Your Grant in Review: IC Funding Caps

We’ve been hearing for some time now that the NIH ICs are using per-PI limits on grant awards as one of their strategies to deal with the budget issues. As always, the goal here for ICs is to keep as many of “their scientists” minimally funded in these times of low funding success rates. This is just one of a litany of strategies which includes the across-the-board-budget-cut, the R56 “bridge” for those who can’t get a fundable score and are dropping below a cut line of total NIH funding ($200K direct is the number I’ve heard) and prioritizing of small grant mechanisms. The award-limit strategy is, or should be, harder to “take”.