NIH funding is off to a very slow start

This is not about my usual kvetching about the way that NIAAA and NIDA never ever, nuh uh, no way ever fund new Cycle I R01 awards on time (Dec 1, first possible start date) under a Continuing Resolution. This is about all of the ICs.

There are currently only two new (Type 1) R01 listed on RePORTER, both of which are funded by NIA.

This contrasts with 379 Type 1 R01 issued before 12/22/2024 for the FY2025 award cycle. As well as with the 344 Type 1 R01 issued before 12/22/2023 for the FY2024 award cycle.

Jeremy Berg pointed out on BlueSky that NIH is likewise off the pace for all award types, including non-competing.

Broadening the FY2026 search a little bit, I note that NIH has funded a total of four Type 1 (new) projects across all mechanisms so far. This includes an R21 from NIA and a K99 from NIDCD in addition to the above mentioned NIA R01. There are no FY2026 Type 2 / competing continuation awards of any mechanism.

Thought of the day

Papers do not equal grant funding.

You do not “earn” NIH funding by being good at the game of publishing papers in fancy journals.

If you think it will get super easy to get a NIH grant once you publish x number of papers in y JIF journals, you are not optimizing your chances of funding.

If you think those guys over there have the secret to easy NIH funding and if you can just become one of them it will all be gravy, you are not optimizing your chances of funding.

I am sorry if this is news to you but grant award isn’t fair or just or directly aligned with measures of science quality in the way you imagined it should be.

Competitive, but not discussed

We are starting to see the first #NIHGrant review outcomes of competitive but not discussed. So of course it’s time to bench race strategy.

This new designation is supposed to be applied to the ~middle third of proposals based on average preliminary impact score. This was created at the same time as the move to triage ~70% of proposals in a study section, instead of the prior ~50% rate. In theory this permits broader* latitude for Program staff to pick up a ND, competitive for funding via exception pay**.

Of course your number one strategy is to contact your PO after you get your summary statement. This seems to me to be increasingly important in the very near future of no published NOSI and increased permission for Program to ignore the order of review.

I would suggest that contacting Program is super important for those experienced PIs who happen to qualify for the sole remaining broad quota based affirmative action policy, i.e., “geographical diversity”. Red state institutions will be prioritized for awards in some way.

I thought I saw it stated somewhere that the designation would not be on the summary statement. Some recent tweetage suggests it will be.

If it does end up on the summary statement, reviewers of the amended version will have this info. This may or may not change anything. Reviewers have been able to see criterion scores for many years now, from which they can draw pretty decent assumptions about the likely overall impact scores. And to therefore get a rough idea of where an application stood within the less-good half of proposals.

This new designation was launched in context of the two review rounds with enhanced triage of 70%. So maybe it will also only be used briefly?

Me, I think CSR will decide 70% triage is the new normal and so is the new competitive/ND designation.

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*I have always thought Program could, technically, fund anything that did not get a Not Recommended for Further consideration. And that not funding ND proposals was more of a culture/tradition than a legal prohibition. I may have been mistaken on that.

**Under the new regime’s approach, perhaps the term of “exception pay” will no longer be used, since they are trying to break the idea that funding should go in order of peer review outcomes.

Twelve Months of DrugMonkey (2025)

I was paging back through the months and…wow did I have a lot to blog about this year.

January: More advance compliance with anti-diversity forces from the NIH I had no idea how bad it was going to get but sure enough, we found out that advance compliance did not head off the assault on NIH.

February: Every Person for Themselves I already got modest resistance responses to the merest suggestion that maybe those with funding could try to help those who had their funding pulled because of running afoul of the regime’s attacks on “DEI”.

March: CSR study section chaos: Making note of the memory hole As the assault on NIH continued, I tried to figure out if cancelled study sections would be rescheduled.

April: The moral injury of participating in a repressive system Does serving on a NIH study section entail moral injury to the participants?

May: The NIH can award all the grants before September 30th I am unimpressed with panicky suggestions that NIH literally cannot catch up to their usual number of grants awarded in the FY.

June: The alleged profession strikes again Another month, another annoyance from journalism. N=1 sourcing on fathers in academia who try to be an equal partner. Yeah, that will be a balanced and accurate portrayal…

July: Where are the T32s? Getting nervous about T32s as the chaos at NIH continues.

August: NIH may block NOSI for all but emergency purposes NIH announces they are doing away with Notices of Special Interest except in urgent circumstances.

September: One month to go for NIH grants in the FY2025 cycle “Another way to look at this is that we’re currently missing 1,809 new R01s.”

October: No rest for the… virtuous Do you think NIH ICs have learned their lessons and will be chomping at the bit to fund grants in December?

November: Notes on NIH matters as the government opens up again Talking about study sections in the wake of the long government shutdown.

December: NYT article claims multi-year awards are all reduced in length and budget…huh? In which I discover I missed something very important about the multi-year funding scheme.

Important Font News!

As you know, Dear Reader, there are more NIH grants that fund when written in Arial font than any other font. Some crazed font nerds around here assert that Georgia font is the way to go, as it is easy to read. Either way, it is clearly vitally important to select the right font if you expect to have your grant funded.

Somewhere circa 2017 NIH went nuts and pretty much allowed any font that met some basic size and spacing requirements. Whatever.

In these times of assault on the NIH, I fear I must alert you to a new font issue.

Some fonts are woke!

And we know what happens to grant proposals that are too woke.

So no more Calibri font, folks.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has directed the State Department to go back to using Times New Roman typeface as the standard for official papers, a spokesperson told CNN, in a reversal of the previous administration’s update to the sans-serif Calibri.

Why, you may be asking yourself?

to “restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program.”

Sorry. What DEIA program exactly?

Calibri is a sans serif typeface, meaning it’s a cleaner font without any extra lines attached to the letters compared to Times New Roman. This can make it easier to read for people with dyslexia or vision problems, some experts say.

Good god. It is now “wasteful DEIA” to make your text as readable as possible for anyone who might come across it.

Whither the NIH Investigator criterion?

One of the major changes, perhaps the most significant change, to the review of NIH grants under the new Simplified Peer Review framework is the Investigator criterion. In the past, Investigator was one of five allegedly co-equal criteria alongside Significance, Innovation, Approach and Environment. Significance and Innovation are now collapsed into Factor 1. Importance of the Research, and Approach is now called Factor 2. Rigor and Feasibility. Investigator and Environment are now in Factor 3. Expertise and Resources, however the review of this is supposed to be a simple choice of Adequate or Inadequate.

The change to having peer reviewers assess the adequacy of investigator expertise and institutional resources as a binary choice is designed to have reviewers evaluate Investigator and Environment with respect to the work proposed. It is intended to reduce the potential for general scientific reputation to have an undue influence.

“Undue” influence. Look, it is right there in the prior instructions to authors that Significance, Innovation, Investigator, Approach and Environment could be combined into an overall impact score in any weighting including zero. There was in fact no obligation that the reviewer actually use weightings, or that the reviewer combine the assessment of the five criteria in any specific way. There was no obligation for a reviewer to behave consistently from application to application when it came to integrating the criterion scores. It was in fact totally kosher by the rules to view the proposal as outstanding solely on the basis of an outstanding Investigator. No more, and no less, than viewing it as outstanding based on the Approach. Or Significance. Or Innovation.

Now of course the evolved culture of review is, in my experience, no where near this loose. And at least from the perspective of broad NIH wide statistics, there were analyses suggesting Approach drives overall scores the most, followed by Significance and Innovation. On the other hand it is a consistent frustration of first or second time reviewers that it seems to them that some established investigators seem to have scores awarded mostly on their status and reputation and less on the actual proposal. It is a consistent campfire chatter topic amongst disappointed applicants (i.e., almost all applicants) as well.

The FAQ page elaborates the NIH perspective on the reputational bias issue:

NIH can’t entirely prevent reputational bias but a change to evaluating the investigator and environment in the narrow context of the work proposed will help to put applicants on equal footing. NIH will manage peer review to ensure that reviewers follow guidance for Factor 3 and focus on expertise and resources as it relates to the proposed science, not general accomplishments. NIH will also be alert to statements related to established reputation in written critiques. Both reviewers and SROs will receive training on this point, and SROs will intervene when such biases appear in written critiques or during discussions.

I am pondering the presentation of this change. The focus here is now on “expertise” and not on “general accomplishments”. The mention of reputational bias is easy to integrate with these comments. I think (insert caveats) that my approach has generally been consistent with this over the year, particularly when it comes to early stage investigators.

Let us suppose that we are reviewing a R01 proposal from a brand new Assistant Professor. Submitted within the first year of the appointment. The thing we have to go from on “expertise” is their record of publication as a grad student and as a postdoc, along with any interactions we may have had at academic meetings, etc. If I saw someone who had published first author papers, and maybe some middle author papers, using the techniques central to the R01 proposal I basically viewed this as adequate evidence of “expertise”. Particularly if the grant proposal itself had preliminary data clearly identified as generated in the new lab. But my take is basically that by the time a young scientist gets into a grant-submitting position, they very likely have the “expertise” to continue doing the same kind of science as a lab head.

My approach is quite obviously related to previous review guidance that we were supposed to make allowances for career stage and lack of prior grant funding. Allowances for their lack of accomplishment, because they haven’t really had enough time to accomplish anything. I.e., to publish a lot of papers as senior author.

Now suppose roughly that same proposal has been submitted in Year 3 of the person’s new appointment. Or Year 5?

Their level of expertise as demonstrated by the publication record has not changed.

However.

My take on early independent folks is a presumption that they did roughly the usual on their papers. And that they will, if given the chance, have roughly the skills and drive to start leading research programs.

The trouble is that after a few years, there is new evidence on that presumption. Evidence of whether they have indeed begun to lead a research program. Start a lab, recruit help if needed, generate publication quality data….generate publications. And like it or not, this is where I start to focus on accomplishment. As do many other reviewers I have seen in action over the years.

And while I believe very strongly that good grant scores should not be a reward for past performance, an Assistant Professor in my fields of interest who has no publications by Year 5 raises an eybrow about necessary ability to accomplish progress on the proposed Aims.

It’s not just the more junior of us. A high rate of publications, a high rate of field-relevant work and a high ratio of generating papers related to the proposed Aims of prior awards underlies and drives scientific reputation. Someone with lower productivity and scientific verve will have a lesser reputation.

Personally, my solution has always been to try very hard to assess accomplishments in the context of job type (teaching load? service loads? etc?) and resources (i.e., prior grants and other sources of support for the lab). And to assess the Investigator criterion as a binary decision of “can they do the proposed work if they get the funding?”, as opposed to a scale of past productivity.

It seems reasonable to me to try to only use suspiciously low accomplishment as a caution, and not use quantities of accomplishment to decide on the merits of a new proposal.

But the NIH doesn’t want us to do that any more. We are supposed to only focus on “demonstrated background, training, and expertise“. Which is basically invariant once one has demonstrated it for the first time. There is no sense they mean “continued demonstration” because that is undoubtedly review of accomplishment.

I don’t know where this leaves our evaluation of Investigator, even in the current framework. I am going to have a hard time re-calibrating myself to essentially ignore intervals of suspiciously low accomplishent given resources.

I think we all know I think about the process of review considerably more than the usual NIH peer reviewing bear. It is going to be REALLY hard, I predict, for study sections to avoid contaminating their reviews with assessment of PI accomplishment.

Hockey players are stupid assholes

The National Hockey League is the fourth place professional sports league in the United States, trailing far behind the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball. Sure, they’ve experienced good success / growth with recent expansion franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle and the movement of the hapless Arizona Coyotes to Utah to become the Mammoth. But I get blank spaces during the ESPN+ game broadcasts and see the same ads over and over. And there are numerous other indicators of how the great game of hockey just doesn’t draw as many fans as some think it should.

Including, for example, average salaries. It was big news this summer when the Minnesota Wild awarded Kiril Kaprizov a $17M annual salary. There were a bunch of other super star players, many with greater accomplishments than Kaprizov, due salary extensions / negotiations and there was some fear he’d reset the bar. Turns out, a host of really big names are still on $11-13M contracts. As I was reciting over on the tweeters, $17M is 10th highest-paid NFL guard money. It is 20th place MLB outfielder and top-5 relief pitcher money. It is so far down the NBA player list it is for guys you’ve never heard of like Norman Powell and Patrick Williams. For goodness sake, Tadej Pogačar, (albeit the generational best and perhaps best ever), a professional in the very obscure sport of road cycling even makes €8M ($9.3M) per year as team salary.

You would think that hockey would be doing every possible thing it can to draw in new fans at all times.

You would be wrong.

Because hockey players are stupid assholes. And so are the coaches and general managers.

The stupid idiot knucklehead Tkachuk brothers have posted a podcast from which a clip is making the rounds. In this, Matti (a run-away agitator who makes $9.5M) and Brady (a thug player who makes $8.2M) wax on about how much it offends them when women have the temerity to use their hockey nickname. Matti said: “nothing worse than when girls call a player by their nickname“. This is Cam Newton “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes.” level stupid misogyny. It is not just dumb, it’s actively working against drawing in fans from one of the largest untapped pools, i.e., women.

And speaking of alienating women, this brings me to the other stupid idiot move of the month, this one involving the Las Vegas Golden Knights. For those who don’t know the VGK have been a whopping commercial success for the NHL, drawing in new local fans and re-enthusing out of town fans such as YHN. They managed to avoid the curse of expansion franchises by making it all the way to the Stanley Cup final their first year and winning the Cup in 2023. They led the way to Vegas for the NFL (the Raiders moved) and the MLB (Oakland A’s are in the process of moving) and I’m sure a NBA franchise will eventually come to Vegas.

The VGK recently hired a goalie who had been out of the NHL for two years, due to a suspension. This suspension was because of a sexual assault prosecution involving the actions of this player and four other hockey meatheads who played for Hockey Canada in 2018. They were acquitted in July of 2025 and the NHL allowed them to return, if any team wanted them. You can look up the reporting for yourself. Suffice it to say that it’s a pretty usual they-said (there were five of them) / she-said (yeah, just one woman in the hotel room) situation.

The relatively undisputed facts seem to be the woman went to one player’s room, they had sex and then he texted his bros to come to the room. Gross. I’m out right there. YMMV.

Look, nobody has a “right” to play for the NHL. There are all kinds of players who don’t get a break at the right time, based on chance or dis/favoritism or character or fit. Players get traded or sent to the minors for all sorts of reasons that may not be completely objectively about hockey merit. Hiring an accused rapist is a massive black eye for a sports franchise and it is just plain stupid for a franchise that needs to grow the audience. The VGK don’t need this clown. They are a premier franchise. They can pick and choose. Sure, they are a little panicky with their goalie situation right now, but there is no real indication this is a head and shoulder’s above type of player. Especially considering he’s been out of the league for two years.

This is a massive own-goal.

It is likely not news to you that sports bro teams are a danger to women when it comes to sexual assaults. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people but football players, hockey players, basketball players…the scandals start in high school. Sexual assaults of various stripes, encouraged by the flocking of women to the local fame of a sports hero. Accelerated into the college years by the thrill of minor fame and maybe even the prospects of hooking an athlete who is going places. But caused, make no mistake about it, by young men who view women as playthings for their enjoyment and cruelty.

I happened to attend a very small college which had a Division I hockey program and this stuff played out in plain view, since we were such a small campus. I can’t say with any authority how many sexual assaults happened, this is in part because people were not really as woke to consent, assault and related issues so long ago. But those guys were dicks who clearly had less than the campus average level of respect for women.

Note that this is not endemic to every possible sports team of men. My cycling team sure as shit didn’t have ongoing misogyny. I mean, we weren’t being constantly chatted up by the ladies, so you might question opportunity. But I’m pretty sure we averaged to the woke side when it came to this sort of thing.

No, only some sports teams tend to have chronic problems with misogynistic culture that all too frequently veer into the criminal.

Hockey, the NHL in particular, has made great strides on a lot of issues during my lifetime. It isn’t perfect, and there are some assholes who fight progress. NHL has made strides to welcoming LGBTA+ fans…but of course there have been some bigoted assholes like the Staal brothers complaining about Pride themed stick tape. And a history of homophobic behavior that doesn’t make news. The dummies who run the league then actually banned Pride themed tape until some decent individual defied them. Willie O’Ree, the first Black man to play in the NHL, is a fixture of the league and it is now seemingly rare for a NHL team not to have any Black players. This is progress. Achieved slowly and probably against a lot of overt and covert opposition. One of the asshole college hockey players at my college actually wrote an essay for some class about how Black people were physiologically unsuited to ice skate. (No, he never made it anywhere as a professional player.)

But welcoming back the Hockey Canada players is a step back for the NHL. It alienates women fans, and it alienates a lot of men too. It perpetuates the tolerance of this behavior down into the younger ranks. “She was askin’ for it, so it’s okay” is the message that the NHL is sending on this one.

Is smoking making a comeback?

I stroll by one of the smoking areas on my campus* fairly frequently and I recently noticed three apparently undergraduate aged women smoking. This is unusual first, because if anyone is there it is typically only 1-2 people and second, they are mostly older than the undergraduate age range. This is the second or third tiny tingle of a suggestion to me that perhaps smoking is becoming slightly more popular again. It is reminiscent of an experience from back in the early to mid 1990s when those of us above the undergraduate age on college and university campuses noticed “the kids are smoking again“. And there was indeed a….bump. The Monitoring the Future trends tell the tale, I pulled this one from the 2023 report on 1975-2022 data. This is the “have you smoked in the past 30 days?” question but the trends look the same from lifetime incidence to near-daily use. In the late 70s, upwards of 35% of 12th graders had smoked a cigarette in the past month. There was then a long downward trend to 2022 when only 4% of 12th graders had smoked a cigarette in the past month; the most recent report** shows this fell to 2.5% in 2024.

There is a significant disruption in the trends for 12th graders, and you can see that smoking rates increased from 1993 onward to a 1997 peak. It took until about 2002 for 30 day cigarette prevalence to drop below the 1992 low of 27.8%. A full decade’s worth of the late teen cohort with elevated smoking rates. Patterns post 1990 for lower grades suggest a similar, parallel increase in the mid-1990s, even though they don’t report the trends prior to 1990. The increases (and decreases) are well-aligned by year, so this is not a cohorting effect whereby increases in 8th grade are inflating 10th grade rates two years later. Whatever caused this affected 8th-12th graders at the same time.

I still don’t know what caused this pattern***. Drug use epidemiology is not my field, I am merely a consumer of the data they report. But these data ultimately validated a real world impression of increased smoking rates in undergraduates back in the mid-1990s. If you were a high school teacher across that key interval, I’m sure you had the same feeling. I wonder if we are about to see a return of this phenomenon.

I am probably over-interpreting the tiny clues I have been exposed to. I sure hope I am.

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*Yes, we are a “smoke free campus”. The smokers around my building have an out of the way place they go to smoke.

**The latest MtF has a novel dataset which I’ve never seen in their usual reports. They numbers date back to the 80s so clearly it has always been part of the survey. These data asked the kids in a given grade who were smokers (I think?) to recall if they were already smoking by prior grades. For the purposes of the day, you can see that the early 90s bump in this subset (not sure why it is not the full sample but the footnote warns about this).

***The cohort**** trend isn’t limited to cigarettes. Similar increases in the mid-1990s were reported for cocaine, hallucinogens, heroin, amphetamines, sedatives, tranquilizers and for marijuana, which remained elevated after a late-90s peak unlike the others. Alcohol prevalence didn’t increase during this key decade, although perhaps the declines in the late 80s were flattened out.

****The kids driving the early part of this wave were born approximately 1977-1984, if we consider the 8th-12th grade range. Late Gen-X and early Millennials. This is perhaps another way to define the social boundaries of the generations. My side is the abstainer side. Their side has a greater affection for using drugs. My side was raised by pre-WWII and early Boomer parents, who share many traits. Their side was raised by the fully flowered mid-to-late Boomers.

Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Programs

NIH has issued a notice (NOT-OD-26-018) about upcoming changes to the Biosketch and Other Support forms, which includes a warning that:

Effective January 25, 2026, individuals who are a current party to a Malign Foreign Talent Recruitment Program (MFTRP) are not eligible to serve as a senior/key person on an NIH grant or cooperative agreement.

The only thing I can recall from NIH that specifically addresses a foreign “Talent” program is the reference to the Chinese Thousand Talents in the context of concern about corruption in NIH peer review. A report from the HHS Office of Inspector General was issued back in 2020 because:

In August 2018, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins raised concerns that peer reviewers-who review applications for NIH extramural grants and have unique access to confidential information in those applications-were, in some cases, inappropriately sharing this information with foreign entities.

To make this short, the Full Report (PDF) mentioned the Chinese Thousand Talents Plan extensively.

China’s Thousand Talents Plan China’s central government announced the Thousand Talents plan in 2008. One aspect of the plan provides financial incentives for Chinese scientists living abroad to return to China.13 According to NIH, access to foreign intellectual property is key to a scientist’s selection for the Thousand Talents program. In a 2018 meeting of NIH’s Advisory Committee to the Director, NIH identified several concerns related to talent recruitment programs such as the Thousand Talents plan:

• undisclosed foreign financial conflicts;
• undisclosed conflicts of commitment; and
• peer review violations, including the inappropriate sharing of confidential information.

In 2023, I commented on the ongoing barrage of admonishments from NIH about the “integrity of peer review” and had apparently forgotten about the earlier report. Because from that 2020 report we learn:

Between February 2018 and November 2019, NIH confirmed 10 cases involving peer reviewers who were stealing or disclosing confidential information from grant applications or related materials and who also had undisclosed foreign affiliations.49 Two of these 10 cases involved peer reviewers who were selected for China’s Thousand Talents program. The breaches of confidentiality included disclosing scoring information, sharing study section critiques, and forwarding grant application information to third parties. In some of these instances, reviewers shared confidential information with foreign entities.

About six cycles of review across the entire NIH and they found 10 cases, two of which were in China’s Thousand Talents programs. I linked a number of articles reporting on the issues of proper reporting of foreign funding and review confidentiality, many of which claimed unfair targeting of Chinese or Chinese-American PIs.

The new admonishment about “malign foreign talent recruitment” links to the CHIPS and Science Act which is now US law. In SEC. 10638 42 USC 19237.DEFINITIONS we find

The term “malign foreign talent recruitment program” means—(A) any program, position, or activity that includes compensation in the form of cash, in-kind compensation, including research funding, promised future compensation, complimentary foreign travel, things of non de minimis value, honorific titles, career advancement opportunities, or other types of remuneration or consideration directly provided by a foreign country at any level (national, provincial, or local) or their designee, or an entity based in, funded by, or affiliated with a foreign country, whether or not directly sponsored by the foreign country, to the targeted individual, whether directly or indirectly stated in the arrangement, contract, or other documentation at issue, in exchange for the individual

emphasis added. I emphasize this part because people are already freaking out on the socials about the first part where it would seem to cover some pretty conventional stuff related to seminar visits, conference participation that is reimbursed, etc. The list of individual actions in exchange for said compensation includes unauthorized transfer of intellectual property, being required to recruit other scientists into the program, taking lab or faculty appointment in the foreign country in a way that violates terms of US Federal grants, being prohibited from leaving the foreign program, conducting overlapping research improperly, being required to take funding from that foreign government’s agencies, omitting acknowledgement of US Federal funding… this all seems like bog standard bad stuff that PIs who are funded by the NIH realize they are not supposed to be doing. Particularly when it comes to failing to report other sources of research funding, effort commitments and/or influences on what can and cannot be published.

The law goes on to add any program sponsored by a foreign country of concern, academic institutions or any foreign talent recruitment programs on a naughty list developed under a 2019 National Defense act.

As always, the Devil is in the details, and when it comes to this sort of thing my viewpoint is mostly related to who is doing the deciding, on what basis, what is the scope of the actual problem and to what extent does this become a witch hunt against a certain class of NIH funded PI.

When an Inspector General report finds 10 instances of peer review shenanigans of which only two individuals are seemingly involved with a malign foreign talent recruitment program, well I’m not sure focusing on that is getting the job done. Far better to work on detecting actual review shenanigans instead of imagining that additional pre-meeting training sessions is going to do anything. If shenanigans are rare, I’m presuming they are not being done out of broad ignorance but rather by intentional bad actors. So catch them!

This new warning and the upcoming changes to the Other Support are, I suppose, designed to make applicant institutions wary? And perhaps themselves to start policing any foreign entanglements of their Professors a bit better. Starting with making an example of any PIs who have been a little too slippery with disclosures about their foreign lab/funding entanglements? Some of those newsy pieces which cast some PIs as the victims of anti-China bias do drop a crumb or two suggesting failures of proper reporting.

I dunno….even if the real motivation is the typical academic scientist’s drive to sustain (and grow) laboratory funding/staff and productivity this becomes a sort of FAFO situation. NIH is pretty clear about reporting Other Support, overlapping funding, etc. Always has been as far as I know. Institutional effort/commitment reporting may vary in specifics across time and space but I’ve always found my institutions to be pretty clear when they need me to report conflicts of commitment/effort, etc.

As usual, the NIH ICs do different things: The Multi-Year Funding Edition

The other thing that drew my eye in the recent piece in the NYT by Bhatias, Fan, Smith and Hwang was the table which reports the number of grants and the funding amount by Institute and Center. Again, it compares 2025 with the average of 2015-2024 (in constant dollars for the funding amount) and reports a percentage change.

Unsurprisingly, the NIMHD took the sharpest reductions in the number of grants (61%) and funding (38%). It is perhaps obvious why an institute dedicated to minority health and health disparities across all of the IC health domains took a big hit under the current regime. NINR funded 51% fewer awards. [The Table, I swear, said they spent 37% less money but I blinked and now it reads as a 0.5% increase. We shall see if it reverses because half as many awards for the same money seems weird.] NINR was identified in the Lauer et al 2021 report as being of disproportionate interest to Black PIs so…yeah, fewer awards tracks. This is of course not driven by “government efficiency” since these two institutes get a tiny fraction of the overall NIH appropriation. In Lauer’s paper, 0.99% for NIMHD and 0.52% for NINR of the subset of 20 ICs. In FY2015 NIMHD got 0.89% of the overall NIH budget and NINR got 0.47%. In FY2020, 0.81% and 0.41%.

NIAAA experienced a 47% reduction in competitive grants from a 12% reduction in funding. NIDA funded 13% fewer grants and actually had a small increase (0.9%) in FY2025 funding amount. It’s always a little weird to see such seemingly similar ICs, which support similar and overlapping research communities, have such different funding outcomes. My browsing of awards in the waning weeks of the FY suggested that NIDA had gotten away with very few multi-year awards. Given my potentially erroneous recollection in the last post, I checked. NIDA funded what looks like 1 of 129 new R01 in FY2025 as multi-year. They did not fund any RF1 conversions. The NYT data incorporate all competitive mechanisms, perhaps they chose to prioritize R01s. Still, I’d really like to know how and why NIDA was able to essentially refuse the multi-year mandate strong suggestion. And whether we might see some variety of punishment (reduced budget) or corrective action (an unusually high multi-year rate for 2026 perhaps?).

In contrast NIAAA funded 13 of 60 new R01 as multi-year. Since NIAA funded 64 new R01 in FY2024, 110 in FY2023, 93 in FY2022, 71 in 2021 and 71 in 2020, I’m not sure what to make of their seemingly large FY2025 reduction in all competitive grants versus a decade average. Maybe they were already starting a planned reduction of R01 support in FY2024. Maybe the relatively higher FY22-23 allocation was receiving a correction. Or, maybe, the multi-year out-years reduced the intended count back towards FY22-23?

I next tend to look at NINDS (26% fewer awards, 26% less funding) and NIMH (43% fewer awards, 31% less funding) as adjacent ‘brain institute’ comparisons. NIA tends to be a bit strange because Congress periodically lavishes “omg, Alzheimer’s!” money on it. They had 31% fewer awards with 17% less money.

FWIW, Lauer et al 2021 identified the National Eye Institute as having the highest success rates and here they funded 21% fewer grants and spent 10% less.

Anyway, all of this is a good reminder that each IC does things a little differently and freaking out / feeling relieved about our prospects based on NIH wide averages or on some other IC’s behavior is unwise.

NYT article claims multi-year awards are all reduced in length and budget…huh?

There’s a new article on the NIH funding results for FY2025 in the NYT by Bhatias, Fan, Smith and Hwang. It has some data indicating that total competitive grant funding ($) ended up 13% down from the average for FY2015-2024, all represented in inflation-adjusted dollars. The piece shows a 22% reduction in the number of competitive grants awarded, again compared with the decade average*. The article also shows that the NSF funding amount was down by 18% versus the 20150-2024 average, corresponding to a 25% reduction in the number of NSF awards.

One part of this article I don’t fully understand is the description of the impact of multi-year funding. This is, of course, a major reason for any reduction in numbers of grants that exceeds the reduction in overall funding. Simplistically, ever year past the first one that is funded in FY2025 via multi-year funding prevents the funding of one additional new award under traditional budgeting. The infographic they included was addressed with the following text comments:

• In the past, the N.I.H. typically awarded grants in five annual installments.
• Researchers could request two more years to spend this money, at no cost.

This is somewhat confused, unsurprising because these technical details of NIH funding are indeed confusing to newcomers (and old hands). The annual installments of the usual grant award typically permit no more than 25% of the annual budget to be retained and rolled forward into the next year. If one wishes to do this for the final year originally awarded (which could be five, or could be fewer), one is allowed to request a No Cost Extension (NCE). The first year NCE request is approved by default** in most cases. A second year requires an additional hurdle of justification and permission- although I do not know if these were rejected with any frequency before 2025. The “no-cost” means no additional funds past those originally committed will be awarded. The phrasing by NYT “, at no cost” confuses this.

The phrasing “two more years to spend this money” is also a bit confusing / misdirecting. The 25% limit on budget “carry forward” is not cumulative, so the NCE will generally be for up to 25% of one year’s worth of the budget.

Of course, the NIH has many areas of operation in which there are exceptions to what is, or appears to be, standard operating procedure. It can permit the carry-forward of more than 25% of the unused budget. It can, therefore, permit what amounts to a cumulative carry-forward. It can permit what amounts to full on skipping of any expenditure in one year to be pushed forward into the next. There are always exceptions.

With that cleared up, the multi-year funding description is likewise confused. First, this seems to imply NCEs past one year will not be approved. They are rare, so meh whatever.

• Under the new system, the N.I.H. pays up front for four years of work.
• And researchers can get one more year to spend this money.
• Which means that they get less money on average, and less time to spend it.

The records on RePORTER show that NIH has awarded new, five-year R01 proposals in FY2025 with anywhere from one (the normal funding system) to four (multi-year) of the budget years awarded from the FY2025 budget. This is where “pays up front” thing comes from. The infographic suggests the “can get one more year” sentence means the researchers obtain this interval via a NCE.

[record scratch]

Uh-oh. My memory from looking at the multi-year funding issue through the summer says to me “This is not what the RePORTER record suggests“. The record for each new R01 lists Project Start and End Dates and Budget Start and End Dates. For a new R01 awarded in FY2025 the Start Dates will all be in 2025, save for a few Dec 2024 awards. Under traditional award, the Budget End Date will be one year after the start, mostly in 2026. A multi-year funded award will have a Budget End Date more than one year away, i.e., in 2027, 2028 or 2029. Thus, says my memory, one can easily confirm five year awards funded partially via multi-year that appear to anticipate the return to good old, Type 5 noncompeting award for Years 3, 4 or 5, depending on the length of the multi-year.

However. In attempting to put some numbers to this today, the most recent set of records varies substantially from my recollection. Now the multi-year awards have both Budget and Project End dates that are the same. Yes, there are something like 45 new R01s awarded for only two years. Another 56 awarded for only three years. And about 260 awarded for four years. These latter span the range of ICs, not just the ones (hi NIGMS) that traditionally only award a maximum of four years for new R01s, regardless of what was proposed. This seems a bit unusual IF the multi-year grants were selected at random with regard to requested interval of funding.

There are only 2 (out of 3,443 new R01) that appear to have been funded up to 2030, i.e., the full five year proposed. The balance of five year awards, about 1,831 of them, were budgeted as traditional single-year funding as indicated with 2026 Budget End Dates.

We can’t tell from the RePORTER record what was originally proposed and what went through Council decisions. We cannot validate that these end up with “less money” compared with what was proposed and what would likely have been awarded, in total, under normal operations. As a final clue, it is possible to divide the awarded direct costs with the number of years awarded as multi-year grants and see a Gestalt impression that these are not five year award budgets stuffed into four, three or two years. So the current RePORTER record does suggest that multi-year funded awards were indeed cut by years and probably be total award amounts.

I would be very fascinated to hear from some of these multi-year PIs whether their Notices of Award have been changed from the original.

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*I am really not sure the point is best made this way. The most important depiction would be compared with FY2024 and FY2023 in my view. Not against a decade long average in which budget levels varied.

**This became an issue in the first half of 2025 when the pro forma approval of first year NCE requests was halted and all of them were supposed to go through the more involved approval process. This led to a lot of concern that NCEs were going to be clipped as part of the induced chaos. There was a related set of rumors that maybe the carry-forward default of 25% for any budget year was going to be denied. Which was very concerning for many PIs, myself most certainly included.