\n<\/p>\n
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\u2019s $48 billion budget\u2014a direct rebuke to the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget, which would have slashed the agency\u2019s 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\u2019s status as the world\u2019s largest public funder of biomedical research.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ceven if we get the money, we won\u2019t be allowed to spend it somehow.\u201d (Several of the current and former NIH officials I spoke with for this story requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions.)<\/p>\n
At this point in the summer, NIH officials are always rushing to spend the agency\u2019s remaining funds before the fiscal year ends on September 30. \u201cMore grants get processed during the fourth quarter than at any other time,\u201d one former NIH official who oversaw grants told me. Usually, they make the deadline. This year, though, the Trump administration\u2019s blocks to grant-making and cuts to staff have left those remaining so far behind that many of the agency\u2019s 27 institutes and centers will fall far short of using up the money they\u2019ve been allocated, several officials told me.<\/p>\n
If those funds are unspent, the NIH will be forced to return a massive sum to the Treasury\u2014which several current and former NIH officials are afraid could be used to justify future budget cuts. The administration \u201cis setting them up to fail,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
When reached for comment, an NIH spokesperson wrote in an email that the agency is \u201ccommitted to restoring academic freedom, cutting red tape, and accelerating the delivery of grants to support rigorous, truth-based science,\u201d and that it is \u201cfocused on empowering our workforce, removing bureaucratic obstacles, and fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.\u201d The officials operating under these principles see it differently: \u201cIt is an ongoing siege,\u201d one of them told me. \u201cWe\u2019re losing all capacity to act,\u201d another said. \u201cAnd we are losing hope.\u201d For decades, the NIH\u2019s primary function has been distributing billions of dollars\u2014the bulk of its budget\u2014to the American biomedical-research community.<\/em> This year, though, the agency\u2019s ability to get its funds out the door has faltered in ways it never has before: A STAT<\/em> analysis found that, as of mid-June, the agency has awarded 12,000 fewer grants and about 30 percent less in funding\u2014at least $4.7 billion\u2014than it typically would have by that point in the year.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 progress, disbursing funds incrementally over the course of several years. But since January, political appointees \u201chave been successfully clogging up the system in every place it could be clogged,\u201d 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\u2019ve never experienced\u2014thousands 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\u2019s political goals.<\/p>\n 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\u2014unable to fund science at the rate they once could. \u201cNo one can function under this kind of whiplash,\u201d Kobrin told me. \u201cPeople are joking about getting neck braces.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2014yet another blow to grant-making that effectively guaranteed that the agency\u2019s 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\u2019t yet gotten the message and were scrambling to rejigger their spending plans.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cIt was like dumping someone over text, and then blocking their number and ghosting them,\u201d 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\u2019s favor, \u201cmany of us figure we\u2019re going to have to re-terminate all these grants anyway,\u201d one grants-management official told me. That official has now helped award, terminate, then reinstate multiple grants\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n The job of \u201cNIH official\u201d 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\u2014do this, or you\u2019re fired<\/em>\u2014while 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. \u201cThe environment is clearly, they\u2019re going to fire whoever they want for whatever reason they want,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cun-happy\u201d hours in recent months to say good-bye to co-workers as they had been to over the past five years. \u201cAnd those are just the ones I managed to go to\u2014I was invited to more,\u201d the official said. \u201cPeople just don\u2019t leave that much. Or they didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n Officials still at the agency told me that the pileup of new policies, combined with staff departures, has saddled them with heavier workloads. \u201cWe have more work to do with fewer people,\u201d one official told me. And what work remains, that official said, feels as though it\u2019s being done in molasses. \u201cI cannot fulfill all the duties responsibly in the time required,\u201d 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\u2014especially losses from the grants-management team, which handles the budgetary aspect of grants\u2014and endless back-and-forths over whether certain grants comported with new political priorities\u2014meant 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.<\/p>\n When I asked officials what it would take for the NIH to feel normal again, most of them didn\u2019t bring up the agency\u2019s 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. \u201cLeave us alone,\u201d one official told me. \u201cLet us do our jobs.\u201d Financially, the NIH\u2014for now\u2014remains intact. The Senate has also pushed back on the Trump administration\u2019s proposal to restructure the agency entirely. But the NIH is fast losing what turns out to be its most important resource: people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s $48 billion budget\u2014a direct rebuke to the Trump administration\u2019s proposed budget, which would have slashed the agency\u2019s funding some 40 percent. After the administration spent months battering the NIH with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[727,1199,855,405,2848],"class_list":{"0":"post-14368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-billions","9":"tag-left","10":"tag-months","11":"tag-nih","12":"tag-spend"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}