What’s New
Even after a judge intervened to prohibit the Trump administration from freezing federal funding, large numbers of grants from the National Institutes of Health still can’t be paid out. That’s because the groups that review grant proposals and decide whether to fund them can no longer schedule their meetings, according to two emails from NIH officials obtained by The Chronicle. The hold on meetings has been described as a loophole that’s being exploited by the Trump administration to circumvent the judge’s ruling.
The Details
NIH grant proposals go through two levels of peer review, the first by a committee called a study section, and the second by an advisory council, which makes final funding recommendations. Study sections and advisory councils are required by law to post notifications of their meetings in the Federal Register 15 days before they occur. But submissions to the register — a daily government publication that includes proposed regulations and public notices — have been put on hold, effectively blocking the process of funding new grants and renewing others.
The pause on funding, first announced by the administration in late January, was thought to be temporary. But according to a February 7 email from an NIH official shared with The Chronicle, Federal Register submissions “are now on hold indefinitely.” That decision, the email says, “came from the HHS level,” referring to the Department of Health and Human Services, “and no further information was provided.”
No NIH-related meetings have been posted to the Federal Register since January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration. Meetings that were published before then can proceed, but those that were planned but had not been posted before that cutoff date are being canceled or postponed, often at the last minute. For example, all 38 meetings scheduled to take place between Wednesday and Friday of this week were marked on the NIH website with an asterisk denoting they “did not take place as scheduled.” (None of those meetings appear in the Federal Register.)
Among those was a study section on bacterial virulence, which had been slated to meet on Wednesday and Thursday to review two grant proposals from Brian Stevenson, a professor of microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, for work on novel treatments for Lyme disease. Stevenson saw posts by scholars on Bluesky on Wednesday morning — just as the meeting was to have begun — saying it had been canceled.
The trainees are looking at what is going on and totally rethinking whether they want to be in science.
The stakes for Stevenson are high. He was hoping for the two new grants to replace his current ones, which are up for one-year renewals at the end of March and of April, respectively. While those renewals are normally a rubber-stamp process, Stevenson is not confident that will be the case this time given the “chaos” surrounding funding. “There’s a lot of uncertainty. Will I have to shut down this April or will I have to shut down next April? Or will study sections begin to meet again and potentially fund the grants so that we can keep things afloat?”
Another scholar whose proposal was slated to be reviewed by a study section on March 5 was notified that the section’s meeting was postponed until late April. But that later meeting is “tentatively scheduled,” the NIH scientific-review officer assigned to the section wrote her in an email.
A third scientist, Carole LaBonne, a professor in Northwestern University’s molecular biosciences department, said a scheduled study section to review her grant was now pending. LaBonne’s postdoctoral fellow was also scheduled to have his Pathway to Independence Award proposal reviewed at a January advisory-council meeting. That was canceled. “He is absolutely a nervous wreck, thinking that his future is in jeopardy,” LaBonne said. “And he’s not alone. The trainees are looking at what is going on and totally rethinking whether they want to be in science.”
LaBonne, as his mentor, said she doesn’t know how to advise him. “Folks in my shoes, we have two phases right now. We have the, ‘My God, the world is on fire’ nervous breakdowns that we’re having. And then we turn around and we take a deep breath and put it all in a box and turn around to our trainees and tell them that this is all going to be OK,” she said. “But increasingly, I worry that I’m not being truthful with them.”
The Backdrop
In late January, the Office of Management and Budget announced a freeze on trillions of dollars in federal grants. That pause was temporarily lifted by a U.S. district judge, Loren AliKhan, who noted that, “for many, the harms caused by the freeze are non-speculative, impending, and potentially catastrophic.” The Trump administration soon rescinded the memo, though the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that that move “is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”
AliKhan in early February extended her ruling, keeping grant money flowing. But the hold on Federal Register submissions “is a clear end run” around that ruling, LaBonne said.
The debacle compounds weeks of confusion at the NIH, which also announced earlier this month a 15-percent cap on indirect costs awarded to grantees. That cap, approximately half of the average rate it previously offered, was quickly met with a series of legal challenges. A judge on February 10 placed a temporary restraining order on the cap nationwide. The judge, Angel Kelley, will hear arguments in U.S. District Court on Friday.
What to Watch For
Even if the pause on Federal Register submissions is lifted, the timeline on which many scholars’ funding is dependent will be affected, LaBonne said. For one, scheduling study sections is no easy matter. Generally, each section involves 25 to 30 top scientists from across the country. “These meetings are scheduled a year in advance. Trying to reschedule on a short timeline is super difficult,” LaBonne said.
If the pause isn’t lifted soon, she added, “the effects are going to be catastrophic for the U.S. research enterprise,” including the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, and the national economy. “This,” she said, “is what I think the people in the White House just don’t really comprehend fully.”
