By Kritika Agarwal
New reporting from The New York Times and The Washington Post confirms AAU’s recent analysis showing that the rate of competitive awards made by the National Institutes of Health has slowed down significantly this fiscal year. The reporting offers fresh evidence of how the slowdown is disrupting the nation’s biomedical research enterprise.
“American Science Is Shrinking”
Both The Times and The Post reported that the NIH has awarded less than half the number of grants it usually gives out this fiscal year as compared to the same period last year. The new reporting tracks with AAU’s analysis, which looked at the number of awards made through February, and verifies that not much has changed since then. The Post reported that the slowdown in funding has cut “the U.S. research footprint across nearly every major disease area – including fewer grants focused on women’s health, cancer and mental health.”
The Times reported that, “As of late March … the National Cancer Institute had earmarked only about $72 million for new and competitive grants, less than one-third of the nearly $250 million it had agreed to spend by that point in a typical fiscal year during the Biden administration.”
“American science is shrinking,” The Post reported.
Administrative Chokepoints
As AAU noted before, the slowdown in awards owes to many factors, including the protracted government shutdown last year.
The Times also attributed the slowdown at the NIH to the use of a “computational text analysis tool” that allows “the agency to comb through new grant proposals and existing projects for phrases suggesting a grant ‘may not align with NIH priorities.’” The tool scans grant proposals for about 235 terms, including “racism,” “gender,” “inequities,” “minority,” and “vaccination refusal.”
The tool is flagging “as many as half of grants,” The Times reported, “requiring staff scientists to extensively document how they will be reworked or why they already conform to agency priorities.” The paper reported that “flagged grants address cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, H.I.V., heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, nutrition and prenatal care.”
This added workload falls upon an agency that is experiencing severe staffing shortages. The agency “lost thousands of workers last year to layoffs and early retirements,” The Times said, adding: “In some branches of the agency, what workers remain can barely keep up with renewing existing grants, much less awarding new ones.”
Another chokepoint is the involvement of political staff in making decisions. The Times noted that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “has become involved this year in flagging certain grant awards and stopping their release.”
Finally, the agency has created yet another administrative roadblock by eliminating “paylines” – or, as The Post explained, “cutoffs that previously gave scientists confidence that if their grant was rated above a certain score, they would receive funding.” Now, NIH program officers are declining to fund grants that have received a score that previously would have had a high probability of getting funded. “When there was an established payline, principal investigators could start making plans, hiring people and making purchases confident they would receive a grant― even though the funding wasn’t in hand yet. Now people are more likely to wait,” The Post noted.
Losing the Next Generation of Researchers
The slowdown in NIH funding is having a major impact on the pipeline of biomedical research talent. As The Post noted, “A large portion of grant money goes to support trainees in labs, so when funding dries up, every kind of young scientist is affected – graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, research staff, assistant professors.”
“With all the delays and things, you can keep trying, but at a certain point you have to pay the people in your lab, and you have to buy things,” Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, told The Post. She added: “It’s horrible. All the people I’ve been training and whose careers I feel responsible for – it’s all falling apart, and it’s really heartbreaking.”
Kritika Agarwal is assistant vice president for communications at AAU.