On January 22, 2025, the US scientific community woke up to the abrupt and startling announcement that the Trump administration has imposed numerous restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including a freeze on grant review meetings, communications, travel, and hiring. The news has left researchers utterly confused and frustrated.
“It's so devastating and short-sighted and completely ignores the interconnected nature of science,” said Emily Barkley-Levenson, a psychologist at Hofstra University.
Many scientists received emails stating that their travel plans for upcoming workshops, conferences, and grant review panels were canceled overnight.
“You hear the word meetings and think, ‘oh, it's just a meeting pause, nobody wants to go to meetings.’ But these meetings are the mechanism by which grants are awarded and dispersed,” said Barkley-Levenson. “It doesn't sound like a pause on all research, but all those pieces—meetings, travel, communication—are the mechanism by which the materials to do research get to the scientists, and by which the scientists get their research out in the world.”
The NIH’s roots run deep into the country’s academic ecosystem. The $47 billion agency awards 60,000 grants annually across diverse fields, many of which have a direct impact on public health. Each grant application goes through multiple rounds of rigorous evaluations over months or years, judged by panels of experts that form “study sections.”
“There's so much preparation on my part, the reviewers who dedicated their time for little compensation to review my grant, and then everybody who blocked their schedule to travel and discuss all of these proposals. All of that got abruptly canceled. This means I have no idea about the status of my grant,” said Shannon Macauley, a neuroscientist at the University of Kentucky whose research has been funded by the NIH since 2007. “One of the grants that I'm waiting on right now has been the amalgamation of data from a variety of projects that led us to this one question that we're dying to answer. And we need the resources to do it.”
This abrupt halt in communication stands in sharp contrast to the disruptions experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even then, Macauley remarked that review panels still met online, and applicants could communicate with the NIH program officers about their grant statuses.
A large chunk of NIH funding goes towards medical research in cancer, mental health, vaccine development, infectious diseases, and heart and lung disorders, among others. Scientists, medical practitioners, and the public are worried about how this roadblock will affect these projects and patient outcomes in the future. Macauley is concerned about the effects it will have on ongoing studies, especially those that include human participants. A stall in funding of this magnitude can lead to loss of valuable time points and potentially derail projects, she said.
Within the academic community, established scientists may have other funds to fall back on, but a pause in grant reviews could be catastrophic for early-career researchers who are just setting up their labs. “Young investigators are the most vulnerable because they're just trying to get their careers off the ground. That first award can make or break someone's career,” Barkley-Levenson said. She is also apprehensive that such uncertainties might dissuade young scholars and international students from pursuing a scientific career in the US. While there are other small funding agencies, many only provide grants to purchase experimental resources. “You can have the money to run the experiments, but nobody to run them,” Macauley said.
Despite the widespread chaos, there may be an end in sight. According to a memo obtained by the National Public Radio, the restrictions will be lifted on February 1, 2025. However, the short-term pause has already caused significant disruption, and it will take time to recover from the setbacks. “Anything that was planned for January and has gotten canceled was based on grants that were submitted in the previous administration. All of this was based on past effort, and to have that go, is [a] waste. It wastes researchers’ time, it wastes government resources,” Macauley said. “That’s not acceptable.”
