NIH Funding Is at a Standstill. This Professor Is Tracking the Delays.

On February 19, Annika F. Barber started counting.

Barber, an assistant professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, had been gearing up for a meeting in which she and other experts would review grant applications to the National Institutes of Health. These convenings of study sections, as they’re known, are the first step in deciding who gets NIH funding. But they’ve slowed to a standstill since the Trump administration’s announcement in late January of a freeze on trillions in federal funding.

Even though a judge has since issued and extended an order to keep funds flowing, neither study sections nor advisory councils, which make final funding recommendations, can schedule the meetings required for grant making to happen. By law, they must publish notifications of their meetings in the Federal Register 15 days in advance — but submissions to the register have been paused “indefinitely.” No NIH-related meetings have been posted since January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, although meetings that were posted before then can take place.

The hold-up in peer review has reportedly stalled 16,000 applications for $1.5 billion of funding. Many scientists are furious and anxious that such delays could halt cutting-edge research into cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases, and more.

Barber had held out hope that her study section would meet on February 20, since there was a brief period earlier in the month when meetings were brought back on track. She estimates that she spends up to 40 hours grading about a dozen proposals in preparation for such meetings. But less than 24 hours before her scheduled meeting, she received an email saying it would be delayed. The email did not give a new date.

Barber decided to record how often this was happening by manually searching the NIH’s website daily and pasting cancellation notices in a Google Sheet. By her count, as of Wednesday more than half of the study sections that should have met since January 2 — 77 out of 148 — “did not take place as scheduled.” (Barber restricts her search to meetings officially listed as canceled by the Center for Scientific Review, which awards most of the NIH’s funding.) Her spreadsheet is just one of many DIY efforts by scientists to pool information in the last month, which has included scraping data sets disappearing from federal websites and crowdsourcing lists of graduate schools cutting back on admissions.

At Rutgers, Barber runs a fruit-fly lab dedicated to circadian biology — the study of the molecular and cellular reasons for when organisms decide to sleep and eat, and how forces like traumatic brain injuries can disrupt that timing. To run her six-year-old lab and pay five full-time staffers, she relies on two NIH grants that are also vulnerable to a 15-percent cap on indirect NIH funding. On Tuesday, she spoke to The Chronicle on a four-hour bus ride back to New Jersey from Washington, D.C., where she and various union members had gathered to protest the cuts to science. “We don’t want to be in the street. We want to be in the lab,” Barber said. “But it feels like a time where we can’t be in the lab if we’re not in the street getting what we need to be able to do research and train scientists.” This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

What made you decide to start tracking and documenting these study-section cancellations?

I think a lot of us are handling a lot of anxiety around these uncertain times. And one of the ways I like to manage my anxiety is spreadsheets. So as I started feeling like, “Oh my gosh, they’re really not going to restart study sections,” I started keeping track of, “Are they going to meet next week? Did any of them sneak through?” I learned how to search the Center for Scientific Review website for the list of every study section that meets every week and whether it did meet or didn’t meet.

A number of my friends started asking me, “Can you check on this study section? Do you think my study section will happen on this date?” It’s not the user-friendliest website you could imagine. And then I had enough friends that were doing this, I was like, “Guys, I’m just gonna make a Google Sheet.” Eventually other people were emailing me to tell me, “Just want you to know the study section I’m supposed to serve on tomorrow already got canceled.”

I was like, “OK, clearly I’m the clearinghouse for this information now,” which is when I decided to just make my Google Sheet public on Bluesky. I’m really well-networked with a lot of NIH-funded researchers there, and we’re all anxious about not only, “Is the study section I’m reviewing for, or the study section that my grant is going to, did it meet?” but, “Are any study sections meeting?” Because without these meetings happening, nothing can get funded.

Yesterday, there was some news that somebody said they will allow the NIH to post in the Federal Register. (Editor’s note: Stat reported late Monday that NIH employees were told that the block on Federal Register notices would be lifted, but the agency did not answer questions about when that would happen.) I can assure you that as of now, that has not occurred, but I will definitely update the spreadsheet if and when that happy day arrives.

Without a restart date, it seems like we’re in the same position as we were before.

Last week, there were a lot of people who just didn’t really believe that, truly, no study section would happen. People were like, “There’s going to be waivers. There has to be a way around this. Blocking the Federal Register isn’t going to stop all study sections.” And now that we’ve had a whole week where no study section occurred, I think a lot of people who were trying to tell us “don’t panic” are now also panicking.

Who was telling you not to panic?

Some senior faculty. And any of us who work in a university have gotten the platitude-filled emails from our university administrators that tell us, “Just keep submitting grants. Everything’s going to get solved in court.” I think this Federal Register strategy shows us that everything isn’t being solved. We have a temporary restraining order that says that the NIH should be disbursing biomedical-research grants, and they aren’t. The funds are not being disbursed, and who’s gonna enforce it?

What is your routine of updating the spreadsheet?

On my lunch hour, I hop on the CSR website. Some study sections are only one day, some are two days, so I usually enter a two-day date range. They put a little asterisk after every one that “did not meet as scheduled.” And every day, by noon, everything that’s listed for that day did not meet as scheduled. I copy the name and originally scheduled meeting dates in the “did not meet” column.

About half of the study sections scheduled to meet this year haven’t done so. What is the impact of that 50 percent on scientific research?

There are two major impacts: NIH councils that should be meeting now would be needing to fund the grants that scientists reviewed last fall, and study sections that are meeting now are reviewing the grants that scientists submitted last fall. So at this point, we’ve got about a six-month window of science that isn’t moving forward. And that’s enough to close a small lab. Every scientist is living from grant to grant and trying to make plans for how to keep our labs open and how to keep our students funded, and there’s always been a certain security inherent in that, but we’ve known what the funding landscape generally looks like. We know how many grants we need to submit in order to get one or two funded — and now it seems like no amount of grants is enough to keep funding.

For some labs, maybe this was their resubmission of a grant that already scored well last time, and they were really counting on this for their next five years. If that doesn’t come through, are universities going to step in and bridge those labs to keep existing? Some will, but not all universities have the financial wherewithal to do that or the administrative will to do that. And for small labs, for pre-tenure people like me who have the one-two punch of Covid and now this, we’re staring down the barrel of tenure and needing to explain why couldn’t we do the things we said we would do when we were hired.

What kind of reaction have you gotten from other scientists to your compiling this all in one place?

I didn’t realize quite how big the craving for this was going to be, but I think it’s where a lot of us are focusing our anxiety right now. We’re all pretty desperate for every scrap of news, and with a ban on NIH communication, all we can rely on are these automated, arcane, poorly designed government websites to trickle out data.

What is the importance of scientists collecting and sharing data like this?

This is something that a functioning NIH should be able to do for us. This is all publicly available data. This is taxpayer-funded time that’s being wasted. But in the absence of the NIH being able to communicate, I think it’s great to see scientists trying to pick up the slack where they can and forming networks, sharing information. Because ultimately, we are all part of the same community, and we are all being impacted by this. I hope that that’s going to lead to scientists coming together and organizing in other ways to support each other.

You’ve got two NIH grants — known as an R21 and an R35 — totaling $1.75 million. How much more runway do you have with those?

My R21 will wrap up this summer. We hope to get a paper submitted this fall with the work that we’ve done to develop fruit flies as a calibrated model for traumatic brain injury and post-injury phenotypes. So that one I knew was running out, and this fall I intend to submit an R01, continuing to build on our findings from that project — assuming they’re still taking submissions this fall.

My R35 grant was just awarded this past fall, so I’m in my first year of funding for that, and I have a progress report due this spring. Normally, when your grants get awarded for two years or five years, you don’t have to go through this entire study-section review process to get each year of funds released. Instead, you submit a progress report and what’s called a noncompeting renewal: Did you make progress on your stated goals? But I’m hearing that even that approval process has been extremely slow, or seemingly not moving at all for some people. So I have to worry about what happens if I don’t get access to the funds that I was already awarded.

Are there other funding sources out there?

We are super lucky to be funded by the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research. I’m really glad to be in a state that steps up and does have state funding for biomedical research. But obviously that’s not enough to cover all the research the NIH funds.

What do you hope scientists take away from this moment?

We need to be better at not just talking to other scientists about science but talking to the public about what their taxes are paying for. We need to be better at [saying], “Look at these amazing things that you paid for, look at the ways that your tax dollars are benefiting you” — so that we can get the public to recognize that they should be demanding the life-saving research that they have already paid for.