced the shift on 21 November, saying the policy offers “a unified strategy that will help guide clearer and consistent funding decisions across all Institutes,” centers, and offices. In addition to peer-review scores, decisions should consider “health priorities, scientific opportunities, the workforce, availability of funds, and the wider research portfolio,” the notice states.

The new process takes effect in January 2026, when NIH councils—which do a second layer of peer review after grants are scored by outside scientists in topic-specific study sections, and then make final funding recommendations—will consider the first of three annual rounds of grant applications.

The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the policy but NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya and other institute leaders have publicly discussed it since word of the change first leaked in August. NIH’s vaunted grantmaking process starts with critiques from the study sections whose peer reviewers assign each application a numerical quality score; lower scores reflect higher quality.

Factoring in their budget for the year, many larger institutes then publish their payline cutoff for grant approval. For example, at a specific institute the payline might be set at the 10th or 16th percentile, depending on the grant type and investigator’s career stage. Public paylines help investigators, who also learn after the study section how their own grant scored versus the full pool, know whether they’re likely to receive funding when the councils meet.

At the same time, most institutes also fund some applications that missed the cutoff but whose research fits with an institute priority. The program officers who oversee specific research portfolios will often give the councils input on those exceptions. And some institutes might decide to “skip” a high scoring application, for instance, because they already fund a lot of work in that area. Institute directors, the new policy states, “will continue to have the delegated authority to decide what is funded.”

Biochemist Jeremy Berg, former editor-in-chief of Science and former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which has long not published paylines, in general agrees with the revised policy. “HOWEVER, my comfort level with this changes if [institute] directors are not selected carefully, without overt political considerations. Encouraging or forcing IC [institute and center] directors to prioritize funding decisions based on political as opposed to scientific and portfolio-based criteria is deeply concerning,” he wrote on Bluesky.

Berg points to the recent appointment of a close friend of Vice President JD Vance as director of NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and a process to fill about a dozen open director positions that apparently won’t include search committees with outside scientists. Some U.S. researchers are also concerned that NIH’s grant advisory councils will be stacked with scientists chosen based on their political views.

In August, when news of the payline change began to emerge, Jenna Norton, an NIH program officer, said she and some of her colleagues within the agency were concerned, like some potential grantees. “If program staff were going to be the ones who got to make these calls [on grant decisions], I would be much less worried. But it definitely opens the door wide for abuse from an administration that has definitely not earned our trust regarding their scientific judgment,” she told ScienceInsider speaking in her personal capacity. Norton, who has protested other recent changes at NIH, was recently placed on administrative leave, a further sign of politicization at the agency in the eyes of some.

Others are troubled by a phrase in the NIH policy stating the agency will aim for “geographic balance of funding”—an apparent reference to most NIH funding going to elite institutions on the East and West coasts. NIH was already taking some steps to rectify that bias—it developed revised peer-review criteria taking effect this year that aim to de-emphasize an applicant’s institution.

Even if there is merit to the new approach, says one official at a larger NIH institute who spoke on condition of anonymity, “the absence of a payline creates enormous uncertainty and anxiety for the applicants.”