Sock It to Me

Posted by Katherine J. Wu

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/08/nih-funding-whiplash/683773/?utm_source=feed

Last week, the National Institutes of Health finally got some good news. A Senate subcommittee voted, with support from both parties, to increase the agency’s $48 billion budget—a direct rebuke to the Trump administration’s proposed budget, which would have slashed the agency’s funding some 40 percent. After the administration spent months battering the NIH with funding freezes, mass firings, and waves of grant terminations, that Senate vote was one of the only clear signals since January that at least some leaders in the U.S. government were committed to preserving the NIH’s status as the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

But inside the agency, officials could not wholeheartedly celebrate. Its political leadership has shredded the NIH playbook so thoroughly, current and former NIH officials told me, that even at current funding levels they are unable to perform their core work of vetting and powering some of the best scientific research around the world. One official told me many of their co-workers are worried that “even if we get the money, we won’t be allowed to spend it somehow.” (Several of the current and former NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)

At this point in the summer, NIH officials are always rushing to spend the agency’s remaining funds before the fiscal year ends on September 30. “More grants get processed during the fourth quarter than at any other time,” one former NIH official who oversaw grants told me. Usually, they make the deadline. This year, though, the Trump administration’s blocks to grant-making and cuts to staff have left those remaining so far behind that many of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers will fall far short of using up the money they’ve been allocated, several officials told me.

If those funds are unspent, the NIH will be forced to return a massive sum to the Treasury—which several current and former NIH officials are afraid could be used to justify future budget cuts. The administration “is setting them up to fail,” the former official told me. In the United States, government agencies need Congress to fund them, but the executive branch still runs them. The Trump administration is no longer allowing the NIH to function as an agency that can handle a $47 billion budget.

When reached for comment, an NIH spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency is “committed to restoring academic freedom, cutting red tape, and accelerating the delivery of grants to support rigorous, truth-based science,” and that it is “focused on empowering our workforce, removing bureaucratic obstacles, and fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.” The officials operating under these principles see it differently: “It is an ongoing siege,” one of them told me. “We’re losing all capacity to act,” another said. “And we are losing hope.” For decades, the NIH’s primary function has been distributing billions of dollars—the bulk of its budget—to the American biomedical-research community. This year, though, the agency’s ability to get its funds out the door has faltered in ways it never has before: A STAT analysis found that, as of mid-June, the agency has awarded 12,000 fewer grants and about 30 percent less in funding—at least $4.7 billion—than it typically would have by that point in the year.

To mete out those funds, the agency pores over at least tens of thousands of grant applications every year, subjecting them to reviews from multiple panels of experts; only about 20 percent are funded, or sometimes far less. The agency then monitors researchers’ progress, disbursing funds incrementally over the course of several years. But since January, political appointees “have been successfully clogging up the system in every place it could be clogged,” Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, told me. The administration has blocked the agency from notifying researchers of new funding opportunities; it has held up the meetings required for reviewing applications. It has instructed officials to scour grant applications for references to diversity, gender, climate change, and other concepts that the current political leaders want to erase from scientific inquiry, then to sideline those proposals. It has frozen payments meant to go out to researchers, essentially cutting them and their staff off from their salaries. And it has, over months, pushed the NIH to cancel grants that the agency had already awarded, at a scale NIH officials told me they’ve never experienced—thousands of grants canceled not, as in the past, for ethical violations or because logistical hurdles made the research impossible to advance, but because they conflicted with the administration’s political goals.

Many of these disruptions have been reversed, in some cases, within days or even hours. But at an agency where policy changes have typically been painstaking, heavily deliberated affairs, the onslaught of sudden shifts has left officials feeling exhausted, afraid, and hamstrung—unable to fund science at the rate they once could. “No one can function under this kind of whiplash,” Kobrin told me. “People are joking about getting neck braces.”

Last Tuesday, officials endured yet another jarring U-turn. First, news broke that the Office of Management and Budget had barred the NIH from spending its funds on anything but staff salaries and expenses—yet another blow to grant-making that effectively guaranteed that the agency’s already sluggish spending would completely stagnate. Then, hours later, senior White House officials intervened to reverse the decision. The second round of information arrived so late at night, Kobrin told me, that the next morning, several of her colleagues hadn’t yet gotten the message and were scrambling to rejigger their spending plans.

The back-and-forth over grant cancellations has been especially demoralizing. When the grant terminations began, two grants-management officials told me, officials were forbidden from communicating with researchers, even as their voicemails and inboxes flooded with panicked questions. “It was like dumping someone over text, and then blocking their number and ghosting them,” one of them said. That policy is no longer in place, but this means officials instead must tell researchers their funding has been paused or permanently severed, and struggle to explain why. After spending months cutting funds to researchers, many grants-management specialists then had to undo that work in a matter of days, after a federal judge ordered the agency to immediately reinstate hundreds of grants. And should the Supreme Court rule in the administration’s favor, “many of us figure we’re going to have to re-terminate all these grants anyway,” one grants-management official told me. That official has now helped award, terminate, then reinstate multiple grants—and may need to help terminate them again soon. In the meantime, officials are operating on two distinct sets of guidance: rules that apply to grants awarded to scientists in states subject to the recent court order, and Trump administration guidance that still holds everywhere else.

The job of “NIH official” has simply gotten much harder. New guidance arrives at odd hours, with impractical deadlines. Several upheavals have rippled through the agency via closed-door meetings and hallway rumors, instead of with clear paper trails. The guidance issued, multiple officials told me, has also felt absolutist—do this, or you’re fired—while often coming off as so vague that, at times, different institutes have diverged in their interpretation, leaving funding policies inconsistent and officials unsure if they have made career-ending mistakes. “The environment is clearly, they’re going to fire whoever they want for whatever reason they want,” one grants-management specialist told me. And looming over each new change is the possibility that officials are, once again, being asked to do something of sufficiently questionable legality that a court will quickly block it.

Many officials have quit or been fired, and every month, more are choosing to leave. One official told me that they have attended as many “un-happy” hours in recent months to say good-bye to co-workers as they had been to over the past five years. “And those are just the ones I managed to go to—I was invited to more,” the official said. “People just don’t leave that much. Or they didn’t.”

Officials still at the agency told me that the pileup of new policies, combined with staff departures, has saddled them with heavier workloads. “We have more work to do with fewer people,” one official told me. And what work remains, that official said, feels as though it’s being done in molasses. “I cannot fulfill all the duties responsibly in the time required,” Theresa Kim, a program officer at the National Institute of Aging, told me. Twenty of the grants in her portfolio were supposed to start paying out to researchers on June 1, she told me. But staffing cuts—especially losses from the grants-management team, which handles the budgetary aspect of grants—and endless back-and-forths over whether certain grants comported with new political priorities—meant that a funding process that should have taken just a couple of weeks had instead dragged on for months. As of this week, Kim said, 14 of those research teams had yet to receive their federal funds.

When I asked officials what it would take for the NIH to feel normal again, most of them didn’t bring up the agency’s budget at all. They instead described more philosophical changes. They wanted to do their work under clear guidance and a supportive director, without political interference or fear that their employment is constantly on the line. “Leave us alone,” one official told me. “Let us do our jobs.” Financially, the NIH—for now—remains intact. The Senate has also pushed back on the Trump administration’s proposal to restructure the agency entirely. But the NIH is fast losing what turns out to be its most important resource: people.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/08/nih-funding-whiplash/683773/?utm_source=feed