\n <\/p>\n
The US National Institutes of Health fell as much as US$5 billion behind in its awarding of grants this past year, but has managed to catch up.<\/span>Credit: Francis Chung\/POLITICO\/AP\/Alamy<\/span><\/p>\n Staff members at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) seem to have done the impossible. Despite US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration laying off thousands of the agency\u2019s workers, delaying meetings to review research grants and terminating funding for some projects, the NIH seems like it will dole out its entire US$48-billion budget on deadline \u2014 by the end of the fiscal year on 30 September.<\/p>\n At some points in the past year, the agency \u2014 the world\u2019s largest funder of biomedical research \u2014 was nearly $5 billion behind in its awarding of grants. Researchers feared that the NIH would have to return any money it didn\u2019t spend to the US Treasury rather than investing it in science. But staff banded together to put things on track in the past few months (see \u2018Playing catch-up\u2019).<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone has been rallying together to clean up the mess, but it\u2019s a mess that did not need to be made,\u201d says an NIH programme officer who spoke to Nature on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.<\/p>\n Source: NIH Reporter; adapted from: Jeremy Berg<\/span> Although the agency\u2019s budget will be spent, many fewer new projects will be funded. That\u2019s because the White House budget office directed the NIH to award some research projects large sums upfront \u2014 rather than spreading it out over years \u2014 meaning that fewer institutions and researchers will receive agency funding. Success rates for grant applications at the NIH have therefore hit all-time lows.<\/p>\n \u201cThat is extremely demoralizing,\u201d says Michael Lauer, who, for about ten years ran the NIH\u2019s \u2018extramural\u2019 arm, which funds researchers at institutions across the United States. \u201cWe want people to be excited about being in science. And if the likelihood of success is so low, you might have to close your lab, this will do even more to chase people away from doing science in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n The NIH did not respond to Nature\u2019s queries about the funding situation or scientists\u2019 concerns about low success rates.<\/p>\n Since Trump took office in January, his administration has directed the NIH to suspend sessions to review grant applications, lay off about 6% of its 20,000-person workforce, terminate projects on a slew of topics such as COVID-19 that do not align with the president\u2019s priorities and freeze and unfreeze its funding programmes several times. Furthermore, representatives of billionaire Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency demanded that they review grants approved by NIH employees before any payments were made, Nature reported.<\/p>\n Exclusive: NIH to dismiss dozens of grant reviewers to align with Trump priorities<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cThis year was really unbelievable,\u201d says an NIH grants-management specialist, who has been at the agency for a decade and requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. \u201cI have never experienced anything like this.\u201d<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s spending slow-down at the NIH earned a reprimand in early August from a watchdog agency in the US government. The watchdog found that the NIH had been illegally withholding, or impounding, funds that the US Congress allocated to it.<\/p>\n To pick up the grant-processing pace, some employees have cancelled holiday plans, worked overtime and filled in for staff missing across the NIH, the programme officer says. \u201cOur work is already end-loaded towards the end of the fiscal year,\u201d she says. But this year, \u201cit\u2019s like a pressure cooker that exploded\u201d. But, she adds, \u201cthere was a willingness to work extra hard to move the science forward\u201d.<\/p>\n The US National Institutes of Health fell as much as US$5 billion behind in its awarding of grants this past year, but has managed to catch up.Credit: Francis Chung\/POLITICO\/AP\/Alamy Staff members at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) seem to have done the impossible. Despite US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration laying off thousands of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[116,4639,2062,405,3905,15063,2848,1259],"class_list":{"0":"post-24863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-funding","9":"tag-grant","10":"tag-money","11":"tag-nih","12":"tag-projects","13":"tag-races","14":"tag-spend","15":"tag-win"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24863","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=24863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}An \u2018unbelievable\u2019 year<\/h2>\n
Collateral damage<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"